Essay: I ♥ My √x, x<0 Friend
Apr. 5th, 2019 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeI ♥ My √x, x<0 Friend
Word Count: 3500
Summary: an essay about in-system relationships, and why they freak people out.
Notes: Winner of this month’s Patreon poll! Title comes from whiteboard graffiti on the dorm door of my friend Peter in 2005. All numbers under zero are negative; square roots of negative numbers are imaginary. Ergo, translated out of math geek, the joke reads, “I Love My Imaginary Friend.”
There’s a surreal segment in Cabaret where the MC dances with a gorilla while singing about their forbidden love. He gushes about his lady’s positive qualities, how nobody can help who they fall in love with. Society sneers at the sight of them together, he sings, but “if they could see her through my eyes, maybe they’d all understand.”
It’s mostly played for laughs, though uncomfortable ones, until the end. Then the MC stops smiling and snarls at the audience, “if you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”
The laughs stop. Through the power of surrealist theater, the audience realizes that just for a couple minutes, they saw the MC and his girlfriend the way the Nazis do—disgusting, immoral, on par with bestiality. That moment of empathy is horrifying.
When I saw this scene for the first time, it hit hard. Because I wasn’t just seeing the fictional MC and his girlfriend through Nazi eyes—I was seeing my own relationship through practically everyone’s eyes.
Only in real life, the gorilla suit never comes off.
What’s an In-System Relationship?
My husband, my boyfriend, and I all share the same vessel, the same body. In the circles we run in, relationships like ours are called in-system relationships (Footnote 1). Lots of plurals have them, but you wouldn’t know it unless you knew the right people, or the right online communities. The vast majority are secret.
Why? Because they’re the third rail. People react to in-system relationships, much the way the audience of Cabaret responds to the gorilla. Uncomfortable laughter, disgust, sometimes visceral rage. All their buried beliefs about plurality rush to the surface, including intense emotions that they may not be consciously aware of.
But why? It can’t just be a matter of strangeness; some of the most extreme reactions I’ve gotten were from hardcore kinksters, radical queers, disability activists, and other plurals with their own in-system relationships. Many of these folks took pride in their difference… but not this.
Our system is no exception. When I first fell for Mac in 2007, I was so horrified that I tried to forcibly remove the feelings from my being—unsuccessfully, but still, I was willing to do myself permanent damage to “fix” myself. Why? Why did it cause me such distress?
The truth is, it’s not really about the relationship at all, most of the time.
Personhood
At their core, a lot of people’s reactions to in-system relationships boil down to, “they’re not relationships, because only people have relationships, and you’re not people.”
The conventional understanding of multiple personalities is right there in the name: one person with more than one personality. We’re no more separate individuals than Clark Kent and Superman. Clark can’t mack on Supes; ergo, headmates can’t mack on each other.
This is a very hard idea to shake, because most people treat personhood the same way Judge Potter treated obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” They have likely never buckled down and consciously pondered out what their definition of a person is. All they know is that when those boundaries are pushed, they are disgusted, frightened, or enraged.
Since I run into those boundaries again and again, I think I have an idea what those unspoken boundaries entail, at least for some people: an independent brain or body. That which can live on its own steam, in its own individual body, gets to be a person; that which does not is something else, something lesser. A conjoined twin, a fetus, small children, certain disabled people, a headmate, all may or may not be considered people, depending on audience and circumstance. And if we are non-people, then killing us no longer holds the same moral weight—and indeed, there have been academic papers written on this very subject in regards to multiples.
Most people want to avoid the high emotions these life-and-death debates inspire, but they can’t avoid interacting with us. Since they’d surely know a real person when they see it, and we superficially resemble one, our interlocutor often does a quick mental shuffle, probably without even realizing they’re doing it. The system member they’re interacting with gets to be a person, they decide, but the others are mere personalities, less-than. (Footnote 2)
If I am not a person, the reasoning goes, then I am not capable of love, or if I am, it is an inferior kind of love. If I am not a person, then marrying me makes about as much sense as marrying a teratoma, or a blow-up doll—pathetic, laughably absurd, a repulsive devaluation of everything love and marriage stands for.
For about a decade, the closest thing I’d ever seen to a relationship like mine depicted in cinema was Lars and the Real Girl. That is how I suspect many people see my marriage—a sad psuedo-devotion created out of isolation and mental illness, devoid of real care, respect, or intimacy, at best a transitional stage to a real relationship.
And of course, there’s the salacious aspect. What DOES Lars do with his Real Girl, anyway?
