Stuff I Read That You Might Like, Vol. 1

An e-reader with a cup of coffee, a notebook, a pen, and a pair of reading glasses.
Photo by Aliis Sinisalu on Unsplash

For a long time I’ve used Tumblr primarily to share quotes from my favorite articles that I read online (and sometimes books, too). Since I’m no longer using Tumblr due to their atrocious, sex-negative decision about adult content, I haven’t been able to find a better way to do this. Most so-called Tumblr “replacements” are pretty barebones and/or nonfunctional.

So, clunky as it is, I’ll be doing it here! Every so often I’ll post some quotes and links to stuff you might like.

Starting off with a very topical one:

Tumblr made sex a community experience.

—Vex Ashley, “Porn on Tumblr — a eulogy / love letter

Now that the full scope of this administration*’s political vandalism and base criminality is largely being copped to in broad daylight in various federal courthouses, a good chunk of the elite political press is moving into the Hoocoodanode? stage of political journalism. This is best exemplified byThursday’s New York Times podcast, the headline of which—“The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It”—got dragged like Hector’s corpse all over the electric Twitter machine until someone at the Times sharpened up and changed the last half of it to “…and How Law Enforcement Ignored It,” which is a little better, but not much.

To take the simplest argument first, “we,” of course, did no such thing, unless “we” is a very limited—and very white—plural pronoun. The violence on the right certainly made itself obvious in Oklahoma City, and at the Atlanta Olympics, and at various gay bars and women’s health clinics, and in Barrett Slepian’s kitchen, and in the hills of North Carolina, where Eric Rudolph stayed on the lam for five years and in which he had stashed 250 pounds of explosives for future escapades.

—Charles P. Piece, “‘We’ Did Not Miss the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. You Did.

Inspired by online recipe sites, he’d sit down to dinner and then let me know what rating I earned. “If I give you five out of five, you’ll quit,” he joked. And I laughed because when I was in my 20s, I believed that you were supposed to laugh when someone hurt your feelings. I thought you were constantly supposed to be trying harder.

—Lyz Lenz, “Now That I’m Divorced, I’m Never Cooking for a Man Again

“As you become more acclimated to the cold, your body becomes more effective at delivering warm blood to the extremities, your core temperature goes up, and all that contributes to being more resistant to the cold,” Leonard told me.

That means the only cure for hating winter, unfortunately, is just more winter.

—Olga Kazan, “Why So Many People Hate Winter” (ugh.)

Mattis saw it up close. He bore it as long as he could, in hopes of mitigating the damage. But when Trump broke America’s promise to the Syrian Kurds, he stained Mattis’s honor, too. That, apparently, Mattis could not accept. He leaves and takes his honor with him. And now the question for Congress is: The Klaxon is sounding. The system is failing. What will you do?

—David Frum, “No More Excuses

It’s called Star Wars. Not Star Trek, not Star Peace, not Star Friends, not even Star Tales. This gargantuan fictional universe is labeled with a title that guarantees the ability to travel space… and near-constant warfare.

We can debate the relative okay-ness of this focus from a moral standpoint, sure. But in reality, I think that Star Wars is accidentally teaching us the greatest lesson of all: It’s depicting what a universe looks like when you dedicate all of your research and technological advancements to war and destruction, and unwittingly showing us what an incredibly dark place that universe is. Because the Star Wars universe is a fun fictional playground for sure, a great place to build weird and wonderful stories… but it’s not a good place. Not by a longshot.

—Emily Asher-Perrin, “Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death

It’s no longer socially acceptable to believe that women are somehow less than especially not during a time when feminism is wielding so much cultural power. But arguing that women are just naturally better at caretaking or domestic work has become a clever way to shirk living up to progressive values while claiming you are simply complimenting women on their stellar ironing skills.

One way to combat this line of thinking is to highlight how fully capable men are in the private sphere. It is true that American culture relishes in portraying men as dolts when it comes to parenting and cleaning, and it’s an unfair stereotype.

But for women to make real progress in and out of their homes, men must give something up: the backwards dream of holding onto their feminist bona fides while seeking out female partners willing to limit their own aspirations to the home.

—Jessica Valenti, “The ‘Woke’ Men Who Still Want Housewives

So yes, forced birthers and [Status Quo Warriors], if you’re going to play it like that, I am OK with the idea of a world into which you, personally, were never born. I am equally as OK with the idea of a world where I don’t exist, either. Neither you nor I personally matters that much in a universe so vast and a sea of human experiences so rich. You and I both are accidents in our existence, possibly unhappy ones.

I would’ve rather your mother not have been forced to carry a pregnancy she didn’t want to term. I would’ve rather your father had approached your mother respectfully in an appropriate setting, or not at all. I dare to love your mother as a fellow human being more than you do and to dream of a better world for people like her. It’s rank misogyny and not very humanist at all to think otherwise.

—Heina Dadabhoy, “Why I Don’t Care If You Wouldn’t Have Existed

It is maddening to watch adult men respond to revelations of endemic sexual harassment in the workplace by instituting a series of ludicrous personal codes, rather than by learning the relatively straightforward lesson on offer: Don’t sexually assault or harass anyone.

At best, these “rules” are reflective of employers’ woefully incomplete approach to sexual harassment. Employers have long done the absolute minimum to comply with the law, relying on trite videos focused on what you can and cannot say or do in the workplace (“don’t give back rubs” or “don’t offer promotions in exchange for sex”) and sexual harassment policies designed primarily to protect them from lawsuits. The sweeping scale of the Me Too movement makes it clear that no mere set of rules is sufficient to prevent workplace harassment, especially when those rules fail to speak to all of the various power imbalances that make the critical distinctions between genuinely consensual workplace romances and harassment.

—Tahir Duckett, “Avoiding Women At Work Is A Childish, Cowardly Response To #MeToo

When you are terribly afraid of being held responsible for the emotional well-being of others, it feels very mature and responsible to decide that you should “work on yourself.” It becomes both a way of retroactively absolving yourself (wow, can you believe all of the ways my issues manifested before I decided to work on them) and a rather elegant little trick to exonerate ongoing bad behavior (dang, those pesky issues again! I guess I must keep working on them). This is especially true for those too-clever-by-half motherfuckers who think that nobly warning someone in advance they “are working on their issues” mitigates any way in which they might disappoint or harm. And even with the best of intentions, it obviates the fact that relationships themselves are a process of being made ready, not something you come to static and fully formed.

[…] We need each other desperately, in ways none of us can be ready for.

—Brandy Jensen, “Ask A Fuck-Up: I’m still in therapy. Should I be dating?


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Stuff I Read That You Might Like, Vol. 1
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How Big is Your Hard Drive?

Close-up of a hard drive.
This is relevant, I swear.

This is a cross-post from my professional blog.

Some friends and I were talking recently about the concept of “emotionally unavailable” people. Most of us have had a friend—perhaps ourselves—who has tried to date someone who seemed into them, but just wasn’t quite present. Sometimes this type of partner is upfront about their ability to commit and/or be there. Sometimes, they aren’t, and their behavior seems confusing and contradictory. These pseudo-relationships can drag on for years until we are finally able to move on, understanding that however much the person enjoys our presence, they are not interested in making things more committed or structured than they currently are.

If I knew what to do in these situations I’d probably be retiring a millionaire, but I do have an analogy that might be helpful. I thought of it on the spot to give my friend some advice. (If you’ve ever been my client, you know how much I love a good geeky analogy.)

Computers come with different hard drive capacities. If yours doesn’t have enough space for you, you can maybe buy and install a new one—but for the moment, you’re stuck with the one your computer came with. Maybe you can’t afford a new one right now.

Different hard drives also have different things stored on them, and these things take up different amounts of space. I know people whose hard drives pretty much just contain the system files, maybe a few extra apps. These people use their computers mainly to get online. Maybe computers aren’t very important to them and they don’t use them much at all.

Some people have a lot to store—photos, music, videos, complex projects they’re working on. These folks are buying hard drives in capacities I didn’t even know existed. (This year, the world’s largest solid state drive hit 100 terabytes. What are they storing on that hard drive???)

Don’t think of the hard drive as your brain. Those analogies are really reductive, and usually insulting to us humans. The hard drive is a symbol, and it represents something I call your capacity as a person. That encompasses a lot of things—time, energy, physical and mental ability, willpower (which isn’t really a thing, but that’s another article; it’s useful here as a concept), tolerance for uncertainty or negative emotion, and much more. For instance, not everyone has the capacity to be a therapist. Being a therapist requires having a lot of space to hold other people’s pain. Not everyone has enough space for that. Unfortunately, some therapists end up without enough space to hold their loved ones’ pain, or even their own.

Say I have a 1 TB hard drive that’s full of music and photos. Maybe there’s 300 GB left over. Then a friend asks, “Could I put some of my videos on your hard drive? I need somewhere to store them for a while.” I say sure, but then they come over with their external drive and I see that they have an entire terabyte of videos. That’s not going to fit on my hard drive. I could probably store some of their videos, and that might still be helpful for them. But maybe they really needed to store the entire drive’s worth. I don’t have the capacity.

