On partners and "meeting all my needs"

[serene]

We're having an interesting conversation on alt.poly that's been had before, but I wrote more in the thread than I usually do, and with snippy's permission, I'm reprinting some of the discussion under the cut (with some line breaks added to make it a bit more readable than my original post).



[snippy] wrote:

>On Sun, 11 Jun 2006 20:51:15 -0700, Serene <ser...@serenepages.org>
>wrote:

>>In my own experience, a thousand people can't meet my needs. Only one
>>can -- me. My partners are not in my life because they meet my needs.
>>They're in my life because they're neat people who consent to be in my
>>life. I feel like an alien when people talk about the
>>meeting-all-my-needs aspect of polyamory, because I honestly just do
>>not think of it that way at all.

>Where, if anywhere, does "humans are social animals" fit into this, in
>your opinion?

>Maybe it's a genuine difference, maybe it's a perception difference,
>or maybe it's just miscommunication, but I cannot conceive of meeting
>my needs by myself. I am a social creature: I need other people. I
>need social contact of some kind, and I am not healthy when I am alone
>too much. Nor do I live like hermit, independent of the efforts of
>other people in society, the ones who create and transport and sell
>the things I need to live (food and water, clothing, shelter). And
>both of those are what I understand as the meaning of the words you
>wrote, and I'm struggling to understand.


I think it's possible we're talking about two different things, but I
may be wrong. I think that I need human contact in order to thrive.
By that I mean that I think I need some affectionate contact with some
humans in order for my life to be happiest. (To be honest, the only
way to test that thought would be to go *without* any human contact,
and I wouldn't know where to begin trying that, nor do I want to, so I
will just take it as a given that I do best with human contact of some
sort.) Not specific contact from specific people, but some positive
contact with some number of people on a fairly ongoing basis.

What I perceive people are talking about when they say, "I have more
than one partner because no one partner can meet all my needs" is that
there are things that some people perceive they need in order to be
happy, and that if partner A doesn't meet them all, then they feel a
need to go find another partner or partners to fill in that lack. To
me, that seems as though the focus is somewhere that it isn't for me
(which I hope you'll believe isn't feeling to me like they're wrong
and I'm right).

For me, my life is about going through my days doing
the best I can to be happy, and if I'm happy around partner A, I want
to be around partner A, and it never occurs to me to think "Gosh,
partner A doesn't do X for me, so I need another partner to do that
for me," or even "Gosh, so glad I found partner A to do X with,
because what would I do if I didn't have an X partner?" (Which is not
to say I don't sometimes say to a partner, "It's nice to have someone
to watch movies with", just that it never occurs to me in partner
selection to enumerate what needs my partner may be likely to
fulfill.)

If I were lacking in someone to do X with, what I would tend to do is
go about meeting X in the best way I know how, or just adjusting to
not having X in my life -- it would never occur to me to try to find a
person to provide X for me.

Exceptions are certain social activities that can be met by hanging
out in groups dedicated to them. I mean, if I wanted to go dancing (I
don't, but if I did) and none of my partners wanted to do it with me,
I am *far* more likely to join a local dance club than to go looking
for a partner or other person to go dancing with. Or to go dancing
alone. It just wouldn't occur to me to think "I need a partner who
dances." I wouldn't even know how to go about selecting partners for
which of my needs they might fulfill.

By the way, I'm not certain I'm not approaching this question from an
unhealthy mental/emotional space. I'm aware, for instance, that I have
a fetish about doing things for myself (largely due to issues over
having been abandoned by my father) that sometimes gets in the way of
asking for things even when I badly need them.

Also, I'm not even sure I'm accurately viewing my way of doing things.
I was surprised to find that in my livejournal shortly before I
started seeing new people (when I was with cute-poet-chick), I wrote
about wanting more romance in my life. I remember wanting that, and
then shortly thereafter, I had new partners, but I don't remember
thinking of myself as "looking for new partner(s)".

Comments

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

I took the 'meeting my needs' argument as a response to the extreme 'coupleism' - the stereotype that your One True Love should be Everything, and if you still need even old friends in your life, you're not Truely In Love.

I agree that I alone am responsible for seeing that all my needs are met. But many of my needs can only be met if loved ones collaborate with me on the project. No contradiction there?

[flippac.livejournal.com]

I've gone looking for "someone to play with" before, and felt that there were specific emotional needs attached to that - not least not having to top all the time. What actually happened was H and I started playing - we'd been friends for a couple of years.

[hopeforyou.livejournal.com]

It depends on what "X" is. I could easily go out dancing with my friends if my partner isn't into dancing... and I do. If my partner wasn't into kink or had a very low libido, though, I could see wanting another partner to explore kink with or have sex with. It would be hard to adjust to not having sex or rarely having it, or rarely having my kink side come out. Sure, I could tie myself up and masturbate, but that would get old after a while!