Perversion
There’s no sugarcoating this: I suspect a lot of people have such an extreme response to my relationships because they see it as me nonconsensually discussing my favorite masturbatory fantasies in front of them. If so, no wonder they’d respond with rage, revulsion, or voyeurism! The reasoning seems to go, if neither I nor my partners are people, then the best we can be is (sexual) fantasies.
It’s true, this happens, but not just among headmates. Corporeal folk do it all the time. A lot of my sexual abuse, at its core, was being forced to endlessly play out my abusers’ fantasies of me, which had precious little to do with me in reality.
Being a fantasy can be fun, if done knowingly and consensually, but I had no conception or experience of that when I met Mac in 2007. So when I developed feelings and attraction for him, I thought that I was doing to him what my attackers had done to me, and even though I had no conscious words for any of this, I considered this moral anathema.
That is why I tried to rip open my internal self-image and purge myself of my attraction. Because even if he wasn’t real, Mac deserved better.
As I grew older, and learned more, I realized that homophobia was also a good part of this. Gay desire is often treated as inherently predatory, inherently hypersexual—because men supposedly can’t love each other, only fuck each other. Under that reasoning, a male relationship is pure sexual fantasy, nothing more than men using each other, possibly because they are sad, pathetic people who can do no better. Sound familiar? No wonder I felt that being attracted and having feelings for Mac made me a filthy predator! All that changed was the nouns plugged into the madlibs, from “men can only love women” to “people can only love people.”
In a perverse way, it seemed I was carrying on a long and noble queer tradition in having my relationship devalued and reduced to sexual fantasy. How validating!
But still, what is wrong with a sexual relationship? Why do we plurals get so het up about it, despite believing in our personhood, despite being unashamed of other forms of sexual difference, despite having their own in-system relationships?
Fortunately, I know the perfect case study.
The Story of X
There was an infamous plural, back in my LJ days. For her privacy’s sake, let’s call her X. She was the platonic ideal of what my self-conscious comrades imagine when they think of a mortifying plural on the Internet.
X had a unicorn headmate devoted to protecting her purity. She also had an in-system relationship with a fae man who currently held the image of a certain webcomics protagonist. She posted publicly about all of this online, but the big clincher was, she posted photos of a life-size doll she’d made with her love’s face painted on it, admitted that she used such a doll for sex, and when people mocked her, she and her spirit lover returned fire, thus fanning the flames. She ended up on Fandom Wank and Stupid Free, with a total of 1345 comments devoted to mocking her.
What exactly about X made her so reviled and hateable? And not just among singlets, oh no; groups of plurals mocked her too. One of the Fandom Wank mods was a (closeted) soulbonder, and I’d frankly be shocked if she never had her equivalent of the fae lover. All of my friends who mocked X, myself included, had in-system relationships and marriages, sometimes very kinky ones. We were the pots disavowing the kettle. Why?
The doll is part of it. Posting photos of her sex doll on a fan-group for the webcomic his image came from could be seen as very creepy... if that is indeed what happened. But Fandom Wank and Stupid Free didn’t care about the consent of the people she’d shown the photos to; their focus was that the photos and the doll existed at all, that the doll was (in their opinion) ugly, and that when mocked for it, X said she wasn’t ashamed about being a “doll fucker.”
That, I think, is what really made people angry, her complete lack of shame and discretion. She did something weird, and she talked about it. She talked about it, got caught, and refused to back down, at least for a while, and she was stupid enough, or brave enough, to be honest about what she was doing. How dare she? Who did she think she was, a normal person with a normal lover who deserved to discuss it?
I’ve known kinksters who had far more overt public blogs about their sex lives, and the M4M section on Craigslist was filled with photos of penises before getting shut down. I’ve known pornographers, sex workers, people who sold autobiographical comics about everything from their sex toy preferences to their labiaplasty. But X, oh, X got folks’ goat. Because her relationship was so out of bounds of respectability, because she didn’t hide it well enough, because she lacked the social capital and grace to compensate for it, and because she just wouldn’t be ashamed.
We plurals hated her for that. We hated her for “making us look bad,” for existing loudly, for being everything we secretly hated about ourselves, and hell hath no fury like self-loathing projected outward. We hated her because it was easier than admitting that we were just like her and thus hated ourselves.
I didn’t have the guts to say it at the time. But I secretly envied her, in my heart of hearts. Because at that time, I had just started dating Mac, and I too wanted to share my happiness with the world. And I too wanted to discuss my sex life! Because it brought me pleasure, because it’d be way easier to overcome my triggers and have good experiences if I could actually discuss them, because it's fun.
