Procrastination blues

Some days I just can't get anything done. Today was one of those days...

I got up, checked my email, checked Facebook and Twitter, checked AVEN, checked The Age website..........REPEAT, again and again!  Before I knew it, it was lunchtime, and then after lunch - even though I told myself I'd make the afternoon more productive than that - pretty much the same routine ensued. It is now after 5pm, and I've literally accomplished nothing all day. Oh, except that I went for a little walk after lunch and bought some grape tomatoes at the shops, as an after dinner snack for later.

All this would even be okay if the day had been marked in advance in my head as a lazy weekend day, but today was actually a normal weekday on which I actually wanted to accomplish something. I suppose the trouble was that it was all very vague, and the "plans" were all in my head. So I'm going to turn this around tomorrow - I've written down a list of things to do, on paper, and I'll actually put a line through each item on the list after each task is done.

For someone who got right through school and uni without ever keeping a formal diary or ever making todo lists, this actually feels slightly pathetic. I thought I had the mental discipline lately to not get myself into this kind of rut with my daily routine. But I guess in the last few days I've been feeling a bit de-motivated. I suppose it's a combination of the slow summer job market (for applying for trucking jobs) and a lack of hours these days in my casual hospitality job.

This kind of procrastination is a funny beast. It seems to cause a weird spiral of hopelessness and depression: you don't start doing anything because it feels like it would be pointless to do it. Of course, nothing gets done, and then you feel bad about not doing anything all day. Vicious circle.

But anyway - enough whining, more list-making! I'll do my best not to overdo the list, because that will just give me an excuse to start removing things from it. But gotta make it big enough to really feel like tomorrow is some kind of non-trivial accomplishment!

My Relationship Anarchy

The theme for this month's Carnival of Aces is non-traditional relationships and polyamory. This is something I've been meaning to blog about for a while, but never quite knew where to start, because my own theories on this are still a bit of a work in progress.

I should probably start by explaining my actual history with this...

Early Beginnings

It all started a couple of years ago (before I knew anything about asexuality) when I finally realised that my attractions to women are never immediately sexual - and do not (necessarily) fit the typical sexual pair-bonding paradigm. Indeed, my immediate pattern of attraction to a new girl is virtually indistinguishable from something like...simply wanting a kind of "close friendship with cuddle benefits".

(The term "romantic friendship" sounds about right - although this often refers to a particular form of this which was common in the 19th century, so I'm sometimes hesitant to use it because of the historical baggage confusion. But it seems to be getting reclaimed these days as a more broad term for these types of relationships, so I'll use it here).

When I discovered asexuality (and my own demisexuality), and that it is indeed quite possible for relationships not to be based on the standard sexual pair bonding script, a huge light bulb went off in my head. There wasn't any particular epiphany moment per se, but at some point in early 2012 I just knew that I'd never look at relationships the same way again.

This article in "The Atlantic" is what really sealed it for me. Especially the following passage:

"If we stop defining our significant relationships only as those that are romantic or sexual, being single will take on a whole new meaning. If we broaden our emotional focus from the person we share bodily fluids with to the sum of our friendships, acquaintances, and colleagues, our communities will grow stronger. If we stop treating penetrative sex as the be all and end all of physical intimacy, we will experience greater heights of pleasure. And if we can accept that although sex can be ecstatic and affirming and fulfilling, it is not all those things to all people all of the time, we will relieve it of some of its cultural baggage."

It was like...wow!!...this is exactly how I've felt about sex and relationships all my life - and suddenly here is a community of people who seem to be wired the same as me, and making conclusions regarding love, sex and relationships which seem completely obvious to me in hindsight.

So that got me thinking - how do I apply all this?

Dating, Romance and Sex

Probably the single most confusing thing about all this was coming to terms with the idea that "romance" and sex are totally separate things to me. They always were separate for me, but the idea that they run together was so deeply socially conditioned into my thinking that I simply didn't consciously see it. But I did, however, always feel like something was slightly "off" about how the dating world works.

This is what makes demisexuality (as well as being sexually non-repulsed) so tricky. It's not like an immediate and obvious case of Does Not Compute regarding sex, the way repulsed asexuality is. It's more that sex just seems like a totally random and unnecessary thing to (immediately at least) combine with romance - because romance is something that grows on its own for me, almost entirely from intellectual and emotional connecting. And indeed, non-sexual affectionate contact is all that I can desire (and handle!) upfront anyway.

