Galaxy brain on non-monogamy

In January I deleted all dating apps from my phone. I've been non-monogamous most of my life but officially since 2008. I got on the apps in 2015 in an attempt to see if I could handle casual sex with strangers. At the time of quitting I had been on the apps for close to ten years. I don't understand how this decade managed to slip past me so quickly. Did I learn anything from a decade of app-based dating? Oh yes. Things enumerable, really. Did it do anything to my brain cutting it off cold turkey? Yes, actually. It has been a strange time of reverting back into myself and also expanding outwards into this new space it freed up in my brain. I've read half of my yearly target for books in the first six weeks of the year. For instance.

Dating for me was this really invaluable way of developing more relational skills. Writing it out like this makes it sound like I was experimenting on the people I dated, which in a way, I guess, is true. I was experimenting on myself too. From this distance I feel like I had more failures than successes. It's that somewhat incorrect self belief I have: I'm uniquely bad at relationships. The natural human brain response to track negative stimulus more than positive. Perhaps also the neurodivergent urge to take the blame for difference. A combo. A cocktail. There are though, quite a lot of things that can come along to fuck up relationships before I've even really stuck my oar in. I want to be clear though. I am a fuck up. I think most people are when it comes to relationships. Communication is hard. Expectations and experience differs. There are many social scripts and escalators that can trip a non-monogamist up, let alone someone solely interested in monogamy. And then there are feelings, they are mysterious etc. People think about each other in such astoundingly different ways. So, if there are permanently more profiles to swipe through, then there are literally many more fish in the sea. If I was a mathematics person I might do some analysis here on the ratios between the number of matches, vs conversations, vs first dates, vs successful dating. However, I'm not that person. I write poetry, and blogposts, and lift weights about my feelings. I don't do maths about them. What I will say is: there is a lot of work in app-based dating. So much filtering, I was like a baleen whale eating the sea. Ultimately, I stopped because the ratio from match to successful dating started to decline in a way where I couldn't afford the effort. I was both bored and saddened. I was tired. I never want to see a photo of a man giving me the finger, or with his tongue out, ever again. I have become a tongue prude. I think the app-based dating did it to me. I just don't want to see another tongue as long as I live. Please. I'm sorry. I'm not sorry. No tongues.

Early on, Tinder especially, was ripe with encounters that transformed into great stories. I make many choices in my life for the stories they provide. I met an AC/DC sound guy and had a great time with him and his gigantic beard in his hotel room after we walked the gauntlet of his colleagues (I smiled and waved). I met up with someone from New York who took me back to a house designed by a famous architect, owned by a throuple. I met a physiotherapist who gave me a useful run down on my body and its flexibility plus hours and hours of conversation. And so on. People in general were open and eager. Motivated to meet, to fuck, to explore things. I don't think it was even that early on Tinder. Tinder started in 2012. By 2014 there were one billion swipes a day. I don't remember when it came to Aotearoa, exactly. I had my first hook up in late 2015, after Kiwicon, in fact. So it must have been the 11th of December. In 2025, as I left the app, I would get plenty of matches, a few decent chats perhaps and the occasional first date. In 2015 the matches were rarer, but the good conversations upon matching more frequent and the number of first dates a lot higher. Some of that change was me. Some of it was about Tinder itself.

The pandemic really changed how I felt about dating. The pandemic changed how I felt about a lot of things. I think it's what lead me to permanently leave the apps. I like kissing. I love kissing. I would kiss thousands more people than I would even consider having sex with. I could spend a day, a night, kissing. Etc. Etc. Kissing tho, is a very risky situation in an ongoing pandemic. I have many chronic illnesses already. There is no room at the inn for more. I've done my best to reduce the risks to me and those around me by continuing to mask, getting vaccinated (I'm up to 8), trying to be in well-ventilated spaces, and balancing all that with taking some risks in order to still have a social life. My mental health requires it. But dating. Dating and kissing. My favourite thing to do. The risk started to really diminish the reward. I was already an outlier in my cautiousness in 2022, now even more so. There was another factor: post trauma therapy I just didn't really seem to like dating any longer. I think for a while I was managing my life through a crash and burn type of cycle and dating was integral to that. It helped with pleasure hormones, excitement and so on. I was always seeking something. What was I seeking? I don't really know. Ultimately the ups, I needed them to balance out my disproportionate downs. There's probably a whole post in my brain, or more, about desire and desirability. The validation when others find you attractive when you don't yourself. How you can begin to see yourself as attractive and so on. How it is also a bit of a fool's game. For me at least. I've written two poetry collections where this is a theme. You could read those. (You don't have to read those, one of them is not even out yet). Trauma therapy allowed me to untangle many knots in my head and allowed me to live a calmer life, not going pillar to post, peak to trough, etc. I stopped wanting it so much. I stopped believing in its possibilities. I became aware of its energetic cost.