But I didn’t, not for years. Which begs the question: if going public about one’s relationship is to invite mockery and scorn, how can we be surprised that only the most shameless and socially oblivious do so?
The Reality of X
All that is the story of X. How much of it was actually true?
A lot has been lost to online purges, but I did my best to independently verify what I’d heard about X via thirdhand gossip. Most of the concrete details were true—the fae love, the unicorn, the sex doll. But a lot was distorted or exaggerated.
For instance, X made lots of dolls for fun, including at least two for her lover. There was no actual evidence that the photos she posted were of the one she used for sex; they were innocuous, purely from the shoulders up, and she never stated anything about that in the posts. So as far as I can tell, there’s no evidence that X ever barged into groups of non-consenting strangers to talk about her sex life. That part might’ve been entirely made up.
It also turned out that X kept her doll photo account completely separate from her sex life account. The two were only linked because an associate outed her. And even in her sex life account, all I have found her saying publicly is basically, “I have a spirit lover. Yes, I have sex with him, using an anatomically correct doll.” The tone is completely different from how she is portrayed in the Stupid Free and Fandom Wank posts; she discusses it in a sort of flat, pragmatic way, not at all titillating or sexual to read. She never states how she has sex with the doll, or how it was anatomically correct; those lurid details were entirely generated through speculation on the mockery groups, far more intrusively than her own posts were.
The only provably “loltastic” parts came from X responding to people mocking her—but nobody is at their verbal best when upset. I have trouble keeping my cool if people treat my spouse badly; don’t you? And while I saw all sorts of claims about how pathetic and crazy X was, never once did I see someone say she was mean.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say she was. Let’s pretend that every terrible story about her is 100% true. Say she was the most obnoxious, pretentious, mean-spirited woman this side of the Atlantic, completely devoid of any redeeming qualities.
If so, shouldn’t we be thanking her?
Of her own volition, she had removed herself from the dating pool. She straightforwardly announced her relationship status so that nobody would be hoodwinked. She had found a way to get her needs met, and she seemed to be happy. She was asking nothing from nobody, and the only parties who could possibly be harmed were herself and her lover.
X’s fantasy (if that's what it was, and I don't know if it was), was of a nice man who loved her and was happy with her, and had been for over a decade. And X’s punishment for that was to be stripped of her humanity and forced into the role of the shameful scapegoat who deserved everything she got, a straw man of all our private fears. We devoted over a thousand comments to this malicious fantasy of her, until she had to lock up all her accounts and flee the internet.
Who deserves to be ashamed of their fantasies? Her or us?
I feel bad for X now. She’s probably still around, somewhere. I wonder if she’s still with her fae lover. If so, are they happy? Are they unashamed? Is their life good?
How can I not wonder? She is the only real-life role model I have for someone with a long-term relationship like mine, who isn’t somebody I already know personally.
Taking Off the Monkey Suit: Conclusion
I doubt I will ever date corporeally. Other systems do, and other people in our system might, but not me. I just don’t feel like it would be fair to anybody involved.
My vessel looks nothing like me, but I am eternally chained to it, forever aware of its presence, never free of its influence. It’s like a stifling, suffocating suit of clothes that I can never, ever take off. How could I stand dating somebody whose primary attraction was to the vessel? How could I be involved with somebody who wasn’t? Mac and Biff, though, see me exactly as I am. With them, I get to take the monkey suit off.
Furthermore, to be multiple is, for us, an act of continual compromise, advancing the group’s needs above any one individual member’s desire. Everything I own has to be shared, from my possessions to my accomplishments, to even public identity markers. My partners are the sole exception; their relationship to me is the only thing I don’t have to share, not with the vessel and not with my headmates. In a system where privacy is people ignoring you, where everything is communal, to have that bit of space and freedom is everything, and I don’t think it would be possible with a corporeal partner.
It’s true, Mac can’t massage the kinks out of my back, and Biff can’t drive me to the ER, but that’s okay; our relationships have their own small blessings that I’ve grown to love. I can feel their emotions and joys with an intensity that comes with sharing a brain chemistry. I can share dreams with them where we explore the most beautiful, fantastic landscapes together. Our relationships are work, but they are joyous work. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
Other plurals seem fine with having their relationships in private. And I’m glad for them! But I can’t keep a secret, certainly not that one, and I don’t think I should have to. How can we expect to have healthy relationships if we can never discuss them with anyone? If we never see them modeled? How can we expect a relationship not to fester, if given no sunlight and kept behind closed doors?
