Ok, well I'm glad you told me in whatever way you feel comfortable. I will leave it to you to work out your own stuff and you can let me know if there's something I can do to help. I honestly don't feel any pressure or resentment. That is something I worked on in therapy, because for a long time I think I was too reliant on you making some move that would get me out of my crappy situation. In the end, I needed to do something for myself. And it's the same for you, I think. Honestly, this frustrated me for a long time. It's hard to just want someone to be happy, or feel fulfilled, and have that drawn out for several years. Obviously that's not as hard as going through it yourself. But I hope you believe me when I say that I just want you to be satisfied and challenged and all that good stuff. However you get there is fine with me. You know that. As for the other stuff (sorry to be vague, but I'm in class), I'm not sure what to say that hasn't already been said. I'm kind of tired of having this same conversation because I feel like it's also causing some of my issues of feeling like I need to "please you" or whatever. I will try to start Opening Up this weekend. I hope that might help us to have a different kind of conversation. Because I keep feeling like I'm in this loop where you tell me you're unhappy about something and I feel like I need to do something about it to "keep you" or make you feel better. gotta go On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 4:31 AM, Jeremy Meyers <softlord@pobox.com> wrote:
Dearest Kate- So, here’s why I was up late last night. I had some some stuff that’s been bubbling under the surface (and sometimes not under the surface). I know we said we’d check in with each other, so here’s some stuff that’s going on with me that for whatever reason I haven’t talked about or been able to crystallize my thoughts on. There are no huge life-changing bombshells in here, and I’m not leaving, so don’t worry. When I decided to move here with you, I knew that your schooling and the program would be your priority. This is the deal that I accepted, because I love and support you and this is what you should be doing. I did a lot of reading on “what its like when your partner goes to grad school”, and thought I was prepared. However, I think a side effect of this is that its put into further stark relief how unsatisfied I am with my life and what i’m doing with it. I’ve basically been treading water since my Waggener job ended, to varying degrees. I know we’ve talked about it, but I’m not sure I’ve really processed the full extent of my feelings on the subject. I’ve always held that a healthy relationship consists of three parts. Yourself, the other person, and your relationship. I feel like I’ve lost my own life momentum as you are gaining yours, and I’m not happy about it. I’ve become acutely aware of how much of my own life (as distinct from our life together) now revolves around you and your schedule and spending time with you. Obviously, I like spending time with you. However, I’m very frustrated that my life right now is about spending a lot of my time doing freelance stuff while waiting for you to get home. You’re the only person I’ve spent any significant time with since we got here (and even for a long time before we moved). This leads to me wanting distance sometimes, even when I don’t specifically want to “not be around you”. I love you and our time together, but I am also lonely, unchallenged and under-stimulated a lot of the time. Even before we were together I was basically spending most of my time at home and alone, so this is not new behavior. I don’t think I’ve really let that sink in without trying to explain it away or feel guilty because of some fantasy implications about our relationship, when its not about our relationship. None of this is news to you, obviously. I’m reticent to dwell on it too much with you because I don’t want you to feel any pressure from me or that I harbor any resentment toward you about your schooling. I appreciate all the support you’ve given me on this front and I’m sure I’ll be leaning on you for more in the future. I don’t, and I don’t want your priorities to shift. It’s all on me to lead and theres nothing for you to adjust, I don’t think. I dont know if theres anything specific I want you to do to help, either. The thing is, I suck at doing stuff for me. I’ve always been bad at it. I don’t like making doctors appointments, I even put off bullshit stuff like haircuts, and i’ve always fallen into jobs or relationships and left them way after it was really time. This is something that I really dislike about myself, and though I have the rare moment of clarity about them, most of the time i’m in a fog of ‘well what if thats not the right thing’ and disgust at this stupid fucking habit getting the best of me while time in this life is so short. The phrase “wasted potential” comes up a lot. So, thats something I’m going to figure out. I’m not sure how yet but I will (and I have some ideas that i need to actually DO), because continuing on how I have been is not sustainable and is only hurting me and by extension our relationship, which is too important to me to fuck up now. Other things.... It makes me sad that there are things that you’re ashamed of or deep dark secrets that you still don’t feel comfortable enough to share with me, things that could bring us closer together. It makes me sad that you say you don’t treat yourself very kindly. I want to support you as much as I can, though I’m not sure what I can do or whether it’s even my place, or if anything I could say would help you in that respect. But if there is, I will do it. It makes me sad that after this much time we’re still so delicate with each other sexually and can’t figure out a way to be more overtly sexual (or as you say ‘sluttier’, though i’m not sure thats exactly accurate in my mind and maybe thats part of the “problem”, framing being more overtly sexual as a charged word like ‘slutty’). These are things that I struggle with internally. I want to figure out why, I want to break through, I want to be way kinkier and more spontaneous and adventurous than we’ve ever been. I get frustrated, however, when it feels to me like you’re not being very proactive with your needs and instead focusing on being accommodating and reactive. This is, I think, a theme that I’ve been struggling with trying to accurately and specifically identify. I’m not sure I have it precisely right, but here’s what I’ve come up with. It seems (from my POV at least) like you sometimes go into situations (be they sexytimes or otherwise) with the attitude of not wanting to “disappoint me”. That makes it very difficult for me (and you too, I suspect) to engage in the moment. For me it feels like it raises the stakes of every interaction. It relies on you then feeling like you’re doing what I’d want or what you think I’d expect, or deferring to my request or preference. Then if I’m doing something outside of that or not providing or following the right script, theres no way to communicate it without maybe ruining the moment or risking the very thing you’re trying to avoid? It also doesn’t leave room for your actual needs wants and desires to be communicated or to happen, so maybe you’re ‘stuck’ with either me guesing or you not getting precisely what you want out of the interaction, or more often its me asking what you wanna do and getting frustrated, or you asking what I want to do and me getting frustrated. No good. I’m not sure what the path to get to a better place about this is. I can hear your response already “well you don’t say what you want either”. I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not sure that would help given the dynamic (not that its the easiest thing for me either). This kind of stuff has us stuck, and it needs to change. One of the reasons I’ve been encouraging us both to read Opening Up is because there’s a lot of stuff in there about sexual communication and templates and things, and maybe that will help, er, open us up, regardless of whether it leads to a restructuring of our monogamy boundaries. In fact it would probably be helpful to separate out the reading from any commitment to opensexytimes, which is perfectly fine with me. Some of the local people I’ve been talking to on OKC (and some that we’ve been talking to together) seem like they’d be fun to hang out with even if we dont end up getting naked with them. I’m just not sure whether you’d be okay with that happening, be i together or me by myself...I’m trying to make friends on my own here too. I’ve been thinking about it a bit and as much as i want to be having hot threesomes and moresomes and meeting fun couples to play with and stuff, I’m not sure given all the other stuff above that I’m even in the right headspace to share that adventure and have it be sustainable. I guess we’ll see. As pervy and kinky as i am, I'm also bored and lonely as I said, which is possibly not the ideal situation to begin such things. I don’t know, though. I just know that it’s really most important to me that it be something that we're both excited about, or at least honestly open to independently rather than you doing it because of how i feel about it or that same sense of not wanting to disappoint me if you don't like it. Well, now it’s late, I’ve been wrigting this letter for 3 hours and you probably think I’m mad at you. Well, I’m not. I just needed to get this out. My love always -Jeremy Momo
— — Kate Farina Graduate Student, Digital Media Department Georgia Institute of Technology 347 306 7954 katefarina@gmail.com @katefarina