Hot Pieces of Ace! Coming out, and Romance v Friendships

I've been officially recruited as a vlogger on the phenominal Hot Pieces of Ace. Hopefully this will finally get me off my butt and generating Ace-relevant content. (I've been giving my love to my other blog.) Here are two videos, I'll post more as the weeks go on.

The Art of Mind-Blowing Conversation

Let’s face it: as Aces, conversation is what we’ve got. Cuddling is all well and good, but when it comes to creating close relationships with others we can basically figure out how to have soul-touching, mind-blowing conversations or we can get busy feeling bored. I want to talk quickly about how conversations work and how to reliably make them powerful and interesting.
A conversation is an animal. It’s created by the people who start it, but it has its own life and it’s own heartbeat. You can’t really control conversations without breaking them, but you can learn to tame them, feed them, and lead them in interesting directions. Outright control of a conversation is manipulation, and it’s a nasty business that tends to preclude the really interesting possibilities. What I’m talking about here is facilitation: gently nudging conversations into more and more powerful territory, without really understanding what will happen beforehand.

Conversations are like animals in that they evolve over time. This is great news, because even though science still doesn’t understand conversations that well, we do understand evolution. Recent research in a field called emergence or complexity theory has demonstrated that systems which evolve have a surprising amount in common: from ecosystems, to economies to cities to the development of the internet. In all of these systems, and in conversations, the same basic process happens over and over again. If you understand that process it’s possible to nudge it along, to take the slowly grinding wheel of evolution and give it a few extra shoves.

It turns out that internets and conversations and fungal spores and social movements are all just doing the same three things, over and over and over. Pretent for a second that you’re a DJ, looking out over a packed club that’s just beginning to move. You’re swapping beats in and out, trying to figure out what gets the crowd moving. As you swap songs and watch the crowd, here’s what’s going through your head:

Differentiate- Some types of music get the crowd moving and others don’t. Do they want hip hop or reggea? Top 40 or mid-90s? How do they respond when you up the bass?

Select- Of all of the musical choices at your fingertips, you want to identify just the ones that get the crowd moving.

Amplify- Now queu up more of the stuff that works and less of the stuff that doesn’t.

Repeat- Now you’ll be able see how the crowd responds to your new, amplified music and refine it even further. As the crowd shifts over the course of the night, you’ll be able to shift with them. You just keep repeating all night long: differentiate, select, amplify, differentiate, select, amplify, until the crowd is going wild.

The same basic principle is true for conversations. In conversations you’re not (necessarily) trying to get people on the dancefloor, you’re trying to create emotional resonance. Believe it or not, when you have a good conversation a certain part of your brain, called the limbic system, actually syncs up with the brain of the person you’re talking to. Like, if both of you were sitting and chatting in an MRI machine your limbic systems would sort of pulse in unison. Dogs have limbic systems that are bigger than ours, which is why you can make eye contact with a dog and instantly feel like you’re having a conversation.

Limbic systems sync up when you are feeling the same thing as someone else. The connection gets stronger when the feeling gets stronger, and when you become more accutely aware of the fact that someone else is sharing it. If DJs want to get people moving on the dance floor, adept conversationalists zero in on shared, strong emotion.

The Opening

Uncovering this sort of emotion can be tricky. Most people don’t talk about strong feelings easily. Once polite tactic is to meander around conversation topics that both people are emotionally attached to (“how about that local sports team?”), but that rarely goes anywhere unique or interesting. Instead it’s best to listen for topics that contain little blips of emotional energy, select them, and amplify.

For example: how should you open a conversation with someone that you don’t know? Let’s take a look at some standard openings:

“It’s hot out today!”- You’ve just expressed a strong feeling, way to set the bar. But you’ve also made the conversation about the weather. They’re sure to feel SOMETHING about the weather, so you’ll have enough emotion to string a conversation on, but those emotions probably won’t get too intense. You’ve just set a template for mediocrity. Next.

“How are you doing?”- Gutsy. You’ve just pinged their overall emotional state. If they are particularly open and they’re particularly open they may talk about something that they have strong feelings about in that moment, and you’ll have a conversation topic that you can take you far. If not they’ll say “Fine, how about you?” and you’ll have to take another shot.

“What do you do?”- Asking someone about their work brings up whatever emotions they feel about that work. All too often this is a mix of boredom and frustration, not the most interesting wavelength to hop on with someone. Like the weather, this conversation topic is low-risk (they probably have some feelings about what they do all day) but low-reward (the strongest of those emotions are probably ones that you don’t share in a precise way.)

“What do you do for fun?”- This is my personal favorite, because it’s got a great emotion to latch onto. It gets people reliving a bunch of positive memories, which makes let’s you take the conversation in a direction that’s interesting and upbeat. It also gives you important information about how to have fun with someone, which is the backbone of most good friendships.

