Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The broken refrigerator and its application to triggers

This entry was written after my first day of "therapy", but published well afterwards.

The counselling session opened with mindfulness meditation. (I mentioned I was nervous, he suggested we do a meditation/breathing exercise to get me calmer). That took me by surprise. It was just like Sam Harris' one from the Global Atheist Convention 2012, so I felt a little less weird about it since I'd had experience with that sort of thing before.

I noticed one interesting thing that my counsellor said that I could really relate to as a polyamorist.

He said, "Often when we feel negative emotions our immediate reaction is to run away from them or avoid them. But we would really benefit from looking at the emotions, or confronting them in some way and examining the reasons behind them. It's often just your body and mind trying to warn you about a threat, but in reality there's no threat there."

I almost said to him, "that sounds just like the broken refrigerator analogy for polyamory!". 

But I didn't. I wrote this blog post instead.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

It's a cultural thing, okay?

Atheism and Christmas time is a theme that's been done to death, but in all my time I haven't really seen much on a topic near and dear to my heart: the nativity scene.

A nativity scene is about the most religious Christmas decoration you could imagine - small ceramic figures of  Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the wise men and farm animals. It's the first thing you'd expect an atheist family to cast aside.

When I was a kid, my family had a nativity scene. A real basic one - the holy family and some animals. It was without a doubt my absolute favourite part of christmas. I'd set it out and arrange the figures with much joy.

When I went to France at the end of year 11, I had the opportunity to stay in Provence, a region that has an amazing custom of the crèche - a nativity scene that is of such a scale that it extends to incorporate the entire city of Bethlehem. Most families have one with a few dozen pieces; some churches or shopping centres would have ones with hundreds. My host mother had quite a few pieces and we even went on a trip to Frejus so she could visit a market and pick up a new figure or two.

My host mother's creche! Isn't it pretty? (click to see full size)
Remembering my childhood fascinations, I was fascinated with them and was almost going to buy a few figures until I saw the ones at the market cost several euros each (boo!).

A few days ago, amid very droll observations of the presence of Christmas stuff in the stores in August, I thought to myself, "me and Mr Wrong need to buy a christmas tree in the after christmas sales so we have one next year". Then I remembered the nativity scene thing, and all the stuff it meant to me and reminded me of and how "cool" it was.

So you know what I did? I bought one. A legitimate provençale set that's going to be shipped from France with about a dozen pieces.

And you know what? I like the tradition. So I'm going to continue it, religious baggage be damned!

I'd like to hear other peoples' opinions on this. What religious customs are you keeping that perhaps you shouldn't? What customs do you miss?

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Relationships that can't last aren't such a problem in polyamory

Often, you see on dating advice columns or similar people asking for advice about their current relationships. They have a partner who they love a great deal and have a nice relationship with, but for some reason or other there's a point of incompatibility that, whilst small, is insurmountable. I often see this on reddit where a girl is childfree but her boyfriend wants kids, or a guy is fiscally responsible but his boyfriend throws money around on designer shoes, and many other examples.

In these situations, the sage dispensing their valuable advise will invariably say something along the lines of "You need to break up. I know it's going to be hard, I know you don't want to do this, but you can't stay together so it's best to get it over with."

This seems to stem in some way on the monogamous need to find "the one" - any time you're spending with this "dead end" partner is time you could be searching for "the one". In polyamory, you can date partners who "aren't marriage material" whilst still being able to date partners who are.

I can relate to this situation. Mr Wonderful is just such a partner; he's super important to me right now and my world revolves around him and I want to spend every minute I can snuggled into his shoulder, but I know on a deeper level that we're not compatible at this stage in our lives. (Maybe in 5 years that will change; who knows). I know that if I was monogamous, I would be seriously considering ending things with him because it would be the right long-term strategy so I could go find my prince charming.

But I am so, so happy that I'm not monogamous because I'm not ready to say goodbye to Mr Wonderful.

I might never be.

But I'm also not ready to marry him in the foreseeable future. And there's no problem with that.