Tag Archives: partnerships

Let’s Ask: A Thriving Long Distance Love

Y:  The text read “Dude, Coachella is amazing! We’re all having a blast. Wish you were here! Btw, I met this awesome girl and we really hit it off. There’s just one thing… She lives in NorCal.”

I sent that to a close friend only a couple of days after meeting my girlfriend, the love of my life. Now let me back up and tell the story, because she loves it when I do (M: Oh boy, here it comes!!!). I met M for the first time at Los Angeles International Airport. She was joining me and a large group of my friends, including two mutual friends—through whom we were being introduced—on a weekend trip to America’s premier music and arts festival, Coachella (feel free to send us comp’ed VIP passes (M: for life, please) for the plug, Goldenvoice). From the moment we first shook hands, I was charmed. There is an air about her; her smile is warm and contagious, and her aura (if you believe in such things) is always welcoming. From that point on, the weekend became about more than just the music festival, it became about us getting to know one another: flirting, dancing, making each other laugh, and appreciating each show together. It was like packing 30 dates into a single weekend, and every date was even better than the last. I made it a point to look after her in a crowd of a hundred thousand people, because I wanted her to feel at ease and a part of the group. It must have made a good impression, because despite some of my more nervous moments, we kissed during one of her favorite acts, the Postal Service, and by the end of the weekend neither of us were prepared to let the other go.

M:  It’s true. He took care of me all weekend in a group where I only knew two others and that was more than enough to keep me interested. He was pretty much assigned to take care of me before we even knew each other and didn’t sweat about it even once. He also took me to see my favorite musician when no one else wanted to go, even though he didn’t know of him. Consider it our first date. I tried to return the favors as much as I could but really, it wasn’t enough; he was on point with everything. He even played Radiohead for me every drive back from the festival so I could sing off key. After the festival was over, I promised to introduce him to my favorite band, Tool and well, let’s just say he was most impressed that the song had a sound bite featuring Bill Hicks, one of his favorite comedians. Last weekend, we returned from our first anniversary celebration, guess where? Coachella! There is no other more perfect scenario for us to celebrate our love: music, dancing, great friends, amazing art and good food. Sums us up pretty well.

Here’s something we’ve both heard from other people more times than we can count…

“You’re in a long distance relationship?” *deep nervous inhale* “Wow, that must be, like, super hard.  I could never do that.  Good luck…”

Oh gee, thanks but I actually don’t need any luck because I’ve never been happier. In fact, we’ve been in an incredibly successful, unicorn-tears kind of magical long distance ‘agreement’ (Y: as she likes to call it) for a full year now.  The distance?  Exactly 300 miles between NorCal and SoCal.  Luckily there isn’t much of a sports rivalry as I like ice hockey (SHARKS TERRITORY!) and he prefers basketball (Y: LAKERS BABY!) Though I did drunkenly lash out on him being from LA when the Kings knocked the Sharks out of the playoffs last year. And how did he respond?  By sending me a beautiful bouquet of flowers to my office with a note that read: “Dear M, my deepest condolences for your loss. I hope these flowers brighten your day the way you do all of mine. Can’t wait to see you again. Yours, Y.”. Chivalry… not dead, my friends. And that is when it really sunk in that I need to hold on to this amazingly special gentleman.

Y:  WARNING: Here’s the thing about long distance relationships—they are not for every couple. Really, they aren’t for most. People are wary of them, including us. And for good reason: they don’t typically work. I had never been in one before, and she had tried it twice with really poor results over half a decade ago. All it takes is half an instinct of insecurity to hit you, coupled with a dead cell phone battery, maybe a half bottle of wine, and/or some Facebook stalking, and next thing you know you’re in world war relationship. M and I, insecurities and flaws aside, trust each other implicitly. Even more importantly, we love each other (queue the feign heaving and eye rolling) unconditionally (M: so far, so good ;) ) . We’re both independent people who are incredibly social and have many loved ones to tend to. We understand that we each need space and time to pursue our own interests and have our own fun. There is a genuine exchange of mutual support for everything we do.  So above any tips, tricks, or special anecdotes we share, remember that if you’re not continuously head over fucking heals in love with your long distance love, your relationship is headed for the rocks. That’s not to say we don’t fight (I am a man, after all, and it’s my first real relationship as an adult: I’m bound to fuck up a little) but we’re quick to make amends, and always show each other respect.