From Good to Mind-Blowing

Say you’ve struck up a good rapport and found a topic of conversation that’s got someone excited. You’re probably both having fun, but you wouldn’t call it mind-blowing. The difference between a good conversation and a mind-blowing conversation is that good conversations are entertaining and mind-blowing conversations are transformative. People walk out of them different than when they walked into them. That’s the kind of conversation we’re going for.

In good conversations we recount things that we’ve experienced before, and have some good, clean fun reliving the emotions involved. In mind-blowing conversations we experience powerful emotions for the first time, which makes them much messier and much more potent. Once someone feels safe enough you can nudge conversations toward these unique, emotionally powerful experiences. You just need to know how to listen.

Most of the time, most people talk about things that they’ve talked about. If you’re talking about the game next Friday, chances are it will be like the game next Friday. If you’re asking someone about their hometown, they’ll probably give the same schpiel that they’ve been giving since they left. Where this isn’t true is around major points of transition in people’s lives: big changes that are happening or that people want to happen. Points of transition can be obvious, like having a baby or starting a new job, or they can be subtle, like a nagging sense of spiritual uncertainty.

If you get whiff of a transition point, steer the conversation towards it and learn what you can. Parts of the transition will be picked over, things that the person you’re talking to has already talked about ad nauseum with friends and relatives, but if you listen closely you can find patches of conversational territory that are still fresh and unexplored. These are the areas where the conversation can become more powerful; where new, unexplored emotions sit waiting in the reeds.

When people start to delve into these powerful unexplored places, tap into your sense of empathy. Most humans are surprisingly empathetic. If we see someone get poked in the arm we don’t just imagine the pain, the part of our brain that connects to our arm actually experiences pain. There’s a whole section of our brain that does nothing but keep track of which feelings come from us and which come from the people we’re looking at. When this part of the brain shuts down, people actually physically feel pain then they see it inflicted on others.

This powerful sense of empathy means that when you see someone going through a strong emotional experience for the first time it’s easy to match their wavelength. Armed with your sense of empathy and compassion you can feel what they feel, pushing the conversation to places that are steadily more powerful.

Video on Asexual Relationships

I'm graduated!! And will hopefully have some time to give love to this blog (in addition to my other one.) I want to start with a response to the awesome stuff that's going down over at Hot Pieces of Ace, the asexual collab YouTube channel.

The Power of Talking about Intimacy

I think I've broken the ice.

I've been ranting about intimacy for a while now, despite the fact that it's pretty embarrassing, socially awkward and professionally detrimental. I do it because I've had this overwhelming sense for the past five years that the asexual community is onto something, that somewhere latent beneath the everyday assumptions that we make about intimacy there's this ocean of unmet need just waiting to burst out, hit oxygen and and change things.

The human need for intimacy is a deeply, deeply powerful force, from our actions as people right on up to our actions as a species. It drives everything from our family drama to our purchasing behavior to gang violence to the rise of megacities. We don't spend nearly enough time talking about it. The flippedness with which most people conflate intimacy and sex is strong evidence of that fact. And even though I've spent years ranting about it to people, I've had almost no luck getting other people to see intimacy as the fundamental, game-changing force of nature that my gut sees it as. No luck, that is, until this year.

See, a few times a year I give talks on college campuses about the asexual community, 90 minute orientations to how we work and what we stand for. Because they consist of safe, friendly and contained audiences I use these venues to test messaging that can later be delivered to the press, and in the past few months I've switched things up. Specifically I've switched up the way that I talk about intimacy in the asexual community. The results have been staggering. Twice now, multiple people in the room have gone through something akin to a shift in worldview. At a precise point in the lecture something in them shifts, and they start to view their own life experience from a new and profoundly empowering perspective. They thank me profusely and gush about how things suddenly make sense that have been murky for them for years.

It sounds egotistical to write this, and to some extent it is, but I also think I've struck a vein. The last time I got reactions like this it was the start of the asexual community. Now it's in the broader population (sex-positive undergrad students so far, but I'll have to test and see where else this model for talking about intimacy is applicable.) Here's how it works:

I open my lecture giving the definition of asexuality and talking through the specifics of our identity and our breed of sexual politics. Then I delve into three stories from the asexual community, all stories about intimacy.

The first is a story about Winter and Paul. Two asexuals from New York, Winter and Paul met when the community was just starting and meetups in Manhattan were just getting off the ground. They hit it off as fast friends, and as they spent more time together something blossomed. To people who equate intimacy with sex it might be difficult to get what exactly changed, but their relationship suddenly started to feel different. They started spending more time together, more and more of their feelings started bubbling to the surface, the plans and promises they made started creeping skyward. It made sense to call the relationship something else. After dating for a few years they got married, making them the second wedding on AVEN, and settled into a life together.