[hopeforyou.livejournal.com]

That said, I wouldn't seek out a partner solely for the purpose of exploring kink or having sex. I think it's more like I'd be open to another relationship and hope to find someone who shared my interests in kink or had a similar libido.

iawtc

[firinel.livejournal.com]

What zie said applies to me, too.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

Your response made complete sense to me. The way I see it, it's my responsibility to be happy, to lead a life that makes me happy, content, joyfilled, and comfortable.

I don't know why I'm poly! I just know that it feels good to be in love, to have relationships that are emotionally, physically and intellectually intimate, and that I see no reason to limit myself to have that type of relationship with only one person.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I tend to think this way in general, but there have been specifics that have reared up over time as exceptions. For example (this is probably a pretty frequent example, I would suspect), I'm not into BDSM at all. If I have a partner who *is* into BDSM, my mental space with reference to BDSM is such that that's likely to be a permanent disparity between us. If they find that something that they really miss or lack, I can understand them looking for a partner who is into BDSM.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

I think part of the reason I don't really grok the whole concept in question is that I have very few things (sexually or relationship-wise) that I feel that way about. I like certain things more than other certain things sexually, for instance, but I can't think of one sex act or group of behaviors (BDSM isn't my thing) that I need to have as a part of my regular life in order to feel happy. Even when cute-poet-chick stopped having sex with me at all, I remember being sad that we weren't having sex, but I never remember planning or deciding to go looking for someone to have sex with. I wished we were having more sex, but I didn't think to look for someone else to provide sex, maybe because I wasn't missing sex-as-a-generic-thing alone -- I was also missing sex-with-that-particular-person.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much with you on that, but I've seen the scenario described come up with partners.

I wonder if it's part of a more general phenomenon. For example, a similar thing to what you're saying at the bottom has come up when discussing porn with the same people -- that I'm interested in the people depicted and liking / being attracted to the people depicted and it didn't matter as much what they were doing (so long as it wasn't something that squicked me), whereas they tended to focus more on what the people were doing and didn't really care if the people themselves were people they'd find attractive or interesting.

[kiya]

Slightly different perspective on this:

I have come to the conclusion that I can't easily maintain a relationship with someone who doesn't share a basic minimum of kink with me (which falls into the BDSM categorisation, for the most part). At some point, I find it becomes actively effortful to suppress the kink to levels that the other party is comfortable with or able to deal with, and this gets very hard on me. I don't currently have a relationship in which kink incompatibility is an issue; at this point, if I ever consider starting another relationship, it will be one of the things that I will have to consider as part of whether or not certain sorts of interaction will actually be workable for me.

Mind, I've also been the person on the 'just not kinky enough' side of things in a relationship, and I found that extremely disconcerting; the relevant partner at that time had a lot of responses that I found utterly incomprehensible and alien, and it did have an effect on our interactions, because while I'm willing to provide a certain amount of sexual interaction that's geared to my partner's preferences rather than my own, there was too much stuff there that utterly failed to connect to anything in my head.

So I've come to the conclusion that a certain level of mutual kink compatibility is something I need in the context of a partnership; it's not something I need outside that context, but I'm not going to try to do a partnership without it anymore. (But this gets back to my perpetual hammering on "need" requiring the X in "need for X" specified in the vast majority of cases.)

[flippac.livejournal.com]

I'm switch, a significant part of it for me's simply not having to top all the time regardless of what exactly topping means. I'd have trouble hiding things, but I don't need to be able to do all of them with everyone I'm involved with.

There do seem to be some emotional needs there that I can't meet on my own, but hey. A significant amount of BDSM isn't really about sex for me at all.

OT, re: Peektures?

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

http://nex0s.livejournal.com/770396.html

and

http://www.fluxfactory.org/projects/opolis/opolisartists/nicole.htm

/OT.

n.
ps: thanks for participating in my poll :)

Re: OT, re: Peektures?

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

I had seen the photos (the first link), but not the opolis project page, and may I say two things:

1) That's fucking awesome!

and

2) It was exciting to read your bio and think "I remember when she was going to school to do just what she's doing now!"

Re: OT, re: Peektures?

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

re: 1&2

i'm still fucking SQUEEING about 'em :D

*bounce*

n.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

I used to think I felt pretty much that way, but I now realize that's not quite accurate. I think the difference is that, if I was missing X in my life, although I wouldn't actively seek out someone to do X with or evaluate potential partners on the basis of whether or not I could do X with them, I would still have a strong desire to have such a person in my life, and feel kind of incomplete in some sense if I didn't.

[lcohen]

well you know i'm going about this one differently, but hey, we're not the same person.

specifically, i decided that a local partner is a need and so i am looking for one. i don't have too many other things in my head about what that person has to be into--i mean all of my partners have lots of overlap. i don't think of that as "needs" i think of that as "what lisa finds attractive." like odds are they will be somewhat geeky, like to read, like wordplay, like music, like to talk (at least with me) and think zaftig chicks in their 40s are hot. but after that, i don't know. and i don't much care. the only "need" in that paragraph was "local."