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And something I just thought of that was more the most recent era of like college stuff and end of relationship stuff:
Parties
Sex
Breakup itself and dealbreakers
First thing is like I was never really interested in partying/drinking stuff. I would chill w Meg and her while they drank sometimes, but that was mostly a proximity thing and it was very low key
In college, I was totally uninterested in going to parties and also seeing her friends at all. It was just p overwhelming and unnecessary for me. But it also meant that it created this pretty big divide between us and how our time was spent. I was totally cool with this, and just
Wanted to see her when I could focus on her, and she could focus on me. Other stuff was needlessly stressful, and my intense anxiety def didn’t help
Side note: pretty wild how much my anxiety has shifted relatively recently, I wonder how much is due to pandemic vs breakup. Intuition feels like post breakup was super important. Anyway back to it
So that separation of time def created a whole new vibe to the relationship, and I don’t think she really liked it that much. But it exposed me to new ways of having a relationship with someone, even if that ended up being dysfunctional for us 2 specifically.
Next thing was sex. She went through a lot of questioning around the end of our relationship around sex, and I’m not sure how much of that might have been to 1) previous negative emotions about sex from early relationship contexts 2) feeling not as close in our relationship
3) maybe somewhere on asexual spectrum. Either way, talking through that and being exposed changed my understanding of relationships in practice, and allowed me to decouple sex from romance. This combined with un-deified “love” leading me to question the solid grounding of
“Romance” (+personal aro questioning [causality undetermined]) laid the groundwork for RA disposition. During breakup, I proposed (knowing full well she wouldn’t accept) that I’d be fine if she dated other people, or had different people to take her on walks for example, and that
I could be her nice chill agoraphobic boyfriend (cute+need). So I think I already had those ideas floating around for a bit, but those specific applications and proposals had me think a lot more about possibilities I’d be comfortable with
Then with further reflection and exploration I found relationship anarchy and found it to be super compelling and less than a year later I’m reading malatesta anthologies - so thanks for coming to my Ted talk on how to radicalize the libs, just do what I did :P
When I went for a walk yesterday I was really struggling but really desiring to think this stuff through, and convos today helped me a bunch so yay, I feel glad (I typed “content” out but didn’t quite fit, ig not fully at peace with things but still pretty good overall