But even more to the point, I was now being haunted by the above line from that article - "If we stop defining our significant relationships only as those that are romantic or sexual, being single will take on a whole new meaning." - Indeed. 

How do you define "single"? Are you still single if you have an ongoing romantic friendship with someone? Multiple romantic friendships? Or is it only a sexual relationship that counts? Or does it all come down to sitting down, having The Talk, and agreeing that you are in a relationship?

Polyamory

A few things happened which made me question the idea of traditional monogamy in the past few years - needless to say, none of them had anything to do with wanting to "sleep around"! 

It all basically gelled around this idea of how we can have different types of significant relationships with different people - which may conventionally qualify as "'just' friendship", "romance", or perhaps something in-between - say "romantic friendship". Then it suddenly started looking very petty and arbitrary to me to throw an exclusive bubble around just one such relationship, to the exclusion of others. When sex is in the picture, I can actually understand the value of exclusivity. After all, historically-speaking, birth control and protection were either extremely ineffective or essentially non-existent, so it did make some sense to reign in promiscuous sex. But this begs the question - why do we still have to apply this rule to non-sexual-yet-romantic ways of connecting? Which is 99% of what I'm about.

In a word - it is not sex that defines polyamory for me - it's emotional connecting. It's the idea of having close, tender emotional connections with people which have no fixed boundaries, as opposed to the traditional monogamous model - where there is a vast emotional exclusion zone around the Romantic Couple - and everybody else is "just" a friend, and has to keep a wide berth to avoid the contact from being seen as inappropriate. 

But alas, since 99% of the world is sexual, polyamory will probably always carry the "just an excuse to sleep around" cultural baggage. Hence I've sometimes been hesitant to use it, especially to identify publicly as such...

"Relationship Anarchy"

My thinking these days is probably best described by the term "relationship anarchy", and a heavily asexual-influenced version of it at that. 

As mentioned briefly in a previous post about labels, I like the idea of doing away with restrictive categories altogether - what really matters is that the people involved in relationships are open and honest with each other, and agree to their own tailored specifics. And I think that broad categories (eg. Friend vs Lover) actually get in the way of happiness here - because people end up having to accept pre-packaged things which might not be entirely suitable for a particular given connection - but are nevertheless so deeply ingrained in the culture that they never truly questioned how connecting with people could be done differently. 

This might be less true of sexuals than people on the asexual spectrum though, which I believe may be the main reason why these theories are quite controversial out in the mainstream world. 

For sexuals, it seems to run like this: You either find someone sexually attractive, in which case you'll want to sleep with them - or else you don't find them sexually attractive, in which case you'll never want to sleep with them. But more to the point - any kind of "romantic" context with them will probably seem awkward and pointless. Why? Because sexuals generally don't experience this disconnect between romance and sex that we do. Attraction is either both romantic and sexual as a package deal, or else it is purely platonic. There seems to not be much possibility of anything in-between.

I'm not entirely sure this theory is correct. I've seen some evidence of sexuals being capable of relationships which can exist in that fuzzy area between purely platonic and romance, but it seems to be incredibly rare. Whereas with people on the asexual spectrum, it seems to be quite common to at least understand the point of this - even if many still subscribe to a more traditional monogamous outlook on actually forming serious relationships.

What I'd like to explore

I currently have a kind of online version of a "romantic friendship", with an asexual girl overseas who's in a polyamorous relationship. It's actually incredibly liberating to be able to share with someone intellectually and emotionally without second-guessing whether it's "appropriate" or not - because everything has been discussed upfront and everybody has agreed that it's okay.

What would be interesting to explore is how this kind of relationship would work out in real life. Given that I'm not one for "serious relationships" in terms of wanting a permanent domestic life partnership and suchlike, I'm actually quite attracted to the idea of simply having romantic friendships while basically remaining "single" - in the practical everyday independent living sense. While I won't set out absolutes such as "living separately is mandatory", this is so close to the truth that it might as well be the case.

So yes, romantic friendships is where it's at for me at the moment. If anyone does inspire me for something "more" involved, it'll be a small miracle I think. But even then, there's no going back to traditional monogamous thinking. Although, being demisexual, I have to say that I'd have no problem with sexual exclusivity - the real impossibility is to not think of multiple relationships as emotionally significant any more. And of course, that the existence of multiple deep emotional connections is okay. Correction: Not just okay, but celebrated as a beautiful thing!