This kind of thing happens in friendships and relationships all the time. You might have a good amount of your own shit to deal with, but that doesn’t mean you can’t listen to your friends vent about their own problems from time to time, or give them advice about a work situation, or treat them to a nice dinner while they’re going through a breakup.

You might not be able to be a friend’s primary source of support as they navigate a serious illness, however. First of all, the time factor would be prohibitive—you may not be able to drive them to all of their medical appointments, be at their house enough to care for them when they can’t care for themselves, and so on. The stress of being a full-time caregiver would be way too much. Holding their anguish as they face the possibility of death or disability is also, well, a lot. Your friend needs more people on their team.

Some people are carrying a lot of trauma, hardship, or personal responsibilities with them already. No matter how large their hard drives happen to be, there may not be space there for you.

Not only that, but some people have pretty small hard drives to begin with. I’ve known many people who just don’t seem to have a lot of space for others in their lives. They don’t tolerate much emotional turbulence when it comes to other people. They may be interested in sex, casual friendship, or even romance, but they don’t have the capacity to build interdependent, long-lasting relationships with others—at least not until they do some work on themselves, and get some bigger hard drives. Some people want to do that work; others are perfectly content as they are.

Here’s where this analogy really breaks down—buying a new hard drive is a million times easier than increasing your capacity for holding other people. And while you can buy a larger hard drive for your friend whose computer you’re always wanting to store your videos on for some reason (this is weird), you cannot increase others’ capacity for them. They have to choose to do it for themselves, and they may not want to. Or it may take them a long time, or they may not be able to do it at all.

If you are hoping for a deeper relationship with someone whose hard drive seems to be too small—or who has way too much data on it already—you have to ask yourself whether or not it’s likely that this person is going to have more space for you anytime soon, and whether or not they want that space to be yours.


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How Big is Your Hard Drive?

So Your Friend’s Just Been Diagnosed With Cancer

Lost? Confused? Me too. I was just as surprised to be diagnosed with breast cancer at the ripe ol’ age of 26 as most of my friends and family were.

Here are a few things I’ve learned so far about what’s helpful and what isn’t when it comes to receiving support from people. Obviously, I only speak for my own experience here, but you’d probably hear a lot of similar things from other cancer patients.


1. Read/listen carefully to what we say.

Since I draw so much of my strength from writing, I turned to it immediately when I got my diagnosis–not just to talk about my feelings and experiences, but also to express what I needed from people who wanted to help. I wrote out detailed instructions and set clear boundaries. (As did my roommate, who started a Facebook group with some of my other friends and used it to coordinate support.)

Nevertheless, both of us were often swamped with questions that could easily have been answered by reading what we’d posted. People repeatedly asked for my address, gift preferences, dietary needs, and other stuff that my roommate had clearly addressed in multiple posts. It was, honestly, really frustrating. I understand that all of this is hard and that paying attention to written text can be hard and being a human is hard. But surviving the first few weeks of a cancer diagnosis is especially hard, so please make it easier on your newly-diagnosed friend by being attentive to what they’re telling you.

2. Don’t inundate us with irrelevant and overly-specific questions about gifts.

On a related note, it was pretty overwhelming when, within the first couple days of my diagnosis, comments and messages like these started pouring in: “Is there anything I can get you? Do you need hats? What color hats? What type of yarn? Do you like letters? Would it be okay to send a card? What’s your address? What kind of food do you like? Can I send cat photos?”

I 100% understand where this is coming from. People want to help, and they don’t want to help in ways that are harmful or unwanted, so they ask lots of questions about exactly what kind of help would be welcome.

But guys. I don’t care what color hat. Those first days, when I was still waiting for all my test results, I was facing the fact that I could be dying. I could find out that it’s metastatic, that I have a few months or years left, that I’m going to have to tell my 12-year-old sister that I’m fucking dying. I wanted to take these well-meaning people by the shoulders and shake them and tell them that I don’t care what color hat.

If you’re already making/doing something specific, such as knitting a hat, it’d be more helpful to ask, “Is there anything I should keep in mind when making this for you?” That’d be a good place for me to ask you to avoid Breast Cancer Pink, for instance. (Although, again–I really don’t care about stuff like that very much right now.)

Otherwise, I’d suggest directing these questions to a caregiver, such as the person’s partner(s), family, or closest friends.

3. And about those cat pictures…

I’m going to reiterate that I’m only speaking for myself here, and not for any other survivors or anyone else living with a serious illness, but boy howdy did it ever rub me the wrong way when people immediately wanted to send cat pictures following my diagnosis. Cat pictures are nice for when you’ve had a stressful day at work or you need to forget about political news for a bit. “Sorry to hear about the cancer, here’s my cute cat” doesn’t really work.

4. No medical advice. None. Nada.

In my opinion, giving unsolicited medical advice when you are not that person’s doctor is always wrong, for a variety of reasons. However, it’s especially wrong when the medical condition in question is both deadly and very poorly understood by most laypeople. (Seriously–I’ve learned a ton about cancer these past few weeks that I never would’ve known otherwise.)

For example, someone literally tried to tell me that there’s doubt that a prophylactic mastectomy is effective for preventing breast cancer. But according to all of my doctors and all of the information I could find on reliable websites, people with a genetic predisposition to breast cancer can reduce their risk by 90% if they have that surgery. Because I have the BRCA-1 gene mutation, my risk of developing a second breast cancer within 15 years is otherwise 33%. (My lifetime risk of developing breast cancer at all was 55-65%. So yeah, I wish I’d known that and gotten the surgery years ago.)

So please do not give me advice that could literally kill me. Thanks.

5. Keep talking to us about your own life and problems.

A lot of times when someone gets diagnosed with a serious illness, people around them start feeling like they shouldn’t talk about their own (comparatively) less severe issues. Please do talk about them! I mean, obviously take your cues from the seriously ill person, but in my experience, it’s comforting to listen to friends vent about work or people in their lives or whatever. Checking in before/while dumping heavy stuff on someone is always a good idea whether they have cancer or not.

6. Resist the urge to relate our struggles to yours.

This is often an issue when someone’s talking about a shitty thing they’re going through, but when it comes to stuff like cancer, it’s especially relevant. The morning sickness you had during pregnancy is not like the nausea folks have during chemo. Your choosing to shave your head for aesthetic reasons is not like having your hair fall out because cells in your body are being destroyed. Choosing to get breast implants is not at all like having to have a mastectomy and reconstruction. And so on.

Sometimes, folks with other serious illnesses besides cancer do have very relatable experiences. (For instance, I met someone who has to have chemo because of a totally non-cancer condition.) Otherwise, just center the experiences of the person who’s going through the serious illness.

Note that I do not mean it’s wrong to simply say, “Ugh, yeah, I have nausea every day from my psych meds” or “That sounds a lot like me when I was pregnant.” Of course some cancer-related experiences are going to resemble some non-cancer related experiences.

Where comparisons fall flat is when you’re trying to comfort or reassure someone, or when they’re trying to talk about their cancer and you keep changing the subject to your pregnancy. If I’m terrified of reconstruction surgery, you’re not going to be able to reassure me by reminding me that some people (whose choices I respect but completely do not understand, by the way) choose to get implants, because that experience is going to be completely different.

7. Remember that most side effects of chemo are invisible.

Cancer patients often talk about the dreaded “chemo brain,” which is the shitty mix of mental fog, fatigue, and executive dysfunction that often happens during chemo. Just because we’re not vomiting or bedridden doesn’t mean we’re not experiencing some pretty serious side effects.

For me, this means having a lot of trouble with time management. Sometimes time seems to pass way more quickly or slowly than I would expect. I have a very hard time processing things like “when do I need to start getting ready in order to leave early enough to arrive at Thing on time.” I’m pretty much late to everything these days. The fact that I’m often so tired that standing up feels impossible doesn’t help.

I try not to keep anyone waiting for too long, but it helps a lot when people are able to be flexible.

8. Look for the less obvious ways to help.

When someone gets diagnosed with cancer, people usually gravitate towards the most obvious, visible ways to help: making meals, giving gifts, and so on. I also got tons of invitations to come hang out at someone’s place. However, the most helpful thing for anyone whose condition involves fatigue and needing to sleep, eat, or take medication on very short notice is offers to hang out near my home, not yours.

Even when people offer rides (which is very helpful, by the way), there’s always the potential discomfort of having forgotten my anti-nausea meds at home or desperately needing a nap or getting hungry in someone’s house and not knowing what to do or running out of tissues. I love offers to go to a restaurant or coffee shop near my place, or hang out at home.

A good question to ask someone is, “Is there anything you need that folks haven’t been offering to help with?”

9. Please don’t take it personally if we don’t take you up on your offers to put us in touch with your cousin/grandmother/friend-of-a-friend who has/had cancer.