M: ^What he said… and it’s not about the distance, it’s about the people involved in the relationship. We’re grateful to have each other regardless of the constant physical presence. But of course it’s tough for us sometimes. It’s standard procedure for me to bawl on him before we part after yet another incredible visit. It’s not being able to partake in the mundane everyday activities you’re ‘supposed’ to do with your partner that makes long distance as hard as it’s hyped up to be. Also, not being able to be there for each other physically in tough times or special moments (doctors’ appointments, him moving into his new home, holiday parties, even actual birthdays—thanks for being born a day before Thanksgiving, guy…) can easily strain a relationship, so you need to get creative and accept the reality that you will have to celebrate it a different day to compensate.. But luckily we are always looking for excuses to party so we never skip occasions.

The good news is we take each other for granted much less. Every time we see each other, it’s a mini blissful vacation and we are just with one another 100% because our time together is so precious. Menial tasks like groceries and laundry become enjoyable. But then again we are party people and sprinkle fun into everything so perhaps that’s just us. We rarely ‘fight’ because neither of us can show up at the door to kiss and make up… it’s exponentially more painful being away from each other and not communicating because both parties are being stubborn about coming to a truce. Luckily he is practically ego-less and I can’t stay upset when he keeps showering me with warmth and love.

One time the Mr. was having an extremely hectic Murphy’s law kind of day, so I stole a genius idea from a friend: I called a nearby massage parlor and booked him his first ever hour long deep tissue full body rub down (I threatened the masseuse not to go near his-MY goodies), paid for it over the phone, and called him to tell him he’s to show up there immediately after work.  And the moment he arrived back home, a delivery guy arrived with Thai food. I scored big time.

Y:  It was by far the sweetest and most thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for me.  Take note ladies, don’t go by those bullshit tips in Cosmo, This is how to keep your man happy.  Anyway, that following afternoon, she wasn’t feeling well and had an unpleasant doctor’s appointment, so I returned the favor by having pizza, pasta, salad, peach soda, and two different desserts delivered to her home.

And while we’re on the topic of food—one of our favorite things to do is stuff each other’s faces.  She will literally have a spoon full of food in front of my face while I’m still chewing the last bite. While she is vegetarian and I am… well, not, I still love sharing food with her, because it’s such a pleasurable experience (with acceptable public moaning to boot) that we get to immerse in together. We even eat together over Skype. Shared pleasures should go beyond the bedroom, and certainly should be relished together even if from afar.  Like communication and-

M: -LAUGHTER! Jinx, you owe me a soda! I win. It’s important to be connected constantly and to share a great sense of humor.  We’re lucky this works for us because we are of the kind that despise constant texting/phone calls. But, our sheer adoration of each other trumps that hard. And we are always laughing, oh man do we laugh… like hyenas on meth.  Why we are glued together from a 300-mile distance is because the hilarity makes the constant contact much more appealing.  We’ve had an ongoing conversation for the last year now: emails, chat, texts, phone calls, Skype, and, get this, over a 100 handwritten letters (multiple every single week)…  I mean, how can you not die laughing (warning: grown up jokey time): Y was on speaker phone while I was doing yoga, and I said, “I’m lying here in child’s pose for 15 minutes because my health guru told me so…” and he goes “Why don’t you come here and get into adult’s pose with me?”  Needless to say I keeled over in a perfect transition from child’s pose to fetal position guffawing. There is also a lot of shit talk, which leads to hilarious conversations we wish we could record to share with the world. I was teasing him about how I annihilated him playing foosball on an epic bar arcade date we had one night (we tag teamed killing zombies and yes, he died first. Milla Jovovich taught me some tricks… He’s lucky I love him enough to protect him during the apocalypse. Y: I sacrificed myself for you, chivalry does still exist, remember! M: See what we mean about shit talk…), and I started laughing maniacally, followed by heavy coughing due to diseased flu lungs… and I said to him, “You’re choking me from afar.” And this Star Wars newbie (it’s true, he watched it at the tender age of 28 thanks to yours truly) responds, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” To which I retort, “I find you fucked up!” To which we both responded with fits of laughter. You get the point. We’re pretty quickwitted folk.

