The Great Salt Lake
Stuck in Utah. After a late departure and waiting after arrival for a gate I missed my connection in Salt Lake City. I was going to be at home in Cleveland at a reasonable time tonight, but now I won’t be there until tomorrow afternoon. And my sleep schedule is going to be nonsense. I’m stopping in all 4 time zones over the course of a day or so and waking to go to the airport before 4 AM in one of them. I’ll recover but it sure makes my week more complicated. Even once I get to Cleveland I have 3 more airport chores over as many days, several in the wee hours of the morning. It’s just going to be a sleepless, grey-speckled-walls sort of week I guess.
I don’t even know what else happened to me today – there was so much waiting in line and waiting during transportation. I somehow managed to only eat one meal despite having a sensible plan when I left the house. And I never logged on to work at all – there was no urgent email but that’s all I even checked. And as soon as I got into my room and took off my travel armor** at like 6 PM local time I took a nap. Now it’s just after midnight and I’m wide awake but still like 6 hours from getting on my next plane.
I listened to about half of New Family Values (Andrew Solomon) on Cowboy’s recommendation†. It’s sort of a primer in patriarchal equivalence for a few common household configurations, mostly focused on child rearing. It’s respectfully done, given the limitations of that context. To me this series plays like how Sesame Street might try to talk about the different households a young person might find in their lives, except framed for people who remember the 1980s and believes that they know how child rearing “ought” to work. As someone who sees marriage and adoption and other “family law” as toolsΩ to force the patriarchy to comply with my individual demands, the framing feels very limiting. Definitely something I’m on the outside of, even though it aims to be inclusionary and targets people largely like me. And I worry a little that saying so will hurt Cowboy, but hopefully this and the related rant are framed selfishly enough to feel like it’s about me and not them.
Because of my history I can’t tell if I’m just super disconnected from what are in fact widely believed and acted upon rules — wherein most people actually are comforted by the existence of social structures with strict, assigned roles and the related rules — or if I’m just listening to someone yell at me about their individual fear. Or if I’m just crazy. There has been a lot of crazy in my life and the idea that I’m simply mistaken about something important should never be dismissed.
I’ve been thinking something similar about monogamy. I’ve talked to several people about it and I hear something from each of them like “I’m afraid of not being picked, if other options were available”. And I definitely under that fear — it’s fundamental to my being, the idea that in a given interaction I’m at best someone’s tolerable backup plan given limited choices. But I don’t understand at all how monogamy alleviates that fear; it doesn’t for me. It doesn’t actually take away options or choices; if your partner wants to choose someone else and abandon you there’s no part of the concept of monogamy that actually limits opportunities for choice, or restricts the choices that are made*. In fact it provides an incentive to lie when such choices occur, and a cover story to make the lie easier to sell.
Obviously I’m missing something. But it’s hard for me to tell what. To me it feels like not demanding monogamy adds safety in a number of ways. Beyond the obvious opportunity to decrease single points of failure and reduce individual stress when under high load (like during child rearing, for example), it also reassures me with ongoing, active choice and not merely the indefinite, unaccommodating status quo. I have a lot of trouble with the indefinite status quo — it’s a thing that religion often tries to sell as utopia but from my perspective it’s clearly a punishment. And it’s certainly harmful in government despite being popular enough to bake into many institutions. Things can literally never get better under a such a plan, and it’s almost always based on some capricious social hierarchy, but for some reason it’s still what many people want.
So there could be some tie to cultural norms that brings the perception of safety to other people in a way I just don’t experience directly. And certainly there are a lot of people who merely want to conform and derive comfort from that conformance directly. But I can’t pick out the gradient. If you don’t imagine it as binary — if interest in monogamy is a spectrum — what things make people more or less interested? Am I missing some practical protection provided by the practice? Is there maybe some culturally propagated fear — beyond non-compliance — that I don’t notice? If you have answers to these questions, or even just better questions, please say so. I promise not to judge your choices in relationships. I’m just trying to figure out the bits of an overwhelmingly popular and often fondly held cultural phenomena that I don’t understand.
Talked to DerbyK for a minute about demanding respect. Talked to M about how I can’t feel wanted regardless of the evidence. Talked to Dave for a minute about the tropes of religious performance and the vagaries of home towns. Quite a bit of talk for Dave in the past few days. Good job. Talked to J about a picture of their coach’s wife’s girlfriend and about the content and construction of gifts.
I’ve got therapy again tomorrow, assuming I ever make it to Cleveland. Still not sure about that plan, in all the ways I discussed last week. Maybe something different will happen today. Hopefully something that will give me an iota of clarity. Though on a sleep-deprived travel day as I sit alone in an apartment in Ohio that doesn’t seem super likely. I will at least have a guinea pig for company. Maybe she has some insight.
And some Dog pics. Because looking for Dog picks made me feel better on a lonely, less-than-great day.
ZiB
*Other than legal tools like marriage. But even they only affect legal matters, not social ones. You might be able to protect your assets with marriage, but not your heart.
**Among other things, fucking socks. All of which I’m going to have to wear again tomorrow. I hate travel.
ΩTo wit, I want to get licensed as a foster care provider in WA state. I’m super done with CASA and fighting within the system, but I’d definitely like the privilege to intervene more directly (and get paid) if I’m part of a situation where foster care is a thing.
†I also recommended Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (John Holt) to Cowboy as something close to my own views on the role of young people in society. Or more generally about the way we could structure society to better accommodate the fact that not everyone has the same capabilities.