I did date some people through this period but post 2021 (trauma therapy) none of it felt very successful to me. I pulled back in many different ways and I think it lead to me ignoring a bunch of red flags or withdrawing in a way that made it look like I wasn't interested. I gave lots of little cues I wasn't into what was happening and you cannot blame people for picking those vibes up and running with them. Often I was the one being way too cautious with the slow down vibes from the other party. Things got confused. Some people have eyes that are bigger than their stomach too. I went on a few dates with lovely people where it was clear they were absolutely over-committed. And sometimes it just didn't work no matter the effort from everyone involved. I had more and more encounters where, especially men, would reveal they had looked me up and gone through my social media or read my book on a first or second date. It creeped me out. I know snooping is kind of de rigeur (I don't do it that much, myself, tho I'm pro the safety reasons) but it didn't feel like curiosity. It felt too fast. It felt menacing. One in particular felt like he was saying he knew where I lived. Uncool. I do wish more cis-men had an understanding of the way some of the actions they think are innocent are actually, not. For instance if you say on a dating app profile you're not a murderer all I'm going to think is that you raised the topic. Swipe left. My poetry collection (to me) feels like seeing inside my mind through a fun house mirror but it's still too much sharing for a first or second date. Then on the other hand sometimes if I really liked someone a poem would come out of an encounter and that's its own type of intensity when shared. So I'm also capable of intensity that isn't always well placed early on in these type of entanglements.

I had one final good date. It was perfect. There was a lot of extremely high quality kissing and conversation in the most exquisite hotel room in Tāmaki Makaurau. I have had many good dates outside my home city. But also, sometimes too good a first date means the second never happens and the second never happened. Some combination of my intensity, the circumstances and their reticence. Or something else. Life circumstances. Distance. Who knows. That was enough for me though. I also had one final bad date, just for balance. A man who I had been on multiple fun dates with decided shaming me into having sex with him would work. Or something. I'm still not sure what he was thinking but he was disparaging about my body to my face. To my face! In this day and age! That was the end. I acknowledged my tiredness to myself and deleted all the apps. A friend seemed shocked I was giving up non-monogamy, and to be clear I'm not. I cannot, at all, imagine being monogamous. Not only because the partner I have lived with for over twenty years was still seeing someone at the time I quit, but because it's just so deeply embedded in who I am now. I don't think non-monogamy is better than monogamy (well maybe I do). Whatever works for the individuals. I do think non-monogamy solves more problems than it creates. No one individual can exist with only one other individual in any context in our lives. So I'm confused as to why we think one person should provide so much to us in the context of the romantic-dyad/economic unit that is a marriage, or de-facto partnership. I mean I also get it. It's unsustainable, it's restrictive and takes up a lot of energy to sustain. It keeps a person busy. I feel like in general our environment is complex and requires so much of our energy just to get through each day. No wonder people don't want to do non-monogamy. If anything it takes up more energy even if it returns energy in a whole bunch of other ways. For me it has made long term partnership extremely possible. But I haven't tried monogamy. I don't really know I couldn't do it except I know I couldn't do it. Have you seen how many exquisite people there are in the world? Did you hear how much I like kissing?

When I first started app-based dating I was shocked at some of the people I attracted. But, I realised, hot people want validation and connection too! And although we act like hotness is very clearly identified, it really, really isn't. To me at least, I have a tendency toward galaxy brain on some concepts. I found people I thought looked ok on the app were magnificent in person. Most people I met looked better in person. I might go on an average first date and try again to see what developed and then suddenly I'd be on a date with the sun. Astounding. I'm sure you've experienced something relatable yourself. Desire is slippery. Sometimes it's the way someone laughs at a particular joke, or a really cogent explanation of an argument, or an energy that's just not visible in a photo. I have known people for years and years thinking they weren't attractive to me then suddenly something changes. I leave room to be surprised in every swipe. I learned I'm into all sorts of bodies. It doesn't really matter what a person looks like to me when we're naked together. If I like them I'll like their body. I think all bodies contain beauty anyway. What does matter to me is a person's face. I have to be attracted to your face. What does it mean???? What makes a face attractive? I don't know don't ask me. But it doesn't matter how beautiful your body is if I don't connect with your face, that's it for me. There's a genre of people I call ugly-pretty and I really need a better name for this. Because undoubtedly these are some of the most exquisitely beautiful people in the world to me and I feel like I'm negging them by saying ugly-pretty. Perhaps a better word is striking. They are all without a doubt, striking. I can't even begin to describe the factors. I just sat here staring off into space considering whether it was a mis-match in facial feature sizes? Or is it large noses? Big eyes? I do enjoy a thick neck but that's not a face. I dunno. It's some kind of contrast. Something unusual. And I guess sometimes it is the energy underneath.

