A Nonsexual Intimacy Playbook

I'm on winter break, and am trying to get back into blogging. This past semester has been fantastic, both in terms of my connection with the Presidio community and in terms of the development of my ongoing ranting about relationships and intimacy. I'm entering the new year a lot more focused on partnered relationships than I have been in the past, and before gearing up and heading into romance land (wish me luck!) I'd like to review some of the tricks of the trade that I've picked up over the years.

I've already discussed in depth a lot of the underlying theory behind my approach to relationships, here are some of the ways that I've applied that theory to do things in relationships that most people at least don't talk about doing.

Greying

Sometimes I'm in a relationship with someone that has great energy but feels like it's not going anywhere. We want to spend more time together but it doesn't quite happen, and things feel like they're stagnating before the relationship's full potential can be realized.

When that happens I focus on two things:

1. Being more emotionally expressive about the relationship, and subtly pushing the other person to do the same.
2. After emotions are out there, being aggressive about proposing new directions for the relationship based on those emotions.

Emotion doesn't just mean "I like you," it means an honest assessment of how I feel about them, what I respect, what I want to challenge and how I feel about what we spend our time doing together. When done right this pushes relationships into the "Grey Area" between friendship and romance, which is a fun but sometimes disorienting place.

Spidering

Sometimes I'm spending time with people and enjoying it, but I feel like I've lost perspective. I don't really know what I'm getting out of my relationships and I feel like I'm responding to the things that are getting thrown my way rather than making things happen on my terms.

When that happens I like to take a step back mentally and really assess what the major relationships in my life are, what I'm getting out of them, where I want them to go and what the major gaps are. For me this literally involves drawing a web, labeling the main relationships and looking at how and why I'm spending time on them. I come out with a clear decision of how the pieces fit together and where I want to go with each relationship.

Triangulating

Sometimes I have great chemistry with someone but they're already in a committed monogamous relationship. I honestly don't understand why this is such an issue for sexual people. If you like one person, then they're significant other is probably cool too right? Extra person! Bonus!

When this happens I'll do a couple things:

1. Emotionally engage the person I'm into without hesitation. I'll be open, smiley, and even slightly flirty (though I'll suppress physical affection if it begins to develop a lot.) I'll be very clear about the fact that I'm asexual as I do this.
2. Emotionally engage their partner just as much. Even if I don't know my friends' BF/GF as well I'll assume a high level of respect for them (after all, someone I respect loves them a lot) and extend them the same level of friendliness and excitement that I extend their significant other. This helps to temper feelings of jealousy a bit, though the relationship will still start out lopsided towards the partner I know better.
3. Listen for things that the relationship is struggling with, and try to add something that soothes those struggles over. This can mean serving as a soundboard for one or both parties, but it often is about introducing something that lets the two partners get to emotionally and intellectually engage with another in a way that they wouldn't otherwise. Once I'm integrated enough to do this I begin to form a relationship with the couple, rather than two relationships with the two people in the couple. It's this relationship with the couple- a contribution to the bond that keeps them together- that ultimately keeps things in balance and is most rewarding.

Breaking out

I've written before about how my breakups are never as showy and dramatic as they seem to be on TV or in the stories of my friends. For me breakups are sad but rarely heated.

That's because on a fundamental level I don't believe that a relationship can stop working. The expectations that underpin that relationship can stop making sense, but the relationship itself probably formed because the people involved have business in one another's lives, and it's always worth seeing whether there's still some of that business to be done.

When expectations stop making sense it can be hurtful, and that makes expectations hard to get rid of. The important thing is to see how the relationship can evolve in new and interesting directions without old clunky expectations bogging it down. It's hard to stomach "breaking up" to be "just friends" if your romantic relationship is worth a lot and friendship is worth a pittance, but if you have faith that that friendship can evolve (or grey) in totally new and fascinating directions than the drama of a breakup is less pronounced. It becomes easier to shed a tear for the old expectations while keeping focused on the future.

Detoxing

Sometimes relationships develop sexual tension, or at least what reads as sexual tension. Even though I'm Ace I'm not immune to it. I'll click with someone, and the sparks will be pronounced enough that we'll begin to express them physically, and as soon as we're expressing them physically the question of whether SOME SORT of sexuality will enter the relationship looms large. This can be toxic. Tension about sexuality can overshadow the good things that give the relationship its energy in the first place, and while it's fun sexual tension can begin to detract from the relationship's larger and more interesting purpose.

