Tag Archives: Relationships

“But he’s supposed to want it more”: the damaging expectation of higher male desire

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After so many years of blogging, teaching, mentoring, and writing, you find yourself getting the same questions over and over again. (Questions about the wisdom of age-disparate and long-distance relationships, for example, are evergreen.) But there are other topics that come up often as well, like incompatible sexual desire. (See here, for example.) And as is often the case, I get multiple queries on the same topic at the same time from different sources; call it kismet or synchronicity, the topic of what happens when a woman has a stronger libido than her male partner has come up four times this week.

Our myths about sex drive tell us that men are supposed to peak in horniness in their late teens, while women only reach their full libidinousness on the high side of thirty. A lot of us suspect that to the extent there’s any truth to this at all, it has a good deal less to do with biology, and more to do with the long and difficult road so many women have to travel to discover and accept their own sexuality. Slut-shaming and sexualization work together to make girls acutely conscious of others’ wants and expectations while shutting them off from their own desires. It’s hard to hear one’s own “still, small voice” of longing if you’ve been raised to be a people pleaser!

But of course, so many young women don’t fit this model, just as the guys they date often don’t fit the male stereotype of constant randiness. And for many young women, finding themselves in a sexual relationship where they are the higher desire partner can be deeply confusing. One FB email this week from a former student of mine:

Before I had sex, my fantasy was always that a beautiful man would want me so much that he would lose all control, overpowering me. Not a rape fantasy exactly, just the idea of driving some hot guy crazy with lust. I guess you’d say my arousal was tied into how aroused the guy was by me. That was my number one fantasy for years and years. But Tom (name changed, of course) doesn’t seem to want sex nearly as often as I do. I’d like it almost every day, and he’d like it a few times a week. We don’t get much time together as it is, and this is driving me nuts.

I hear variations on that quite often (though rarely several times in one week.) And of course, my former student is hurt and confused. She knows enough to know how much of her own sexuality was shaped by cultural messages about uncontrollable male desire. She’s done a great job of leaving behind the message that “good girls don’t really want sex”. But while she’s given herself permission to want and to have, she’s still got the old tape playing that says that in heterosexual relationships, particularly among young people, the man should always be hornier than the woman. Continue reading →

“Men Run When They Lack the Words to Stay”

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A slightly different version of this post first ran in June 2009.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day; she and her boyfriend of several months are “taking a break” from their relationship. He’s in his early thirties, she’s in her late twenties; in different ways, each carries the “baggage” of family, faith, and previous lovers.

The fella — I’ll call him “Gordy” — is a bit overwhelmed by the gal, “Calliope.” Gordy, apparently, does something that I very much remember doing in relationships when I was younger: retreat in the face of intense emotion, particularly in the face of a woman’s anger. Many young — and not-so-young — men feel overwhelmed by what seem to be the superior verbal and emotional skills of female romantic partners. When a man has grown up learning not to display feelings, or to talk about them, he may end up feeling a bit as if he’s a first-year French student suddenly plunged into a conversation with fluent native speakers. He hasn’t got — or he feels he hasn’t got — the vocabulary with which to keep up. This isn’t because of testosterone, of course, or some inherent aspect of the human brain; it’s the hangover from growing up with the “guy code”. And the guy code, followed rigidly, leads to a kind of learned emotional helplessness.

I’ve been over this ground before in the three posts in the male transformation series. The three posts from the autumn of 2007 explain aspects of the problem — and the solution — in considerably more detail. But what I want to focus on today is Gordy’s need to “take a break” from the relationship, and the reasons that seem to undergird it. It’s entirely possible, of course, that “wanting a break” is code for “I really am tired of this relationship, and want to get out for good, but lack the courage to say so directly.” But from what I can tell, there’s something else at work. Gordy doesn’t want out; he has fallen in love with Calliope and wants to be with her. He also finds her — the complete package of Calliope-ness — to be more than a little overwhelming. He’s not calling an end so much as he seems to be calling for a time-out.

