the story of a secondary

Maybe you feel down deep that that is a boundary.

I'm curious what you mean by this? I feel like it could be interpreted more than one way.

Oops, sorry for my awkward wording. What I meant was...

I think that one possible interpretation of the dream is that perhaps you feel like you've crossed a boundary with Davis by not telling him about your crush on Jay. And so in your dream, that "boundary-crossing" was magnified and played out as making out and having sex with Jay. I think it might just reflect this sense you have that you're doing something wrong (for lack of a better phrase) by hiding something from Davis, or you feel like you're hiding something that he should know.

Just a hunch. My sister and I often get into dream interpretation (she's a genius at it!), so that's all I was doing. I wasn't making any judgment about your relationship or anything else.
 
No judgments assumed, and you may well be right!

My comment about it maybe meaning that I'm ready to renegotiate our boundaries stems from the anger I felt towards Davis at the end of the dream. I think that it does make me feel dishonest to not tell Davis about my crush on Jay, and that maybe I've held off on telling him because I feel like it's "wrong" to have this crush when pursuing it would be breaking our boundaries. And so I'm annoyed at him on a certain level because the boundary is at his request and I don't like feeling like my feelings are wrong. It's kind of silly I guess, you can be on a diet and not be "wrong" for having a chocolate craving.

Hmm...
 
What a long couple of days... G&E&B and I spent all weekend together, visiting some out of town friends who were having a party. On the road, Gia navigated, Eric drove, and I hung out in the back and kept the baby entertained which worked out very well. We stayed overnight at the party and the whole thing was lovely, lots of chill, pleasant time with our friends.

Gia and I spent a half an hour or so lying in the dimly lit guest bedroom on our own with Bee asleep between us, just talking, which was especially nice. I would have loved to have slept with them but there wasn't room and, knowing that would certainly be the case, I had brought an inflatable mattress anyway. I really miss sleeping with them. Gia speculated about maybe some day replacing their queen sized bed at home with a king.

As we were getting ready to leave in the late afternoon the next day, Eric got a call -- his cousin, who's been in the hospital, had taken a turn for the worse. We rushed there, and I helped juggle the car and the baby as we figured out what was going on. Thank god, he'd stabilized and is ok for the time being

Standing there with the three of them in the hallway outside Eric's cousin's ward as the sick boy's mother, Eric's aunt (I'm not sure if she recognized me from Gia's baby shower), filled us in; fetching the poor woman a snack (she hadn't eaten since the morning) and making sure to get a couple of extra things as well because even though G&E had said they were fine I knew they'd need something by the time we were leaving; finding things to chat about as we waited for them to be able to go in; waiting with Bee in the lobby while they visited his bedside...

I feel awful even saying this. I am so sad and sorry that this is happening. But I can't help it -- there's a part of me that thought "This is what family does, shares good and bad times equally, gives and accepts help in a crisis without hesitation. Maybe this will help make that which is already clear to me clearer to them as well, that family is what we are."
 
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I feel awful even saying this. I am so sad and sorry that this is happening. But I can't help it -- there's a part of me that thought "This is what family does, shares good and bad times equally, gives and accepts help in a crisis without hesitation. Maybe this will help make that which is already clear to me clearer to them as well, that family is what we are."

I had a similar thought as I read the story, but maybe from a different direction. It struck me more that this is the reason why we should take the time to cultivate deep connections with people . . . and not just with one or two people, but in networks.

It all comes down to being there for one another - to park the car, or look after a child, to get a snack for someone, or even just to exchange wan, exhausted smiles - in the middle of a crisis.

There's no reason to feel sorry for thinking that.

P.S. I'm just starting to read this thread . . . cheated by starting at the end.
 
I feel awful even saying this. I am so sad and sorry that this is happening. But I can't help it -- there's a part of me that thought "This is what family does, shares good and bad times equally, gives and accepts help in a crisis without hesitation. Maybe this will help make that which is already clear to me clearer to them as well, that family is what we are."


