Get in Touch

Touching, sadly, does not generally fall within the boundaries of social interaction in our current culture. As the Bad Religion song goes, Handshakes are nothing but a subtle Fuck You. It’s unfortunate that human contact – such a necessity to our species that infants will die if left untouched – is mostly rejected in polite company. Unfortunate because almost all of us enjoy being touched, and physical contact is a special form of communication existing at a level unavailable to other modes.

Basically, I’m advocating more touch. Offering simple massage whenever and however appropriate was a boon to my love life, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of giving it.

Of course, touch can be a powerful precursor to intimacy, and knowing how to approach someone with a gift of massage means being practiced in the art of perceiving signals. Some social contexts may allow touch as the first contact made, whereas in other contexts this would be tantamount to harassment. So be careful about when, where and how you touch. In most cases you should get verbal consent before going beyond a hug. Few people will turn down a neck rub if the situation is conducive. But make sure there’s a Green light.

In terms of the touch itself, I eventually went through massage therapy training and can verify that by far the most important aspect is the giver’s intent. You are speaking to a person through your touch, and your intent will be obvious, so please be present with what you are doing and make contact with a giving, loving spirit. Going through the motions, or otherwise having disconnected thoughts, will be obvious through your dead fish hands. Your massage may not be technically perfect, but if you are present, the receiver’s body will speak back to you. You may even get a pleased moan out of someone – enjoy this reaction that you’ve caused! Most people will relax and respond very well to a gentle stroking of the neck, shoulders, shoulder blades, arms and hands. If you want to offer a more assured touch, consider taking a workshop in massage technique. Hopefully this type of education will soon become more standard curricula. I believe giving and receiving manual therapy will one day soon be as natural as taking a shower. In fact, the shower is a fantastic place to ease tight muscles – your own or someone else’s.

Another place a man can gain confidence in the world of touch is at a gathering called a “Cuddle Party.” Look it up online, they already exist in a number of major cities worldwide, and the phenomenon is growing. A Cuddle Party includes a workshop element where one practices communicating personal boundaries, like saying “no, thank you,” with no further excuse. Asking directly and non-threateningly for what you want helps forge a safe space to touch each other, and there is no stress about where the touch is leading since overt sexual rubbing is not allowed. The fascinating thing is that spooning, massaging and caressing somehow makes conversation instantly deeper and more nourishing. Communication at a Cuddle Party seems to quickly move beyond the small talk one finds at other social gatherings.

Cuddle Parties also offer a place to explore what I’ll call “affectionate massage,” which goes beyond what is appropriate in the context of therapeutic massage, but is still short of overtly sexual. This sort of non-sexual intimacy can be extremely rewarding, even between romantic partners. And if you are not currently in a romantic relationship, Cuddle Party offers a place to “get in touch” with women, and vice-versa.

While dating, not every woman I met was receptive to the casual physicality of massage. But unquestionably there are many of women who will respond to confidence, a respect for their space, and a desire to offer a soothing and healing touch.

Ultimately our goal should be to give freely and to receive freely!

Image by *~\[ Yuga ☼ Sunshine ]/~* used under a Creative Commons license.

Zen and the Art of Signal Detection

Brothers, regardless of whether we’re talking about meeting a woman for the first time or getting into bed the 400^th time, if there’s one thing that I’ve been confronted with repeatedly, it’s that women are (almost subconsciously) repelled by desperation. I repelled my ex-wife by radiating a desperation for sex. In my early attempts at online dating I repelled women by being desperate to meet in person. No question, desperation is unattractive. If repulsion isn’t your goal, it is imperative to develop a Zen attitude, specifically toward sex.

The Tao of Steve is a film in which the main character elaborates a method of scoring with women: Be Desireless (no desperation), Be Excellent (show some kind of worthiness), and Be Gone (supposedly from Heidegger “We pursue that which retreats from us”). The oversexed protagonist in the film eventually learns that reducing lovemaking to “scoring” is a recipe for dissatisfaction. But there is something valuable in being desireless. You don’t have to don the orange robes and shave your head, but not being driven purely by desires is imperative. Sexually, an overabundant desire is hard to satisfy, and women are rightly intimidated by it. Being “driven” certainly implies there is a driver – at least endeavor to have some control over your own psycho-physical energy, and Get Zen.

In the meantime, you’ve got to communicate to a woman the attitude that, Yes, you would certainly like to make love her, but it’s 100% fine if that doesn’t happen. There’s nothing wrong with making this explicit. Even if the desire is burning in you, it really does have to be okay to go home and read a book or jerk off. Maybe even tell her you’re going home to jerk off.