Let me say again (though my MRA critics don’t hear this) that I don’t think women are always blameless when heterosexual relationships go south. Women have their own lessons to learn — and in the case of sexist acculturation, it might be more apt to say that they have their own lessons to unlearn. But I write much more often about what men can and ought to do because, well, I’m a man. I’ve lived nearly 44 years in a male body, and while I don’t pretend to be a professional relationship expert, I’ve lived a bit — and thought a lot — about the ways in which culturally constructed masculinity undermines our collective happiness and our ability to function intimately with other human beings. And so I focus more on what men can do, respecting the reality that women have had plenty of experience being told how to behave by the males in their lives. Continue reading →

The Cautery of Hate: on Breakups, Psychoanalysis, and the Healing Power of Rage

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I was reminded of this story by an exchange with a friend today.

Dealing with the end of an intense romantic relationship is painful, regardless of the terms on which that relationship took place. Whether an unrequited obsession or a marriage, the adjustment to life without that one other person on whom you were so focused for so long is very difficult. And especially when we’ve had a hard time seeing a lover’s flaws, recovery may call for a period where we zero in on nothing but those shortcomings.

The story:

Many years ago, during one of my intermittent attempts to get sober, I went into analysis. Yeah, old school Freudian analysis, four days a week for an hour at a time. My psychiatrist, who had gone through the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, had me on the couch in his Pasadena office for nearly two years. My grandmother footed the bill. But when we made the family decision to put me through the famed Freudian process, it was my mother who told me about a dear friend of hers — another psychiatrist — whose own daughter had gone into analysis (with another doctor, of course, not her mother.) My mother’s friend had told her daughter, “Boopsie, at some point during this process you will realize that you hate me. Don’t worry, the hate won’t last. But it’s a necessary stage in analysis.”

“Don’t be silly, Mom, the day could never come when I’d hate you!”, Boopsie replied.

Six months later, the phone rang. When my mother’s friend answered, she heard her daughter’s voice: “Mom”, Boopsie said, “I just want you to know… it’s that day. I hate you.” Click.

Several weeks later, of course, the phone rang again. “Mom, I just want you to know, I don’t hate you anymore”, Boopsie announced with pride. Her mother laughed with her, and they cried together.

And yeah, I went through the same thing with my own mother.

But it’s not just Freudian analysis with its high price tag that produces this process of progressing from idealization to angry contempt and then on to loving acceptance. It’s also part of a good breakup, as I discovered not long after I began the analytic journey.

As I’ve often written, early on in my teaching career I went through a period where I dated and slept with many of my students. Though all these relationships were consensual, at least in the legal sense, they were also deeply unethical. And while some were one-night stands, some lasted on-and-off for months, and in a couple of cases, over a year. One of the latter relationships was with a young woman named Tanya, whom I slept with on and off from late 1996 to early 1998. I was a complete jerk to Tanya, not only because our relationship had started when I was her professor, but also because she was someone who wanted an exclusive romantic relationship with me, something I had neither the willingness nor the ability to give at that turbulent and self-absorbed point in my life. As far as I was concerned, Tanya and I were “friends with benefits”. And yet my conscience wasn’t so drugged and numbed that it didn’t know damn well I was taking advantage of her feelings for me.

Finally, in early 1998, Tanya told me that it was too painful to continue to sleep with me when I could give her nothing more than sex, affection and conversation. If I couldn’t commit, she told me, she’d need to stop seeing me altogether. She also told me she was starting therapy, and was excited about where that would take her. Since I was, at this point, on dear Dr. Levine’s couch Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons, I was all about therapy, and told Tanya I was excited for her. Continue reading →

Can I Pop Your Zit? Reprinting an old post on relationships and grooming

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A reprint from February 2008, inspired by a comment in this post by Glenden Brown.

I’ve been married four times and lived with a couple of other women for extended periods. (I never did single well, evidently, from the time I was seventeen). And just about every last one of the women with whom I have lived in or out of wedlock has developed a fascination with grooming me. Whether it was searching my back for acne or patrolling my beard line looking for ingrown hairs, virtually everyone with whom I’ve been in a long-term relationship has had a strong desire to explore, poke, pluck, and pop various parts of my body. I have never once felt even the remotest desire to reciprocate.