That's the first story.

The second story is about a monk named Dave. Now, Dave became a monk long before the asexual community was established, starting as a US Navy Chaplan and never looking back. He bounced between the Vatican and far-flung adventures in exotic locales, devouring life experience as avidly as he devoured books and intellectual argument. Eventually he decided to quit the church, and settled happily into the DC gay community where he applied his considerable intellectual muscle to the gay rights discussions of the day. He grew a monumental beard and got busy building himself a house with a generously proportioned library. As Dave settles into his library he'll look back across the journals from his travels, across the dog-eared books that he's spent his life tromping through and the clean, crisp ones he's still ready to devour. Dave is happy.

That's the second story.

The third story is about a girl named Ann and her punk band. Ann is in highschool, but that's ok because Ann loves punk music. She's got this band that tours regularly, and the band vibe couldn't be better. When they get together they can really tap into something, really put a part of themselves out there together and build something powerful with it. That experience trumps most of what Ann has experienced in her life so far, and the same is true for many of her band mates. They've got something. It's deep, it's powerful, and it's build relationships that are just as deep and powerful. The band is together all of the time for practice, and because of that they've become one another's support network. It's always tough to say how these things will go, but for now Ann's punk band is giving her a lot of what she needs in life.

That's the third story.

Now, the important thing to understand about these stories is that in the asexual community they're all seen as equally valid ways of getting at the same thing. The word "single" doesn't really get used in the asexual community, because it implies that if you're not in a romantic partnership with someone you're somehow isolated and your human need for intimacy isn't being fulfilled. In the asexual community you can't really be single, because it's equally valid to fulfill your need for intimacy by focusing on your relationship with yourself and the world around you, the way that Dave does, or by focusing on a close relationship with a community, the way that Ann does. Intimacy still matters. There's no getting away from our need for it, and in the asexual community we challenge ourselves vigorously to pursue it. We just don't think that romantic relationships are the only path.

At different times in our lives it makes sense to focus more on intimacy from a partner, from ourselves or from our communities, but we'll always need a little of all three. Think about these stories. Which resonates most with you and why? Does our culture value these types of intimacy differently?

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.

----------------------

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.

What is a Relationship Model?

Relationships are everywhere. We have relationships with our friends and our family. When we go to the store we rely on a relationship with the person at the checkout counter. The onion that we buy got to the store through a (probably complex) relationship between the store and a farm. When it grew, it grew through complex relationships between the plant, the soil around it, and the sunlight and water which rained down on it. And the crazy thing is, none of these relationships ever stay the same. How we buy food from stores is not the same today as it was 100 years ago, and it will probably be different 100 years from now. How the onion relates to the soil around it changes drastically as the onion matures, and has changed in a larger sense as onions have evolved and been selectively bred. 

We're used to thinking of these things as things: stores, onions, sunlight and people, but sometimes it is useful to think of them differently. You can think of the entire chain- from the sunlight hitting the soil to the onion soup you eat at your pot luck- as an interacting series of relationships. Understanding how all of those relationships evolve and change can be just as useful as understanding the things and people involved. 

This is useful because when it comes to relationships, especially relationships between people, we tend to be very very smart. If I ask you to explain the impact of the federal funds rate on housing prices you could probably read 5 articles on the topic and still be scratching your head. But if I ask you how bringing your new girlfriend to Thanksgiving will impact the conversation between your grandma and your uncle, you'd probably be able to tell me. A computer could never do that. People are incredibly complicated, much more so than obscure financial data, but because we have a deep intuitive understanding of the way that relationships work we are able to operate in them remarkably well. Thinking in terms of relationship models allows us to tap into that intelligence and use it to enhance our understanding of just about anything.

A relationship model is a set of expectations about what will happen in a relationship. If I call my friend Sam we will probably make plans to hang out next week. If I go on a date with Lori's sister things may get weird between Lori and I. If I work hard and kiss up to my boss, I may get promoted. If I buy this onion, I can cook with it. Relationship models allow us to confidently take actions in a largely unpredictable world, they consciously or intuitively tell us how relationships work. 

The relationship models that are easy to describe tend to be static. In these relationships expectations are written down in laws, scientific studies, or cultural customs. The relationship between a customer and a teller at the grocery store is one example, in most grocery stores around the world that relationship works in essentially the same way. Science tells us what to expect from the relationship between baking soda and vinegar, legal documents tell us what to expect from the relationship between a corporation and its shareholders. Even these fairly static relationships are constantly being redefined and disputed, which makes laws, science and cultural custom riddled with controversy. 

