Querido
Emergent relationships last the long haul
I feel drawn to write about him often. I should let it rip, I should know he would love it.
Purity culture veiled by the new age cautions us about the bonding that sex creates between humans.
I don’t need to deny that sex is bonding. For me it goes the other way around. Sexuality is among the things that tend to arise between me and someone I feel bonded to in a certain way. It’s never really off the table. It’s not sequestered away in a tall tower built of conditions and assurances—there are no lines to cross.
There is simply what the relationship specifically does, what it’s about, what we do together. Integrity has a specification, and I’m not going to roll a ball to an adult for hours on end like I would with a child, and I’m not gonna ask the baby to come on a dangerous ski trail with me. These things simply are not of the nature of the connection and the capacities of each of us within the connection.
It’s far easier to simply look at the relationships as they arise than it is to project and predict the limits and capacities, or fill roles that require certain capacities.
Querido knows this. That’s why he gets laid so much. That’s why I feel a sisterly bond with his other lovers. That’s why you’d never hear him say that his sex and love is a gift to women—he’s simply giving it.
He’s in bed for the fun of it, for the love of us, he unleashes his insatiable craving on us in a way white collar American men seem to have forgotten all about.
He’s brilliant and loving and devastatingly attached to everything, to every woman, to every dream; he is utterly devoted and always suffering for it.
We are incompatible in ways I find hilarious. It only worked if we kept to the house.
But he is sharp and honest and hilarious, and when I see him, all that matters is the love, the sweetness, the adoration, as we joke about our incompatibilities and sink teeth of loving restraint into the impulse that still wants our bodies together.
Not now. Not never, but not now. It doesn’t need a reason, it’s not a matter of reason. The bond is intact because we both live the technology of maintaining the bonds through all the transitions, holding the thread of love with just the right tension as the seasons change.
I could write this of so many of my lovers who are now simply loves. The bonds that we’ve chosen to honor with sexuality are some of the strongest in my life, a network of safety that ensures my autonomy, lasting quality relationships as evidence that my discernment was wise.
This is a facet of village eros, community sexuality which offers relational safety to honor real lifelong strong existing bonds with sexual bonding activity. Sexuality as a welcome community norm creates cultures of safer sex with little drama and more visible boundaries.
This is the fundamental compatibility I must share with lovers, and when I focus my discernment on this one facet, the relational bonds I invest in continue to appreciate, grow, and reveal themselves over time.
I do not invest based on the idea of an outcome or a form, I don’t invest because of desire or feeling, I invest based on the compatibility of our understanding of sex as the honor of a bond.
When I see that someone I feel drawn to has the technology of keeping bonds in place through transitions, I am free to invest as I will.
Truly, without seeing this technology in a person’s being. I don’t feel bonded in any way, including friendship. If I think a change in circumstance or definition will blow up the relationship, that’s evidence that there is no bond, and I have pleasant interactions without investing.
Bonding is not a threat to life, it is the point of life. Love is not a threat to love—it is an exponential multiplier, if we know how to let it be. When we have the technology to iterate and transform, to witness relationship and nourish its organic emergence, bonding is easy and sweet, and lifelong relationships are the most natural thing in the world.