Mind you, I like my wife’s grooming. Though it’s periodically painful to have tiny hairs torn out, zits punctured and so forth, I take it as evidence of affection. It’s obviously a behavior we humans share with a wide variety of our fellow animals; everyone from primates to penguins seems to delight in removing impurities from a loved one’s skin, fur, or feathers. Despite more than twenty years studying or teaching gender and sexuality, I’ve never given much thought to the cultural or psychological implications of this behavior in humans. In my experience, at least, this sort of grooming in heterosexual relationships is rarely reciprocal — it seems to be initiated mostly by the female partner, and is submitted to with varying degrees of willingness by the male. (In the animal kingdom, it does appear to be a gender-neutral behavior, and enthusiastically mutual.) Continue reading →

Crucibles, threshing floors, and labels

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A former women’s studies student of mine, Mariana (names all changed, of course), wrote me over the holidays. She’s been dating her boyfriend, Marco, for a year. But a couple of weeks ago, Marco asked to make a change in their relationship. Mariana writes:

Marco expressed to me that he didn’t want to be in a relationship and that he wanted to take things a step back. He also told me he doesn’t ever want to get married and have kids, which I do! He tells me he doesn’t want to deal with obligations of being a boyfriend…I don’t know how to take that…he tells me he still wants to date but not be in a serious relationship…I appreciate his honesty but I just don’t understand why he sees being a boyfriend as a burden rather than a blessing.

I got Mariana’s permission to respond here on the blog, because I think the issues she and Marco are having are fairly common. And it is “issues” in the plural, because a couple of different things are going on that we be should be careful to distinguish.

First off, there’s the set of pressures that come with the labels “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”. It’s not just the baggage of exclusivity that may trouble some, it’s an entire luggage set of assumptions that comes with formalizing a relationship. The terms suggest images in the minds of the young (and not so young), images created by peers, parents and by popular culture. For example, in the minds of many, boyfriends and girlfriends are “expected” to talk a certain number of times per week, expected to leave large blocks of time open for their partners, expected to be progressing towards something (be it sex, or cohabitation, or marriage, or children.) Combine the absence of a universal definition of what a boyfriend or a girlfriend is and does with the reality that people’s expectations, fears and hopes associated with those labels can vary widely, and you’ve got a recipe for conflict. This is one of the reasons why “the talk” (the “where is this ‘thing’ headed” conversation) grows ever more awkward as the definitions of what it means to “go out” or “date” or “be in a relationship” grow ever muddier.

The old labels were confining and inflexible, but they offered at least the temporary sensation of certainty. Rigid expectations — about male and female sex roles, that dating was a preparation for marriage, and that marriage led inevitably and quickly to children — were often both misery-making and clarity-bequeathing. Young people have more options today, including increasing acceptance of alternatives to monogamy and increasing support for chosen childlessness. But of course, choices have consequences. And one of the consequences of an abundance of choices is that it can seem depressingly difficult to find a partner who shares your vision of what a romantic relationship should look like. Continue reading →

The pro-feminist pick-up artist: rethinking a blind spot

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Clarisse Thorn, the noted sex-positive writer and blogger, came to speak to my women’s history class today. Clarisse was in Los Angeles on another engagement, and was kind enough to come and talk to my students about sex-positive feminist masculinity. We had a short and very amiable debate, as I challenged some of her positions. (More on that in a future post.) I look forward to getting some good feedback from more of my students, but have already had a few enthusiastic emails and Facebook messages.

UPDATE: Clarisse notes her visit here. Her post lists some links from each of our archives that cover some of the areas where we disagree.

Clarisse’s article on the pathologizing of male desire got a great deal of attention in the blogosphere last month, and there were over 100 comments in the debate about it here on this blog. A follow-up post has a still-active comment thread. Those two posts received more comments than any others I wrote in October. Clarisse is clearly an instigator of good discussion.

I took Clarisse to lunch to thank her, and in our discussion over various vegetarian goodnesses, we returned to this challenging theme of constructive sex-positive feminist masculinity. I talked about how frustrated I’ve been in my exchanges on the topic with many men, who — as my comment threads indicate — find my writing on the topic to be shaming, or unhelpful, or privileged. I’ve been asked before for “pick-up tips for feminist men”, a request I’ve resisted for both ideological and experiential reasons. I haven’t spent much time around the “pick-up artist” (PUA) and “seduction” communities, largely because I find their views to be deeply demeaning to women (as well as men). Clarisse has a more nuanced view, as one of her many interests is focused on “bridging the gap” between the PUA and feminist worlds. I’m leery that that gap can be bridged at all, but I’m open to discussion.

