Things I Have Learned About Life

I guess the biggest deal for me is discovering that polyamory 1) exists 2) is something I’ve been missing a lot in my interpersonal relations. It’s the big one because it most directly affected me, and because other stuff I’ve learned, I’ve learned from my poly partners.

In a nutshell, polyamory is the idea that is OK to love several people at the same time time. That if you love A, and also love B, it doesn’t mean that your love for A is somehow fake or untrue. I find the analogy with kids illuminating — if it’s OK to love both your kids, than it should be OK to love both your partners, right? I highly recommend everyone to read More than Two, on the basis that it’s a rare book that directly affected my life, and that it would probably would have affected it even if polyamory weren’t my thing (which is, of course, totally valid as well!).

A more general point is that until 2017, I didn’t have a real working model of romantic relationships. I am reasonably sure that a lot of people are in a similar situation: it’s hard to encounter a reasonable relationship model in society to learn from! (This might be biased by my culture, but I suspect that it might not).

We aren’t taught how to be with another person (if we are lucky enough, we are taught how to practice safe sex at least), so we have to learn on our own by observing. One model is the relationships of our parents, which are quite often at least somewhat broken (like in my case). The other model is the art, and the portrayal of romance in art is (and this is an uncomfortably strong opinion for me) actively harmful garbage.

What I now hold as the most important thing in romantic relations is a very clear, direct and honest communication. Honest with yourself and honest with your partner. Honesty includes the ability to feel your genuine needs and desires (as opposed to following the model of what you think you should feel).

An example that is near and dear to my heart is when you are in relationship with A, but there’s also this other person B whom your you find attractive. Honesty is accepting that “attractive” means “my body (and quite probably my consciousness) wants to have sex with this person” and acting on that observation, rather than pretending that it doesn’t exist or shaming yourself into thinking it shouldn’t exist.

Or a more concrete example: one of my favorite dishes (code named “the dish I find the most yummy”) is bananas mixed with sour cream and quark. Me and my partner O enjoyed eating this dish in the morning, and I was usually tasked with preparing it. There are two variates of quark — a hard grainy one and a soft one. O had a preference for the soft one, so, naturally, I made morning meals using the soft one, because I don’t really care, and eating the same thing is oh sooo romantic. This continued until one day O said “Kladov, stop bullshitting yourself and admit that you love the grainy one. Let’s buy both variates and make two portions”. O was totally right. And the thing is, I haven’t even noticed my (useless, stupid, and most egregiously, not called for) sacrifice for the sake of the relationship until it was called out by my partner. (In the end, O came to the conclusion that the grainy quark is actually yummier, but that’s besides the point).

And the depiction of love in art is the opposite of this. Which is understandable — the reason why romance (and death) is featured so prominently in art is that a major component of art’s success is its capacity for evoking emotions, and there’s little so heart wrecking as romantic drama (and death). And the model of “speak with words through the mouth” relationships is very good at minimizing drama. (Reminder: this is non-technical post, so if I say here that something is or isn’t doesn’t mean I’ve performed due diligence to confirm that it is true). My relations with poly partners were more boring than my relations with monogamous partners. This is great for participating people, but bad for art (unless it is some kind of slow-cinema piece).

Recently, I re-read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I highly recommend this novel if you can read Russian. (I am not sure if it is translatable to English, a big part of its merit is the exquisite language). There are two romantic lines there: a passionate, forbidden and fatal love between Anna (who is married) and Vronski (who is not the guy Anna is married to), and a homely love/family of Levin and Kity. The second one is portraited in a favorable light, as a representative of the isomorphism class of happy families. The scene of engagement between Levin and Kity made my blood boil. They are sitting at the table, with a piece of chalk. Leving feels that it’s kind of an appropriate model to ask Kity to mary him. So he take chalk and writes: “к, в, м, о, э, н, м, б, з, л, э, н, и, т”. Which are the initial letters of a phrase “когда вы мне ответили: этого не может быть, значило ли это, что никогда, или тогда?`” which asks about Kity’s original rejection of Levin several years ago. Kity decodes this messages, and answers in a likewise manner. This “dialog” continues for some time, at the end of which they are happily engaged, and I am enraged. Such implicit, subtle and ellipsis based communication is exactly how you wreck any relation.

Which is the saddest part here is that I wasn’t enraged when I’ve read the book for the first time when I was 15 or so. Granted, I had a full understanding that the book is about late XIX century, and that the models of relations are questionable. But still, I think I subconsciously binned Levin and Kity’s relationship to the good ones, and this why I find the art harmful in this respect.

My smaller quibble is that sex is both a fetishized and a taboo topic. It’s hinted at, today not so subtly, but is rarely shown or studied as a subject of art. Von Trier and Gaspar Noe being two great exceptions among the artists I like.