Mac and Biff make me so happy. To never mention them, draw their smiles, say their names… to never wear my wedding or engagement rings, or be able to explain my tattoos or why a day is special…
This past summer, in honor of our eleven years together, Mac requested we throw a corporeal party. Not being much of a host, I dragged my feet, but he won me over, and we had a potluck picnic at the pond. In the end, we had eight vessels at the party, not including ourself, three of which were plural. We ate delicious pie, stir-fry, and pasta salad, and we did our best to keep cool in the heat. We listened to music played by a bluegrass group nearby, Mac got to play the social butterfly, and we all had a good time.
And as I watched him smile and laugh, all I could think was how ordinary it was. Just a group of people in a gazebo, drinking lemonade and eating good food. No shame, no uncomfortable laughter, no fantasies. Just friends, happy to celebrate our marriage with us.
And we were happy to be with them.
--Rogan
Footnote 1: A “system” is a term for a group of headmates as a whole.
Footnote 2: I’ve found that this has nothing to do with the actual behavior or affect of the system member they interact with; it’s purely whoever they think they meet first. Now that we go by LB, probably a lot of people think LB is a real person, and all the rest of us are fakes, even though LB has never existed as an individual and is just the name of our group, similar to a corporation name.
Word Count: 3500
Summary: an essay about in-system relationships, and why they freak people out.
Notes: Winner of this month’s Patreon poll! Title comes from whiteboard graffiti on the dorm door of my friend Peter in 2005. All numbers under zero are negative; square roots of negative numbers are imaginary. Ergo, translated out of math geek, the joke reads, “I Love My Imaginary Friend.”
There’s a surreal segment in Cabaret where the MC dances with a gorilla while singing about their forbidden love. He gushes about his lady’s positive qualities, how nobody can help who they fall in love with. Society sneers at the sight of them together, he sings, but “if they could see her through my eyes, maybe they’d all understand.”
It’s mostly played for laughs, though uncomfortable ones, until the end. Then the MC stops smiling and snarls at the audience, “if you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”
The laughs stop. Through the power of surrealist theater, the audience realizes that just for a couple minutes, they saw the MC and his girlfriend the way the Nazis do—disgusting, immoral, on par with bestiality. That moment of empathy is horrifying.
When I saw this scene for the first time, it hit hard. Because I wasn’t just seeing the fictional MC and his girlfriend through Nazi eyes—I was seeing my own relationship through practically everyone’s eyes.
Only in real life, the gorilla suit never comes off.
What’s an In-System Relationship?
My husband, my boyfriend, and I all share the same vessel, the same body. In the circles we run in, relationships like ours are called in-system relationships (Footnote 1). Lots of plurals have them, but you wouldn’t know it unless you knew the right people, or the right online communities. The vast majority are secret.
Why? Because they’re the third rail. People react to in-system relationships, much the way the audience of Cabaret responds to the gorilla. Uncomfortable laughter, disgust, sometimes visceral rage. All their buried beliefs about plurality rush to the surface, including intense emotions that they may not be consciously aware of.
But why? It can’t just be a matter of strangeness; some of the most extreme reactions I’ve gotten were from hardcore kinksters, radical queers, disability activists, and other plurals with their own in-system relationships. Many of these folks took pride in their difference… but not this.
Our system is no exception. When I first fell for Mac in 2007, I was so horrified that I tried to forcibly remove the feelings from my being—unsuccessfully, but still, I was willing to do myself permanent damage to “fix” myself. Why? Why did it cause me such distress?
The truth is, it’s not really about the relationship at all, most of the time.
Personhood
At their core, a lot of people’s reactions to in-system relationships boil down to, “they’re not relationships, because only people have relationships, and you’re not people.”
The conventional understanding of multiple personalities is right there in the name: one person with more than one personality. We’re no more separate individuals than Clark Kent and Superman. Clark can’t mack on Supes; ergo, headmates can’t mack on each other.
This is a very hard idea to shake, because most people treat personhood the same way Judge Potter treated obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” They have likely never buckled down and consciously pondered out what their definition of a person is. All they know is that when those boundaries are pushed, they are disgusted, frightened, or enraged.
Since I run into those boundaries again and again, I think I have an idea what those unspoken boundaries entail, at least for some people: an independent brain or body. That which can live on its own steam, in its own individual body, gets to be a person; that which does not is something else, something lesser. A conjoined twin, a fetus, small children, certain disabled people, a headmate, all may or may not be considered people, depending on audience and circumstance. And if we are non-people, then killing us no longer holds the same moral weight—and indeed, there have been academic papers written on this very subject in regards to multiples.