But in talking with Clarisse, I realized how often I’ve been unnecessarily contemptuous of those men who have sought out techniques and strategies for approaching women. I’m married, of course, and devotedly so. I’m obviously not looking for sexual or romantic partners. But even when I was single, I never had trouble “meeting” women, finding sexual partners, or getting into relationships. (I had tremendous problems making relationships work, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.) Writing those words makes me uncomfortable; they seem filled with macho swagger. I’m not boasting of my sexual prowess, or at least, I’m trying not to. But though I have had myriad challenges in my life (particularly around drug and alcohol addiction), one problem I haven’t had since I hit college was finding sexual partners. Learning to be celibate was hard; learning how to be monogamous in thought and word as well as in body was hard. Unlearning flirting was hard. Getting laid — and every few years, getting married — was easy. Continue reading →

“Show me this person not as I see them, but as you see them”

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Robin wrote to thank me for this morning’s post. While she continues to wrestle with what direction to take with this young man she’s tutoring, she asked this:

It’s not like crushes are always based on logic. OK, are they ever? I have every reason in the world to steer clear of this. I wish it didn’t make me weak in the knees when I see him flash his gorgeous smile at me, or hear myself trying not to giggle like an infatuated, embarrassed schoolgirl whenever I feel the mood shift from “strictly textbook” to “personal.” Do you or your commenters have any brilliant ideas on quashing a crush? Please don’t say “another crush” because I currently know no one who’s got real potential and the last thing I need is to be hung up on a worse prospect.

Commenters feel free to weigh in. As a happily married middle-aged dude, I don’t get crushes on people the way I used to, but I don’t kid myself that either my age or the strength of the bond with my wife will invariably innoculate me against having one unexpectedly again. Whether wanted or not, I do remember what I was taught to do with a crush by my old mentor Jack. He taught me to pray this prayer:

“God, show me this person not as I see them but as you see them. Help me to be for them what I am called by you to be. Remove from me my fears and my selfish desires, and show me how to love them as you love them”.

I pray that prayer in situations where I am fearful I may be tempted (rare), and with people to whom I take an instinctive, immediate dislike (also rare). It’s a prayer for clarity — and prayed by a single person like Robin, that clarity might lead to a romantic relationship where once an apparently unrequited crush existed. Or it might lead to a platonic friendship. Or it might help build an appreciation for a person whom one had first thought unworthy.

See this post for the context in which I first shared that prayer.

“Sixes only date sixes”: of knights and rescuers, messiah complexes, and the call to grow

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Below yesterday’s post, FormerWildChild asks:

Quick question: what if a woman is in a truly desperate situation, if she made a few stupid choices, but also caught some really tough breaks. She has figured out where she went wrong and how to stay away from the people who make the tough beaks happen, but it is a hard scrabble back into a decent life when you are doing it alone and without much money. So, a guy comes along who wants to help her. She says yes, even though it makes her feel a little guilty, because she is truly desperate. They have a romantic relationship, and she really likes the guy. But he also gives her what she needs, and she takes advantage of it to make her life begin working, to make changes that will significantly improve her life-chances. She works hard enough, that she can probably make a go of it without him…

The question becomes: did she take advantage of a good guy? Did she prostitute herself for an education and a chance at a good life?

Well, I can guess what the Men’s Rights Advocates (MRAs) would say.

In thinking about my answer to FWC, I refer back to this post on relationships from October 2008: 100/100, not 50/50: of percentages, insurance companies, men, women, and apportioning responsibility in relationships.
 I wrote:

Here’s something three divorces and four marriages have taught me: if I am doing 50% and expecting my spouse to do 50%, then the marriage will (one way or another) founder. It’s not 50/50, it’s 100/100. I need to be 100% responsible for my behavior. My wife cannot, cannot, cannot “drive me to drink”; I cannot “make her depressed” without her active consent. I am completely responsible for myself, and she for herself, and we need to do everything we can to make the relationship work. I say to people “We split everything 100/100″, because though that may not make sense in terms of arithmetic, it captures a basic truth about what it takes to make a relationship not only survive but be vitalized, dynamic, and ever-changing.