Sometimes it’s helpful to talk to people who’ve been through it; sometimes it’s not. Regardless, that’s why support groups exist, as well as tons of one-on-one peer support services. I’m not really comfortable with calling a total stranger on the phone to talk about cancer, especially when it’s someone at least twice my age (which it often is).

Every cancer is unique, but the experience of young breast cancer patients in particular is often quite different from that of older people, because ours tends to be more aggressive and difficult to treat, and we tend to have less material/social resources and support than older survivors do. Many of the older survivors I talked to told me quite cheerily that they simply had surgery and were back to their normal lives soon after. That’s not at all how it’s going to be for me–I have to have chemo, then surgery, then possibly radiation, and then ten years of hormone blockers, plus being constantly vigilant for symptoms of ovarian cancer, which I’m also at increased risk for and which has no reliable early detection methods. Not super helpful to talk to people who didn’t have to deal with most of that.

10. Mind the boundaries.

There’s something about getting diagnosed with cancer, and talking about it openly, that makes some people assume that our relationship is much closer than it really is. It was weird to have people I barely know telling me that they hope I visit their city so we can hang out, or to offer help with stuff that’s honestly really personal and not at all a part of my life that I’d normally share with them. (For instance: decisions about my breasts and what to do with them.)

It’s true that there are certain boundaries that come down out of necessity when you’re going through a serious illness; for instance, my parents now know a lot more about my health, body, and lifestyle than they would’ve known otherwise. But that’s because my parents are my primary caregivers. They need to know that stuff in order to take care of me. You, random person who added me on Facebook because you like my writing, are not my primary caregiver. If you wouldn’t normally talk to me about my breasts or expect me to include you in my travel plans, don’t do it now, either.

11. Unless otherwise stated, assume that your gift/gesture is received and welcome.

In most situations, it’s rude not to reply with a “thank you” when you’ve received a gift from someone. When you’re newly diagnosed with cancer, it’s not. When people message me with “Did you ever get my package?” or “So was that hat I sent a good fit?”, the message I get is that I should’ve made sure to reach out and let them know that I received the gift and that I like it (whether or not I actually did like it), even when my days are a messy jumble of medical tests and treatments.

Personally, I take gratitude very seriously and I’m keeping a notebook of everything kind anyone does for me so that I can properly thank them later. (The key word there is LATER: when I’m not in the middle of chemo, probably.) But this isn’t something you should expect of your friend with cancer. This isn’t a normal situation, so normal rules of etiquette don’t apply. If you know that you wouldn’t be happy to give this gift or offer this help without the validation of a personalized thank you, don’t give it.

12. Assume that other people are doing what you’re doing. 

While that’s not always true, it can help you avoid doing things that are going to frustrate your friend or make their life more stressful. The previous suggestion is a good example—one person asking if I’ve received their package may be okay, but multiple people asking gets really overwhelming. One person asking for detailed instructions on how to knit me a hat isn’t that big of a deal, but providing multiple people with instructions for multiple types of knitted items is way too much.

“What if everyone behaved the way I’m behaving” is a great question to ask ourselves in many situations because it’s a reminder that it’s not just about you, and your gift, and your need to be helpful, and your anxiety that your gift wasn’t appreciated enough.

For me, there’s no such thing as too many cards and letters, or too many texts that say “No need to respond to this, but I love you and I hope your treatment is going okay.”

13. Decide what kind of support YOU want to offer, and offer it.

It’s a cliche by now that “Let me know if you need anything!” isn’t a super helpful thing to say (not that I mind it—I just take it literally), but the way to really grok that is to understand that most struggling people would rather you help in ways that YOU want to help rather than turning yourself into a put-upon martyr at our beck and call. That’s not a dynamic healthy people like.

Ask yourself what kind of help would bring you joy to offer, and what kind of help you’re good at giving. Do you like mindless household tasks? Cooking? Taking care of pets and plants? Organizing fun distractions? Being a workout buddy? Figure it out, and then offer that.

Of course, there are some tasks that need to be done even if nobody particularly loves doing them. (Some horrific things I’ve heard about post-surgery recovery come to mind.) But these tasks are for caregivers, not concerned friends. My parents will be the ones to make the noble sacrifice here, not you.

14. Comfort in, dump out.

It’s a classic for a reason.


As I’ve reflected more on what I find helpful and what I don’t when it comes to receiving support from people, it occurs to me that the most irritating, upsetting, or tonedeaf responses are also the ones that seem like they’re covering up something else. I don’t want to presume and play psychoanalyst with people (that’s from 8 to 5 and with pay only), but sometimes it’s pretty clear that the person I’m interacting with 1) doesn’t know how to react when a friend has cancer, 2) realizes on some level that they don’t know, and 3) is panicking about this.

“Can I knit you something? Do you need hats? What are your favorite colors? Do you care which type of yarn?” often seems to be masking “I’m worried about you and I have no idea what I could possibly do to help.” “So did you get my package???” is maybe actually “I sent you this thing without asking first if you needed it and now I’m feeling awkward because maybe you didn’t need it or want it.” Unsolicited medical advice often means, “Cancer terrifies me and I’m trying to believe that if I do everything right it will never get me like it did you.”

Again–not necessarily. Not all the time.

But the further I get into this whole ordeal the more it feels like honesty and openness is the way to go–just like it is in almost every other situation we find ourselves in. I would rather hear that you care about me than answer a dozen questions about exactly how you can help. I would rather one silly card with poor handwriting than The One Perfect Gift That Will Make All This Go Away–because that doesn’t exist.

Send the card. Offer the practical household help. We’re all gonna be okay.


Two great books for those interested in learning more: There’s No Good Card For This and The Art of Comforting.


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So Your Friend’s Just Been Diagnosed With Cancer

I Still Feel Anxious About Communication Every Day

I get asked a lot about how I set boundaries or communicate my feelings or do anything else in that constellation of terrifying interpersonal tasks.

Sometimes people are looking for concrete suggestions or scripts because they’re simply unsure how to put their thoughts into words. But more often, especially these days, they already know how to do that. So there’s usually something tacked onto their request, almost as an afterthought, although it’s really the main thing on their minds: “How do you set boundaries…without hurting their feelings?” “How do you tell someone they’ve upset you…without having an anxious breakdown about it?”

These are the questions I can’t really answer. I guess there’s strategies, ways you can make it easier for yourself and the other person. But you can’t control how other people feel, and often you can’t control how you feel either.

So how do you make myself vulnerable and communicate what you really feel without being anxious about it?

Maybe you can’t.

Here’s a confession: despite the fact that many people identify me as a role model when it comes to communication skills, I am not free of anxiety when it comes to communication.

Sure, it’s better than it used to be. I find that the more I cultivate relationships in which everyone intentionally and honestly shares their inner experiences–so that it’s not just me blabbing about my feelings all the time–the easier it gets. As I build up histories with people who are gentle with my vulnerability and who let themselves be vulnerable too, I gain trust that that vulnerability won’t implode, and that eases the anxiety a bit.

But I can’t tell you how to set boundaries and share your feelings “without anxiety.” I don’t do it without anxiety. I do it with anxiety, every single time.

Every time I set a boundary, I feel afraid that the person will lash out or abandon me. Every time I share negative feelings, especially negative feelings about someone’s actions, I worry that this time it’ll be too much, it’ll be the straw that broke the camel’s back, and they’ll decide that dealing with me and my feelings isn’t worth it anymore. Every time I am honest about my depression and anxiety–which often means letting them out into the open rather than suppressing their symptoms–I fear that people will recoil and withdraw.

I hate telling people they’ve hurt me. There’s no satisfaction or schadenfreude in that for me. I hate knowing that they might feel like bad friends/partners and that their guilt will be painful. Every time, I wish I could keep it to myself and get over it so that we wouldn’t have to talk about it and I wouldn’t have to take that risk. But I have to, or else those relationships will rot from the inside out.

I hate telling people I can’t make time or space for them in the way they’d like. I hate knowing that they might worry that I dislike them, and I hate that, honestly, sometimes I DO dislike them because I can’t like everyone. I hate that a lot of the time, giving them a reason would turn this into the kind of honesty that’s no longer kind or helpful. What’s someone supposed to do with the knowledge that I think they talk about their trauma too much and it exhausts me, or that they talk too loud and fast, or I don’t find them interesting because we don’t really care about any of the same things?

In my communities, we tend to cheer people on in their boundary-setting and emoting, applauding dramatic demolitions and disclosures in the hopes of helping each other feel better about being vulnerable. I’ve been praised for it and heaped praise onto others, relishing someone’s crisp shut-down of an online troll or a thoughtful post about their emotional needs.

But for the most part, real communication isn’t an Upworthy moment. It isn’t You Wouldn’t BELIEVE What Miri Did When Her Partner Accidentally Made Her Feel Like A Piece Of Shit. It’s more like, I’m crying and I hate myself for crying and I hate myself for saying that I hate myself because I’m not supposed to say that anymore and I’m trying to tell you that I hurt.