When this happens I try not to let the tension linger to long. I'll introduce some light sexuality into the relationship (usually kissing), and see how things fall out around it. On occasion the sexuality fits in seamlessly with what makes the relationship click and it becomes a more common occurrence, but it's far more often for both of us to realize that sexuality isn't really what we wanted. We come out of the experienced focused on what really works about the relationship and are usually much closer as a result.

This seems counterintuitive- introducing sexuality as a way to (3/4 of the time) DEsexualize a relationship, but it works surprisingly well. It's only once sexuality is no longer a question mark that you can see the nonsexual intimacy in a relationship clearly.

Listening to the Ground

Sometimes I like someone a lot but can't get access to their time. They may be a mentor or someone I have a crush on, but when I hang out with them I wind up feeling pathetic and small and questioning why they would want to spend time with me.

When this happens I start by realizing that my own insecurities are blaring a lot more than their actual opinion of me. I'm a person deserving of their respect, though not necessarily someone worth a lot of their time. In order to make a bid for their time I need to know that I have something to offer, so I do a little research and a little thinking and try to figure out what major transitions the other person is going through. When people go through transitions (new job, new city, retirement, applying to grad school, etc) they tend to have a whole host of issues and no existing support network to deal with them. If I can make myself part of that new support network then I can approach them confident that I have a good reason to be in their life, and that confidence and focus makes all the difference.

Wingmanning

Sometimes I love people, but the things that they ask of me are more then I can offer.

When that happens I think about how my community and the other person's community can fulfill that need. I'll very directly and honestly tell them that I can't provide what they're looking for and take some step to connect them with a resource that can. These connections often pay off in the long run- my friend is more integrated into her community and we both reap the benefits of that integration.

Community Intelligence: How well do you understand your community?

Still busy with grad school, but I'm coming up with tangentially relevant stuff from time to time:

Relational Economics

I'm on vacation, which means I get to spend some quality time nerding out with my brother. We just used a big chunk of beach as a chalkboard to explore this question:

Can relationships be meaningfully described as a series of rational decisions?

My mom's immediate answer, when she walked by to see what we were up to, was "don't be silly." First off, looking at the decisions that get made in a relationship doesn't really tell you about the heart and soul of that relationship, the emotion and subtlety that make that relationship work. Second, anyone who has experience with these things will tell you that relationships can be anything but rational. There's no rhyme or reason to love, and we had all better get used to it.

Despite the fact that she's my mother, and therefore always right, my brother and I persisted. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that relationships can be described that way. That means that a relationship can be thought of as a series of decisions that people make, and each of those decisions can be broken down to a sort of cost/benefit analysis that has one logical conclusion. This kind of a theory isn't meant to be practical, like most real world examples of physics most real world relationships are far too complicated to be predicted with any precision. (Physics can't, in any practical way, tell you how a teapot is going to shatter.) It could be interesting in thinking about overall trends in the ways that people connect with one another and communities come together.

Because, irrational as relationships seem, the decisions that we make in them almost always ARE rational (or at least as "rational" as our decisions to purchase things, and that hasn't hurt the field of economics.) To test this my brother and I decided to explore the following scenario:

Bob has called Alice and invited her to play golf on Saturday. Will Alice say yes?

As I've mentioned before in this blog, decisions about time are particularly important to understanding what makes relationships tick. A quick poll of the beach seemed to hint that this was, in fact, a problem with a rational answer. When presented with the scenario, people immediately sought to define factors which would define a rational decision.

"I think she would," said a passing six year old "because girls like golf."

Her friend, eager to contribute to the problem, added another condition "She might stay home if she was sick though."

The response of these two girls was telling. If the decisions that we make in relationship were completely irrational then they would have simply shrugged their shoulders, as they would if I asked them whether it would rain in a month. Their guts and life experience told them that the situation with Bob and Alice COULD be understood if the right initial conditions were known. That is, if we know enough about how Alice feels about golf, enough about how she feels about Bob, enough about her other options for that Saturday and a few other tidbits of information then we can predict her decision with at least the theoretical certainty that economists predict real-world economic behavior. My brother and I had fun for the better part of an hour mapping these criteria on the sand, but I won't bore you with them here.

