Reverie needs a THERAPIST. Adding garbage qualifiers like "sex-" or "poly-friendly" is time-wasting bullshit.
I actually have had a therapist turn me down in the past when she learned I was in a poly relationship, so I think the poly-friendly part might be kind of important.
I know there's a relative lack of mystery. But long time partners can surprise you. No one stays the same completely. As they grow and change they can seem more exciting.
Yes, I keep hoping and hoping that eventually this will happen. When I think of what is sexy, I don't think "mystery" per se, so it seems like it wouldn't be a factor, but maybe it is on some subconscious level.
Anyway, her main point was, that people often stop desiring each other if they come too close to each other, if the partner has become too well known. To desire someone, there must be an element of admiration, which only comes if there's something that's unknown about the other partner (having independent lives, i.e. codependency kills desire). ...She also stressed doing new (and/or exciting) stuff together, as adrenalin and the other chemicals help desire and bonding. ... it might be worth looking if there's an area where you've grown too close and too mundane or a bit codependent and try produce a shift.
This might be interesting to look at—the idea of having independent lives but also making sure that some of the things that we do do together are new and exciting things.
I do know that when Rider and I do fun and exciting things together, I feel
closer to him, but generally that has not corresponded to a libido bump. And our "independent lives" aspect unfortunately only so far has seemed to make me feel more detached in an odd sense.
Also, on a personal note, from the experience with my ex I conclude that my desire wanes if there's any kind of contempt (even subtle) on my side - so that's what I consider a danger for me, and work on accepting my partner's weaknesses instead of being judgemental.
Oh boy, yeah, this is definitely something I struggle with sometimes. There are definitely things about Rider that I used to choose to overlook or even celebrate that lately run the risk of making me eye-rolly.
I used to not mind and indeed sometimes feel a quiet joy in helping him with certain stuff, like when his apartment was a disaster, it felt like a nice thing to do to help him clean it, or managing his calendar because he's no good with keeping it straight. But now that we've lived together for two years and it's OUR apartment, I find it frustrating that he doesn't naturally care for things to be as clean as I do.
And I used to find his peacocking and desire for attention from all quarters kind of cute, but lately for some reason I have felt irritated with attention-seeking behavior in general, whoever I witness it in, and that includes him. I've preferred to stay home rather than go to events where I know he'll get stopped every two minutes and photographed, etc. It's totally not just him, either. For example, if I'm trying to photograph someone and someone else hams or photo-bombs their way into the photo, it bugs the fuck out of me. If someone keeps turning a conversation to be all about them, I can barely hide my annoyance and I begin to think poorly of them. If someone posts a Facebook post that is clearly a bid for validation and attention, I shake my head and hide it. Basically, anytime someone is clearly trying to draw attention to themselves and try to manage other people's opinion of them, it has been bugging me lately.
Unfortunately, this is a thing that has changed about
me. Rider has always been this way and actually even mentioned it from the start—that he has an "attention fetish" and is an exhibitionist and loves the spotlight. I don't know why my feelings about attention-seeking have shifted so much, but they slowly have over time. I've slowly come to feel like shallow things such as wanting to be noticed for "coolness" or appearance matter less and less to me, and that it's better to let actions and good work stand out and speak for itself than to wave a flag saying "look at meeeee"!
I think that, in part, I used to be sort of oblivious to the fact that people were even doing it, and I'm just starting to see and notice it more, and in doing so, I have negative feelings about it. Maybe I should indeed work on trying to be less judgmental. In general, whenever I do find a judgmental place inside of myself, I try to root it out and be like "live and let live." I try to observe without judgment. But sometimes that stuff sneaks up on me.
The way you describe how you feel after the sexual desire wanes is how many of my monogamous friends feel about a partner who isn't wrong in most ways, but isn't right in the right way. They still like them, as friends, even close/best friends, but they don't have the sexual passion/desire necessary for their romantic relationship to be mutually fulfilling because these work in tandem at least some of the time for most people. As monogamy restricts dating outside of that couple, they split up.
A monogamous friend once asked me whether I think I'd think each of my individual relationships worth continuing if I had to date exclusively. What she was asking is whether each relationship was fulfilling, or I needed all of them to feel fulfilled. If it weren't for the fact I could see other people, would I keep seeing those individuals? I pondered this for months, maybe more than a year. I decided that I couldn't have a nesting relationship where the answer to this question was "no, I wouldn't feel fulfilled enough with this relationship alone." But this isn't as important for non-nesting relationships. This led me to split from my first spouse as the relationship was more about mutual companionship and convenience than passion and desire. It would have been okay if that worked for both of us, but it didn't. It left one party feeling inadequate and impacted on their ability to form other healthy relationships as their self esteem was so low.
Yeaaahhhh, this is something that I kinda worry about? Like, OK, so I do have a pattern of losing desire once NRE ends. But in hindsight, in all my previous relationships, it was because the end of the NRE-blindness allowed me to see glaring flaws in the way that the people were treating me, which I'd been able to tolerate and overlook while under the influence of happy-making brain chemicals. Those relationships ended because the NRE ended, but it wasn't the wearing off of the NRE that made me want to leave—it was that if I hadn't been blinded, I would have wanted to leave long ago.
But with Rider, he treats me really well, so there's nothing like that. There's no big, glaring "oh this is a dealbreaker" thing that he's doing wrong that I have been tolerating. Sure, there are always going to be minor annoyances in any relationship, but there's nothing terrible.
But I do still sort of worry that maybe my strategy of "find someone who is a good companion and keep them" was not the best tack. What if my pattern is not "desire ends with the end of NRE" but rather the end of NRE lets me know when something isn't, as you say, "right in the right way"—or maybe it was, but something changed? And here I am, trying to stick it out because I figure that's just what happens to me, and I should power through it since the alternative is "throw something I do still value away." But how would I ever know the difference?
I feel like, hypothetically, that answer should be inside of me somewhere. But I feel like I just don't know it.
I do remember things feeling insanely perfect with Rider in the beginning, at that exact moment in time. And now they feel a bit troubled and, looking back, I can see signs of potential sexual incompatibility that I missed at the time—stuff that I was willing to try out but that didn't end up sticking well for me. Was that perfection in the beginning just NRE? Or could it be that we
were truly insanely perfect for each other at the time, including the experimentation with stuff that didn't end up working for me—maybe that's something I needed to try!—and now we've just grown in different directions as I've discovered more about what I like and don't?
Currently, things feel insanely perfect with Dustin—it seems to me that there is an unprecedented natural matchup of love-style and sexual preferences and topics of interest. I know there is NRE, but is that perfection
just NRE? Or does the degree of correlation and matchup suggest an ability to transcend the fade of the thrill? When the NRE wears off, will I again find that along the way I have grown and changed to a degree that the alignment isn't perfect anymore without the thrill to kind of lube it up?
Where can long-term fulfillment come from, if what I want is constantly evolving? I'd rather continue to grow and to change than to stagnate, and I feel like I'm ever-evolving in a way that calibrates me into a better person and closer to my true self each year, but does that always necessitate leaving good things behind that don't quite work the same anymore?
I feel like present me cannot speak authoritatively on what future me will feel or want—my pattern is a pattern, sure, but in this case, is it a pattern of foolishness (messing up something that could continue to work somehow just because the thrill is gone) or a pattern of wising up (recognizing that something isn't working when no longer blinded by said thrill)?
I really do feel like I should know. But I don't.
