Everything is temporary
Content Warning
This post contains content which may not be suitable for all audiences. This is limited to the mention of kink and kink-related concepts, but nothing specific or explicit.I understand. You want a label.
I've been thinking about that myself.
We all know the old gag, "I'm going to live forever, or die trying."
Everyone who tries to live forever dies in the attempt. It's not meant to be forever.
Even things that are meant to be permanent inevitably end at some point.
I watched a video documentary at some point (though there's a small chance it was a paper I read and not a video at all) that talked about long-term storage of hazardous materials, on the scale of, not years or decades, but centuries and millennia. On the sort of scale where you have to worry about more than language evolution, but the actual death of civilizations, how do you write a universal "Do Not Enter" sign?
So much of our existence is cultural in ways we don't always recognize, because it's so baked into our very lives. It's not universal to nod your head to mean yes or to shake your head to say no. If even the simplest concept of yes and no isn't expressed with universal body language, how then can you guarantee accurate translation over the rise and fall of generations for a concept as complex as "Do Not Enter/Hazardous Materials"?
You can't.
You simply can't.
What is the solution then?
Why, it's the simplest one:
If you want to deter people from visiting an area... make it as impossible to access as possible, and then make it utterly unremarkable. Don't post a sign. Don't post any warning at all. Don't leave a message to future sentient beings--human or otherwise--that there's anything remarkable about this mountain. Don't call attention to it, and with any luck, they'll find something far more tempting to scan with ground penetrating radar (like our less hazardous waste disposal sites) than a somewhat random mountain that's situated on a remarkably stable tectonic region.
Here's the thing... I do not want anything even closely resembling a relationship. Not now, probably not ever. ...what started as harmless teasing and flirting has clearly evolved into more. And I just sort of went with the flow...
As usual, I'm telling this story out of order.
And leaving out a lot of details.
[W]hether I have feelings for you or not, that wouldn't change what we ought to be.
I've never gone into a relationship and said, "I want to be in a relationship with you."
Actually, I have.
I think I did it twice. And both times it was a complete and utter flop. Literally the worst relationships I've ever had started with a clear declaration of intentions.
My best relationships just happened organically.
We just started talking, and then one day one of us woke up and realized feelings had happened, hearts had gotten involved (especially if we'd been deliberately trying not to). I'll admit, my heart usually takes a little longer than theirs. Perhaps I've had a little too much practice keeping my heart out of the queue. (Or maybe it's the autism.)
It's talking.
And then it's flirting.
And then it's making plans, building schedules, getting invested...
And then suddenly there's feelings involved.
I don't ever want to hurt your feelings, or dare I say, break your heart.
Of course, now that I've said that, you know where this is going next.
...Yeah, I think I might've fallen first this time. I genuinely have no idea how that happened. I'm usually so much better at this.
Hell, we even managed to get into kink without talking about safe words. Seriously, I know better than to do that. We had a moment where I yellowed out mid-conversation and their reaction was "I don't know what that means," because despite my assertion that the stoplight system is generally pretty well understood by most kinksters, it is in fact not universal. (Fortunately, we're both mature enough and adult enough to be able to break what we were doing and have a quick sidebar about what our preferred safe words were and what the problem was, and then resume the conversation with only the mildest hiccough.)
Why was I talking about impermanence?
I know I had a tie-in somewhere...
[Q]uestion for you: [W]hen talking about you, about us, without calling you out by name, is there a way you'd prefer that I refer to you or to our relationship?
Labels suck.
Language evolves.
There are words in use today that describe things about myself I was only just beginning to figure out way back in high school. I don't even want to think about how many years ago it was... when I first came out as bisexual.
I remember who I was talking to. I remember who I was talking about. Neither of those details are important (especially since neither of those people are still in my life). What is important is that way back then, the list of orientations I knew about I could count on one hand, and one of the terms I wasn't even eligible for. I didn't know about demi or ace or grey or pan. To my knowledge, even my knowledge today, looking back (hindsight ain't always 20/20), I don't think I met a transgendered person until college. At the time, I didn't even know it was a thing, at most my high school sex ed class might've spent a few minutes on it that went past without my notice (I had bigger things to worry about in that class, and it's probably not what you think), and it wasn't until college and I signed up for a Sex & Gender course...
Even after the S&G course... it was close to a decade until I sat down and took a good look at my own gender identity, and realized that I just didn't fit with what I'd been taught I was supposed to be.
(Sorry, that one got a little more off track than where I intended, and ran a lot longer than what I intended.)
Suffice to say that labels are a limit. They're a baseline. They're something to draw us together to a point of common understanding. I may have identified as bisexual in high school, but that was a starting point to say, "Hey, I'm not straight, and maybe I'm attracted to more than just one thing." I had neither the words nor the worldly experience to go beyond "bi equals two".
There are a whole host of different identities and many of them have their own pride flags. But just because our flags are all different, that doesn't mean we don't stand for the same things. (Okay, this paragraph is way off course. Apologies. Let's see if I can drag this back...)
Labels are like pride flags. We use them as shorthand to refer to intangible things or ten-thousand word explanations of the way things are. They're imperfect and subject to interpretation (and misinterpretation).
They're like that coding test about the shortest way to write a number... is it writing the number out, or writing a string of code that's capable of writing that number out?
So...as for what we are, the most I would ever want is a...
It doesn't matter what it is.
It's a word. It's a label.
It's a starting point.
Leave a comment or continue reading: other Sunday posts and more on relationships.