Attractiveness isn't just in how someone looks. At all. Of course. Everyone knows that. I do not care for the word sapiosexual. I have seen it deployed largely by people who tend towards fatphobia, at a minimum. How boring. And intelligence itself is topic which quickly descends into racism and sexism etc. What are the sapiosexuals on about? Why are they like that? Maybe I could be kinder. Another aversion to chalk up to app-based dating. No tongues. No sapiosexuals. I do have a thing for brains. I need to find a person interesting to talk to. Luckily for me, quite a lot of people are. I will do a lot for interesting conversation. Sometimes I don't have to do anything. Interesting people simply appear. I once went out to dinner with friends and met a close friend of theirs. We spent the whole evening deeply engaged in conversation and it honestly felt like our brains were having sex. An unusually pleasurable and totally acceptable public experience. I have a reasonable amount of curiosity. Perhaps more than a reasonable amount. How much curiosity is normal? Again, I don't know. My curiosity is sated by and with other people. I like my risks to be interpersonal. That's sometimes also a physical risk but either I am so used to those risks I don't see them anymore or I've overcome enough I'm unworried about my ability to handle the consequences. Hard to say. My brother I would describe as an adrenaline junkie. I am also, but I don't want to mountain bike or kayak. I want to engage with strangers. At least I did for a decade. Now I'm not so sure.

In the ongoing discussion I'm having with myself about whether I'm autistic I come across concepts which support the idea I am autistic. I mostly tend to find supporting information. Maybe it's confirmation bias. Maybe it's Maybelline. Maybe it's trauma. Autism and trauma overlap in a Venn diagram with other neurodivergent ways of being, like ADHD. One person in my life (convinced I'm autistic because they are and they like me and they generally only like other autistic people) said to me: which came first the trauma or the autism? And honestly I do not care. I don't need a diagnosis. I don't think I would receive any significant treatment or support. I don't need the words. I am who I am but I do find the sensory stuff particularly interesting in handling what it's like in my brain, at times. In dating, I think I am sensory seeking. Or there is a component to dating that is about sensory seeking. Autistic people can be sensory seeking, sensory avoidant or both. Most people seem to be familiar with sensory avoidance. Most people seem to be familiar with a very narrow understanding of autism. I think I'm a combination of both seeking and avoidance but I lean toward seeking. In sex my main enjoyment is sensory overload. But it doesn't have to be sex. Dancing or kissing serve the same purpose it's just that sex is a higher order sensory overload. It properly scrambles my brain. Lifting weights I think is also sensory overload. Swimming in the sea. Cuddling. Many of my favourite things involve an element of sensory overload. Sensory overload isn't always good. If there are too many people and too many competing sounds and it is too hot and so on, I flip out. The first time I really experienced this and understood what was happening was at a family wedding. We were all staying in a Lockwood home (creaky, so creaky) the house was full of adults, there wasn't a lot of privacy. It was in a beach suburb in high summer. It was hot. People were mowing lawns. Children were screaming and running around. Then a concrete truck turned up to pour concrete next door at 7am on a Saturday morning right outside my bedroom. My brain filled with bees. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to chew something, and my brain fills with bees.

The bees leave when I kiss someone new. The bees leave when a beautiful person sits in my lap. The bees leave when we're touching and in deep conversation. Or perhaps the bees just calm down. Maybe I'm stretching this metaphor too far. Did I spend a decade dating simply to manage what it is like for me to exist in a physical form? Is that what I'm driving at? I think there's a clear argument I used the tools available to me to manage a malfunctioning nervous system. Perhaps some of my changing perspective on dating is about my changing perspective on my own nervous system. I have learned to live with it, mostly, these days. Was it malfunctioning? I think depending on how you view it, yes and no. Now I tend to view it as neurodivergent and misunderstood. At the time it felt like a malfunction. It's hard to distinguish between these two things when there is scant information available to you. Like my gender and sexuality my neurodivergence existed within me but I didn't have the language to explain it to myself let alone others. I have a bit more now, but I have spent a lot less time on it than my gender or my sexuality so it still feels half-baked to me.

I must also consider sobriety as a part of this end to dating. I don't drink that much any longer. Partly, this was because I got an Apple Watch and could see in real time the impact alcohol had on my heart rate. Partly, I've lost the tolerance you build through regular drinking. My friend group has changed and inflation happened. I don't really have as many people to drink with! Partly, I just stopped wanting it as much. I love the fuzzy edged feeling of two glasses of wine. I love even more the fuzzy edged feeling of kissing someone after two glasses of wine. The research on alcohol and its incredible damage is pretty conclusive and although I love many of the things about drinking and its social easing etc, I'm not into the long term effects. I don't know yet whether this is going to be a larger thing for me going forward but sober dating is harder. I just don't like it. I've done it a lot but there's something about it I'm not into. Alcohol knocks the edge off. I don't love that I want my edges knocked off, but I do. These days I don't need it as much but there are times.

So, no more dating. Well, no more app-based dating. Maybe some dating. I'm still trying to figure out where I stand with other people and connection. It has all become increasingly difficult and tiring. There are some good reasons I haven't enumerated here. It is hard not to see some of it as just aversion to the interpersonal conflict that has felt like a theme in the past six years. It's not an entirely fair lens. To myself or to others. Emotional tiredness doesn't exactly make me fair in my approach. I list. Post trauma therapy it has become both easier and harder to have relationships. Easier because I'm more present and I see what's happening sooner. Harder because things still fall apart. Things will always fall apart. Humans come and go from your life. It is the constant but it is hard to live through, for me. Probably for everyone. I'm still stuck on the absences. I'm trying to pay attention to the presences.