This is how we feel. Three Adults and two children working as a family. My kids are only 4 and 2 ... but they love Devo .. and ask about her often. It makes me smile to know how much she is asked for by my children.
 
So, I told Davis about my crush on Jay. It was anticlimactic. He hadn't noticed anything, thought maybe the flirting was in my head (and he may well be right... some kind of brief but intense hormonal surge or something??), didn't want to hear details but also didn't seem at all upset by it. We had a very nice evening, played cards, drank wine, and watched a movie.
 
This is how we feel. Three Adults and two children working as a family. My kids are only 4 and 2 ... but they love Devo .. and ask about her often. It makes me smile to know how much she is asked for by my children.

:) :) :)
 
Oh, also, Davis got a job offer today and he starts on Monday!! His contract at his old job ended back in late August and being between jobs was bumming him out, plus it was also starting to concern me that he didn't seem to be putting his all into the job search any more. He admitted that himself and reapplied himself to it last week, and this is the result! It seems like a pretty cool company too.
 
Wow, good for Davis about the job! :) And also, I love the anticlimactic conversation about your crush on Jay. :D
 
So, I told Davis about my crush on Jay. It was anticlimactic.

Heh. I just remembered...

One of the things that used to turn Shorty on was my telling stories about my sexual experiences with other guys, but I never told him how much I had fantasized about his best friend JD who had introduced us. I'd had some of my best orgasms thinking of JD! But I felt funny telling Shorty about that because I thought it was sort of taboo, or would cross a line somehow since they're best friends. But this one night, we were laying in bed after sex, and we were talking about JD so I did say I had a crush on him. I was wondering how he would react, and he just casually commented, "Oh, that doesn't surprise me. JD walks into a room and all the women want his attention." Talk about anticlimactic.
 
Will post more later, but I just wanted to share this quickly because I found it amusing.

In the dream from which I just awoke, I was sitting with Davis, Jay, and another friend at a talent show when suddenly I was asked to participate. It was scary, because I had to come up with things to do on the fly, but I felt buoyed by the fact that the two of them were cheering for me and inspired to do well so that they would be impressed. At the end I almost failed to come up with anything and would have had to bow out, but then at the last second I decided to go up anyway and I opened my mouth, not even sure of what I would do, and sang. It came out beautifully, though I was still very afraid I would fuck up. The song was an old one that I've known since I was a kid about how music is more powerful than words for conveying emotion.

Such a contrast to the last dream. :) I'm glad I decided to tell Davis about my crush -- talking *really* does make everything better for me. And while I'm still enjoying some lingering crush-i-ness, I've found that I've gone back to thinking of Jay mostly as a friend.
 
On another person's blog, SourGirl and I got into a conversation about age of consent laws and underage sex. What should and shouldn't be legal, for the safety of young people. Her perspective was (correct me if you're reading this and I misunderstood, SG) that laws should be more stringent to prevent older minors from taking advantage of younger minors. My perspective was that if the age gap is slight (my example was a 16 year old and an 18 year old) it should be ok, but that a large age gap (her counter example, which I agreed was not ok, was 12 and 17) is not.

It got me thinking about my first experience with sex, and it occurred to me that I might as well blog about it. :)

I met my first bf, Jonas, when I was 12 and he was 13. We lived several blocks away from each other in the not-quite-the-slums-not quite-the-suburbs neighborhood where I grew up, just outside of the city where I now reside. We became friends because we were both always hanging out at the same little piece of wooded parkland, taking turns with other kids swinging on a rope above a creek.

Jonas and I started hanging out a lot, watching tv, playing video games. After a while I thought to myself, well, he's a boy, he's my best friend these days, that's how these things start, right? So I asked him to be my boyfriend and he said yes.

