Friends? Intimacy? Hormones?

The posts I've been writing this year have been considering a lot of things in my life and how they've changed. Since the pandemic friendship has been one of those things. Increasingly, I have trouble separating the pandemic and the trauma therapy I received in 2021. They are intertwined for me. And friendship, that's tricky too. I think I said in one of my earlier posts how being a lesbian (1998-2004) confused my sensors. And in general I'd say I find distinctions between different types of relationships very confusing. I've had romantic and non-sexual friendships, and romantic and non-sexual partnerships. They differed only because in one we made out and in the other we held hands. Which is which? Who can say? I have gone through periods where I made out a lot with friends. I've had sex with friends. I've not had sex within romantic partnerships. I've had sex with people I wouldn't otherwise have in my life. I feel like I've performed all the permutations of relationships that seem possible to me. In some relationships we evolved through all of them to different states at different times. The only way I know how something will go is sometimes more about who the other party is and/or what they want. Are they monogamous and partnered: we're friends. Are they ostensibly straight and I'm not on the right gender for that: we're friends. Anything else, probably up for grabs. What combination of sex, romance or friendship would you like? What sort of chemistry do we have? I have added at quite a late stage: Am I attracted to you?

I often talk with people who I might date about it being a negotiation of the energy between us. We get together and see what happens. But it doesn't always feel like a negotiation. For instance, I often feel like I'm waiting for something. Some point at which I will know something. And most often that point feels like yes, I want to see what's next, rather than some complete knowledge of what the relationship will be. Sometimes we discuss it together and make a decision and sometimes my desire to discuss what a relationship is diminishes or extinguishes any possibility entirely. In those cases, it's usually for the best. I will shape-shift around almost anything if I think I want someone in my life. But it's not my thing to want to exist in ambiguity where I don't know what's going on. We can negotiate ambiguity and boundlessness but that's not the same as just wafting along together into the ether. So much of white western ways of dating and relationships is about guessing and that's a massive issue both in terms of emotional and physical safety.

Friendship then, even worse for me. It is pretty unusual to talk about what a friendship is in my life and culture. Do I just feel immense pressure to not say anything and I've never really worked my way out of that? Absolutely. Maybe more people than I think are open to these conversations and perhaps I've never tried? I mean I've tried and I've failed. That's definitely how it goes. But why did that stop me? Early on I just didn't have the skills. These days I can talk about almost anything with almost anyone, given appropriate levels of need, intimacy and/or trust. Thank you trauma therapy. I'm not saying I don't make a mess or screw up. It's just it's so much easier to open up and to risk things. Half of the reason I don't say stuff is that good old chestnut: I'm afraid I'll say something and the person will leave. Though romantically I've gotten better at just saying what I want or what I think, in friendship, sometimes things still remain unsaid. Because in friendship I am always building a level of intimacy that isn't always present in other situations. The risks feel bigger. To have casual sex with someone is a type of intimacy but it's not the same as letting someone really see me, or speaking about topics that get me going. It's just my body they have access to and that can tell them some things but not others. Often casual sex feels transactional, part of why I've stopped having it. But even then in romance, where growing intimacy is also important, I'm still holding back, too. Friendship is where I build closeness and intimacy but it's a contradiction because it's also sometimes where I'm least likely to talk about the stuff we really need to. As I write this down all the categories collapse and reopen in my mind like an accordion. There's someone I'm dating at the moment, and we're building deep intimacy, slowly, over time. We are forced to by the strict limits in the ways our lives can come together.

So maybe it actually doesn't matter what the category of intimacy is? Maybe it's just trust, connection, rupture and repair. Perhaps some relationships are in a state of before where we haven't had a rupture and haven't needed to be repaired. That's a place I dislike being: in a relationship that hasn't been tested. I feel more secure if we've had to have a conversation where we can deeply talk about something that went wrong and how we'll stitch ourselves back together, and then we've done the stitching. Not all bids for connection are responded to. Not all repairs can be made. Sometimes small repairs can be made then a larger hole appears and we're overwhelmed. It's all possible. Until it's not. One of my saddest relationship failures in the last five years is someone who I thought I would genuinely grow old knowing. And now we barely talk. Things change. I change. But by the same token some repairs are exquisite. More than a decade after I stopped speaking to someone I considered a kind of life partner, we reconnected and are now back in each other's lives. It's magical. But it's also deeply mundane. It is what it is. Both and neither.

I don't want this to sound like I think it's a binary because it's never a binary to me. Although there's a before, there's also a during that goes on forever, or as long as it lasts. I am non-binary in more ways than one. Relationships are a process. It's like making a quilt. In less than a week I will have been with my partner for 21 years. We've made a super-king sized quilt. Many small stitches. A lot of piecing different bits of fabric together. Length doesn't necessarily mean it's a good relationship but I feel confident in saying ours is. And in part I think it's because we are still working on this quilt. Even in shorter relationships it's the same. I don't think you're ever done. You're always practicing being in relationship. Even after it ends or transforms sometimes you continue on. That's not depressing to me. That's beautiful. There's always more to find out about someone. The older I get the more people seem like entire universes to me. It's so slow and hard to communicate an entire self to someone else. Let alone taking account of the way the selves change and fluctuate and also kind of don't exist. I want to keep finding out about the people I love. They are mysteries and I love mysteries.

I started writing this months ago. I started writing this before I started Hormone Replacement Therapy. I started writing this before I knew what I thought. This stuff was just percolating. And thinking back to what I was feeling at the time, it seems to be it was 100% about fluctuating and declining hormones. I felt confused and disconnected from other humans. I became a hermit. I'm not sure exactly how long I had been feeling the change as my levels dropped, but it was a while. For me it was mostly mood related. I knew something was wrong when I went back to thinking about dying regularly. The benefit to having done so much therapy and knowing myself very well was I knew what was happening. It was a something is wrong signal, not a reality I wanted, at all. I could distinguish between those things easily. I am also very thankful that in this time there is so much more awareness of what perimenopause can do to a person. Each time I talk about it I feel both very old (my cunt must be turning into dust) and slightly inappropriate like I'm talking about something very, very private (for shame). But, it was only because of the women I was friends with who went through this before me that I knew what was happening and what to do. I want to be that person for other people too, perhaps especially non-binary people. Hormones come with some downsides but I will take them all just to have a stable emotional state. I keep walking around noticing the warm glow that was absent for a while. The world is awful and a lot all the time now but I have a bit more resilience for it. I can balance more things.

I gave up dating in January and especially gave up the apps. That was related to my mental state. I had my reasons and the break was very good for me. Now that I am on a more even keel I have returned to the apps and surprisingly when I'm in a better mental space things are easier and better. It's still overall a very poor experience. I've been ghosted or canceled on at the last minute in 80% of the recent dates I've been asked out on. But I have a bit more hope than I used to about the whole thing. That's really the only bit that's important to me. Hope that I can keep on aging and growing and learning and knowing people, learning myself. For a time I started to believe that it was just getting older. But that's not totally true. I want to go out dancing again. I will go out dancing again.