What that means in terms of FWC’s question is this: her “good guy” is 100% responsible for his choices, as she is for hers. At first glance, their relationship was founded, as so many seemingly are, on a transactional basis: she gave love in return for stability. Of course, as any therapist will tell you, transactions are almost never that simple. Rescuers and rescuees have the same basic set of motives in these sorts of relationships: a longing to be loved and validated. Many rescuers derive a powerful feeling of self-worth from the act of rescuing; by choosing to be with someone vulnerable, they feel as if they have inoculated themselves against the possibility of being abandoned. (I’ve never met a rescuer who didn’t have massive abandonment issues.) It isn’t just women who buy into the self-flattering “my love is so strong it can change anyone” narrative about which I wrote here. The rescuer looks for someone whose weakness (a history of sexual abuse, drug addiction, anorexia, and so on) provides an opportunity to practice rescuing. Rescuers generally don’t want folks who have their shit together, as it were; aspiring doctors don’t demonstrate their skills by healing the already well. Jesus didn’t improve the sight of those already blessed with 20/20 vision. Continue reading →

Fighting from the uncorrupted self: more on conflict in feminist heterosexual relationships

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I’m writing a lot about men this week.

Below yesterday’s reprint about men being unable to articulate their deep emotions, Brian writes:

Reconciling some kind of commitment to egalitarianism with the conflict between how it plays out in practice with how people say it ought to isn’t very obvious, or straightforward… how can you reconcile “Figure out what you want, and require it” with “renounce male privilege”? Doesn’t sit right in the gut, you know?

I appreciate the question, and I see the concern.

In any healthy relationship, we don’t get to confuse our “wants” with what we “require” from our partners. The oldest truism in the book is that relationships require compromise. But compromise in heterosexual egalitarian relationships does involve several key things that aren’t always fully understood.

First of all, as I’ve written before, we (all of us, men and women alike) need to work on fighting fair. Part of that involves the recognition that it is very unlikely that in any given argument, all the truth is found on just one side. People tend to end up in relationships with partners who are more or less at their own level of spiritual and emotional health, which means that the propensity to be wrong is likely to be evenly distributed. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that the batterer and the batterree are equally at fault for the violence that happens in the relationship, but they may be equally at fault for the issues that were being fought over at the time the battering took place.)

Years ago, in my brief incarnation as a hardcore evangelical, I read Intimate Allies: Rediscovering God’s Design for Marriage and Becoming Soul Mates for Life, a book written by two Christian pastors. It has as its chief virtue a belief in mutual submission; the authors reject the “man is head of the household” trope, understanding that when it comes to marriage, Ephesians 5:21 trumps Ephesians 5:22. I remember one line that was very helpful, but since I don’t have the book with me anymore, I’m likely to misquote it. The authors, Allender and Longman, suggested that a marriage couldn’t work unless each party could honestly acknowledge the other’s essential sinfulness. To put it in secular terms, until you can see your spouse’s most serious flaws, and acknowledge they are real, you can’t truly love him or her, chiefly because you’ll be unable to help them do the valuable work of becoming a better person. Allender and Longman suggested that at least some of the time, it is well-meaning men who have the most trouble with this, believing that truly loving their wives means never noticing any flaw. Marriage requires forgiveness, they wrote, but not a refusal to see where someone else is broken. And women, the authors noted, have just as much brokenness as men. The tendency to put women on a pedestal is well-meaning and foolish at best, demeaning and destructive at worst.

For men who are feminist allies (and not evangelical conservatives), is there any usefulness in what Allender and Longman are discussing? Yes. If you’re a feminist man in a heterosexual relationship, you know that both you and your female partner have been impacted by a sexist, often misogynistic culture. You know already how hard it is to root out the inculcated expectations about gender roles. And you may know the important idea we discussed on this blog last fall, that “privilege conceals itself from those who possess it.” But rather than be incapacitated by this awareness, we need to remember that our knowledge of how gender dynamics work is a tool for better understanding ourselves and our relationships. What we get from this knowledge and this work is, one hopes, discernment: the ability to distinguish what about our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (and that of our partner) is sexist role-playing and what are the needs of our own authentic self.

Not to verge dangerously onto philosophical ground, but I think most of us (even if we haven’t read Plato or been washed in the Blood of the Lamb) think we have a “true self” somewhere deep inside, somewhere deeper than the corrupting influences of a sexist patriarchal culture could reach. Overcoming sexism or racism is about overcoming learned lessons, not about changing our very nature. The fact that the lessons began to be taught before our conscious memory doesn’t change the fact that they were learned after birth rather than encoded in our genes or written on our hearts. And the feminist man in an argument with his female partner needs to remember that both he and the woman he loves have had their perspectives warped by society — and that each of them has an uncorrupted self which is no more or less valuable than that of the other. Those born with penises were not maimed from the start, carrying from their mothers’ wombs obtuse and violent hearts. (Sorry, William B.)