We started with chaste goodbye kisses and went from there. I remember very clearly hanging out in his room watching tv when he turned to me and asked if I wanted to try french kissing. I thought about it for a minute, then said sure. We progressed like that, one of us proposing a new idea, the other agreeing, over the course of the following year and 3/4. We were a year and a half apart in age total, so sometimes there was one year of difference between our official ages, sometimes two. We were equal in innocence and curiosity, though I'd done a lot of reading by that point ("Our Bodies, Ourselves", sneaking peeks at my mom's hidden erotica books when she wasn't around) that he hadn't, so I knew more.

By the time I broke up with him (he was sweet but he didn't even like to read or eat vegetables, and I was beginning to want to try dating girls) when I was 14 and he was 15, we had tried everything you can think of aside from penis-in-vagina intercourse. Like, we never did watersports or group sex. But anything two people can do that you can think of that you might find in a mainstream porno (and a couple of things you wouldn't) aside from that, we did it. I started to write details but then thought "Good god, am I writing child porn on the internet... of my own life? Could I be prosecuted for this?" so I'll leave it at that.

My point in saying all this is, I think it set the stage for me to have a really healthy relationship with my sexuality. My initial experiences were mutual, unhurried, unashamed, exploratory, and had limits (I would NOT engage in PIV because I was terrified of getting pregnant).

Would I want my 13/14 year old doing all that? Welllllll, I'd be squeamish about it to say the least. But who could have stopped me? Should our parents have just made sure we were never alone together? How? There were many summer nights when one of us snuck out in the middle of the night and woke the other one up with pebbles thrown at his or her window so we could very quietly hang out.

If my parents had found out and called the cops (not that they would have done that, but let's imagine) and Jonas, who was the older one, had been charged as a juvenile sex offender for things we did consensually, things I often suggested, I can't imagine what it would have done to my young adulthood, or to my sense of my sexuality, or, more importantly, to him.

I believe that young people shouldn't be made into criminals for exploring their sexuality with each other, as long as neither one is harming the other and the age gap is reasonable, and this is why.
 
I first had intercourse when I was 14. I had been doing other things (usually clothed frottage or groping around in each other's pants -- and lots and lots of French kissing) for about a year before that. But my first fuck was with my boyfriend, a 19-year old hippie with long wavy black hair halfway down his back (this was 1974, mind you). We thought he was so cool because he actually had a job , his own apartment, and a Cutlass Supreme. I remember some comments from his friend about me being jailbait, but it didn't seem to matter to anyone. His friends were also fooling around with my friends, but they weren't fucking, just diddling around. I was the only one among my friends who had actually got it on at that age. Most of them waited another year or two or three.

I remember my first orgasm was when I was 15, during a fully clothed frottage/makeout session with my boyfriend (a new guy, not the 19-year old), on the couch in my living room with my grandmother in the next room. Haha!

I wonder how different things would be for me today.
 
Happy 2012, all!

It's now been just over a full year since my first post in this blog. These boards were a small part of my life to start, then became a daily thing, and lately I've been trying to cut back a little as I've found I can really eat up a lot of time here! But I'm very grateful for this community. Thank you to everyone who's ever commented on this blog, especially those of you who've followed along and lent your advice on a regular basis. It's been a huge source of help to me, to be able to reflect here with complete honesty.

It's been an eventful year, as they usually are. I:
- Started a new job that I love
- Performed in two plays out of state
- Went on several kickass trips
- Wandered into the BDSM scene, met Harry, and got to explore that side of myself more
- Started dating Davis again
- Met and fell in love with Bee

Harry's doing extremely well, btw. He's head over heels for his new gf. She's not a new person in his life, but now that they've had the chance to give things a try between them it's electric and it looks like it could be a very important partnership for them both.