Most people want to avoid the high emotions these life-and-death debates inspire, but they can’t avoid interacting with us. Since they’d surely know a real person when they see it, and we superficially resemble one, our interlocutor often does a quick mental shuffle, probably without even realizing they’re doing it. The system member they’re interacting with gets to be a person, they decide, but the others are mere personalities, less-than. (Footnote 2)
If I am not a person, the reasoning goes, then I am not capable of love, or if I am, it is an inferior kind of love. If I am not a person, then marrying me makes about as much sense as marrying a teratoma, or a blow-up doll—pathetic, laughably absurd, a repulsive devaluation of everything love and marriage stands for.
For about a decade, the closest thing I’d ever seen to a relationship like mine depicted in cinema was Lars and the Real Girl. That is how I suspect many people see my marriage—a sad psuedo-devotion created out of isolation and mental illness, devoid of real care, respect, or intimacy, at best a transitional stage to a real relationship.
And of course, there’s the salacious aspect. What DOES Lars do with his Real Girl, anyway?
Perversion
There’s no sugarcoating this: I suspect a lot of people have such an extreme response to my relationships because they see it as me nonconsensually discussing my favorite masturbatory fantasies in front of them. If so, no wonder they’d respond with rage, revulsion, or voyeurism! The reasoning seems to go, if neither I nor my partners are people, then the best we can be is (sexual) fantasies.
It’s true, this happens, but not just among headmates. Corporeal folk do it all the time. A lot of my sexual abuse, at its core, was being forced to endlessly play out my abusers’ fantasies of me, which had precious little to do with me in reality.
Being a fantasy can be fun, if done knowingly and consensually, but I had no conception or experience of that when I met Mac in 2007. So when I developed feelings and attraction for him, I thought that I was doing to him what my attackers had done to me, and even though I had no conscious words for any of this, I considered this moral anathema.
That is why I tried to rip open my internal self-image and purge myself of my attraction. Because even if he wasn’t real, Mac deserved better.
As I grew older, and learned more, I realized that homophobia was also a good part of this. Gay desire is often treated as inherently predatory, inherently hypersexual—because men supposedly can’t love each other, only fuck each other. Under that reasoning, a male relationship is pure sexual fantasy, nothing more than men using each other, possibly because they are sad, pathetic people who can do no better. Sound familiar? No wonder I felt that being attracted and having feelings for Mac made me a filthy predator! All that changed was the nouns plugged into the madlibs, from “men can only love women” to “people can only love people.”
In a perverse way, it seemed I was carrying on a long and noble queer tradition in having my relationship devalued and reduced to sexual fantasy. How validating!
But still, what is wrong with a sexual relationship? Why do we plurals get so het up about it, despite believing in our personhood, despite being unashamed of other forms of sexual difference, despite having their own in-system relationships?
Fortunately, I know the perfect case study.
The Story of X
There was an infamous plural, back in my LJ days. For her privacy’s sake, let’s call her X. She was the platonic ideal of what my self-conscious comrades imagine when they think of a mortifying plural on the Internet.
X had a unicorn headmate devoted to protecting her purity. She also had an in-system relationship with a fae man who currently held the image of a certain webcomics protagonist. She posted publicly about all of this online, but the big clincher was, she posted photos of a life-size doll she’d made with her love’s face painted on it, admitted that she used such a doll for sex, and when people mocked her, she and her spirit lover returned fire, thus fanning the flames. She ended up on Fandom Wank and Stupid Free, with a total of 1345 comments devoted to mocking her.
What exactly about X made her so reviled and hateable? And not just among singlets, oh no; groups of plurals mocked her too. One of the Fandom Wank mods was a (closeted) soulbonder, and I’d frankly be shocked if she never had her equivalent of the fae lover. All of my friends who mocked X, myself included, had in-system relationships and marriages, sometimes very kinky ones. We were the pots disavowing the kettle. Why?
The doll is part of it. Posting photos of her sex doll on a fan-group for the webcomic his image came from could be seen as very creepy... if that is indeed what happened. But Fandom Wank and Stupid Free didn’t care about the consent of the people she’d shown the photos to; their focus was that the photos and the doll existed at all, that the doll was (in their opinion) ugly, and that when mocked for it, X said she wasn’t ashamed about being a “doll fucker.”