I suppose I should feel somewhat hypocritical for advising people to be honest about their feelings even though I have panic breakdowns about being honest about my feelings, but I don’t, because it’s not hypocritical. I never said it was easy; I only said it had to be done if you want better relationships than your parents had, or at least ones that don’t look like a TV sitcom.

The good news is that your communication skills aren’t measured by whether or not you can implement them without panicking, crying, or stumbling over your words. They aren’t really measured by anything at all, but if they were, it would be by your willingness to approach that scary swamp and wade around in it, and maybe even get stuck in it sometimes.

Nobody ever said you have to feel good about it.

You just have to do it.

And I can promise that it’ll get easier, and I can also promise that it probably won’t get easy.

I’m coming around to the conclusion that those feelings I described–the fear of abandonment, the guilt, the panic–are, like their cousin awkwardness, just the price of admission to being human. They certainly make it a lot harder to communicate openly, but they don’t make it impossible.

Those feelings are there because they speak to real possibilities. Sometimes you ask someone to stop hurting you and they decide that they’d rather not bother with you at all. Sometimes you try to set a boundary and the person would rather argue about it than respect it and move on. Sometimes you express your feelings as kindly as you can and people still take it personally, feel attacked, and blame you.

The only way to not have any anxiety about communicating is to do it falsely, or to stop caring if you lose people you aren’t ready to lose. Neither of those options appeals to me at all.

So if you could know–and accept–that you’re going to feel anxious and uncomfortable about speaking your truth no matter what, and if you could release yourself from the responsibility of controlling or preventing those feelings, what would you do instead?


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I Still Feel Anxious About Communication Every Day

Polyamory 201: “Monogamous for the Right Person”

When it comes to relationships, I usually try to let myself rely on my gut feelings a little more than I do in other situations. They tend to be pretty spot-on when it comes to relationships, and ignoring them has usually been pretty regrettable.

One of the things I have a gut feeling about is ostensibly polyamorous people who say that they’d be “willing” to be monogamous…”for the right person.”

Recently I was listening to a new-ish podcast called Hannah and Matt Know It All, in which the titular polyamorous married couple reads advice columns from around the internet and adds their own perspective. Lately they’ve been getting their own listener questions, too. I love Hannah and Matt’s progressive, consent-aware takes on things. Polyamory doesn’t actually come up all that often on the podcast, but recently they did a whole episode on it since they’ve been getting more questions about it.

One question in the episode (at 9:38) was from a woman who prefers monogamy, but is giving polyamory a shot because she’s really into a guy who prefers it. He has another girlfriend too, but he’s also mentioned to her that he’d be “willing to be monogamous for the right person.” The letter-writer is asking for perspectives on polyamory to help her understand it so that she can make this relationship work, but Hannah and Matt (and their guest, Laurel, who happens to be Matt’s girlfriend [cute!]) focus in on that “monogamous for the right person” bit.

Laurel points out that by framing his preferences in this way, the guy in the letter is setting up a competitive situation between his two girlfriends–never a healthy thing–and not-so-subtly implying that if he doesn’t agree to be monogamous with the letter-writer, then…she’s not “the right person.” Ouch.

And there it is. I’d never thought about it in those terms before, but what really bothers me about these “monogamous for the right person” folks is that, intentionally or otherwise, they’re ensuring that any partner they have who may prefer monogamy feels like they have to prove themselves worthy of it.

I’ve met poly people who are okay with monogamy. That’s been many of my partners. But their framing was entirely different. They usually told me that they’d be totally fine just being with me, but that if I want to be polyamorous, that’s cool and maybe they’ll take the opportunity to date other people too. Sometimes they have, sometimes they haven’t.

And while I didn’t understand at first–it always seemed like polyamory versus monogamy is a divide you’d fall clearly on one side of–it eventually made more sense.

For these folks, unlike for me, monogamy doesn’t feel like a suffocating trap. And for these folks, unlike for many monogamous people, polyamory doesn’t feel like getting cheated on or left behind. So they’re happy to do either one, and if either one is particularly important to their current partner, that’s what they go with.

But it wasn’t a matter of “monogamous for the right person.” It was a matter of, “I don’t really care, so let’s do what you prefer.”

While I hate to play No True Poly, something reads a little weird about the idea of labeling yourself as polyamorous while searching for The One Partner To Rule Them All or whatever. Back when my parents were getting together, I think folks just called that “dating.”

In fact, I read a book about the history of dating recently and it turns out that this idea of being monogamous before you get engaged (or close to it) is actually fairly new. It used to be that people–especially young people who aren’t ready for marriage–commonly dated several people fairly casually until they felt a special connection with one of them and chose to invest all of their romantic energy into that.

When I was in high school and still dating monogamously, my parents thought it was totally bizarre and kind of unhealthy that teens took “exclusivity” so seriously. What, they asked, is the point of forcing yourself into a relationship that has all the trappings of engagement when you know you’re not even remotely likely to stay with this person after graduation? It’s like the worst parts of commitment and none of the best.

I didn’t get it then, but I see the point now.

Obviously, I don’t think that preparing for marriage is the only valid reason to be monogamous. Plenty of people like monogamous relationships whether or not they’re intending to take things up the escalator. But “monogamous for the right person” implies that your choice to be monogamous isn’t really about you and your comfort level or preferences; it’s about your partner and whether or not they’re “right” to bestow this great honor upon.

I don’t think there’s really a way to have a healthy committed relationship with someone who identifies as “monogamous for the right person.” If you prefer monogamy, and you’re hoping that you and this person will be “the right people” for each other, you still have to go through a waiting period while this person dates around and figures out which (if any) of their partners is “the right person” to be monogamous with. It’s literally The Bachelor with a faux-progressive veneer and probably not even on a beach.

And if you prefer polyamory, then there’s no point in wasting your time, because sooner or later this person will either want monogamy with you–and that’s a non-starter–or they’ll dump you for someone else.

The only way this really works is if you’re only interested in something casual, and it doesn’t bother you too much if the person ends up cutting things off to be monogamous with someone else. That’s not polyamory. That’s casual dating.

Regardless, waiting around for your partner to either dump you or to dump their other partners is not a healthy polyamorous situation. Polyamory is not about worrying that your partner will “pick” someone else, or trying to decide which of your partners to “pick.” It’s about being open to multiple loving relationships.

Sometimes that means that one day, for whatever reason, you find yourself committed to just one person, and they are committed only to you. But if you’re looking for a monogamous relationship, then you’re a monogamous person. Own it.

I can only imagine there’s a huge overlap between “monogamous for the right person” poly people and “wow my partners are just so jealous of each other all the time, I can’t deal with all this drama, why can’t you guys just get along” poly people. That’s because cultivating jealousy, like managing jealousy, is a skill, and it’s one that people deploy somewhat intentionally, even if they don’t realize exactly what they’re doing.

The way that we make polyamory work on an ethical and psychological level is by reminding ourselves and each other that being with multiple people does not mean that anyone is better or worse or enough or not enough. It means that, just as we may love more than one friend, child, parent, sibling, cat, or sourdough bread recipe, we can also love more than one partner—for whatever definition of “love” you’re using.

“Monogamous for the right person” blows that right up and destroys the sometimes-fragile trust that polyamory requires. These folks want you to laboriously prove to them that you’re The One. Forget it. As polyamory shows us, there are plenty of wonderful humans out there to love.

And cats. Also cats.


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Polyamory 201: “Monogamous for the Right Person”

Canaries in Coal Mines: Early Warning Signs of Abuse

Yes, I’m still alive and writing! I’ve spent the past few months enjoying life with medication for my sleep disorder and focusing on stuff like hiking, building friendships, baking bread, and learning how to ride a motorcycle. To that end, I’ve recently started a separate blog to document some of those adventures. But now I’m back with a Real Blog Post.

[Content note: sexual assault and abuse. Another note: This post discusses some dynamics common to many forms of violence and abuse, of which sexual assault is obviously a subset. This isn’t to conflate sexual assault with abusive relationships in general, but rather to acknowledge that they often go hand-in-hand and that most sexual violence involves someone the survivor knows.]

All too often a friend or client with a long history of abusive relationships or sexual violence asks me, “Why does this keep happening to me? How can I break out of this pattern?”

And most of the time, I’ve had nothing to say. The feminist perspective is that, because you are never to blame for violence or abuse, any “prevention” thereof has to focus on the perpetrator. Implying that there’s a way for you to keep yourself safe(r) by changing your own behavior is victim blaming.

As a response to our nauseating cultural tendency to interrogate survivors about their behavior and insist that they stay safe by dressing like nuns and locking themselves indoors (preferably with an armed guard), this makes sense.

But as I look at the scared but determined person sitting in front of me, asking me these questions, it seems incredibly unhelpful to say, “Well, it’s not your fault that this happens. The only person who can prevent abuse is the abuser. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

Okay, now what? Are folks supposed to just sit around patiently waiting for us to replace rape culture with consent culture, teach everyone bystander intervention, establish real consequences for sexual assault, and ostracize all abusers from our communities?