What's harder, but generally more fun, is thinking about dynamic relationship models. These models describe relationships where what we expect changes radically over time. We generally can't say where the relationship will wind up, but we can develop an understanding of the forces that will get us there. Falling in love is an example of a dynamic relationship model, so is scientific innovation or the development of an ecosystem or market strategy. Dynamic relationship models can't tell us exactly what will happen, often they can't even come close. They tell us what to pay attention to (ie the look in his eye, your gut instinct), and give us guidelines for how to act (keep an open mind, communicate clearly and openly) while we hold on to the changing situation for dear life.

The interesting thing about dynamic relationship models is how much they are similar. Did you notice how "keep an open mind" and "communicate clearly and openly" apply equally well to falling in love, making a scientific discovery and selling a product? It is not uncommon for dynamic relationships in widely differing circumstances to behave very similarly. A dating scene is a little like the trading floor on wall street which is a little like the woods regrowing after a forest fire. Relationship modelling is about finding a common, flexible language to describe those relationships, so that our understanding of one kind of dynamic relationship (building a lifelong friendship) can inform our understanding of another (building a stable company.) 

What are some concepts that you use to think about dynamic relationships?

Love and Leadership

How is being a leader like falling in love?

Something seems profane about that question. Leadership is about a sacred form of responsibility, while falling in love is about an equally sacred form of release. The idea of falling in love seems too mysterious, too emotional and too deeply personal to have a place in close proximity to the selfless work of leadership. But in other ways the two are perplexingly similar. As personal as it is to fall in love, it is also a selfless acceptance of another person. Though leadership is a deep responsibility, good leaders can motivate others to collaborate, overcome the barriers in their lives and feel an extatic sense of release. Love and leadership are both about empowerment, they are both about connection, they both involve work and they both create power. 

In this article I would like to cross-polinate some of the ideas that we use to think about romantic love with other ideas that we use to think about leadership. I will argue that love and leadership are not as disconnected as they might first appear. I believe that the skills we develop to find and keep love in our lives are deeply applicable to leading positive change in the world, and that the process of leading that positive change can be emotionally nourishing in many of the same ways as romance. 

Let's start by talking about energy. Think back to a time when you cared for someone who did not reciprocate, or to a time when you had an exciting idea that other people were uninterested in rallying around. Whether you're looking for love or looking to be a leader you're faced with the challenge of getting other people to invest energy in a relationship.

Energy means effort, it means focus, and relationships thrive on it. If you are in love with someone you may see them for only an hour, but you will spend an entire week putting energy into that hour. Similarly you can work with a team for forty hours a week, but it takes good relationships for that team to really invest energy in their work. We tend to invest energy in the things that bring us fulfillment, whether it's the simple sense of fulfillment that comes from eating food or the overhelming fullfillment that comes from overcoming oppression. The relationships that we find personally fulfilling are the ones that we tend to prioritize.

So how do you make a relationship fulfilling enough to be a high priority? It's not as simple as mapping out a plan for a fulfilling relationship on paper, giving a great sales pitch and then letting everything fall into place. Fullfillment is messy stuff. No one really understands what makes them fulfilled, and what we do understand we can't clearly communicate. As our lives change and our environment changes what we find fulfilling can change drastically, and our relationships need to be able to change with it.

The key to developing powerful, energy-rich relationships is iteration. Relationships need to constantly change and evolve in order to become powerful and stay powerful, and that change happens in three stages:

1. Investing Energy- This is what happens when couples support one another or campaign volunteers hand out yard signs. At the core of any relationship people invest energy in some process that makes them feel fulfilled. 

2. Communicating Emotion- This is what happens when couples say that they love one for one another or when a basketball team celebrates after a game. Now that everyone has invested energy in the relationship they need to take time to experience whatever the relationship created and express how they feel about that experience. 

3. Evolving Expectations- This is what happens when couples discuss where their relationship is going and teams sit down to strategize. Now that you know how everyone feels you can make a plan about how to invest more energy in the future. 

In powerful relationships these three steps happen constantly. You go on a date (energy) and at the end you say "that was fun (emotion) we should do it again sometime" (expectation). A group of friends builds an art project together (energy), then goes out afterward to celebrate (emotion) and starts planning the next project (expectation). 

In this way, love and leadership are not as different as they may first appear. Both are a way to use your time and energy creating powerful fulfillment in your life and the lives of others. Both provide deep feelings of love grounded in a process which improves the lives of everyone involved. Whether it happens across a nation or is confined to two individuals, the power to transform the world is inextricably linked to the feelings of love that come from that transformation.

I will end with an asexual story. One of the perks of being AVEN's founder is that I get to fly around the country giving talks at various universities. I'm usually invited to campus by the LGBT group, and I've noticed an interesting trend. Not surprisingly, the LGBT groups that invite me tend to be ones that have active asexual members. Of the 14 schools where I have spoken over the past two years, 7 have had out n' proud asexuals waiting in the audience.