That, I think, is what really made people angry, her complete lack of shame and discretion. She did something weird, and she talked about it. She talked about it, got caught, and refused to back down, at least for a while, and she was stupid enough, or brave enough, to be honest about what she was doing. How dare she? Who did she think she was, a normal person with a normal lover who deserved to discuss it?
I’ve known kinksters who had far more overt public blogs about their sex lives, and the M4M section on Craigslist was filled with photos of penises before getting shut down. I’ve known pornographers, sex workers, people who sold autobiographical comics about everything from their sex toy preferences to their labiaplasty. But X, oh, X got folks’ goat. Because her relationship was so out of bounds of respectability, because she didn’t hide it well enough, because she lacked the social capital and grace to compensate for it, and because she just wouldn’t be ashamed.
We plurals hated her for that. We hated her for “making us look bad,” for existing loudly, for being everything we secretly hated about ourselves, and hell hath no fury like self-loathing projected outward. We hated her because it was easier than admitting that we were just like her and thus hated ourselves.
I didn’t have the guts to say it at the time. But I secretly envied her, in my heart of hearts. Because at that time, I had just started dating Mac, and I too wanted to share my happiness with the world. And I too wanted to discuss my sex life! Because it brought me pleasure, because it’d be way easier to overcome my triggers and have good experiences if I could actually discuss them, because it's fun.
But I didn’t, not for years. Which begs the question: if going public about one’s relationship is to invite mockery and scorn, how can we be surprised that only the most shameless and socially oblivious do so?
The Reality of X
All that is the story of X. How much of it was actually true?
A lot has been lost to online purges, but I did my best to independently verify what I’d heard about X via thirdhand gossip. Most of the concrete details were true—the fae love, the unicorn, the sex doll. But a lot was distorted or exaggerated.
For instance, X made lots of dolls for fun, including at least two for her lover. There was no actual evidence that the photos she posted were of the one she used for sex; they were innocuous, purely from the shoulders up, and she never stated anything about that in the posts. So as far as I can tell, there’s no evidence that X ever barged into groups of non-consenting strangers to talk about her sex life. That part might’ve been entirely made up.
It also turned out that X kept her doll photo account completely separate from her sex life account. The two were only linked because an associate outed her. And even in her sex life account, all I have found her saying publicly is basically, “I have a spirit lover. Yes, I have sex with him, using an anatomically correct doll.” The tone is completely different from how she is portrayed in the Stupid Free and Fandom Wank posts; she discusses it in a sort of flat, pragmatic way, not at all titillating or sexual to read. She never states how she has sex with the doll, or how it was anatomically correct; those lurid details were entirely generated through speculation on the mockery groups, far more intrusively than her own posts were.
The only provably “loltastic” parts came from X responding to people mocking her—but nobody is at their verbal best when upset. I have trouble keeping my cool if people treat my spouse badly; don’t you? And while I saw all sorts of claims about how pathetic and crazy X was, never once did I see someone say she was mean.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say she was. Let’s pretend that every terrible story about her is 100% true. Say she was the most obnoxious, pretentious, mean-spirited woman this side of the Atlantic, completely devoid of any redeeming qualities.
If so, shouldn’t we be thanking her?
Of her own volition, she had removed herself from the dating pool. She straightforwardly announced her relationship status so that nobody would be hoodwinked. She had found a way to get her needs met, and she seemed to be happy. She was asking nothing from nobody, and the only parties who could possibly be harmed were herself and her lover.
X’s fantasy (if that's what it was, and I don't know if it was), was of a nice man who loved her and was happy with her, and had been for over a decade. And X’s punishment for that was to be stripped of her humanity and forced into the role of the shameful scapegoat who deserved everything she got, a straw man of all our private fears. We devoted over a thousand comments to this malicious fantasy of her, until she had to lock up all her accounts and flee the internet.
Who deserves to be ashamed of their fantasies? Her or us?
I feel bad for X now. She’s probably still around, somewhere. I wonder if she’s still with her fae lover. If so, are they happy? Are they unashamed? Is their life good?
How can I not wonder? She is the only real-life role model I have for someone with a long-term relationship like mine, who isn’t somebody I already know personally.
Taking Off the Monkey Suit: Conclusion
I doubt I will ever date corporeally. Other systems do, and other people in our system might, but not me. I just don’t feel like it would be fair to anybody involved.
My vessel looks nothing like me, but I am eternally chained to it, forever aware of its presence, never free of its influence. It’s like a stifling, suffocating suit of clothes that I can never, ever take off. How could I stand dating somebody whose primary attraction was to the vessel? How could I be involved with somebody who wasn’t? Mac and Biff, though, see me exactly as I am. With them, I get to take the monkey suit off.