Drawing the line between actual prevention advice and victim blaming is challenging, but it can be done. For starters, don’t give unsolicited advice, and especially don’t give unsolicited advice to someone who’s just disclosed to you that they’ve been the victim of someone else’s fuckery. That’s the sort of thing that makes you really come across like you’re blaming, whether you meant to or not.

Second, recognize that prevention strategies may not be accessible to everyone, every time. The leap from “this might help” to “you have an obligation to do this or else it’s your fault” is really more a hop than a leap in our culture. I think of it like this–many people learn defensive driving so they can try to avoid accidents caused by another driver. But just because you didn’t spot the warning signs of a collision this time doesn’t mean you’re now to blame for a crash caused by someone else. They’re still at fault. Their insurance still pays. The story is still “wow, some asshole totally ran a red right into my car” and not “I fucked up and failed to see that someone in my peripheral vision wasn’t actually decelerating as I drove legally through a green light at or slightly above the speed limit.”

And sometimes there are no warning signs.

Third, acknowledge that the vast, vast majority of advice intended to prevent sexual or emotional violence is bullshit. Most of it focuses on irrelevant factors that the advice-giver has a personal fixation on, such as what people wear or how nice they are to their abusers, and has nothing to do with reality. A lot of it demands that people drastically curtail their lives and freedom for what is, at best, a small increase in safety. For instance, if you stop going out and socializing, you’re probably less likely to encounter a would-be assailant or abuser because you’re not socializing, but at what cost?

Any prevention advice worth listening to has to begin from the premise that sexually and emotionally violent behavior is caused by the person who perpetrates it, and that if they’ve decided to behave that way, you can’t stop them by dressing some particular way or placating them somehow. What you can do is learn to recognize the red flags for such behavior and stay as far away as you can from people who display it.

Most resources about abuse focus on pointing out the signs that a relationship is abusive–for instance, they damage your property or pets, try to isolate you from friends or family, and so on. These signs are important and you should familiarize yourself with them, but the whole thing with abusive relationships is that they’re really hard to get out of. A lot of folks who have been in abusive relationships say that they were caught off guard–“When we first started dating, he was so sweet and loving. I never knew he had this side to him.” Abusers often wait quite a while before revealing their abusive traits and behaviors. By then, their partner is invested in the relationship and leaving would be difficult.

By in paying attention to how abusive people behave, I’ve noticed that they often start giving off red flags a lot earlier. Like, as soon as you meet them, in some cases. Most of us Just don’t see them as red flags. We may even see them as quirky, charming, or romantic.


1. Crossing boundaries. Abusers will often deliberately cross small boundaries to see how you respond. Many of us are vigilant about this when it comes to sex, but it happens in a lot of other contexts. Pushing you to talk about something you’re not ready to talk about, pressuring you to try activities that you’re scared of or uncomfortable with, calling you and apologizing when you said you needed space, showing up uninvited or as a “romantic” “surprise”–basically the plot of any romcom. Some of these things may be totally okay in a context where they’ve been mutually agreed-upon, but otherwise they indicate that your preferences aren’t that important to the other person.

A lot of people think that these small boundary crossings are no big deal even if they’re uncomfortable with them, but that’s because our culture often encourages us to ignore our own gut feelings about people. When people deliberately ignore your stated boundaries, that tells you a lot about who they are. Assume they’ll continue to ignore them, in ways big and small.

2. Making you uncomfortable as a “joke.” Some people seem to find it funny when others are scared or uncomfortable. I suggest staying far away from these people. There’s a huge difference between playing practical jokes on people in order to amuse everyone involved and actually relishing seeing them in discomfort, even if it’s momentary. Most people have a visceral negative reaction to seeing others in pain or distress. Those who have a positive reaction instead are likely to make you feel like crap in order to feel good themselves.

3. Blaming you for others’ choices. One way that red flags for abuse can show up very early on in a romantic relationship is when someone blames their partner for the fact that someone else flirted with that partner or asked them out. It’s a disturbingly common dynamic in monogamous relationships between men and women–the guy sees or hears about another guy asking his girlfriend out, and tries to deal with his jealousy by blaming her and accusing her of having somehow provoked it.

For many people, it’s normal to feel some type of way if someone else hits on their partner. But blaming their partner for a choice someone else made is controlling. And while this is already disturbing in and of itself, it also slides really easily into other, more overtly abusive dynamics. Abusers often blame their own behavior on their victims–“If you weren’t so ______, I wouldn’t have to yell at you.” Abusers often convince themselves that some people (i.e. them) can’t be expected to control their own behavior, and that others should be expected to control it for them.

4. Using double standards. Do they get irritated at you whenever you’re late, but expect you to tolerate their own tardiness? Do they suddenly become tired or busy whenever you want to vent about something, even though they vent to you all the time? Abusers have a way of making others feel like nothing they do is good enough. One of the ways they do this is through double standards.

Aside from blaming others for their own behavior, as I discussed above, abusers will often find all sorts of excuses for their lower standards for themselves. “My job is really stressful; you can’t expect me to listen to you complain when I get home from work.” “I can’t not yell when I’m angry; it’s one of my mental illness symptoms.” You, on the other hand, will not be forgiven for anything, even if you also have a stressful job and a mental illness.If you want your partner to be okay with your lack of punctuality or willingness to listen to them vent, it’s unfair to expect those things from them. They may obviously still choose to be punctual or listen to you, but that’s different. You can also agree as a couple about what exactly to expect from each other. Just because I need you to take care not to wake me up when you come home late doesn’t mean you necessarily care about getting woken up when I’m the one coming home late. But if someone expects from you by default things that they have no intention of expecting from themselves, that’s a red flag.

5. Expressing bigotry towards people like you. If you’re in a relationship with a bigoted person, they may say things like, “You’re not like other girls,” or “I don’t even really see you as black.” They may say hateful and demeaning things about marginalized people and follow that up with, “But you know I don’t mean you.”

But that’s not how bigotry works. They may really see you that way–for now–but the moment you step out of line, it’ll be, “I thought you were different” and “Come on, don’t be like that.” Given the way bigotry and stereotypes work, your partner will probably use them against you whenever you try to set boundaries or advocate for yourself.

When you’re involved with someone who hates, fears, or looks down on people like you, it becomes your never-ending job to prove them wrong–even if you don’t realize you’re doing it. I’ve known a lot of people who were shocked when, in the middle of a heated argument, their partner suddenly spat out words they’d never heard them use–“whore,” “f****t,” “n****r,” “cunt.” I clearly remember a few moments when I suddenly transformed from a girl, a woman, a partner, into a fucking bitch. I knew then that to them, I was always just a step, a word, from being “like other girls.” From being a “fucking bitch.”

That’s why bigotry towards people like you is a red flag, no matter how kind and respectful they’re being towards you right now. And bigotry towards one marginalized group is good evidence of bigotry towards others.

6. Gaslighting. So much has already been written about gaslighting that I won’t give it much space here, but in a nutshell: gaslighting is denying and invalidating your feelings and experiences, making you feel like you could be wrong about your own perceptions. Gaslighting isn’t the same thing as disagreeing with you about your interpretation of something (“Are you sure this means she hates you? It sounds to me like she’s upset at you for what you said”); it’s disagreeing with you about something that you have knowledge of and the other person doesn’t (“I’m sure he didn’t really do that; he’s a nice guy”; “Come on, there’s nothing to be so upset about”). Gaslighting is usually pervasive in abusive relationships and it’s one of the main ways they function–by making the person being abused distrust or ignore their own perception of reality in favor of the abuser’s.

But gaslighting can also come up in subtle ways when you’re first getting to know someone, before they have enough influence over you to gaslight you “successfully.” Like I discussed above with boundary crossings, we often ignore these apparently-harmless interactions. For some people, especially men, gaslighting is practically a style of social interaction (especially when they’re interacting with women). While it may never escalate into something that would actually harm you, it’s at the very least annoying and at worst, potentially a very red flag.

A great way to test this when you’re first meeting someone is to tell them a story about a time you were hurt by someone, and how you felt. For maximum effectiveness, choose a story that involves someone that that person might identify with. If you’re on a first date with a white cis guy, tell him a story about a white cis guy. Watch him get really uncomfortable and start pulling out rhetorical moves such as, “Aren’t you overreacting a little?” and “It can’t have been that bad.” Then tell him it’s not going to work out and sashay away.

7. Saying one thing and doing another. 

One of the most destabilizing traits of many abusive or otherwise unsafe people is that they will repeatedly tell you what they intend to do and then do the opposite. It’s sort of a gaslighting-adjacent behavior in that it leaves you really confused and uncertain of whether or not they really did agree to whatever it is they said they’d do.