Obviously, we can’t unlearn everything. It would be absurd to say that fair fighting requires each person to speak from their “pure, true, untainted selves.” Deprogramming ourselves is always going to remain partly aspirational. As good as we get at purging the effects of the toxic soup in which our younger selves marinated for so long, we’re not going to finish the job in this lifetime. But we do our best. And when I, as a feminist man, fight with my wife (and we do fight), I remember that we both are still struggling to unlearn what we were taught. As I wrote last October:

Sometimes my wife is wrong. (Yes, my love, you are, even if it’s only every fifth Tuesday.) Sometimes I am right. We quarrel like any couple, though our experiences have given us tools like “fair fighting rules” that not everyone, alas, possesses. We know that in our marriage, each of us is equally important, each of us is entitled to his or her opinion, each of us deserves to be heard. But we also know that we didn’t come into this marriage as disembodied souls; we brought in our gender identities, our class backgrounds, our skin tones, our multi-generational family histories. And just as it’s absurd to pretend that we’ve come from equally privileged backgrounds, it is equally absurd to pretend that those backgrounds have not at least in part shaped our worldviews. Again, power obfuscates; oppression clarifies. So when the topic at hand is gender dynamics or race or class, the epistemic privilege is not mine. And thus the burden to reflect just a bit harder, is.

But not every fight is going to be about gender dynamics or race or class. And even when it is, the burden to reflect just a bit harder doesn’t mean the burden of always being in the wrong.

Rebounds and transition figures: doing it right after a divorce

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Another email, from Mallory. She writes:

I was married at 27 to my college sweetheart. This man checked all of the boxes dreamed of on the surface – doctor, boy scout-esque from a nice family – all of the family, etc. were thrilled when we were married. However, quite quickly after the wedding things fell apart and he told me essentially that he was not ready to grow-up and had to go find himself. I picked up the pieces, moved to another country with a business opportunity, and started over.

I started dating a man that is very fun, we have a great time together; he’s one year younger, we are very attracted to each other, he stimulates me intellectually and I care about him a great deal. However, I do not see it going towards a serious relationship and/or marriage. This is primarily for a mis-match in ambition levels, he is not willing to move countries, and I am not convinced he is fully ready to take on the responsibilities of a relationship on that level (needless to say a big sticking point after the last relationship).

Currently I do not want to be married, but I am ready to care for someone deeply again.
Being in my 30s, divorced, but not interested in dating lots of men, I feel like it should be okay to have a lighthearted relationship – but I cannot quite shake this feeling of maybe looking like the overweight, middle aged comb-over guy in the red Porsche when dating someone I have no intention of being serious about.

When does it become counter productive to engage in flippant relationships? Am I listening to society too much, or not enough to my gut?

Though I am fond of marriage (I’ve done it four times), I don’t think lifelong monogamous commitments are the only sort of relationships worth pursuing. I’ve come to believe, instead, that at different seasons of our life we may need different sorts of relationships to help us grow. And one of the most important kinds of relationships we can have after a divorce is with a “transition figure” who can help us process the lingering wounds and doubts that almost always remain in the aftermath of the end of a marriage.

I’m not talking about using people. I’m not talking about relying on one’s own pain as an excuse to deal cavalierly and recklessly with another human being. One basic dating maxim for grown-ups: our past history of suffering doesn’t vitiate our responsibility to avoid hurting others. It’s not enough to simply say “I’m on the rebound, watch out!” and then, having broken the heart of the person with whom we rebounded, to exclaim “What did you expect? I was on the rebound!” Nothing we’ve endured gives us the right to disregard our responsibility to consider how a sexual relationship we’re having may affect the other person emotionally. Misleading another person into believing that what is temporary might turn out to be permanent is bad form indeed, particularly for those old enough to know better.

That said, I think there’s a distinction between a “rebound” and a “transition relationship”. The difference lies in three things: our willingness to assume complete responsibility for our own actions, our honesty — in both word and deed — with the other person about what we can and can’t offer, and our own internal clarity about what purpose this relationship plays in our life. If we’re scrupulous about these things, “transitional relationships” which are time-limited but intense can be enormously healing for those who have them. Continue reading →