Furthermore, to be multiple is, for us, an act of continual compromise, advancing the group’s needs above any one individual member’s desire. Everything I own has to be shared, from my possessions to my accomplishments, to even public identity markers. My partners are the sole exception; their relationship to me is the only thing I don’t have to share, not with the vessel and not with my headmates. In a system where privacy is people ignoring you, where everything is communal, to have that bit of space and freedom is everything, and I don’t think it would be possible with a corporeal partner.
It’s true, Mac can’t massage the kinks out of my back, and Biff can’t drive me to the ER, but that’s okay; our relationships have their own small blessings that I’ve grown to love. I can feel their emotions and joys with an intensity that comes with sharing a brain chemistry. I can share dreams with them where we explore the most beautiful, fantastic landscapes together. Our relationships are work, but they are joyous work. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
Other plurals seem fine with having their relationships in private. And I’m glad for them! But I can’t keep a secret, certainly not that one, and I don’t think I should have to. How can we expect to have healthy relationships if we can never discuss them with anyone? If we never see them modeled? How can we expect a relationship not to fester, if given no sunlight and kept behind closed doors?
Mac and Biff make me so happy. To never mention them, draw their smiles, say their names… to never wear my wedding or engagement rings, or be able to explain my tattoos or why a day is special…
This past summer, in honor of our eleven years together, Mac requested we throw a corporeal party. Not being much of a host, I dragged my feet, but he won me over, and we had a potluck picnic at the pond. In the end, we had eight vessels at the party, not including ourself, three of which were plural. We ate delicious pie, stir-fry, and pasta salad, and we did our best to keep cool in the heat. We listened to music played by a bluegrass group nearby, Mac got to play the social butterfly, and we all had a good time.
And as I watched him smile and laugh, all I could think was how ordinary it was. Just a group of people in a gazebo, drinking lemonade and eating good food. No shame, no uncomfortable laughter, no fantasies. Just friends, happy to celebrate our marriage with us.
And we were happy to be with them.
--Rogan
Footnote 1: A “system” is a term for a group of headmates as a whole.
Footnote 2: I’ve found that this has nothing to do with the actual behavior or affect of the system member they interact with; it’s purely whoever they think they meet first. Now that we go by LB, probably a lot of people think LB is a real person, and all the rest of us are fakes, even though LB has never existed as an individual and is just the name of our group, similar to a corporation name.
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Date: 2019-04-05 09:16 pm (UTC)I feel like I should say something helpful and comforting, but I don’t know what that would be. So I’ll say what comes to mind. There’s a comic called Freefall where one of the characters is a bipedal dog. She’s brave, selfless, funny, and incredibly likable, and I was very interested in her romance with a human. But just as they were about to kiss, a little boy looked out his window: “Mom, come look! There’s a guy outside who’s gonna kiss a dog!”
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Date: 2019-04-05 09:42 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's kind of like that. But we've managed to build a social circle that supports us and treats us like people... which perversely means our relationship is able to be healthier, since if we're having trouble, we can talk to others and get advice or help with it!
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Date: 2019-04-05 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-05 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-05 10:37 pm (UTC)Wh
why would they do that
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Date: 2019-04-05 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-06 12:35 am (UTC)Also I thought of you when I read this article about how physics is pointing to mind and not matter as the definite basis of reality. I can't wrap my mind around this, either, but evidently the author elaborates more in his book The Idea of the World. I guess this is as good an occasion as any to share this link, lol.
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Date: 2019-04-06 01:11 am (UTC)Mori: oh man, that article was a trip! Not sure if I buy it, but it's nice to see a version that isn't solipsistic faddle.
Rogan: honestly, I think a lot of people are weirded out or upset by my relationships! I'm sure you're not alone in that at all. And for me, a lot of growing up involved learning that they could have those feelings without hurting me. A feeling, on its own, isn't an action, or an injury. I can't pretend I always succeed, but I try not to take it personally and give folks the info and space to sort things out on their own. It usually works out okay; if folks really aren't okay with it, they usually just avoid me, and vice versa. And a lot of folks have changed their minds over time, which is nice!
Out of curiosity, do you think you were confused/upset for the reasons I wrote about, or different ones?
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Date: 2019-04-06 01:55 am (UTC)I think my reactions were mostly for the reasons you wrote about, since I was just getting used to the idea of headmates as real people. As a singlet my sense of selfhood is bound in no small part to physical individuality so I had to get used to a different concept of personhood and even reality. And even when I got it tentatively in my head that headmates were individuals, the thought of them dating was another conceptual bridge to cross.