As an extreme example, I’ve known people who would ask their partner to put on a condom, and the partner would reply “Oh of course” and then literally proceed to have sex without the condom. But it also happens in non-sexual situations and with other types of boundaries, and although the person will often try to chalk it up to a bad memory or their own confusion, that’s rarely it. I once asked a partner to stop doing certain things that I found patronizing and described exactly which behaviors I took issue with, and that partner would agree to stop doing those things, but by next week would be doing them again.

I mean, could it be a memory issue? I suppose so. But if you can’t trust someone to remember your clearly stated boundaries, that’s a problem.


All of these behaviors could be (and frequently are) explained away as some combination of good intentions, mental illness symptoms, genuine miscommunication, garden variety human hypocrisy, and more. Doing a few of these things doesn’t automatically make someone an abuser.

But I encourage folks to move away from questions like “Did the person mean to be hurtful/controlling/etc” and instead ask questions like, “Does this work for me? Can I be in a healthy relationship with someone who acts like this?”

Assume, too, that these behaviors will escalate. Small boundary crossings will probably turn into bigger ones. “Oh, come on, I’m sure it wasn’t that bad” turns into “How dare you accuse me of this horrible thing I never did.” “When I saw you sitting all alone and looking so beautiful, I couldn’t help but to come and talk to you” turns into “You can’t expect me to control myself when I’m turned on.”

Setting firm boundaries right away rather than waiting till later can help truly well-intentioned people improve their behavior, and convince the ill-intentioned ones that you’re onto them. “I don’t appreciate pranks like that.” “Stop asking me to try this [food/activity/drug/sexist TV show/etc]. I said no.” “Actually, you weren’t there; I was. I know what I experienced.” “Whoa, that’s pretty fucking racist and I don’t care if you think I’m an exception to that. I’m leaving.”

Feeling uncomfortable setting boundaries is normal and okay; it takes practice. But if you feel unsafe setting boundaries–if you’re actively worried that the person will yell at you, become physically violent, gaslight or guilt-trip you, or so on–that’s a red flag in and of itself. We will all need to set boundaries at some point in every close relationship, and in many casual or professional ones, too. If you have the option to avoid someone that you feel unsafe setting boundaries with, I suggest taking that option.

But we can’t avoid all abusive people forever; unfortunately, many of us will experience abusive family members, friends, partners, bosses, or others. Blaming people for “letting” abuse happen is one way that many people try to cope with that reality, but it doesn’t work and it’s unjust.

Sometimes, though, gut feelings and a good knowledge of how abuse works can help us NOPE out of potentially shitty situations before they develop. Hopefully this helps someone.


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Canaries in Coal Mines: Early Warning Signs of Abuse

“He was acting creepy, but she seemed okay with it…”

[Content note: sexual harassment and assault]

This is something I hear from guys a lot–they’ve witnessed another guy in their space or social group acting in a “creepy” or inappropriate way towards a woman, but because she’s smiling or even laughing along, they figure she’s fine with it and they don’t intervene.

I hate to break it to you, but even without knowing the woman in question I can say that there’s a very high chance that she’s not fine with it at all.

Women and AFAB people are socialized from an early age to politely smile, nod, and laugh along in response to men who annoy, scare, and even violate us. Sometimes this is a survival mechanism, like backing away slowly from a predatory animal or playing dead. Every day there’s a news story about a woman or trans person who was injured or murdered by a man after telling him to stop talking to or harassing them. Often, even smiling and nodding isn’t enough.

Even when it’s not a matter of life or death, it’s really difficult to explain to cis men what it’s like when you’ve been trained for your whole life to ignore your own boundaries. For many of us, smiling and nodding isn’t even necessarily a conscious and intentional strategy; it’s a reflex, something that happens as naturally and automatically as breathing. Of course, it’s not “natural” in any meaningful sense of the word. But it feels that way, and that makes it really hard to unlearn.

For many of us–until we do manage to deliberately and effortfully unlearn this shit–telling a man “leave me alone, I don’t want to talk to you” is unthinkable, not just because it’s scary and potentially dangerous but because we don’t even think it. Ditto for just ignoring the man completely. It often takes hours, weeks, or years to realize that a particular interaction was uncomfortable and violating, to finally recognize the discomfort, fear, and anger that had hidden beneath the polite smile all along. That can happen with harassing comments and it can happen with rape.

For most of us, it’s not because we read some articles about feminism and changed our minds. It’s more like realizing that a house that seems stable and well-built actually has crumbling foundations and a rotting frame. It’s not that the crumble and the rot wasn’t there before. We just didn’t see it.

So yes, when you observe a man leering at, making sexual comments to, or otherwise appearing to sexually harass a woman who is gamely playing along, there’s a chance that she’s okay with it or even enjoying it. What’s much more likely is that she’s very uncomfortable, or will soon realize it, but she’s not showing it because she’s been taught not to show her negative feelings towards men or even recognize that they are there.

So let’s talk about “white knighting,” since men are always telling me that they chose not to stand up for women’s safety and autonomy in order to avoid being “white knights.”

First of all, I’m not convinced that accusations of “white knighting” are necessarily being made in good faith, i.e. by women or other marginalized people who are upset that male bystanders tried to help them deal with a harasser or assailant. Most of them seem to be coming from anti-feminist men who are trying to delegitimize and ridicule male feminists. While there are many important conversations to be had about the motivations and missteps of male feminists, none of those conversations are going to be initiated by people who do not believe that sexism exists or that it oppresses people who are not cisgender men. These people are trying to create a safe space to further marginalize and terrorize women and trans people, and male feminists who take these “white knighting” accusations seriously are giving them exactly what they want.

Second, it’s not a choice between “literally do nothing” and “force the woman to accept your patronizing and uninformed assistance.” Yes, there’s a shitty history of men “protecting” women from other men (men they may be interested in) because they assume that women have no agency and how dare another man take “your” woman. We have to push back against that, but without using it as an excuse to let harassment and assault happen in our spaces.

I’ve noticed that men engaging with feminist issues are often frustrated by the lack of clear answers and action steps. They want to fix it immediately and they want to get it right on the first try.

I can’t tell you how to do that. There is no flowchart for exactly how to intervene successfully when someone is being creepy. There are simply too many variables.

Instead, here are some strategies you could try when they seem appropriate.

  • Talk to the women and trans folks in your life about what (if anything) they would want from you if you witness them being harassed. Be proactive about this. Don’t wait for it to happen to them. It already does.
  • If you did notice someone being harassed but didn’t do anything because you didn’t know what to do, check in with them later about their experience and what they might’ve wanted from you.
  • If you see someone you know being harassed, step in and say, “Hey, can I steal you for a moment? I had a question for you.” If they say, “I’ll catch you later,” they’re probably fine. If they come along, ask them if they need an out.
  • If you don’t know the person being harassed, and you’re a man, it’s a little tough. Offering to lead them away is unlikely to feel comfortable for them because they don’t know you either and you could be even worse. If the space has an organizer–i.e. a party host or conference staffer–ask them to check if the person is ok. You could also ask a female friend to do the previous suggestion.
  • If you know the person who is harassing someone, find a reason to pull them away for a conversation. Tell them what you observed and why it’s inappropriate. This won’t be a comfortable conversation, but it’s extremely important and can make a huge impact. One of the biggest contributing factors to sexual harassment and assault is that many men think their male peers approve of it. Rain on that parade.
  • Talk to the organizer of the space. Ask your friend to stop inviting the harasser to their parties. If you’ve observed harassment, you don’t have to wait for one of the victims of it (there are almost certainly more than one) to speak up–they may not, because they have no reason to expect to be listened to. If someone started a fistfight, you’d kick them out without waiting for the punched person to tell you they don’t like being punched.
  • Avoid speaking for the person being harassed–when appropriate, center your own feelings. Tell the harasser that you are uncomfortable with what they’re doing and that it’s creepy and wrong. That’s one way of letting other guys know that you personally disapprove of harassment rather than just wanting to look good in front of women, and helps prevent them from trying to drag the person they’re harassing in to defend them.
  • Review the Geek Social Fallacies and remember that no one is entitled to any non-public space. That’s why you don’t have to wait for an Official Complaint to kick a harasser out of your space. Ask yourself–is this the kind of behavior I want at my event/in my friend group? If not, take steps to make it stop.
  • Confronting harassers is not safe or accessible for everyone. So if you can’t do it, do some of the other things listed here. But you can get better at it by roleplaying with a friend or practicing out loud on your own. This can be a great project for a few progressive guys to do together.
  • Let others know what you’ve observed so they can potentially intervene too if it happens again. Just like those who get harassed, many bystanders stay silent because they don’t want to “gossip” or “trash talk.” But letting someone know what you’ve seen or heard someone doing in your shared space isn’t gossiping. It’s giving people information they need to help keep each other safe.
  • If you interrupt a situation and the person you thought was being harassed says they’re fine, take that at face value. Yes, they may not feel safe telling you or they may realize later that it’s not fine, but you have to respect their autonomy. Apologize for interrupting and let them know you’ll be nearby if they need anything.