I continue to fret over where things are going with me and Davis. Mostly I manage to let it go and just enjoy what we have... I do, really! There are just so many little things that make me stop and wonder "Is this the relationship I want to structure my life around?" It's all stuff I've mentioned here before, I feel like a broken record even talking about it. The spring is coming quickly and then I'll have to decide whether or not to tell my roommates that I'm stepping out of our lease (it ends in May and I'd want to give them some warning) to move in with D.

I'm thinking that if I'm this ambivalent I probably shouldn't? But I keep weighing it. It's a big, scary question to me.

Last night was really nice. Jay and Bonnie were having a New Years Eve party at their place and there were maybe a dozen people there, which I think is a perfect size for a party in a smallish house. We played doubles beer pong with Jay and Davis versus me and our friend Russ (a giant man who graciously drank my beers for me since I didn't want any) and ended up in a tie after three games. It was so silly and fun and playful.

At midnight, Davis and I kissed. It's not a tradition that has meaning for me, but it was still nice. Jay and Bonnie did too, after being cajoled by the rest of the group. After everyone else had left, the four of us, plus Davis's roommate Blaine, hung around drinking and playing a silly card game where you have to guess at what the other people are thinking. I tried to leave after the second round, but everyone roared at me to stay for one more hand. It felt good, it felt like family. :)

Speaking of family, Xmas at Davis's parents house passed without incident. His sister and her bf, who I had been worrying about seeing, weren't warm to me but they were in no way mean and they even gave me a thoughtful present. His parents were wonderful, as per usual.

Gia, Eric, and Bee are out of state visiting family and will return in the middle of the coming week. Before they left, I had a Saturnalia party at my house and they came, we got to spend some good time together, exchange gifts, etc. Gia gave me the most beautiful, intricate, necklace that she'd made by hand, it clearly took a lot of time to do. Love. :) I can't wait to see them next.
 
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Jay and Bonnie had a New Years Day movie marathon at their house that started yesterday afternoon. Davis was there at the start, I arrived late. It was just the four of us. We lounged on the living room's two couches in our dyads, each curled up with our partner.

I love to laugh, and I do it a great deal around people I really like. When I feel an attraction to the person or people I'm with it can sometimes border on a nervous thing, inasmuch as I almost can't stop. With Gia and Eric, when we're just hanging out and chatting there'll often be a suppressed chuckle hidden behind every other sentence I speak because *something* will strike me as funny. It was like that with the four of us tonight. We made up drinking games to go with each movie and laughed and laughed at them, well into the night.

At one point I walked with Jay and Bonnie to the store up the street while Davis ran home to grab something. I couldn't remember if I'd ever been alone with the two of them before for more than a few moments. We joked, we had some short snippets of serious conversation, we walked in companionable silence.

It seems odd to go on and on about these perfectly normal aspects of close friendship but you have to understand how closed off these people are. I've known Jay for ten years total and never come close to being this close to him before. Both he and Bonnie (and Davis, I'm the one exception) have small, insular groups of tightly knit friends and like their space. When the three of them have come to see me at shows, I always know to look in the farthest back corner of the audience to find them. And at intermission they'll always be apart, outside, in their own little clump. They're hard people to get close to, hard people to know.

Intimate best describes the way the evening felt to me. Me stroking Davis's foot as he "mmmed" his approval at me, Bonnie admonishing Jay not to tickle her in a voice that she couldn't manage to keep serious, each of us riffing off the others and giggling at in-jokes we'd just created. And of course I couldn't help but sneak glances now and then at Jay's lanky, sprawled form.

Back at my place, Davis and I fucked each other silly. He passed out afterwards, I still felt wakeful so I wrote this.
 
I've decided something. The next chance we get for a serious chat I'm going to tell Davis, flat out, that I'm not going to commit to moving to a primary relationship with him with things as they are. This will probably necessitate reiterating what "primary" means (to my understanding)... structured commitment and a shared life, not importance. Another way to put it is that I still love him and prioritize him but as things stand I won't be moving in with him in the spring.