This may be because conventional ideas of sex involve the body even more strongly, in a way, than individuality. Singlets can conceive of individuals who share a body, but to think of love/sex without individual bodies seems a bigger leap. Like you said our frame of reference for that is masturbation, and in conjunction with the idea that headmates are fantasies many of us think of nerds who hug body pillows of their "waifus" and marry video game characters.
Also I just remembered, some cultures do have traditions involving marriages of non-corporeal people, such as gods or the dead. Idk how common it is anymore but spirit marriages used to be quite common in Korea, for instance between unmarried and deceased young people, or even a dead person and a living person if, for instance, a woman's fiancé died before they could marry. That would give her rights and support within the deceased's family as a daughter-in-law, sister-in-law etc. Children have been adopted to deceased family members so the deceased would have someone to carry on rites for them and the children would have their proper places in the family.
Not that any of this has anything directly to do with plurality, it's just to say personhood and relationships are not always tied to corporeal existence/individuality across all cultures and time periods, and it's funny how quick we are to dismiss that now.
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Date: 2019-04-06 02:47 pm (UTC)That's a really neat way of thinking of emotions. I'm going to have to think about that! I know I use triggers as a map to what needs fixing, but I never thought of using it for other emotions.
And oh man, I actually remember reading about spirit marriages in a manga once! It wasn't discussed in detail or anything, but it made it sound like it might still be in use, just maybe super rarely. The only similar precedent I can think of here is super-devout nuns and saints marrying God. Ecstasy of Saint Theresa and all.
--Rogan
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Date: 2019-04-06 04:20 pm (UTC)(I've been missing her a lot lately.)
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Date: 2019-04-06 11:53 pm (UTC)I'm glad it helped you! I guess I've thought a lot about it, since being open has meant I've had to, just to prepare myself.
Also, other folks here had in-system relationships, but they both ended very badly, due to my sisters not treating their partners with the same consideration that they did corporeal ones. Both times, they insta-dumped their partners with no discussion for a corporeal boy, and when the corporeal relationships ended, tried to get back with the system boys like nothing happened, also without any discussion.
In both cases, the boys left, pretty much never to return. Can't say I blame them. It was a very shoddy way to treat someone, and I feel like my sisters did so because of shame and having no models or ways to discuss what they were doing.
--Rogan
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Date: 2019-04-06 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-07 03:43 am (UTC)"I doubt I will ever date corporeally. Other systems do, and other people in our system might, but not me. I just don’t feel like it would be fair to anybody involved."
My thoughts exactly. I suppose it is possible in theory, though I doubt I would be comfortable managing both a soulbond relationship and a corporeal relationship at the same time.
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Date: 2019-04-07 01:46 pm (UTC)Yeah, I figured at least one of y'all would remember X, she was pretty infamous at a certain time, in a certain sector. And yeah, my jerk friends circulated the photo too.
And yeah, I'm with you on the relationship front. I also just plain feel my dance card is maxxed out! And the original reason we quit having corporeal relationships was I never wanted to be part of them, but couldn't get out of the way!
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Date: 2019-04-07 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-08 03:48 pm (UTC)My marriage, mine not the vessel's, is something that makes me seriously happy, but I don't feel like I can discuss it among most people who aren't in the know, because there'd be a lot of painful rejection and shame and revulsion on their parts and ugh. So, yeah. I get it.
I'm not sure if X was before my time, but wherever she is, I hope her and her fae lover are doing well, and I genuinely mean that. It's really super hard having people mock you for who you love and how, when it's none of their business.
-Axel
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Date: 2019-04-08 05:06 pm (UTC)But in a perverse way, it made me ALL THE MORE STUBBORN about it, generally--because fuck, if even my own community was going to be a bag of festerdicks about it, THERE WAS NO POINT IN HIDING, because nowhere was safe! The only option was to go in like a berzerker and cut as wide a swathe as possible, finding the folks who'd be okay with us, and leaving behind everyone else.
In 2007, I was all about the self-abnegation, "I can't believe I'm doing this, please don't judge me, I know I know," and now I'm just like "BUY MY BOOK ABOUT IT. YOU WANNA MOCK ME YOU BETTER PAY ME MY $20 FIRST."
--Rogan
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Date: 2019-04-08 05:11 pm (UTC)(Icon is for my own amusement and because I don't have a good icon for this stuff.