Here's what is surprising: 6 of those 7 asexuals were club presidents. Think for a second about what that means. An asexual becoming president of an LGBT club is a little like a youtube video getting an oscar. When these people were freshman, their clubs probably weren't aware that asexuality existed, and probably had to struggle just to accept an asexual into their ranks. Yet whenever one of those asexuals is waiting to greet my plane I can be almost certain that she is running the show.

I can't help but wonder if this is, in part, because love and leadership are so fundamentally connected. Most of the people in an LGBT club split their energy between pursuing a primary partnership and building up their network of friends, but few asexuals on college campuses have that luxury. The best way for an asexual to fulfill her emotional needs is to build close-knit friendships, and the best way to do that is to work with her friends on something that all of them find personally empowering.

My point is not that asexual people are innately better leaders, merely that circumstances may have forced asexual people to tap into the link between love and leadership more deeply than most. See our need for love and fullfillment as deeply connected with our ability to positively impact the world around us can have an incredible effect on both. When we are desperate for love we make it by reshaping our world for ourselves and those around us. When we are desperate to reshape the world our skill in loving others guides us to a place of power, abundance and justice. 

Asexuals on the TV Screen

Allright all you aspiring hollywood writers out there. Ily's recent post on queer cupids has propmted me to brainstorm some ideas for asexual archetypes I hope to see popping up. Many of these are already out there, but not dropping any identity yet. Doing so could make things spicy and oh so interesting...  

The Cupid- Asexual character uses her uncanny familiarity with nonsexual intimacy to set up sexual characters. Character is out, proud and wisecracking ("you look fantastic, now run off and have some of that sex you like so much.")  

The Closet Case- character with conflicted feelings about being asexual finds community, wears t-shirts, gets an asexual love interest.  

The Asexual Slut- affectionate, flirty, this character gets nonsexually intimate with everybody. This character is out, proud and empowered, she/he has an uncanny ability to turn sexual tension into, a she puts it "something interesting." People who think they are going to bed with her wind up staying all night doing something that they find more interesting and personally relevant than sex, much to their surprise.  

The Homewrecker- boy meets girl, girl meets asexual. Boy and girl struggle to understand what constitutes "cheating" when an asexual is involved. At moment of confrentation asexual befriends boy, they figure it out and live happily ever after.  

The Clueless- otherwise intelligent character simply does not get sex. Accidentally makes comments with sexual innuendo. Asks for sexuality to be broken down in nonsexual terms ("So what's the deal with butts? Someone break it down for me, I'm lost here.")

The Vis King/Queen- Whenever character mentions asexuality, people around her overreact with confusion. Character is annoyed by this, and has a glib line that she uses to explain asexuality and dismiss disbelief. ("Some people like sex a lot and some only like sex a little, right? Some people don't like it at all.")

All About Asexual Relationships: A Recap

Over the past several months I've had a running series of posts on issues facing the asexual community in general and on asexual relationships in particular. I'm going to take a hint from Pretzelboy and have a post summing up the series so that it's easily readable. It all started out with:

What Asexual People Want- A quick overview of the issues facing the asexual community, which I break down into Support, Visibility, Institutionalization (I know, unfortunate word) and Relationships. I posit that asexual people have a relationship problem, and go into more depth in...

The Asexual Problem Part 1: Numbers- A discussion of the (temporarily) shitty outlook for asexual people that want to form romantic relationships with one another. Until we can get a good system in place to hook up asexy singles, a lot of people are going to have a problem finding the kind of intimacy that they want. But it ain't all that bleak, because...

The Asexual Problem Part 2: Language- Asexual people don't necessarily have a problem finding relationships, we just have a problem talking about them. Most of us have very, very poor language for talking about nonsexual intimacy. If we improve that language we can pretty much do it however we want whenever we want with whoever we want. (Yeehaw!)

The Magic Words Part 1: Focus on Relationships- To jumpstart the whole language discussion, I start talking about the language that I use personally. First rule: stop thinking in terms of "friends" and "partners," the binary sucks. Instead, just think in terms of "relationships" and explore the reasons why each relationship is unique. This has the added benefit of conceptually separating a relationship from the person with which you have that relationship (since relationships can often take on a mind of their own.)

The Magic Words Part 2: The Three T's- So if there are no friends or lovers, just "relationships" then how do you distinguish them? I talk about my personal system, which looks at Time, Touch, and Trust (which I used to call "Talk", but whatevs.)

The Magic Words Part 3: Using the Three T's- I flesh out the Three T's some more. They're not only a way to describe where a relationship is at, they're a way to think about growing it. I argue that spending time with someone leads to emotion (touch), expressing emotion leads to discussions about expectations which build trust, and trust makes people spend more time together. I think this cycle is the coolest shit ever.

The Magic Words Part 4: The Big Picture- Ok I lied, I actually think community is the coolest shit ever. After all, I'm not in just one relationship, I'm in a whole community of them. I talk about what it's like to actively build that community, what it feels like to depend on a community for my emotional needs, and how that community provides the kind of deep trust normally found in partnered relationships.