I have a truck licence!

Whew! What a long week...

I went for my heavy vehicle licence training this week. Initially I thought about going for a lower grade licence (such as the one for small or medium trucks only), but then I thought I should get it all out of the way in one go and earn the hardest possible one - "Heavy Rigid Non-Synchromesh". This is the biggest jump you can make from having a car licence, and it entitles you to drive basically any kind of truck except for semi trailers and road trains.

The leaning experience itself was quite interesting. A lot of information to take in, and driving huge trucks was quite an assault on the senses for the first time. The first day I walked away with a headache, but after that it was better. I seem to have a natural talent for reversing large trucks - because from day one I never got the reversing manoeuvre wrong (this is something that's very difficult for some people).

After resting this weekend, I'm going to get stuck right into job hunting on Monday. Firstly research what would be the best thing to aim for initially, but then probably apply across the board for anything I can get to begin with.

Labels - Point/Counterpoint

I've been thinking about labels quite a lot lately. And not just subtle things like the difference between being a "normal" sexual person versus grey-asexual.

One of my main issues with labels is quite nicely summarised in the first minute or so of the following video (totally different theme, but makes the same general point):

The point about picking up all the cultural baggage that a label entails is actually a very insidious thing. And not just because it makes other people make assumptions about you, but also because you can start boxing yourself too far into the identity yourself.

For example: when I first learned about demisexuality and identified with it, I ran with it quite eagerly and started attributing all sorts of things to it. Most of these were probably related, but some possibly not. But when I look back now, I definitely feel I was too eager to use this newly found label as a blanket explanation for all sorts of things about my sexuality and how I seem to process attraction subtly differently than the norm.

Point

The real point of labels is to explain outlier attraction processes to others. If everybody in the world was romantic and heterosexual, then we simply wouldn't need any words to describe sexual and romantic orientations at all. Everybody would be attracted to the opposite gender, and in more or less the same way. Romantic and sexual attractions would be in sync in everyone, and none of this label drama would be necessary. We would never need labels to communicate what we desire, in whom, and in what ways.

Of course, the world isn't so neat and tidy. Apart from obviously different orientations from the heteronorm (such as being gay, bi or outright asexual), there are those for whom romantic and sexual orientations aren't quite in sync, or work as generally expected. These can actually be particularly difficult to deal with because their effect is relatively subtle. The human brain loves certainty - neat and tidy black and white categories (ie. "You're straight therefore you're into the opposite sex, and you see good looking specimens of them as sexually appealing on sight, period!") - so these things can be quite confusing and scary, not only to ourselves but also to others. Especially those who get involved with us while we're still figuring ourselves out. 

This is the value in identifying with one of these "subtle" labels - such as demisexuality or grey-asexuality. As long as it's done after an honest and thorough self-evaluation, it can give a good idea to others that what they can expect from you probably won't run to the usual heteronormative dating script. It doesn't even necessarily matter if the outcome looks similar to how many people who don't identify with the label end up in their relationships - the point is that it was useful and potentially avoided misunderstandings and pain. 

Once again: as long as we haven't tied ourselves up in knots by over-attributing all sorts of stuff to the label that wasn't necessary - and was potentially misleading.

Counterpoint

The other side of the coin is that there is a Postmodern "relationship anarchist" in me - one who would like to do away with labels altogether. One who basically says People Are People, and how any two of us relate to one another should be entirely individual and not be labelled or pre-packaged in any way at all. Under this model, even the likes of "friend" versus "partner" would be rejected as labels for how we connect, and each relationship would be totally unique and run its course on its own terms.

By definition, this kind of outlook completely eliminates all the subtle labels - since it has even done away with the obvious unsubtle ones! If it no longer matters who you are attracted to and in what ways generally - because you're approaching each relationship on its own terms and not as part of some set of pre-packaged expectations - then your underlying "orientation" really doesn't matter that much. You'll get to know each person and mutually find the unique boundaries that make sense for the two of you, without deferring to any external definitions at all.

Of course, this is probably impractical when taken to the extremes. eg. If someone is staunchly gay, it certainly makes sense not to lead people of the opposite sex on. Or if someone is an outright repulsed asexual, it doesn't make sense to lead highly sexual people on, expecting that dating you might eventually lead to a sexual relationship, etc. But for the more subtle cases, it does make a lot of sense I think. 