Zen-ness also improves a man’s practice of a particular, infinitely subtle art: figuring out how to act around women. A wise friend, call him Obi Wan, introduced me to the Traffic Light metaphor. In the US, a traffic light has three colors which individually indicate “go,” “proceed with caution” or “stop.” A carefully observant man will be able to tell, in any given situation from casual interaction to sexual foreplay, when a woman is giving her own particular version of a Green, Yellow or Red light. A Green light means: “Keep moving forward, I like where this is going.” A Yellow light means: “I’m a little unsure right now if I trust you, or where this is going, or if I’m interested.” A Red light means: “Right now I don’t trust you, or I am not interested in pursuing this type of interaction with you.”

Unlike a real traffic light, a woman’s traffic light doesn’t progress predictably. A Green light may change to Red instantly, or a Yellow light may go back to Green depending on what the man does. Traffic lights may also be circumstance specific – a Red light shouldn’t necessarily mean “Never approach me with this intention again.” Recognizing the cues means being attentive to verbal communication as well as body language, and interpretation of cues takes practice. Contrary to classic mainstream perception, the most successful lover isn’t the man who pursues with the most tenacity. The most successful male lover is a keen perceiver. Casanova absolutely does have to pursue, but he acts only upon receiving signals.

The ground-level assumption of the Traffic Light metaphor is that hetero sex is the domain of the woman. In terms of the coital act, man enters woman as a guest, and must be invited. A guest never invites himself. A man’s advances will be more successful if he correctly identifies invitations. And this is much easier if he maintains a Zen attitude at all times.

My vision is that men around the world will increasingly embrace Zen far beyond the bedroom. But it may start there for many. Like modern versions of Lysistrata, the fictitious heroine who helped end the Peloponnesian War by leading Athenian and Spartan wives to withhold sex from the warriors, women of the new age may be responsible for the enlightenment of more than a few boys.

Thank the women, brothers, for not accepting less than what we are capable of.

Image by Roberto Zingales, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poly-Science 101: New Age Non-Monogamy

Is monogamy the natural order of our species?

More and more people don’t think it is, and the paradigm of couple-hood is under the cultural microscope like never before. But do non-monogamous unions represent the relationships of the future?

“Polyamory,” as popularized in best-sellers like The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, is probably the best organized approach to consensual non-monogamy. Geri D. Weitzman defined polyamory in a paper aimed at psychologists as “a lifestyle in which a person may have more than one romantic relationship, with consent and enthusiasm expressed for this choice by each of the people concerned.” In one sense, polyamory is to love what swinging is to sex. In a broader sense, “poly” relationships look as different as the people in them. They can be open or closed. They aren’t always sexual. But one idea that poly-identified individuals do tend to share is the belief that a single partner can’t necessarily meet all of a person's needs, and probably shouldn’t try.

While not attempting to catalogue every pattern, Weitzman elaborates three main configurations of polyamorous relationships:

1. One primary romantic relationship takes priority over one or more secondary romantic relationships.
2. An individual maintains two or more romantic relationships of equal priority, but an individual's romantic partners do not have a strong relationship with each other.
3. Poly-family: a romantic inter-relationship of three or more people, in which there is a strong relational commitment between all members.

Confusing? Wait until you sift through a glossary of poly terminology. This is relationship science.

The rise of the internet has allowed the sub-culture of polyamory to flourish, with forums and user groups providing much needed emotional support and information for newbies, and connectivity for the existing poly community. The poly boards on tribe.net overflow with an endless parade of how-to lists and helpful hints, opinions and warnings, starry-eyed chronicles and tragic rants. If poly people are anything, they are communicative. It would seem that thousands of people around the world are architecting pluralistic relationships, undeterred by the fact that this lifestyle is more closeted, and arguably more scandalous, than homosexuality.

Many who are in or have experimented with polyamorous relationships claim a lifelong discomfort with the perceived restrictions of monogamy. Others stumble across polyamory having had no prior concept of romance beyond the norms of serial-dating or marriage. I fall into the latter group.

♥

My own experience with poly began as a need to explore the wider world, but from within the container of marriage. My wife and I married young, neither of us bringing prior sexual experience to the table. Unsurprisingly, we hit a wall, and found ourselves in sex therapy. One of the recommendations was that we begin sharing fantasies.

Our sex heated up the night we started talking about one particular fantasy: adding other people into the mix. And it really blew my wife’s mind when I confided being turned-on at the thought of seeing her with another man. I began campaigning that this might be something to try in real life; we needed a change and this represented an exciting dash off the edge of our known universe.