Anti-Love Drug in the New York Times

Whattt??????

Ok, quick rant about the above-linked article in the New York Times, which is titled "Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss" and which chronicles a study of prairie voles to try to understand human pair bonding. In it researchers and the reporter both equate love and sexual neurochemistry:

"reducing love to its component parts helps us to understand human sexuality, and may lead to drugs that enhance or diminish our love for another, says Larry J. Young."

Why prairie voles? 'Cuz:

"These mouselike creatures are among the small minority of mammals — less than 5 percent — who share humans’ propensity for monogamy."

I'd love to see the studies classifying humans as a monogamous species. "Love", for the purposes of this study, apparently means "monogamy," and is hence a squarely sexual phenomenon. Love is just the emotional/neurochemical rollercoaster which enforces (ha!) monogamy in humans:

"'Some of our sexuality has evolved to stimulate that same oxytocin system to create female-male bonds,' Dr. Young said, noting that sexual foreplay and intercourse stimulate the same parts of a woman’s body that are involved in giving birth and nursing. This hormonal hypothesis, which is by no means proven fact, would help explain a couple of differences between humans and less monogamous mammals: females’ desire to have sex even when they are not fertile, and males’ erotic fascination with breasts. More frequent sex and more attention to breasts, Dr. Young said, could help build long-term bonds through a 'cocktail of ancient neuropeptides,” like the oxytocin released during foreplay or orgasm.'"

"Unproven" is the key here, but this speculation is still the crux of of the NYT's article. 

There's something in here that should disturb even you die-hard romantics out there, namely the subtle implication that love is outdated. According to this article (and, apparently, the assumptions of mainstream science), the intense emotions that we feel are just instinctual leftovers from a less civilized age. The article goes on to talk about the inappropriateness of cupid's oxytocin arrow hitting during a business meeting, and speculates about how useful it would be to have a "vaccine" that got rid of the emotional mess alltogether. 

All too often I see love discussed in terms of loose neurochemistry and even looser evolutionary psychology. The idea seems to be that the complicated emotions that we feel for one another only make sense in contexts outside of our understanding- the complicated mathematics of hormone interaction and Bedrock, respectively. I'm not willing to give up so easily. Love isn't just a chemical burden passed down to us from homo erectus, it's something that is profoundly shaped and reshaped by cultures across geography and time. 

Love is around because it makes our lives better and because it makes our society tick. Understanding the neurochemistry of love might help big pharma's bottom line, but ultimately it won't help us understand how the things that we feel and the relationships that we have can genuinely improve our lives. To do that, we have to think about love in the context that where we feel it. Neurochemistry won't help us unless we want to start interacting with romance through drugs. Evolutionary psychology won't help us unless we want to hit on australopithecus. But if we can begin to seriously talk about, study, and understand the structure of relationships then we may just get somewhere.

My Second Breakup

The first time I broke up with someone was in high school. Her name was Rachel, and in proper highschool style I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. I hardly had a word for asexuality at that point, let alone words for asexual relationships, so we became pretty heavily emotionally involved using only the shabby language of friendship. Her boyfriend became obsessively jealous of our relationship, which eventually forced both relationships to fall apart. I got the full hollywood experience: crazy phone calls, sitting in my room listening to mopey music and deep emotional scars. When I ran into her years later I still got a chill.

Though my relationships have certainly gotten close since then, there haven't been any more breakups until about two hours ago. It's a conceit, but I like to think of this as a good thing. Since I've gotten my shit together a little more relationship-wise my relationships tend to evolve rather than end suddenly, they have the quiet emotions of ebb and flow rather than the drama of a big explosion. My meticulously balanced community kept everything relatively stable, and that made this breakup remarkably different from the last.

In this blog I've referred a few times to "Primaries," a core of close relationships at the center of my community. Treating someone as a primary is Kind of A Big Deal, and generally involves some acknowledgment that our relationship is getting serious. I created this box because I wanted a special way to think about the people who I mattered most in my life, because I wanted to begin to seriously commit to people and have them commit to me back. When I started using the word I applied it to three relationships, two of which fizzled within a month. The remaining relationships was joined by three others that have been relatively stable and growing for about two years.

Two years is a long time. It's time enough for relationships to grow intimate and it's time enough for people to change. Over the past six months one of these four people became increasingly busy with a combination of a demanding job, extensive volunteer work and a business that she is starting. Our time together remained as emotionally powerful as ever but became less and less frequent, until for weeks at a time I saw her only in events packed with other members of her community that she didn't have time for. We made up ways to spend time together but none of them worked. About two weeks ago I decided to seriously reconsider the relationship's role in my life. I spent the holidays slowly untying all of the emotions and expectations that I had entangled in the relationship, and earlier tonight we finally got a chance to talk about it.

