Relationship Parable

This column ran last spring in a few places, but I kind of lost track of it since it ran during my transition from part time columnist to full time novelist. The timeline stuff was accurate in spring when I wrote the column and this was supposed to be the first part of a several part series on relationship parables, which I might still end up writing to post here.

Enjoy!

Not the moving service we used, but close enough.

In case you’ve noticed the absence of a column from me in awhile (or a blog post for that matter), let me tell you a little story about relationships…

I’ve been living with my girlfriend for a couple years now. About eight months ago, I relocated with her from Orange County California to Orange County Florida. Anyone who has tried to move somewhere with someone, you know that aside from the primary function of relocating all your things, moving also seems designed to causes stress, fights, and costs a ton of money. Since my girlfriend and I are both very thrifty women, the costs only added to the stress and fights.

We survived the cross country move but then, at the beginning of March, we moved across town from an apartment to a house, which caused one of the rarest and most intense kind of fights a couple can have, the dreaded:  we’re moving out, so we don’t have to worry about our neighbors hearing our argument. In an empty apartment, we had a proper screaming at each other match. That’s not entirely accurate, technically, she was screaming at me, and I was intentionally getting under her skin in a much quieter way. From the outside, it probably sounded like she was screaming me silly without response, but let me say, I am a master of messing with people without seeming like I’m messing with people. If I ever had an argument with myself, I would probably end up slapping the hell out of me. To my girlfriend’s credit, she only yelled.

Ah, traditional marriage.

We’ve been together for several years, known each other even longer, and we’ve never had a fight like this. More specifically, she’s never had the out of control reaction she had, and it scared the hell out of her that she was able to get so angry. The combination of stress from moving, the huge amount of money we were spending, and her need to take on absolutely every responsibility she can get a hold of, finally caught up with her, and then I started needling her with bitchy comments because I’d felt like she hadn’t listened to me enough that day. I totally earned the screaming at, and I told her so, but that didn’t make her feel better since she was a little freaked out about the rage reaction.

As women, we’re socialized to internalize our anger. We’d rather take stuff out on ourselves than externalize it onto the people who probably caused the anger. In the rare occasion when we do externalize our feelings, it is usually accompanied by a lot of guilt and shame. I have no doubt in my mind that if I was straight, and I managed to get my boyfriend that angry, he would have punched a hole in the wall of the apartment we were leaving and we would have lost our deposit; yay for being a lesbian! We all have those emotions at those intensities in us. It’s a human thing, not a gender thing. So, while it freaked her out because she was still thinking in the socialized terms that women aren’t supposed to have that kind of anger and we certainly aren’t supposed to show it, I wasn’t surprised, shocked, or appalled to learn my girlfriend was an emotionally vivid human being. Having anger is normal, expressing anger is healthy, internalizing anger because that’s what you’ve been socialized to do is damaging.

The intemperate sex indeed.

The relationship moral to this story is two fold:

-           Firstly, and most obviously, understand that moving with your girlfriend/wife/partner/whatever-nomenclature-you-prefer is mind bogglingly stressful. Give each other a break, learn to take breaks from each other, and accept that arguments are almost certainly going to arise no matter how much you love each other.

-           Secondly, and perhaps not so obviously, outward expressions of “unsavory” feelings like anger, jealousy, contempt, etc. shouldn’t be looked down upon. I put unsavory in quotes because there aren’t “bad” and “good” emotions, only “preferred” and “not preferred” emotions; calling these emotions bad is where the guilt and shame over feeling them comes from. Anger isn’t a bad emotion and so expressing it doesn’t make you a bad person. Trying to destroy or suppress a perfectlyhuman emotion like anger is what’s actually bad for you. Within a relationship you don’t just have to understand your connection to these supposedly negative feelings. You have to understand your partner’s relationship to the feelings both in how they experience them and how you express them to your partner. Knowing Nikki had that kind of anger in her didn’t scare me, didn’t make me rethink the relationship, or think less of her; it let me know she was human with a very human need to express her anger sometimes. The really scary thing would be if she never showed me anything but a happy face.

Happy endings involve sunsets and rainbow flags.

How Soon is Too Soon?