So the bottom line is that apparently you can fall in love and make it last at a music festival and in long distance… with humor, creativity, constant communication, distance pampering, and truckloads of love. Oh, and to end… here’s 2 nightmare-ish pictures he drew of us (Tim Burton would be proud) because he thought it would be romantic. We’ll let you decide which one is attempt #1 and #2. In the words of the Moldy Peaches, we sure are cute for two ugly people…

1 & 2

1 & 2

Long live (long/all distance) love,

Y&M

Let’s Ask: Why a Polyamorous Relationship Works Best For Me

UE Writer Emily Knight’s high school buddy Matthew has always marched to the beat of his own drum. An active participant in a polyamorous lifestyle and the Santa Cruz kink scene, Matthew was the perfect person to shed some light on a little-understood relationship lifestyle. Emily and Matthew sat down to work through some misconceptions, explore the benefits, and understand the details of the polyamorous relationship.

Emily: How about we start off with your individual experience. Describe your relationship life.

Matthew: Real or ideal?

Emily: Both, please!

Matthew: Ideally, eventually, I’d like to be in relationships with a group of like minded people working together for common goals. Right now, I’m living with one significant other. We’ve been living together since August and seeing one another for almost two years. During the course of that two years, I’ve had a few much smaller relationships—I went on a few dates, had a few kink experiences—but nothing you’d call a strong relationship or sexual intimacy.

Emily: And how about your S.O.? She is actively poly-amorous, too, right?

Matthew: Yeah, she definitely sees other people. When we got together, she was also seeing a guy with another primary partner, whom she still sees about once or twice a month, and recently she met another person who she sees as well. I’m actually pursuing one of the second guy’s other partners—she’s really cool.

Emily: Wow, that sounds complicated. Are most of the folks in your friends group non-monogamous?

Matthew: Yes, most close friends would identify as non-monogamous or polyamorous—not swingers!

Emily: Oh, really? What’s the deal with that term?

Matthew: There’s nothing wrong with it; it’s just a completely different thing than what we do. Non-monogamous can refer to anyone not in an exclusively two person relationship—including people who cheat on their partners, though that is obviously not us. Swinging, on the other hand, refers to married couples who get together with other married couples and “switch” for the evening. Polyamorous means lots of different things to lots of different people. For me, it means someone who has multiple loving, caring relationships. However, some define it differently. Some folks have one partner with whom they are “monogamous,” but they also have other partners for kink experiences or sex.

Emily: So they would say that these kink and sex experiences they have with others lack the love and care element of their monogamous relationship?

Matthew: Yes. It looks pretty much the same to me, as an outsider, but it’s not for me to define their relationships.

Emily: So is your variety of polyamory more common?

Matthew: Kind of. We look like a standard “couple” who do other things with other people… that makes us more easily accepted. Other polyamorous people often lack that hierarchy of one primary partner and other secondary partners. They try to equally share love and attention among all their partners.

Emily: How is that… calculated? Can you quantify love and attention?

Matthew: Everyone does it differently. And most don’t actually achieve this in reality. People you live with, people who excite you more, those people are going to get more of your attention—just like with friends. But lots of people do refuse to rank their partners. Then, you have polyamorous folks who use hierarchy. Some people refer to their primary or secondary partners—oh, and there are statistically significant others!

Emily: Ouch! What a clinical term!

Matthew: No, it’s actually really interesting. It’s the person you spend the most amount of time and energy on. So it could be a business partner, a roommate, anyone you’re with the most.