Enter “Obi Wan” – a man responsible for hiring me on a recent job and whom we had gotten to know that year at Burning Man. My wife thought he represented the only person we could realistically invite into our private world. Obi Wan was unattached, level-headed and honest, and my wife was excited by the idea of approaching him. I thought the choice made sense, so one night after inviting him over to watch a movie (ironically enough, Closer), I purposefully dozed off on the couch in order to give my wife the opportunity to tell Obi Wan that she’d life to fuck him, and that I had suggested it. He was a little thrown, but asked for some time to think about it. A few weeks later he interrogated both of us, and after being reasonably satisfied that our marriage could tolerate such an adventure, accepted the invitation. We agreed on a policy that any one of us could halt the proceedings at any point.

Our first encounter didn’t happen until later that weekend after a big night out with my wife’s girlfriends from nursing school. A group of us ended up drunk at our apartment, and eventually everyone had left but for one girl passed out in our bathroom. Despite the distinct possibility that a groggy, intoxicated nursing student might stumble out of our bathroom at any time, Obi Wan, my wife and I proceeded to engage in a very steamy menage-a-trois on the living-room couch. It was the first of many steamy nights.

A few months later we stumbled across a discussion on relationship models hosted by a group called PolyParadise, and within the year we were preparing to move in together as a threesome. The intervening time represented a crash course for all of us in what it means to be members of a triad, or more correctly a V (vee) relationship. In this three-person model my wife was the pivot, while we men cultivated a non-romantic, fraternal bond. What had begun as a couple opening up a marriage transitioned into an open structure with my wife having one primary romantic partner and one secondary romantic partner, which eventually became a three-person unit with my wife having two primary romantic partners: an openly dating spouse and a fidelitous boyfriend.

As a poly family, we learned to juggle the unique emotional and practical needs of three people, including processing frequent flushes of jealousy and democratically resolving disagreements. It became clear at some point that each of us had “the most challenging role.” I was a husband stretching his identity to make room for another man. Obi Wan was the interloper, cautiously finding and defining his place within a long-standing married partnership. My wife was the exhausted focal point, heart always pointing in two directions and responsible for satisfying and meeting the needs of two men. The amount and depth of communication required to keep this experiment afloat was enormous. But despite the trials, it was an amazing time for all of us. For me it represented the most emotionally exciting, enriching period of my life up to that point. My wife found herself utterly swept away by the experience of feeling deep love for two people at once. Obi Wan was experiencing the profound nourishment of loving trust with a woman for the first time in his life. We were an intentional family, one that loved journeying together and taking care of each other. We absolutely felt like we were waving at the world from great heights…

♥

Ultimately, our little trio encountered overwhelmingly rocky territory. We didn’t quite reach 18 months, the average lifespan of the notoriously volatile triad configuration (a quad made up of two couples is well-known to be more stable). My wife had found a powerful sexual intimacy with Obi Wan, but she and I had fallen back into our stale sexual groove. Unable to reconcile these problems, and realizing we needed freedom to grow individually, my wife and I separated. Our threesome ended in a maelstrom of heartbreak.

Do I think polyamory ruined my marriage? Absolutely not. But major transformation was accelerated as long-dormant issues were forced to the surface. For me, it was wonderfully liberating to evaluate my personal boundaries and value my own worth. It’s potent to realize that every relationship is unique and irreplaceable, and that your partner is not with you because he is your property, but because he loves you. Polyamory requires something akin to an advanced degree in truth-telling, communication and introspection – invaluable skills in any relationship. My wife and Obi Wan are still together over a year later, and I am exploring new frontiers of love with a woman who brings more to my life than a dozen relationships could.

I believe polyamory will become more and more commonplace, eventually sharing social legitimacy alongside monogamy. Romantic love may be seen at some point as the glue that holds entire tribes together as humanity discovers its meta-conscious destiny. On the other hand, polyamory may never be a fit for a majority of people. Even in the best circumstances it can easily become a full-time job managing pluralistic relationships – in our current culture the intense challenges of partnership increase exponentially when extra personalities are added.

Beyond the fact that I am happy in a monogamous partnership, perhaps the biggest reason I am not endeavoring to make polyamory a part of my life right now is that while love may not be a “zero-sum” game in theory, some degree of intimacy is sacrificed as one gains lovers. This isn’t necessarily a problem for everyone, but my wife practically had a breakdown trying to maintain intimacy between just two partners. My soul is clearly capable of boundless love, but on this plane I’m forced to limit the extent to which I share my most intimate moments, dreams and fears.

When the lightning of Love strikes, it’s miraculous. To be sure, it is possible for Love to strike repeatedly.

Just be wary of electrical storms.

Further poly reading: http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html

http://www.polyamory.org/%7ejoe/polypaper.htm

Originally published at Reality Sandwich. Image by the-G-Man, used under a Creative Commons license.