Thirty, Flirty, and the Opposite of Thriving

Don’t find your chill.

Dear Pal,

Today I’ve got something a little different. I’m going to use a letter I received recently as a jumping off place for my letter to you. The person who wrote this letter is almost certainly a stranger to you, and I guess by printing what they’ve written and responding to it, I’ll be flying dangerously close to the supersaturated genre of Advice Column Writing. That’s not what I’m trying to do, exactly — it’s just, this is a great letter! (Thank you tremendously to the person who wrote it and agreed to let me print it.)

Hi Sophie!

Recently my partner and I, after almost nine years of being together, decided we'd give polyamory a shot. It was something I was interested in pursuing for a while, but he was hesitant, and we went back and forth on it for a few years. Late last year, after many conversations and therapy separate and apart, we both landed in a place where we felt we could try it. We also both read this book, which I am not sure you're familiar with, but it was really good.

A lot of me wanting to try polyamory stems from my feelings of wanting to pursue a queer relationship. I've known since a teenager that I'm bisexual, but when I dated in my early 20s, I was a mess. My mom had just passed away unexpectedly, and I craved stability. It felt, for many reasons, like monogamy was what I needed most. It was hard finding a young queer person who wanted monogamy too, though (and like jesus chirst, fair enough), so I just sort of repeated patterns of becoming enamored with people and it being unrequited... until I met my current (cis/straight/male) partner.

I'm now on some dating apps trying to meet queer folks and even though I am older and wiser, I fear that I'll repeat those same patterns. For example, I met a person and started messaging with them pretty frequently. I also made more or less the first moves - I messaged them first, flirted first, asked them out on a date, etc. which they seem receptive to! but I already feel like I am being swept away in the idea of being in a relationship with this person and we haven't even met in person yet. I also fear that I am initiating a lot of the conversation, and it just feels SO embarrassing and I can't pinpoint why.

I can't remember the last time somebody ever pursued me and maybe that's part of the problem. I guess I often feel like, well, somebody has to do the pursuing, it might as well be me, and then go forward with it with reckless abandon. It's just that I feel like I've been this way my whole life in most relationships and I don't really know how to change it either. I want to close my heart up but I tell myself it's worth it to keep it wide open; I just can't seem to find a happy medium that doesn't leave me disappointed at best, crushed at worst.

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense. I guess I just don't know how to find my chill, or if I should be finding my chill at all. It's also just weird to step back into a dating pool after years away, so maybe that's part of it too. Ugh!!

— 30, Flirty, and the Opposite of Thriving

The first thing I thought about when I read this letter was a boy I dated in college whom I’ll call Bernard. He was the first boy ever to kiss me (versus be kissed BY me). I’d had a crush on him for months, and he knew it. That night, it had snowed, and we’d just taken a whimsical walk through our college town’s side streets (whimsical = we found a Polaroid [?!] of a boy holding a kitten [?!?!??!?!?] on top of the snow near a 1985 yellow Volvo station wagon [!?!?!?!?????!?!?!?!?!!!?]). We’d gone back to my room so I could change my shoes, because no one who is 19 has practical shoes for snow. My room was narrow — it wasn’t really intended to be a bedroom, and my single mattress on the floor barely fit, so quarters were intimate. Bernard picked up a red, fleece slipper that I’d discarded near my Costco-box “bed stand” — it was a horrible slipper, a silly slipper, a gift from a grandparent who didn’t know anything about cool slippers, the kind of slipper you only wear if you’re 91 years old — and he said, “Do you wear this?” I was so embarrassed. I didn’t know how to explain away the horrible slipper, and so I stammered about it. In the midst of all the stammering, Bernard swooped around and kissed me — no pretense, bad angle, horrible slipper in hand. And reader, yes: it was perfect.

The second thing I thought about when I read this letter was a girl I dated in college whom I’ll call Kate, and “dated” is a strong word for what was really a private flurry of sexual encounters in a dorm when my roommate wasn’t there. We had no idea what we were doing, and we didn’t know how to talk about being queer, but we knew we were and we saw it in each other without ever ever ever saying anything about it out loud. We literally felt around in the dark, trying to figure out what we wanted from each other and what we were to each other. We’d get breakfast together and shop for vintage figurines together and never talk about it.

And both of these college loves were formative for me, but not in the ways I would have imagined. The first kiss with Bernard had turned me to goo, and I thought I was in love forever, because he’d read my mind (and also he was funny, and also he was tall). But that mind-reading thing is short-lived. We get the script for the horrible-slipper-kiss from movies and TV shows, and we all know how it’s supposed to look. We are less sure about how things are supposed to look a week, a month, or a year later. If you’ve watched any serial TV show, you’ve learned that a single conflict will probably fracture the relationship; it’s likely you’ll break up (at least for a while), or one party will never forgive the other. We’re taught that romantic relationships are like single, giant soap bubbles that both parties have to figure out how to keep in the air forever. I wanted Bernard to keep on reading my mind, and he kept on trying; but he’d get it wrong all the time, and I’d get mad, and he’d be resentful, and eventually, there was no forward. The same thing happened with Kate — and I walked away from that relationship unsure about how much my queerness should be central to the way I defined myself. In the short term, I learned that girls were to be fooled around with, and boys were to be serious with, and everyone was going to have to get a whole lot better at reading everyone else’s mind if a relationship was going to become the thing I knew relationships were supposed to become: marriages, with babies.

None of this is directly related to “30, Flirty, and the Opposite of Thriving”’s (henceforth referred to as Flirty) question, but it is. It’s all about the things we believe about relationships: how they’re supposed to be, and how we’re supposed to be inside of them.