Things still feel shitty, but I'm in a whole different world from last time this happened. I've still got three other core relationships and a strong community to depend on, so while there's certainly a whole in my life I don't feel like I'm alone in the world. I have no ill will towards her- she hasn't done anything wrong, just shifted priorities- and while I've got a lot of emotion flying around about the relationship I'm keenly aware that she is no longer a place where that emotion should be directed. We had a short, melancholy conversation where we acknowledged where we were and agreed to remain friends, and then we went our separate ways.

I can't help but walk away with the eerie feeling that this is all unhealthily mature.

The Magic Words Part 4: The Big Picture

It's taken me a long time to write about community. A lot of the blame rests on the usual whirlwind of grad school and life, but this is still a tough topic for me to articulate clearly. Here goes:

    I struggled with relationship stuff for a long time. Through college and for a few years after I beat myself up over what seemed like a persistent inability to form romantic relationships (the fact that I was attracted mostly to very sexual people didn't help.) I was scared- a fear that I'm sure a lot of asexual people can relate to. I was saving a part of myself for a kind of close romantic relationship that I just hadn't figured out yet. It started to feel almost virginal, and if there's one thing I can't stand it's saving myself. 

    Over the course of about a year, an experiment began to formulate in my mind. I didn't have a romantic relationship, but I was constantly surrounded by incredible friends and tight communities. What if I worked with what I had? How many of those pent-up expectations that I was waiting to put on a romantic relationship could be fulfilled by the people I already had in my life? When I caught myself pining over a romantic relationship I switched my thoughts to the people already in my life. I painstakingly went through every person that I spent time with on a regular basis, inventing a language to map the relationships and their potential for growth. I thought about the things that make romantic relationships special and began to invent small, subtle ways to incorporate them into my closest friendships. Slowly, the line in my mind between romance and friendship began to disappear. As my understanding of them became more ingrained and more intuitive the relationships in my life transformed from melodic background noise to something rich, beautiful, and at least as powerful as romance. 

    Earlier, I laid out a language for describing relationships in terms of Time (What you do), Touch (How you feel) and Trust (What you expect.) I'm going to use these three categories to try to describe my relationship with my community as a whole. What I describe may not seem all that different from how you relate to your own community, but hopefully the language will provide an interesting new perspective. 

Community: Every relationship in my life. This includes friends, coworkers, people I pass on the street, people halfway around the world that I am connected to economically, animals, plants, inanimate objects that I'm particularly attached to, spiritual relationships and my relationship with myself.

Time-Earlier this year I started business school. I showed up at orientation eager to meet the people that would be a big part of my life for the next two years. As I went around shaking hands and making introductory smalltalk, I paid close attention to the parts of the conversation where people got excited. All of us were in a scary, new environment where we hoped to accomplish great things, and all of us were going to need strong relationships to do it. I tried my best to squint and imagine what those strong relationships might look like so I could get busy creating them.

    Building relationships can be slow going, but it always pays off. All of the people that I met had things that relationships could potentially help them do- finishing homework, partying in Tahoe, emotional venting, etc. At the end of the day people don't prioritize relationships because the people in them are funny or attractive, they prioritize relationships where useful things happen, so I set about trying to build relationships that were mutually useful.

    I helped people with homework, I gave them a space to process the exciting things going on in our program. I also wasn't shy about building relationships that were useful to me. I spent time mapping out the things that I wanted to accomplish in the program, from getting through classes to exploring the business case for social justice, and I put extra emphasis on the relationships that took me in that direction. Before long I had more exciting opportunities to connect with people than I knew what to do with. I zeroed in on mutual utility, spending my limited time only on those activities and conversations that were most useful both to me AND to the other people involved. The result is rapidly transforming into a functional and supportive community, where I have relationships to support me in all of the things that I want to do. Because those relationships are mutually useful I know that they'll stick around, and if they don't I've got plenty of opportunities to build or deepen other relationships to take their place.

      Now that my community is falling into place, it's mostly just a matter of growth and balance. By deciding which parts of my community to focus on, I can determine whether my environment is supportive, fun, intellectually challenging or chill. I can arrive in class, ask myself how I'm feeling and then pretty easily focus on relationships to match. I can also begin to think long-term. All of the people that I'm connecting with have impressive skills and abilities, so for yucks I'll nudge my relationships so that those skills and abilities come together in interesting and potentially powerful combinations. I wonder what happens if I mix an innovative sustainable product designer, a detail oriented project manager, a dynamic spokes/salesperson and someone with a background in media? Small groups of people with good underlying relationships and the right combination of skills can get some very interesting things done, so I try to grow my community in ways that let these combinations happen organically.