It’s important to remember that bystander intervention is fundamentally a harm reduction tactic–it will not remove the problem, just reduce the harm that the problem does. The only thing that will stop sexual harassment (or at least reduce it to its lowest possible baseline) is a massive cultural shift in how we think about sex, boundaries, and gender.

So don’t beat yourself up if you try all of these strategies and nothing seems to “fix” harassment. It won’t. It may, however, make some cool women and nonbinary folks stay in your social group who would otherwise have quietly left, and it may prompt a major attitude shift in a few of your guy friends that will keep them from harassing anyone else. That’s a small win in the great scheme of things, but it’s a massive win for those individual lives.


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“He was acting creepy, but she seemed okay with it…”

For Poly Folks Who Desperately Need Autonomy

I recently discovered this amazing piece by Nora Samaran about relationships, gender, and autonomy that has really resonated with me and many of my friends. Go read it.

Here are some of the key points I took away from this article:

  • If you’re afraid of being relied on, you’ll probably treat your partner inconsistently and any “acts of care” that you will do for them will feel inauthentic.
  • If you treat your partner like their needs are unreasonable and unmeetable–like they’re “crazy”–they are much more likely to act “crazy” with you. That same person, with a partner who treats their needs as reasonable and meetable, might seem a lot more stable. (Sidenote: this is one of several reasons I absolutely refuse to listen to any “crazy ex-girlfriend” stories from guys.)
  • Sometimes, in order for your partner to feel comfortable with distance, you have to establish real closeness first.
  • A common way that people (especially men) deal with their own fear of attachment, closeness, and interdependence is to blame their partners for having “unreasonable” needs or wanting “too much.”  This is gaslighting.

I encourage you to read (and reread) the entire article. It seems to be making a huge (positive) impact on many people I know.

That said, I have some deep disagreements with the author–not necessarily about any of these main points, but about the basic philosophical place that she comes from. We do relationships very, very differently.

For instance, one of the main ideas in the article is that autonomy is not something you “take,” but something you “build.” The author seems to believe that the default for healthy relationships is interdependence and intertwinement (to an extent that I would personally consider codependent), and she states that the reason she is able to trust her partner is because he has repeatedly met her needs no matter how inconvenient or difficult that was for him. Only then has he “built” autonomy; only then does she “give” him that autonomy; and only then does he “get” to do something like go away for weeks for a job without her being upset about it.

I see things the other way around. The default is independence and autonomy. The default is that we are each a ship at sea, setting our own courses, and we get to choose when and how and for long long to dock in someone else’s harbor. True, we don’t “take” autonomy, but that’s because we already have it.

For me, it’s interdependence that gets “built.” It requires immense trust for me to become more interdependent with someone else. If you want that from me, you first have to create a safe space for it.

And for me, I don’t “give” autonomy to anyone. They already have autonomy, and they have it no matter what I say or do or what our relationship is. They get to choose to reduce certain aspects of their autonomy if they want to, but ultimately it–just like their time, their body, and their emotional reserves–belongs to them.

The difference in our philosophies was made very clear to me in this paragraph about her breakup with the partner she had written about:

What we are no longer giving each other is sex, romantic feeling, and partnership – we are no longer committing to live together or have children together or make our lives in the same geographical location. His new girlfriend and eventual life partner will have priority decision-making power over how close he and I can be. We cried and grieved those parts.

I had such a viscerally negative reaction to this I almost had to stop reading, despite how much I had loved the article up until then. No. No no no. I would never accept someone having this kind of power over me, whether they are my partner or my ex’s partner. I would never accept a friendship or relationship with someone who agrees to let someone else control our closeness.

Moreover, I would never, ever want to exercise such a power over someone else. When I imagine one of my partners having as close and meaningful a friendship with an ex as this author has with hers, and I imagine telling that partner to destroy that closeness, I honestly feel that it would be monstrous of me. I can’t even imagine wanting to do that. Such connections are so rare, so precious, so difficult to build–who the fuck are we to tell others to destroy them for the sake of our own comfort?

But I get that given the way most people do relationships, that’s perfectly reasonable. It’s a common monogamous dictum that you get to control (though most people wouldn’t use that word) your partner’s relationships with their exes.

More to the point–Samaran’s conception of emotional safety is that it develops when (and only when) partners are able to meet each others’ needs every time they’re asked to. But what if they can’t? What if they cannot be available on demand like that? What if they have other partners–hell, what if they have friends, family members, jobs, passions, responsibilities–that matter just as much? What if the author’s partner, during his camp when he was mostly unavailable, wasn’t able to take even that half an hour to be with her? What if he had his own mental health issues that impacted his availability? What if romantic relationships are not your primary focus, but one of many domains of your life that you balance? What if you do not agree that your romantic partner (just one) will be your first (and, really, only) priority?

Do people like me just have to give up on feeling emotionally safe, and on building emotional safety for our partners?

I don’t think so.

I think Samaran creates a false choice between fully meeting your partner’s needs every time and saying (in her words), “My needs matter and I will meet them regardless of the impact on you.” She is correct that we must treat our partners’ needs as “normal, healthy, [and] eminently meetable”; I don’t think she’s correct, at least not for people like me and my friends and partners, that we must be able to commit to this:

“So, if I actually need you, you’re always there, right?” I ask.

“Of course,” he says. “Look, I really need to be able to focus on being here. But if you really need me, of course you can just come by the desk and ask where I am and I’ll come help with whatever you need.”

(I do appreciate how honest her partner is here about how it will impact him if she does need to access him during the camp. But what if he were unable or unwilling to be available during that time? Would that make him an emotionally unsafe partner? I think she might say it would. I say it wouldn’t.)

(Also, I may be misrepresenting the article unfairly; at times the author seems to imply that she doesn’t need her needs to be completely met in order for trust to develop, but at other times she implies that she does, and that she needs her partner to always put her first. In any case, though, the article is clearly based on a style of Primary Relationships that I don’t do myself.)

[Edit: I’m having a great chat with Nora on Twitter and she clarified that she does not mean that you have to fully meet your partner’s needs every time; we both agree that that’s too high a bar. But Wired for Love, the book she cites, does claim that. Seems that we both disagree with that aspect of it!]

So. I’m not trying to criticize how Samaran personally does things because that’s her own business, but this piece left me (and a bunch of people I know) totally unsure of how to incorporate these insights into a poly framework, and specifically a poly framework in which individual autonomy, not any particular relationship, is what’s “primary.”

Here are some thoughts I had:

1. Just because you can’t meet a need doesn’t mean it’s an unreasonable need.

One of the ways we cope with our own feelings of helplessness in the face of loved ones’ unmeetable needs is to try to delegitimize those needs. If you have real needs that I can’t or won’t meet, that makes me a bad partner(/friend/family member). I don’t want to feel that way, so maybe your needs aren’t legitimate after all, so there’s nothing wrong with me not meeting them.

Of course, this mental process usually isn’t so conscious. I think most people who do it don’t realize they’re doing it.

As Samaran writes in another piece, gaslighting doesn’t have to be intentional to be deeply harmful. If your defense mechanism against feeling powerless to help someone is to make that person feel like they shouldn’t have even asked or needed that in the first place, you’re gaslighting them and that’s abusive. You need to own your own limitations and take responsibility for them rather than blaming the other person.

Which brings me to…

2. You must own your boundaries and limitations.

There’s a huge difference between saying, “[I’m sorry], I’m not in a good place to listen to you right now” and saying, “I can’t listen to you because you’re too emotional.” Both might feel true to you–your own current state of mind may limit the amount of strong emotion you can hold space for from others. But the root cause here isn’t your partner’s emotions; it’s your limitations.

Yes, it’s true that if your partner were less emotional in that moment, you might be able to listen to them. But when you set a boundary and implicitly blame the other person this way, you’re telling them that their feelings and needs are wrong. The message your partner hears is, “My partner won’t support me because I’m too emotional,” rather than what they should hear, which is, “My partner can’t support me right now because they need to take care of themselves.”

3. Not meeting needs doesn’t mean disregarding needs.

There’s a dangerous false dichotomy that a lot of relationship advice reinforces, and Samaran’s article does this as well. That’s the dichotomy between “meeting your partner’s needs” and “not giving a fuck about your partner’s needs.”

I’ve noted before that every time I talk about my autonomy-based form of polyamory, the first question I get is “So what you don’t even care if your partner is sitting at home alone crying while you’re on a date?” Of course I care. And if that’s really how it would be, I probably wouldn’t go on the date. But it wouldn’t be my duty to not go on a date, and it can’t happen every time I have a date, and I would not choose to continue a relationship with someone who regularly gets that upset about me going on dates because it doesn’t sound like we’re compatible.