Instead, I'd like to talk about the possible implications of this rationality. Let's pretend for a moment that the statement at the beginning of this post is true. If it is, then the process by which relationships form and thrive can be mapped in a new sort of theoretical detail. Rather than bitching about dating, we could tease the process of dating apart and ask ourselves whether a better system could be designed for producing intimate human relationships. Rather than trying to build professional communities by throwing 500 people with business cards in a room together we could begin to build a real set of knowledge about what makes relationships happen and what doesn't. The art of community building seems stuck at the developmental stage of medieval medicine; a conglomeration of pet theories, wives tales and one-off solutions. It seems like we can do better.

I'll leave it here for now, and solicit people's responses to the questions above. Can relationships be described as a series of rational decisions? When (if ever) can't they? And if you had to map the criteria influencing Alice's decision to play golf with Bob then how would you do it?

Asexy Pride Video

I made an incredibly cheesy video about this year's AVEN Pride contingent. Check it out:

The Power of Smalltalk

I'm playing with video again!

If you like it, please digg it. Thanks!!

A/Sexy

There's nothing sexy about starting a band.

Talking about starting a band is sexy. Playing in a band, once everything is said and done, gets you laid like the Mattress Giant off I-270, but the process of starting one is anything but. It's just you in a room with a bunch of other dudes fumbling around to try to find a sound. Things are not quite clicking yet, your styles and personalities haven't quite figured out how to fit together. But there's something thrilling in that, the possibility that it all COULD come together, and that possibility is what keeps you at it, keeps your failing and trying again and growing closer as a group. Starting a band is asexy.

If sexy is about being alluring and desirable, asexy is about being unapologetically true to oneself and one's passions. According to the urban dictionary:

An adjective used to describe an asexual person showing intelligence, confidence, style, physical attractiveness, charming personality, baking skills, or any other combination of sufficiently positive and unique characteristics.

DJ is one asexy amoeba. I hear he can bake a three-layer cake in thirty minutes flat.

While Dictionary.com defines sexy as:

–adjective, sex⋅i⋅er, sex⋅i⋅est.

1.	concerned predominantly or excessively with sex; risqué: a sexy novel.

2.	sexually interesting or exciting; radiating sexuality: the sexiest professor on campus.

3.	excitingly appealing; glamorous: a sexy new car.

Something about the interplay between these two terms is fascinating to me. In the eyes of many of my friends, the two are one and the same. Being true to oneself and one's passions make you desirable, hands down. In my geeky queer hometown of San Francisco doing your thing, whatever that thing happens to be, is incredibly hot. Typeface nerds are hot. Drag queens are hot. Line-dancing biophysicists are hot. In open and accepting environments focusing on being asexy almost always leads to being sexy. The opposite is not necessarily true. Going out of ones way to be sexy means following the crowd, grasping for things that seem to make other people glamorous and appealing at the expense of genuine self-expression. Being asexy makes you sexy, but being sexy does not necessarily make you asexy.

This has not always been true. When the term "sexy" was in its cultural infancy it meant anything but a two-stepping, thrift-store clad graduate student. Some googling reveals that the term "sexy" first cropped up in publications like the LA times around the early 1920s. World War I had just ended, and the most advanced propoganda machine known to man, headed by Frued's nephew Edward Bernaise, was retasked to sell consumer products in what became the birth of american consumerism. People were realizing that people brought products not just becuase of their functionality, but because of much subtler social drives.

In Hollywood, where the barriers between the mainstream film industry and the porn industry were still paper-thin, people needed a way to describe the fact that stuff with "sex appeal" had a way of flying off the shelves and selling out at the box office. "Sexy" emerged because sex sells. Sex appeal became so ingrained in consumerism, and consumerism so engrained in our culture that what started (possibly) as a tagline for soft-core porn has become intertwined with the way that we think about all sorts of desire. Heirloom tomatoes are sexy. Green jobs are sexy. iTunes apps are sexy.

If "sexy" came to us from consumerism, "asexy" comes from a reaction against it. In the 1960s and 70s, a massive backlash against consumer culture led to a nationwide epidemic of unsexy behavior. Feminists gave sexy Hollywood starlets the finger, shaving their heads and rebelling against a society which defined them in terms of a sexual role in which they were fundamentally uninterested. Gay liberation followed suit, laying the groundwork for a politics of sexual identity founded on self-determination, self expression and unapologetic celebration of any and everything (so long as no one got hurt.) It was with these ideals that the asexual community first began to hobble together, much like the band in the first paragraph, around 2002 and 2003.

