(un)Strategic Ambiguity

Wow, Rhonda unleashed a whole mess of hormones flying around the halls of HON. All of these relationship posts are either going to get someone dead or get someone laid. I love it.

Updated because I just re-read something absurd mathgimp wrote.


Original rambling:
Here's the way I see things.

There's no one right way for societies to manage relationships. Arranged marriage, polygamy, polyamory, open marriages, friends with benefits, all have folks on one side singing their praises, and folks on the other swearing it will lead to the downfall of society. Neither is right. Just about everything works for someone (or some culture) somewhere, and just about everything is a disaster in some situation somewhere.

Every single type of relationship has problems associated with it. Of course committed relationships have problems that non-committed relationships don't. The stakes are higher, it's harder to walk away, problems get blown out of proportion by apocalyptic thinking, you have to manage and balance sex and emotions and personalities and life goals and that of course breeds stress and a little bit of the crazy.

In a moderate piece of self-disclosure, the reason why Rhonda and I started talking about this, and the reason why she wrote the blog, is because I've talked with almost every person I've ever had a romantic relationship with over the past two weeks. They all offered ostensible reasons for getting back in touch. They all came with explicit or implicit assurances that they didn't want to get back together.

Every time one of those boys called, I called Rhonda and said "boys are stupid!!!!" Even if they don't want to get back together - so the commitment problem goes away -- it fucks with my head a little, not only because I still feel something in one way or another for all of them, but because it's extremely difficult to judge other people's motives and intentions. Why are they calling me?? What are they thinking?? And because it makes you play the "what if" game. It feels like it's been a constant string of the ghosts of relationships past come to visit, exposing what my life would have been like had I been a little bit different, or made a few different choices.

If we were born 20 years earlier, or in rural America, or were socially conservative, I would have married the first one of the aforementioned guys who wandered into my life. Because I wasn't, relationships become a lot more confusing. The reason why boys are stupid and girls are lame is because we live in a subculture that fosters ambiguous relationships. It's acceptable to a) randomly hook up with people b) have friends with benefits arrangements and c)have platonic relationships with folks of the opposite gender. How do you choose?

The tables have turned in terms of a lot of gender norms -- I know plenty of women who just want no commitment hookups, and a ton of guys looking for long-term relationships. Men and women both have the option to choose careers and education over immediate procreation. It's great, and liberating, but it also increases possible interpretations of any given behavior that the opposite sex does at any given time about a thousand fold. THAT is why boys are stupid. You have no fucking clue what ANYTHING they do means. (And, of course, why girls are lame, too).

We have a delicious smorgasbord of sex and romance at our finger tips. And I wouldn't change it. We can experiment, we can be independent, we can self-actualize now, commit later, but of course it causes bitterness and resentment and misunderstanding. It's also fun and exhilarating and teaches you stuff about yourself. Once you get to the commitment part, that shit's easy - even if you go a little crazy, at least you're in it together.
End original rambling.

Update 1: Mathgimp, bizarrely, writes: "Non-committed relationships don't make anyone act crazy, unless they were crazy to begin with." This needs about 17 caveots to make it kind of make sense: non-committed relationships with no sexual or romantic dimension don't make people act crazy. If you want to sleep with them, or they want to sleep with you, all bets are off. Most of the time, people in non-committed relationship act like raving lunatics driven mad by hormonal uncertainty.