If you’re unable or unwilling to meet a partner’s need at a particular point in time, that doesn’t mean that you’re saying, as Samaran writes, “My needs matter and I will meet them regardless of the impact on you.” It might mean saying, “My needs matter but yours do too–what solutions can we come up with?” It might mean saying, “I hear that this is hurting you, but this is something I need to do. Is there any way I can help you through it?” It might mean saying, “Let’s do what you need this time, but later let’s talk about what we can do to make sure that next time I can do what I need.”

4. You might be able to find comfort in your partner’s care and concern for you, even if they can’t meet your need.

Say I have a very intense job that doesn’t really allow for many (or any) breaks to chat on the phone with someone. Say I have a partner who really needs to be able to call me during the work day if they’re having a hard time. Say that, due to the limitations of my job, that’s an unmeetable need at this point.

How would my partner feel if I said, “Sorry, can’t do that. I already told you that I’m very busy at work. We can talk about it when I get home”?

How would my partner feel if I said, “I’m sorry, I really wish I could be there for you during the day, but my job just doesn’t allow for that. I’ll be there for you after work if you want to talk then”?

If they’re anything like most people, they’d probably feel pretty different in those two scenarios, even though I’m still declining to meet their stated need and offering the same alternative. What I’m doing is the same, but how I’m doing it is totally different.

If you’re someone who, like Samaran’s examples of men who aren’t ready to be relied on, treats every request for your care as overwhelmingly too much, you are liable to respond in that snappy, detached way from my first example. And that’s going to really hurt your partner, and they may come to the conclusion that they feel hurt because you aren’t meeting their needs, not because of the way you aren’t meeting their needs. This will lead to arguments about how you aren’t meeting their needs enough, and you will respond that you can’t and why can’t they understand that, and it’ll be a mess. (I may or may not have been on both sides of this at various times.)

Whereas if you respond to unmeetable needs not only by treating them as valid (as I discussed above) but also with real compassion and concern, that may go a long way in healing your partner’s pain at having their needs unmet.

5. Compromise is key.

If you can’t meet your partner’s need, what’s the next best thing?

In my work phone call situation, it might be that they can text me while I’m at work and I’ll respond as I’m able. It might be that they can call and leave me a long voicemail that I’ll listen to as soon as I’m done–that way, they can at least talk their feelings out and know that I’ll hear it even if I’m not responding right away. It might be that we set aside time that evening to cuddle and talk. It might be that they find a friend or another partner who can talk during the work day, even though they’d rather have talked to me. It might be that they work on finding a therapist who can help them develop other coping skills that they can use independently. It might be that once a week, I set aside my brief lunch break to talk to them on the phone during the work day.

It doesn’t have to be a choice between “fully meet your partner’s needs” and “ignore your partner to suffer alone.”

6. Patterns tell the truth that individual cases don’t.

Everyone has bad days, bad weeks, bad years. There will be times when your partner comes to you for support and you snap “Leave me alone, I can’t deal with this right now.” As Samaran writes in her article, these things happen and they can be repaired–as long as they don’t become patterns.

When I talk about the importance of taking care of yourself and your needs before others–putting your oxygen mask on first, as I sometimes refer to it–someone often says, “Well, my partner is always putting themselves first and they never seem to have any time or energy left over for my needs.”

That’s a pattern. If your partner consistently can’t or won’t meet your needs, maybe you’re not compatible. (Or, in a polyamorous/non-elevator framework, you might be compatible in a different way than you’re trying to be–for instance, as good friends who have sex, or as occasional lovers.)

And because it’s painful to acknowledge that you might just be the wrong partner for someone, it’s tempting to say that they’re “selfish” or “detached” or “not ready for relationships,” when in fact they might make a great partner for someone who isn’t you and has a different set of needs and expectations.

7. We’re not bad people for not being able to meet each others’ needs.

In the first point, I wrote about how people try to delegitimize others’ needs as a way to protect themselves from feeling bad for not needing those needs. Rather than resorting to gaslighting, we should remind ourselves that our goodness is not tied to what or how much we give others. My own philosophy is that goodness is about respecting and valuing others (and, more broadly, valuing your community, humankind, and our planet). I am good as long as I treat people with respect and remain mindful of my impact on them and on the broader systems and ecosystems in which I exist. None of this requires me to do what others need or want all (or even most) of the time. You are free to develop your own philosophy (especially if you, like me, are an atheist who is not provided with any preformed religious answers to these types of questions).

If you detach your sense of your own goodness from meeting others’ needs all of the time, you might find that you have an easier time meeting those needs, because you’ll have less anxiety about it. When we hang a whole bunch of baggage onto an otherwise-simple task, it becomes much impossibly difficult. What have you attached to the acts of care you do for others? Do you feel like doing (or not doing) those acts makes or breaks you as a Good Person?

That might seem like it’s going in the opposite direction of Samaran’s article that inspired this post–and maybe it is–but I think that one of the great paradoxes of life is that sometimes you have to let go of something in order to get it. If you’re struggling with feeling like you can’t meet anyone’s needs, try to let go of feeling like you have to meet those needs and it might become actually doable.

Moreover, we have to stop telling ourselves that we either have to be there for our partners all of the time or we’re not supporting them at all. Open yourself up to other ways of supporting and of being supported, and try to let go of the myth–perpetuated by a culture that glorifies and centers romantic relationships–that partners are the only ones who have any meaningful support to give.


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For Poly Folks Who Desperately Need Autonomy

5 Ways to Navigate Consent with a Partner Who Has Trouble Setting Boundaries

New Everyday Feminism piece!

More than I regret any of my nos, I regret quite a few of my yeses.

To this day, I don’t understand why I’ve said “yes” to some of the things I’ve said “yes” to. Even after I discovered feminism and sex positivity, I kept agreeing to intimacy – physical and emotional – that I didn’t want, or quickly realized I didn’t want. The longer I went without admitting that I didn’t want it after all, the harder it became to speak up.

It didn’t help that when I did speak up, my partners were often confused – and even angry. “Why didn’t you just tell me before?” is something I heard often.

If that sounds a little like you – I hear you. You have a long journey ahead of you, but you’re not alone in making it. These resources can help.

And if that sounds a little like your partner, this article is for you.

Navigating a relationship with someone who has a hard time saying “no” challenges your ability to respect both your partner’s boundaries and their autonomy.

You want to trust their words and take them at face value, but you know from experience that that’s not always possible. You can do your best to create a safe space for your partner to let you know when they’re not okay with things, but they may not be ready to meet you in that space yet.

If your partner is a woman or is perceived as one, they are especially likely to have difficulty with this. Our society teaches women that their boundaries are invalid in many ways.

However, people of any gender may have a hard time setting boundaries because it’s not easy even in the best of circumstances. People with a history of trauma or abuse may have grown up with the belief that their boundaries won’t be respected no matter how hard they work at setting them, so why bother?

As much as you might want to, you cannot undo the things that made your partner who they are. You can work with them to build a relationship that honors that history while also helping them to heal.

Here are five ways you can try.

1. Remember That Only Yes Means Yes

When you’re involved with someone who has a hard time saying “no” directly, it’s important to be aware that responses like “okay,” “that’s fine,” or “I guess” probably do not mean “yes” – especially not when combined with non-responsive body language, lack of eye contact, and a monotone.

Unless your partner has made it clear to you that they intend for these types of response to communicate consent, it’s safest to treat them as “no”s.

Many people have pushed back against the enthusiastic consent model. Asexual folks and sex workers especially have argued that consent need not be enthusiastic to “count.” Nonverbal consent can be established between close partners, too (and can also be quite enthusiastic itself).

While it’s important to listen to these narratives, we shouldn’t use them as an excuse to ignore potential signs that someone is not really consenting. If you’re not sure what it means when your partner responds to you in a particular way, ask.

Read the rest here.

5 Ways to Navigate Consent with a Partner Who Has Trouble Setting Boundaries

How to Get the Most Out of Therapy

Drawing of a therapy session in progress.
Credit: Guy Shennan

When you spend a lot of money on things, they usually come with an instruction manual to help you use them in the most effective possible way. Unfortunately, therapy doesn’t.

A common misconception about therapy held by many laypeople (and, unfortunately, some therapists) is that all you have to do as a client is show up and then…some vague hand-wavey magic stuff happens, and then the client gets better. Many people think of therapy like this:

  1. Go to therapy
  2. ???
  3. PROFIT

Really, though, it’s more like this:

  1. Go to therapy
  2. Establish some rapport with the therapist before you can delve into the serious stuff
  3. Sometimes be really uncomfortable
  4. Have a lot of meta-conversations with your therapist–that is, talk to the therapist about the process of talking to the therapist
  5. Do homework (in some types of therapy)
  6. Get called on your shit by the therapist
  7. Be uncomfortable again
  8. Make changes in your life outside of therapy
  9. PROFIT

As a therapist, it’s tempting to say that you should just show up and let the therapist do their job and you’ll feel better. Sometimes that’s exactly how it works. But ultimately, you can only get as much out of therapy as you put into it.

Continue reading “How to Get the Most Out of Therapy”

How to Get the Most Out of Therapy