Emily: Where do you and your S.O. fit on this?

Matthew: She and I are a little different. We look like primary partners: we buy groceries together, we live together, go on dates, etc. But we don’t really like the idea of ranking. So we view her other relationships (and my future ones) as equally important, no matter how often she or I see them or how long they’ve known each other. It’s not fair to rank people’s emotions.

Emily: That all sounds counter-intuitive and kind of confusing, but I love what you said at the end. When you look at it that way, it makes a lot of sense.

Matthew: But it is important to talk about those emotions. If someone is getting all your Friday nights and the other is stuck with Tuesdays, you should bring it up.

Emily: It seems like there is a big potential for drama. How do you avoid that?

Matthew: I avoid everyone with a propensity for drama—even if I’m attracted to them, even if they’re interesting. If you stick around in the community, you can find out who is with whom and who has had practice in this type of relationship. By living like this, everyone’s communication skills are automatically going to improve. Everyone’s self-awareness and awareness of their own role in a given situation gets better. If you’re in the community for the right reasons, you’ll get better. People who aren’t will not improve and cause drama.

Emily: I know that in high school we would get into arguments and things and a lot of that would stem from poor communication between us. I don’t know about my own skills, but I’ve noticed that your communication abilities have gotten a lot better as we’ve grown up a bit. Do you think that comes from polyamory?

Matthew: Yes, and motivation. I work hard to build up my communication skills and look for relationships where we can work toward common goals. Most don’t see it this way, but… I know my own goals.

Emily: Well you’ve always been that way: very straight-forward and blunt, with clear directions.

Matthew: Still working on it! Seriously, though, I’ve had some really good experiences with people who are really good at communication. The Santa Cruz kink group I’m part of has some very good leaders. One in particular “gets off” at making people feel understood. Seeing how other people do the things that I want to do and do them well really helps. Being a part of the kink group and various other meet-ups, like Poly Pocket—

Emily: No way!

Matthew: Ha, yes, it’s a great name! Anyway, groups like this have social interactions at the heart of them. So we drink tea and eat cookies and just have great conversations. We have the really interesting conversations on feelings and they all took this same route:

Person: This made me feel ______.

Me: Why did you feel ____?

Then, of course, the person gets defensive, but then we have a really good conversation and I understand better where that person is coming from. People would get upset with me for not understanding the basics of emotions, so these conversations were a huge step for me to start understanding and using words for emotions and understanding the emotions of others better.

Emily: This kind of is starting to bring me to my biggest question about polyamory—jealousy. What role does that play in people’s relationships, and how do they navigate it?

Matthew: Some people don’t get jealous. My S.O. doesn’t at all. Other close friends don’t either. I am not one of them. It’s something to work on, like willpower. I’m analytical, so I look at it this way. I take apart the emotions: why am I feeling this way, how can I stop it? I was in a mono-poly relationship—

Emily: A what?

Matthew: I was monogamous to her, but she was polyamorous—not recommended. I was just hit with all these womps of jealousy—feeling left out, wanting what my partner had, wanting what my partner was giving, feeling not cared for… so those are the worst.

Emily: That’s how I’ve felt it in the past as well.

Matthew: Yeah, and that’s a very common way to feel jealousy. The other way would be anger-jealousy, but I have the “womps.” And I’ve been working on this for… six years. The entire time I’ve been polyamorous. So one thing I do is work to parse out why I’m feeling this way, for each situation. Another thing that’s really common is to take baby steps in a relationship. You set up rules for the relationship and slowly take them away. So I might say, okay, we can go on dates, but no kissing. Now we can kiss other people but no sex. Okay, we can have sex with other people, but no kink.

Emily: So setting up rules on what is allowed physically, that makes sense.

Matthew: Yeah, and there are emotional rules, too. Like call me after your dates, check in with me this often, etc. Or don’t tell me anything; I don’t want to know. This one is often less healthy, but it happens.

Emily: Do most polyamorous relationships have rules?

