Suggestions for wording during a difficult conversation?

[Seasonedpoly]

No offence but...

I read your blog avidly and have always wanted to comment but understand the blog section is not really for comments.

As I said I avidly read your blog so I am aware that any agreements you have made have been agreed to by Rider so what I am about to say acknowledges that he has agreed to these terms. However, I can't help thinking that you can be more than a little unfair in your requests and there are a lot of double standards that you nurture and deem acceptable. For example, Rider was happily with a woman, Hannah was it? And you had issues with their closeness and wanted this change in relationship style which would basically restrict their interaction to the most casual of connections. Smartly, she decided that she wasn't interested, perhaps because she saw your actions as a warning sign but that meant Rider lost out. Additionally, you wanted to ban overnights as you do not like to sleep alone. Then when you met someone, immediately you wanted these rules changed to suit your new connection. I understand that Rider has less of a problem with sleeping alone than you, and that he agreed to it but in my experience, double standards simply don't work in terms of encouraging a peaceful and stable relationship with secure and content players. If I was his friend, I would have strongly advised him to ensure that the rule either remains or is lifted for both parties. Not lifted at your convenience and put in place to restrict him when he seems to be bonding with someone else.

I strongly suspect that Rider, consciously or unconsciously, struggles with you limiting his dating when you are having a dry spell and then pushing any connection that you have well beyond the rules you outlined. Even now, with Dustin, the level of expectation you have from someone you have dated and kissed once is extraordinary in my opinion.

You sound like a lovely person really but I think you should reconsider some of how you treat your partner and your level of entitlement. Maybe this speaks more of my self esteem than your entitlement but I would never dream of asking for a restrictive rule and then for it to be lifted one way. Even if my partner was happy to facilitate it, my conscience would prick me.

So in answer to this thread, any conversation I raised in your position would be about his true feelings about your new set up and the double standards in how you're "allowed" to be with others.

 

[Reverie]

Hi Reverie,

It does sound like some kind of cloud is looming over Rider's head, I don't know if something has been troubling him lately. Perhaps you could start Wednesday's conversation with something like, "I've recently been feeling like we haven't been communicating as well as we usually do. I was wondering if something was bothering you that I wasn't aware of." Kind of a tricky conversation to have, but that might be one way to start it. You can of course adjust my suggestion to what you feel would work best.

Let us know how it goes, okay?
Sincerely,
Kevin T.

Going through my thread subscriptions here, I was reminded that I posted this and had never come back to it. Honestly, what ended up happening was that we got too busy to talk, the moment passed, and his grumpiness seems to have lifted on its own. So that's that, for now anyway.

I read your blog avidly and have always wanted to comment but understand the blog section is not really for comments.

As I said I avidly read your blog so I am aware that any agreements you have made have been agreed to by Rider so what I am about to say acknowledges that he has agreed to these terms. However, I can't help thinking that you can be more than a little unfair in your requests and there are a lot of double standards that you nurture and deem acceptable. For example, Rider was happily with a woman, Hannah was it? And you had issues with their closeness and wanted this change in relationship style which would basically restrict their interaction to the most casual of connections. Smartly, she decided that she wasn't interested, perhaps because she saw your actions as a warning sign but that meant Rider lost out. Additionally, you wanted to ban overnights as you do not like to sleep alone. Then when you met someone, immediately you wanted these rules changed to suit your new connection. I understand that Rider has less of a problem with sleeping alone than you, and that he agreed to it but in my experience, double standards simply don't work in terms of encouraging a peaceful and stable relationship with secure and content players. If I was his friend, I would have strongly advised him to ensure that the rule either remains or is lifted for both parties. Not lifted at your convenience and put in place to restrict him when he seems to be bonding with someone else.

I strongly suspect that Rider, consciously or unconsciously, struggles with you limiting his dating when you are having a dry spell and then pushing any connection that you have well beyond the rules you outlined. Even now, with Dustin, the level of expectation you have from someone you have dated and kissed once is extraordinary in my opinion.

You sound like a lovely person really but I think you should reconsider some of how you treat your partner and your level of entitlement. Maybe this speaks more of my self esteem than your entitlement but I would never dream of asking for a restrictive rule and then for it to be lifted one way. Even if my partner was happy to facilitate it, my conscience would prick me.

So in answer to this thread, any conversation I raised in your position would be about his true feelings about your new set up and the double standards in how you're "allowed" to be with others.

Hm, this is a lot to unpack, and very little relating to the question I'd asked, but I suppose the main thing I would say to all of this is that our agreements tend to be shaped and re-shaped based on whatever works for us at the time. Sometimes they're lopsided one way, and sometimes they're lopsided the other way, and sometimes they are perfectly evenly applied, but as long as we're both happy with them, that is what matters the most.

It's true that, for a time, I was less comfortable with overnights than Rider was, so until I adjusted, I went on overnights and he didn't (this was a relatively short time frame, however—a matter of a few months). He wasn't explicitly "banned" from doing so, but I expressed my discomfort with it at that time, and he chose to accommodate me. Currently, we both can have overnights, though neither of us has in a while. I don't see the needle moving back in the other direction again because I've found some inner peace recently that seems to have allayed many of my feelings of stress.

One example of an agreement being lopsided the other way (which I don't think has come up in my blog since I was so busy at the time we discussed it), is that right now I am fine with Rider having other partners in our bed when I am gone (as long has he handles the laundry after), but he is not OK with me doing the same. I understand that he'll probably relax about this like I did, with time, so in the meantime I just give him the time he needs, like he almost always does for me. I kind of think of it like a relay—sometimes one of us does the sprinting toward growth while the other one pauses to consider.

Do I *hope* he'll relax about it before he goes out of town Labor Day weekend? Sure. But other than checking in with him once as the time draws near, I'm not going to push. He'll get there when he gets there.

Stuff doesn't always have to be perfectly uniformly applied to work, at least not for us. As long as we're both getting our needs met and neither feels overly restricted, we seem to both be doing a really good job of evolving and building together.

 

[kdt26417]

Re:

"Honestly, what ended up happening was that we got too busy to talk, the moment passed, and his grumpiness seems to have lifted on its own. So that's that, for now anyway. "

Glad to hear it.