This early asexual community was full of people looking for a place to just be ourselves. We didn't want to be alluring or desirable, we just wanted to be validated and celebrated for who we were and to escape from a culture where the mandate to be sexy was often overwhelming. So we got busy celebrating. We busted out the cake and started partying about all of the nonsexual desires that made our lives hum. "Asexy" was our way of giving one anothers' passions an unjudgemental nod. Fly fishing is asexy. Fuck You Penguin is asexy. Your 76-page paper on the composition of medieval brick is asexy.

All of this makes me wonder if it might be time to bring asexy back. Todays hot trends aren't like the Hollywood producers and starlets of the 1920s. They look like steampunk, DIY, the viral YouTube remix and fighting climate change. What's sexy today is sexy precisely because it had the guts not to be. What's appealing isn't showing some skin or flashing some glamour, it's having the chutzpah to have fun keeping it real. More and more people are realizing that living life chasing what's sexy makes you anything but. With any luck, the juggernaught of sexy may finally be grinding to a halt and people may start looking, quietly, for a word to take its place.

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Caveats & footnotes:

• I fully acknolwedge that the majority of bands out there are not just a bunch of dudes, and that in many circumstances a bunch of dudes together in a room is totally sexy. For the purposes of this exercise we're assuming a straight, all-male band totally in it for the chicks.
• Oh god. If you look up "asexy" in the dictionary is my name really there? That's terrifying.
• As my friends will attest it takes me, like, forever to cook anything.

Make Love Not (Necessarily) Sex

I've been nerding out on the history and philosophy of nonviolence.

Sparked (kinda) by Mahatma Ghandi and brought to the US by Dr. King, nonviolence has had a profound impact on the way that we think about social change. The biggest misconception about nonviolence is that it is a form of absolution, swearing off the use of force because hitting people isn't nice. Nonviolence is a tactic. It's a set of principles and strategies for groups to create social change which are, in almost all circumstances, MORE EFFECTIVE than hitting people.

This seems kinda counter intuitive. After all, isn't power ultimately about who has the ability to hit who? Isn't refusing to literally fight for what we believe in a cop-out? Aren't we just yielding power to those willing to use violence to achieve their ends?

Non-violent activists would give a calm, resounding "no" to all of the above. Power isn't about who can hit who, it's about who can stand together. When given the option between a powerful violent group and an equally powerful nonviolent one people will almost always choose the latter. Sure, it takes guts to fight for what you believe in, but it takes even more guts to stand up to anger and violence with compassion instead of retaliation. Standing up to anger and violence this way doesn't yield power to it, quite the opposite. If someone wants to hit you and you show them compassion, they stop wanting to hit you. Effective nonviolence dismantles violence, and in doing so it demonstrates that violence is a lot less powerful than everyone thinks.

I bring this up here because increasingly when I think about what it means to be "nonsexual" the idea of nonviolence comes up. To be clear- unlike violence, sex is NOT a Bad Thing. But like violence, sex is a massive source of fear, power and control in our society. And like nonviolence, nonsexuality can be an extremely effective tactic to dismantle that power. Replace "violence" with "sexuality", "nonviolence" with "nonsexuality" and "social change" with "intimacy" (or vice versa.) When used correctly, nonsexuality can be a more effective tactic to create intimacy than sexuality. This is counter intuitive. We live in a society which largely equates intimacy with sex, which loudly celebrates sex as a THE way to create intimacy in popular media. Sex is a blunt instrument, a way to monitor and control the intimacy that people create without really delving into the reality of what makes that intimacy happen. But the power that sex has is also fundamentally fragile. As someone experienced in the practice of nonsexuality, I have learned that if I respond to sexuality with open, nonsexual compassion the sexuality miraculously dissolves and the other person winds up thanking me for it.

There are some powerful implications here. In our society, both sex and violence are tightly controlled as a way to control the ability of people to create social change and form close connections (two pasttimes which are more than a little connected.) What if nonsexuality works like nonviolence? What if we can go around creating whatever kind of intimacy suits our fancy without regard for society's tight constraints? I'm not suggesting that sexual people start lining up to take vows of celibacy, just that we asexuals should think of the nonsexual stuff that we're doing as more than a form of absolution. Nonsexuality is a tactic. It's a set of principles and strategies for individuals to create intimacy which are, in almost all circumstances, more effective than sex.