Tag: relationships

Age gaps (or: Sparkly watches trash TV.)

I am so fucking tired of people who get “dangerous power dynamic” and “grosses me out” confused.

Some of us are trying to talk about rape and they’re over there all “He’s twenty-eight and she’s forty? Eww!” Just fuck right off.

That’s not what it’s about.

It’s about how children and young adults don’t have the knowledge, experience and (for lack of a better word) mental maturity that older people do, nor the legal rights, nor the power over their own lives that making your own money and paying for your own home gives you.

None of this is a 100% definite guide to whether a relationship is okay or not. And when the younger person is over 25 or so it stops being a useful guide to even “possibly a problem”.

Some of these things are still factors for older people in some situations, and some of them aren’t factors for some younger people. It’s just that a person’s age is no longer even a slightly useful measure of whether they have a stable job, etc. once they’re older than the standard college age.

People who don’t understand that there’s a difference between fictional underage sex, or porn with young-looking adults, and porn of actual children being raped can also fuck right off. One of these things grosses you out; the other is photographic evidence of a terrible crime.

There may possibly be some argument to be made for the not-actually-a-crime ones being illegal too. I don’t know. If there were evidence that nobody sticks to just fiction/fantasy, I might be convinced. But my guess is that’s not true, and I really don’t like the idea of thinking or writing about committing a crime being illegal.

I’ve been re-reading this and it strikes me how much Sparkly is like that– except that I never really see her being distant. Somehow it isn’t a problem between the two of us.
Why does it work so well/so much better between Sparkly and me?

I guess partly because of how I deal with my emotions. Partly just by habit, I tend to go off by myself and think things over, instead of talking to other people. And partly because of weirdness, it takes me time and effort to be able to explain my feelings out loud. So, I rarely go to Sparkly for help with my feelings, and when I do it’s very explicit, “Can I have a hug? I’m stressing out about ____.” I don’t go to her in the midst of big emotions. I don’t throw my emotions at her.

We’ve found a decent way to deal with Sparkly wanting to run away but get chased. Namely, she freely admits that that’s what she’s doing, and I have a pretty good idea of how to tell when she means “please follow me” and when she doesn’t.

I guess my willingness to ask questions out loud is a big part of it. Sometimes we actually get by on nonverbal signals, but it works well because we have had actual in-words conversations about what the signals are. And mainly we’ve done that because I’m willing to ask the “What does it mean when you ____?” “How do I tell if ____?” questions.  (Though Sparkly sometimes asks me about things like that too, which is good.)

Also,  she is better at getting over embarrassment/reluctance in text than she is face-to-face.  So I guess us being long-distance helped.  And having Big Important Conversations in text is generally better for me, too, so I was happy to do that where I guess someone else would have insisted on phone calls or something.

Thinking About Something Else Time

I have conflicted feelings about Sparkly and language. 

Sparkly talks about herself as very extroverted, very social, very verbal, very able to multitask.  She thinks before she talks, sometimes.  She always has a snarky answer.  She almost never has the experience (that I have all the time) of being sort of caught flat-footed and unable to speak.  (What I mean is, she’s told me about one time when she felt the way I feel probably about once a day.)  She is apparently capable of really paying full attention to more than one thing at once. 

But a lot of the time she’ll, for instance, ask me to get her “that thing” and it takes a while for her to get to any actual description of what she wants.  A minute ago she turned to me and said “Dear…” and gestured towards me, and I had to work out that she was reaching towards her can of soda that she left next to me when she changed seats, and that she wanted me to hand it to her.  Very often she’ll get a few words into a sentence and then just stop talking, and I have to wait for her to get done with whatever distracted her, and then remind her that she was about to say something. 

All this is frustrating to me. 

Maybe I’m not cutting her enough slack.  I feel like these things are easier for her so she shouldn’t make me guess so often, but maybe that’s not true. 

But I really wish we could find a better way to deal with her not answering when I talk to her.  Having to wait and hold half a sentence in my mind is frustrating for me, because I can’t just go back to what I was doing and still remember the half-a-sentence.  I have to wait doing nothing until she gets back to me, or I’ll lose the thread.  And I don’t want to pester her when she is going to answer, but I can’t necessarily tell when she has me “on hold” and when she’s forgotten about me.  I really wish I could get her to say “In a minute” or something instead of just leaving me hanging. 

She also does a thing where she’ll say “Yeah, let’s go do X,” and then not move.  And she interprets me asking her repeatedly as wanting her to hurry up, much as I try not to make it sound like that.  I just wish she would give an indication when she actually means now, and when she means “in ten minutes,” or “after I finish this chapter” or whatever.  Because what often happens currently is she says “Okay, I’ll help you with dinner,” and rather than pester her I go get started, and half an hour passes and she remembers that she was going to help when I come out and tell her it’s ready.  And I would be okay with delaying dinner, but I can’t if she doesn’t say that’s what she wants.

Dear RDG,

What do you want out of this situation?

Because I have to admit, it seems like Sparkly is right and you were expecting this to go like the plot of a romance novel.

You told her you wanted to break things off.  You said you felt like she was just using you for sex, like she didn’t really appreciate you– in fact, you said you weren’t sure if it’s possible to have a friends-with-benefits relationship that doesn’t consist of using someone for sex.

But then you said that you’re upset with her for avoiding you after you said all this.

So it kind of seems like when you said “I don’t want to do this anymore,” you actually meant “Please reassure me that you want me.”

The advice I have for you is this: If that’s what you want, you’re going to have to ask for it in so many words.  And it would probably help if you apologized for not being clear about it from the start.

I’m scared that you guys are going to keep talking around the real issue and just keep hurting each other’s feelings more.

For the sake of thoroughness, let me tell you why (I think) this was never going to cause Sparkly to try to win you back somehow.

1. Sparkly is kind of scared of being vulnerable in relationships.  She’s never going to beg and plead about anything.  She’s going to avoid being the person who can’t get over it, the person who’s hurt, as much as she possibly can.  She is hurt, and she liked what you had together, and she cares about you, but she isn’t going to say anything besides “If that’s what you want, then fine,” and distance herself from it as quickly as she can.

2. Sparkly cares a lot about consent, and not pressuring people, and not making unfair demands on people.  She cares about it mainly because people keep treating her like shit in that respect.

(a) So of course she’s not going to try to make you change your mind about breaking up.  She trusts you to mean what you say, and she’s respecting your stated decision.

(b) She’s extremely sensitive to what seems like you trying to manipulate her into reassuring you, and also to you saying that she has to respond to you and not ignore you.  She’s angry with you for that, and her way of dealing with what seems like manipulation is to refuse to give you what you want.

Sparkly and RDG are having some issues.

Basically, RDG is feeling insecure about how much Sparkly cares about her, since their relationship is a “friends with benefits” type thing and not romantic.  She was kind of throwing FEELINGS at everyone within reach yesterday and this morning (starting with texting Sparkly to say she wanted to break things off, and following it a few hours later with “You are sexy and I miss you and I don’t know what to do.”) But I think she’s got a better handle on things now.  Sparkly has been incredibly busy with a big project, so they haven’t really talked about things yet, but they’re going to tomorrow.

It’s sort of academically interesting to see how Sparkly deals with rejection.  She tries to be really cool and collected and not be vulnerable, but it still comes out in different ways.