Matthew: Not always. The healthiest relationships may or may not have rules, but they have always have a groundwork of comfort and communication. So if my partner knows what will hurt me and she loves me, then she’ll just choose to express her polyamory in non-hurtful ways, and vice versa.

Emily: That makes it sound really… doable. It always sounded like something I would never be able to make work, because I knew I would be too jealous. But I love this idea of using rules and setting groundwork to avoid it.

Matthew: And the thing is, all relationships have “rules.” It’s just in polyamorous relationships, these rules are laid out, whereas in monogamous relationships, the rules are implied and everyone is just expected to know them.

Emily: Mind. Blown. That’s true!

Matthew: It all goes back to communication. If you lay out rules, it sets you on a much better playing field. My S.O. and I don’t have rules. We talked about it and we don’t like the idea for us. Instead, we trust each other’s judgment and focus on open communication for what we are comfortable with and what hurts us.

Emily: And that circles back to building up those communication skills to make all relationships better.

Matthew: Yes, definitely. Oh, and one more thing about rules—they are also for safety. So rules like wearing condoms can be important, health-wise. And rules like avoiding sketchy meet-ups. There are a lot of benefits and a lot you can cover with rules.

Emily: You mentioned an idea earlier that I want to get back to—people in poly for the wrong reasons. What would those be? Is the horny bro out of place here?

Matthew: Not necessarily! The right reasons would have to do with having lots of different experiences, wanting to meet cool new people and make new connections, or fulfilling different needs, etc. Wrong reasons would be like if someone is pressuring their partner into it because they want to be poly. You also see people get into it to try to save a relationship, and that rarely works. Some people do it because they have low self-esteem and they don’t think they’re good enough to have their loved one to themselves.  You can almost always spot people in it for the wrong reasons, and they usually don’t stay.

Emily: Okay, I have one more major question for you—how did you get into the poly culture? Is it something you always wanted, or did you hear about it and want to try it out, or what?

Matthew: There are two reasons why people get into polyamorous relationships: 1) Monogamy never worked for them. 2) Monogamy never worked for them.

Emily: Ha!

Matthew: A lot of folks had bad monogamous relationships or somehow knew that they could never be happy with just one person.  But I came to poly in a slightly different way. When I was about eleven years old, I looked at my parents and thought, if two people are this happy together, how happy would three people be? And why stop there? Wouldn’t four people be like sixteen times as happy?

Emily: So from your eleven-year-old musing, how did you get here?

Matthew: As a teen, I laid out some steps. Step One: Get comfy talking to girls. I’m still working on that one. No, I mean I still re-lay out my goals, but it’s less often. I probably did it last maybe two years ago. And the goals are always similar—level up my communication, level up meeting people.

Emily: Since your goal is a loving relationship community that works for common goals, are you actively searching?

Matthew: I am very passive as far as meeting people goes. So much is going on in my life. And you can’t force good connections. I go out to events, meet friends of friends. But when I find the right people, that’s just going to happen.

Emily Knight is a Baker/Teacher/Writer Extraordinaire! She is also overly fond of biking, dinosaurs, Trader Joes, YA fiction, and the city of San Jose. Watch her cook food and talk about books here: Lovin’ My Oven: A Blog of Cooking and Reading

Photo by Sara Slattery.

We Don’t Know: Is Love a Choice?

In the description of Martin Ingle’s video, You don’t fall in love, you jump., he admits, “I do my best at trying to explain this. But I really have no idea (don’t tell anyone.)” We feel the same way, we don’t know. So we want to hear from you: do you think love is a choice?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLZ_YiWngXw&w=560&h=315]

Martin argues that love is not something you feel, it is something you do.  That real love is not the fiery passion but the “slow burning embers” and that we must choose to make the effort, to do the work, that keeps those embers burning. That love is not something you know, but something that you are figuring out. An action, not an emotion. Love is a battlefield where fear meets choice. It is not a destination. It is the burn in your muscles after you’ve been swimming up stream.

What do you think?

Photo by Michelle White