Conclusion

On the whole, I think labels can be useful so long as they are used to describe things that are identifiable patterns which would occur even without them being there. As soon as they become a thing-in-themselves, some kind of badge of identity that starts carrying socio-cultural baggage, things can start to get corrupted and murky. Then it's no longer a case of looking back and thinking: "Ahh, I did such and such because I'm demisexual...." but "I'm going to do such and such in the future because I'm demisexual...", and this has a way of limiting us, in potentially harmful and unnecessary ways.

Still, in my version of Utopia, labels wouldn't matter at all. Every relationship would be unique and wouldn't have to be limited by any pre-set expectations of what it should be, and how it's defined by any labels outside the two people who are having it.

"The Moral Landscape"

I just finished reading Sam Harris's book "The Moral Landscape - How Science Can Determine Human Values".

The basic idea of the book is that moral values have long been shaped by religion and culture, and science has tended to skip around them. To a large extent out of fear of offending religious views, and lately also out of fear of being politically incorrect by offending differing cultural values. eg "Western Liberal cultural imperialism".

Harris contends that certain things are simply scientifically measurable good and bad things to do for the human condition, and that science shouldn't yield to religion and culture which insists on pushing its ways when they can be shown to be demonstrably incorrect.

An extreme example to demonstrate this idea is described at the beginning of the book - Female Genital Mutilation - which is something even very hardened moral relativists don't try to defend. It's quite possible to take populations which practice it versus those who don't, scientifically measure various indicators of human development, health and well-being, and basically demonstrate that the cultures which practice it are overall worse off for it than those who don't.

The idea is that with more scientific knowledge and further developments in neuroscience, we'll be able to learn in more fine-grained detail than ever what's actually good and bad for the human condition (on both a personal as well as a social well-being level), rather than relying on traditional religion and culture for our values.

My Take?

I agree with essentially everything in the book. And in the end there isn't much of a revolutionary conclusion in terms of where we should go next, per se.

The biggest issue I can see with something like this - at least at the level of personal relationships and micro social politics - is that people simply have different personalities and tastes. One person's independence and happy solitude is another person's loneliness, to use introversion-vs-extroversion as an example. So while it might be easy to eventually work out (down to a neurological level) what increases well-being and happiness in any one person - playing together will always have its challenges, I think. But of course, the more we know the more we can finetune those interactions and mitigate conflicts.

Anyway, a highly recommended read!

True Sources of Happiness

I went to a Kadampa Buddhist talk and meditation session on Friday. For the most part it was an introductory session for people who are new to meditation and Buddhism, but one particular detail stuck out quite memorably - the idea of "true sources of happiness".

As defined by the nun (paraphrased from memory):

"A true source of happiness is something that always leads to happiness, and cannot possibly cause pain or suffering."

The example she gave was having dinner at your favourite restaurant with your favourite person, say your partner: At first glance, that event (in and of itself) seems like a source of happiness. But then, what if the flow of conversation drifts into some topic which leads to an argument? Your entire evening now turns into one long uncomfortable passive-aggressive silence. A source of suffering, no longer a source of happiness. So what this means is that the event of "going out to dinner to your favourite restaurant" isn't actually the source of happiness in itself, but rather the mental state that you expect from the event is. And if the mental state shifts for whatever reason, the happiness is shattered, and can even be replaced by downright awkwardness and suffering.

So what all this means is that the only true source of happiness lies in cultivating states of mind which aren't dependent on external circumstances. If you can maintain a happy state of mind despite external shifts in circumstances, you can remain happy. On the flipside, no amount of seemingly "good" external circumstances can guarantee happiness - though of course it's certainly better to have a certain basic level of security and physical well-being than not.

It's amazing how simple and true this is, and yet how difficult it can be to truly grasp. It's so easy to think - "If only I could accomplish XYZ, life will feel good and complete!". And this mostly comes in the form of some kind of worldly material goals, or accumulation of more and more Stuff.

The talk finished with the nun suggesting that the biggest New Years Resolution for 2013 (for everyone present) should be simply this: to learn to cultivate states of mind which will be causes of happiness despite external circumstances. Makes a lot of sense to me, but I know enough now to understand that this is an ongoing process, and not something that will ever be "complete".