I'm not going to rule out the possibility, but I'm going to set conditions that would need to be met for me to open the idea back up for consideration. I need my partner to be an adult, and that means someone who takes care of him or herself. There are certain ways in which Davis decidedly does not take care of himself. Chief among these, in my view, is the fact that he's not in therapy even though he admits that he has recurring depression. I refuse to wed my life to someone with an unmanaged mental disorder.

There's also a physical health thing that is long overdue for him to address, and I need to know that he has his finances in order. That isn't to say I need him to be perfectly trim and fit and sculpted, or that I need him to be entirely out of debt and flush with cash, hardly. It's more about facing problems head on, creating plans to address them, and then following up. Self-care and responsibility.

What tipped me over into knowing I had to do this was asking myself -- would *he* let *me* get away with this stuff? Hard to say for sure, but I'd like to think not, that he'd care about me too much to let such important things slide.

People always say that you shouldn't try to change your partner. Is that what I'm doing here? Or am I just setting personal boundaries about what I'll accept in a co-pilot? Any perspectives?
 
I think your points are very valid. I would handle such a situation similarly. There is no doubt that every person is responsible for him/herself but, if I am involved with them, they become part of my life and if I am thinking about mingling our lifes to such a degree, I feel that I have got the right to stick to my guns and look out for my priorities/boundaries/needs to be met. Finances, taking care of oneself, having an outlook into the future, all those are points that are so basic, that I would put my foot down if they were missing in one of my relationships.

You shouldn't start to want to change every part of what is typical for your partner, that's really unhealthy, but I believe that everyone who is entangled in a relationship with someone else, will be influenced by this person and vice versa. That's just the way relationships work. A friend of mine asked for 'What is a good, life-long marriage about, how do they make it work?' and along those lines, there was someone who said: “Every person changes during his life, again and again and again. Every relationship that is able to keep up with those individual changes of the partners involved, needs two persons who are able to adjust to each other and start loving new traits without mourning the changed, old ones too much.” This was meant to fit to a monogamous marriage but I think it is universally true, that we influence each other constantly. It's impossible to not do so.

The needs you talked about here are basic ones. Essential to any shared living arrangement. I don't think that they fall into the category of “I don't like the way you started to wear your hair. Change it, it doesn't please me!” I wouldn't search for equality either. It's not important if he would be able to tolerate you doing something like he does now, there is no point in asking what he would do in your situation. The only valid question would be the one that brought you to the conclusion that you would be uncomfortable to life with him at this point in time with his take on his life and the way he handles it. Because this decision is about you and you are the only person in this relationship you have an justified right to care for primarily and 'dictate the terms' in case of the priorities that should be provided.

The next step is him deciding to act accordingly and change something about himself. But this isn't dictated by you. You may influence this development by setting the terms you need basically but you aren't making any decisions for him. If he values his way of living more, he won't change and everything stays like it is now. But those things are outside of your field of responsibility.
 
Thanks for the affirmation, Phy.

I haven't seen Davis since I last wrote, so no news there.

I visited Gia and Eric last night and got to see Bee balance himself, upright and standing, while holding onto the side of his swing. And his foot sort of shuffled a tiny bit... we could almost believe he might take a step!! That didn't happen (we would have all been utterly shocked if it had) but it was still an exciting and new moment in his development and I was glad to be there for it. Gia caught it on video. :)

G&E are having troubles with money. And Gia just posted to a small circle of friends on a social network that she is upset, stressed, and worried about finding new childcare she trusts for Bee. It kinda stings that she hasn't asked me to step up and do a day a week, when I've offered multiple times. They need two days a week, so it wouldn't solve their whole problem, but it would save them money and I know they trust me with him, so what the heck? Are they uncomfortable with the idea of me stepping into a role that feels too co-parent-y? Or do they just not think I was serious?

I guess the only thing to do is ask.

Yaaaay, serious relationship conversations to look forward to with both of my partners...
 
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