    Business school makes a convenient example, but I can use essentially the same process to do things traditionally associated with romance. At the end of the day, romantic relationships also last because they are utilitarian- they let both people do the things in their lives that they want to do. Most of those things are fairly mundane (doing the dishes, going on hikes) and can be accomplished just as easily by a supportive community. Only a tiny portion of what happens in a romantic relationship actually requires a deep intimate connection. Confiding secrets, processing major life decisions, feeling a sense of stability and security with another person. For that stuff I've got what I call "primaries", relationships at the core of my community that happily reside in that gray area between friendship in romance. I'll discuss them later. 

Touch- I was looking back over old notebooks from college, and in one of the margins I'd sappily scrawled "I wish I could fall in love for about four hours a week." That's about what focusing on my community feels like. The big, showbiz emotions of romance are distributed across all of my relationships as they heave and change. I don't get my heartbreak in big, torrential breakups, I get it in little droplets as the parts of my community that I was most excited about quietly wash away. I don't spend days at a time head over feels about a special someone, but on a pretty regular basis I'll feel that rush of excitement about the possibilities presented by a new person or (better yet) a new opportunity for people to come together. 

    Emotions matter. They matter because they're my best guide to creating the kind of utility that I talked about earlier. If a relationship feels exciting then there is probably something useful going on, even if I don't yet understand what. Paying close attention to how my relationships feel and how those emotions are communicated lets me stably contributing to my life and the lives the other people involved. They're the key to keeping things in the balance, and the key to uncovering the places where relationships can grow.

   This is important, because it stops that deluge of emotions from across my community from becoming overwhelming. Right now I'm smugly happy about my relationships with my classmates, anxious about a good friend, giddy about a project I'm taking on and sad about a close relationship that's drifting. Because each emotion has a clear role in a distinct relationship it's easy for me to compartmentalize. When I feel something I generally know pretty clearly when and where that emotion is relevant, and I can keep ahold of it and act on it accordingly. Of course, a lot of the things that I feel are too big to fit in these sorts of boxes. I'll be bummed out or awkwardly overjoyed, and I'll pull on the parts of my community that help me express that mood until it stops being so overwhelming. 

    A lot of you are probably reading this and gagging at the idea of keeping emotions more or less neatly compartmentalized, but the shit works. Things aren't big, dramatic and messy, but that's kind of the point. I don't avoid feeling things, I just feel them in a way that helps my relationships along rather than threatening to tear them apart. This drives my relationships to go deeper and my communities get more and more interesting, and lets me feel things that would otherwise be impossible. 

Trust- If there was a core to that fear about relationships that I felt in college, it was a lack of trust. There are some things that just can't happen in relationships without monumental levels of trust. Major commitments like buying property and raising kids require a significant amount of trust in a single person, and it's hard to imagine how I could accomplish that level of connection while flittering around my community. There's something deeply compelling and simple about having someone who I can fundamentally depend on, a relationship that will be around through thick and thin. How can I build that kind of trust?

    In romantic relationships that trust comes with time. It often takes years of standing together through good times and bad for that kind of quiet certainty to really take root. If I want to build that kind of trust it's a simple matter of identifying the people I care about most, making real commitments to them, and holding those commitments sacred. These kinds of extremely close relationships are vital, right now I have three of them. We openly discuss how we feel about our relationship and where we see that relationship headed. We constantly prove ourselves to one another and, about two years in, are beginning to develop the kind of trust that's normally associated with romance.

    Why three? It has to do with some basic but extremely important math. If I had a romantic partner I might expect to spend about four nights a week focused on quality time with her and another three nights a week attending meetings, taking classes and visiting friends. Instead of spending quality time with one person for four nights a week, I spend one or two nights a week with each of my three primary relationships (and usually save another night for a more traditional best friend.)   I still wind up spending four nights a week having quality time with someone that I love deeply- it's just not the same someone each night. All three of these relationships have all been going on for over a year now, and they feel like intimate relationships do when they settle in. The honeymoon periods with their explosive emotions are over, and we have begun to settle into our deeply comforting routines. By itself, none of these three relationships is as powerful as a yearlong romance, but in combination they're about the same. If I need someone, I know that at least one of these three will be there.    

Since I've started this experiment, some incredible things have started happening. I've been able to see my community and the other communities that I observe with a newfound clarity. I've been able to envision more and more powerful ways for my community to enrich my life while I enrich the lives of the people in it, and that's where things get interesting. Good romantic relationships force people to grow. They simultaneously challenge the people involved and give them the support that they need to surmount those challenges. My relationship with my community is no different. For an individual personal growth could mean quitting smoking or letting go of inhibitions. When communities grow they tackle problems like racism and political apathy. If I see community as the source of intimacy in my life I will inevitably work to improve that community. All of that time, emotion and trust flowing around my community contributes to a fertile environment for change.