I’m really impressed with Flirty. They have clearly done a lot of work in therapy to figure out some of their own patterns and to better understand the kinds of relationships they want to be in. They’ve talked with their partner about it — they’ve even read books with their partner to establish common language and ideas around their changing relationship structure. They acknowledge and are working through the deep grief of losing a parent at a relatively young age. And on top of all that, they have a sense of the kinds of things they want. These are huge accomplishments in the realm of relationships, and they’re prerequisites for the next part: actually dating.

Mostly, people agree that dating sucks. It’s time-consuming, performative, exhausting. You often feel like you’re showing up to a type of game where you have a sense of the rules, but you also know that the other person’s rules might be totally different than yours. At least “Catan” comes with a booklet, so no one at the table thinks it’s acceptable to quietly trade four sheep and an ore for the guarantee of sex after dinner. When I was at the apex of my dating life, I was lucky. I lived in New Orleans, a small enough place with radical enough politics that the vast, vast majority of the people I dated were categorically lovely, and fairly communicative. I was in my twenties, and I often got to learn FROM the people I dated about how to talk about things that are difficult to talk about, because the scripts aren’t in any of the stories we know about love. But getting a relationship that you like without fumbling around aimlessly boils down to three main things that you can do. (And PS - this is all true for friendship, too! Life is an endless stream of new relationships. If you’re sitting there thinking you’re over all of this stuff, I hate to break it to you, but you’re wrong.)

1. You can ask! Want to be pursued? Put that in your dating profile. “I am interested in someone kissing me first,” you might say. Do you want to be in a the kind of relationship where you’re texting all day and all night? TELL THE PERSON YOU’RE INTERESTED IN! Find out if your texting personalities are compatible. You can ask for what you want, and you can ask them what THEY want! “But this isn’t sexy,” you might be saying. “I want someone who JUST KNOWS the things that I want.” Are you sure that’s a thing YOU want? Or is it something that popular media has made you believe you’re entitled to? It definitely does feel good when someone correctly guesses exactly the thing you want them to do. It definitely does NOT feel good, however, when someone INcorrectly guesses that you want to be kissed, touched, nuzzled, barraged with texts, given lavish gifts, etc. etc. etc. Bernard correctly guessed that I wanted him to kiss me. Then he incorrectly guessed 10,000 other things, and ultimately, the one perfect kiss wasn’t worth it.

2. You can change your mind! As you venture into new types of relationships, you might be curious about something, or think you’re into something, and try it out and realize you actually hate that thing. (Examples: dates at bars, spending the night, light [or heavy] bondage, three-ways, making someone dinner, getting into ethical debates, D&D.) You are allowed to realize you were wrong about yourself, and you are also allowed to notice that your tastes and preferences have completely changed. The thing about Kate was that she wasn’t a romantic match for me AT ALL. We were both curious about kissing girls, but that was it — and it wasn’t enough to power a full-fledged relationship. I thought I wanted to be “with girls,” and I was so eager to see what it would be like that I didn’t think I cared about the kind of girls (or the kind of relationships). I was wrong. I wasted a lot of time with a person I didn’t really like because I thought I wasn’t allowed to change my mind about what I wanted. And it ended it so much worse than it needed to, had I just been truthful about my needs sooner.

3. You can say no, and you can get good at HEARING no! If someone wants a partner who will also play tennis with them every week, and you don’t want to do that, tell them you don’t want to do that. If that’s a deal-breaker for them, then say, “Thank you for what this relationship has been so far. It looks like we’re not a match after all! Match-set-point! Hahaha! Bye.” But seriously: telling someone “no” doesn’t mean you hate the person they are, and HEARING “no” doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person with bad desires. It means that in the nearly-infinite sea of human beings, you did not end up being compatible with this part of this ONE other human being. That’s bound to happen MOST OF THE TIME. Brush it off, and congratulate yourself on understanding that a “no” isn’t a total rejection of everything you are. It’s just a “no.”

The main thing I wanted to say to Flirty was that there is absolutely no need to “find your chill.” If you’re not feeling chill about dating, great! There are tons of other people out there who are also not chill about dating, or who are seeking someone who is not chill about dating. If you feel like you’re moving too fast for the other person, ask them about it. If you feel like you’ve put yourself out there in a way that has you feeling vulnerable, gather your support network and tell them how you’re feeling. Let them tether you to the earth and remind you that you’re already loved.

I put the picture of the boy with the kitten in a box that became a box full of other things from my relationship with Bernard. A few months into our relationship, he found the box. “What even is this?” He asked. “That’s my Bernard box!” I told him. He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “This kind of creeps me out.” My heart broke.

I keep boxes for all my people. I am a collector, and I love loving people; of COURSE I keep boxes! How had it happened that Bernard didn’t know that about me? How could he have been surprised? The reason is clear to me now, in hindsight: I’d spent our whole relationship trying to convince him I was chill and cool and open and “whatever” about everything. But that’s not who I am at all! When my husband Luke found my Luke box, he said, “Oh! This is your Luke box!” And he wanted to go through it so we could remember together the shitty restaurant with paper menus in Lafayette we went to, and our first Mardi Gras parade where he caught a handful of condoms from a passing float and gave them to me.

There are people out there who will love you, just you, not the version of you you perform for strangers because someone made you think that was part of the game. A person who loves you isn’t going to try to change you; AND, amazingly, a person who loves you is going to love you even though you are going to change. As you change, your relationships will change too. That’s OK. Love can last, even as specifics may not. (I made a comic about this today. Here it is.)

Sending love to all the Flirty people out there, wherever you are in life. I hope you know that you have already found “your chill.”

Love,

Sophie