Another quick retread of an article from the dating website I work for addressing the complex lesbian issue of U-Hauling! Original post here on 8-17-2011

From a really charming greeting card company with LGBT options

A recent letter I answered on the Q and A section of my web column addressed in very limited detail how soon is too soon to move in together. This actually matched up with a conversation I had with a friend recently about her and her girlfriend’s desire to start having babies. Something she said kind of stuck out to me: they’d been together for six years and it was about time they started having kids. Wait, what? Six years is the alarm clock for children? Do we start sperm donor shopping at about five years and six months? What happens if a couple makes it to seven years without procreating? Are one or both ladies labeled an old maid? It all seemed a little arbitrary to me.

In the aforementioned letter, the submitter said she’d moved in with her girlfriend because it was more convenient to see each other that way. I may have been a little outraged in my response, but I think my outrage was warranted. Of all the reasons to move in together, I think convenience is even sillier than your relationship meeting some arbitrary time stamp set up by the particular Sapphistocracy in your area (I made that word up—please use it until it catches on). I’ve started to wonder how many of these relationship norms and benchmarks my own relationship violates. We’ve been together going on three years, have been living together for about two of those, and we’re light-years from even deciding which one of us would get pregnant, let alone looking for genetically favorable strong swimmers from a willing donor. This all begs the question: how soon is too soon?

There is of course the silly joke about U-Hauling (there’s even a word for it) where any relationship that doesn’t result in moving in together within the first few dates is viewed as a failure. Let’s move past that though and take a realistic look at some real reasons for and against moving in and how soon is really too soon.

First and foremost, let me reiterate the advice given in the Q and A section a few weeks ago for those of you who may have missed it. Moving in for convenience, to save on gas or commute time, for the insurance benefits, a shared wardrobe that doubles your options (I am so freaking jealous of you ladies with girlfriends the same size as you who get to do this), or any other reason that really boils down to ‘it makes things easier’ is all a bad idea. We have enough trouble with bed death and girlfriends becoming roommates without actually using reasons tailored to having a roommate thrown in the mix. You move in with your girlfriend when you want to move your relationship to the next level and you’re both ready for the lifestyle change. You do not move in together to save on rent and split the cost of milk.

 

Addressing the concept of time stamps is a little more difficult, because these are the demands brought on by peer pressure, both external and internal. You look around at your circle of friends and you see Katie and her new girlfriend Beth are moving in together and they’ve only been together six months, but you and your girlfriend have been together for eight months and you’re not sure you’re ready yet, but they’re both going on and on and on about how great it is, so you…? Let’s just stop right there, and let’s not even touch how much pressure you’d feel if you and your girlfriend had been together for a year or more and still hadn’t moved in together. Seeing the pace others are running around us can encourage us to try to run at a pace we’re not built for, not ready for, and will exhaust us long before it does them; I don’t actually run, but my girlfriend does and she said this metaphor works. The point being, your relationship is different than your friends’ relationships, but, more than that (and this is where most people get tripped up) your relationship with your current girlfriend is different than any other relationship you’ve likely had. You can’t move in with Sara at six months just because you moved in with Jennifer at five…remember how that turned out? (I totally hope I freaked someone out by using the name of their current and ex-girlfriends in that hypothetical example. If I did, send me an email telling me to get out of your head).

“How soon is too soon?” is a question only you and your current girlfriend can answer. It can’t be based off the people around you or their opinions on how long is long enough. Lesbians are entirely too reliant on the advice of their friends when it comes to making life choices and that advice usually comes from a place just as confused and lost as the one you’re currently in. If someone is saying X number of months or years is the right time to do something in a relationship, take a step back and realize your relationship isn’t on a timeline. To use a sports analogy, since I’m dating a stem and I’m a total daddy’s girl I know all of these cool parallels between dating and sports: your relationship is like softball or baseball—there’s no time limit on things, just benchmarks to be met; your relationship is not like a soccer match where the time can run out on something and there’s very little scoring going on (hopefully that’s true on the second part).

Move in together when you’re ready to take that next step. Understand that your relationship is unique even within all the relationships you’ve already had. And never move in for simple convenience. Together we can make that U-Haul joke go away by making good relationship choices and increasing our chances for longer-lasting unions.