What do you do when you have what feels like a wildly selfish meta? Not Joan, she's great. ArtistWife. I'm ... rather livid at her right now, for reasons which will become obvious.
So Artist and I were spending the evening together last night - went wandering around in a forest (some people would call it hiking, really it's more strolling about and talking and possibly more interesting things while as far away from people as possible - it's about the only really date-like activity we can do right now, right?) and then we're in the car to pick up sushi takeout to take home with us, when his phone rings. It's ArtistWife, who had already told him about plans for that evening for a socially distanced hangout with a guy she had known for a while - but as far as he knew when he came over to see me, it was just a friendly get together.
Apppppparently, dude in question had had a thing for ArtistWife for a while, which she vaguely knew but wasn't acknowledging (for reasons that have since gone away) and in talking they figured out the "thing" was mutual. So she's calling up to see how Artist feels about breaking social distance boundaries. And of course by extension he has to figure out his partners and the people they live with, especially me but also (girlfriend I've never named here, although I've mentioned her I think - I probably need to just to keep things straight. Um um um... Elayne. They've been together probably as long on the calendar as Artist and I, but I don't think it's quite as romantic/intense a connection. Might be wrong there, on some level her relationship with him doesn't really affect me and vice versa, unlike ArtistWife.) OK, that's not *entirely* an unreasonable thing to want to do, but the timeframe she was asking about - literally that evening - made it so there was almost no time to think about / discuss it.
I say it's not entirely unreasonable, because I'm trying to convince myself of that.
The numbers are worse by far in my state than they were in March, though at least I'm not in Florida.
As I said back then, I think the separation earlier this year was partially Artist's caution and partially ArtistWife's. I sort of knew that then, but I 100% did not want to know the proportions thereof, because I wanted to come out of all this still on speaking terms with her.
Throughout Artist and I's relationship she's had far more control of his actions than I thought was really reasonable, and in many ways I ignored that, because as I told Joan this morning when we were talking about this, I'm usually pretty firmly in the camp of "if I think I have a meta problem, I probably actually have a partner problem" but this is Very Emphatically Not That since Artist was even more blindsided than I was. Other examples of her control include social media absence and - I've talked about this obliquely here but there were ... boundaries of our sexual relationship that were determined by her comfort level until they officially ended their sexual relationship. Sooooooo... those last few things were not of zero importance to me but I was willing for them to be "price of admission", to quote Dan Savage.
I mean, it's rough. I'm very sex positive, obviously. But it feels like there's something very very very different between "able to spend time with your partner of five years" and "able to hook up with someone that you've known for a few years but are not even dating". I mean, I would LOVE to see Ginger right now, but her profession is a bit risky and it just feels like a bad idea so we're sticking to video calls (socially distanced dates seem.... unideal ... especially given the last couple times we went out we made out a bit and I'd really like to do that again...)
I've been treating this whole pandemic very much like... there's a poem I read recently that has the line of "
Touch only those /to whom you commit your life." And that's how I've been treating it - Artist was always in that category. And this new person... obviously is not. I'm not seeing my friends (the ones I love and would move onto a cohousing space with if we ever found one), I'm not even seeing family (Knight's mother). Part of the motivation - because I think we're all doomed anyway - was to keep my bubble small enough that it wouldn't squick Artist or AW. And now...
And yet I can't tell someone that because of my level of isolation, they are doomed not to fuck anyone for the next... year? who knows? I mean... toys are only so good, and I was not happy for that separation even though I was technically sometimes having sex with Knight, so without even that...
Back to the first hand it's yet another spot where she gets to do what she wants - living with someone and social media and and and, back when it was her other partner - but Artist is supposed to wrap his life around her needs/wishes (and by extension not his own, or taking mine into account for that matter).
So. As it turned out from conversation this morning, she did the thing, at least on some level, and he's sort of staying socially distanced from her for a bit. Staying here tonight, decisions as to what happens for the future need to happen - it may end up going back to that plan of three weeks here / three weeks there, though perhaps shorter cycles as she can get tested every 5 days through her work. But tests aren't perfect, so that's... small consolation. But as I told Artist last night I can't can't can't can't CANNOT do that long separation again, so that might be the best option, despite my house being FAR too small already. (It wouldn't be, except my son manages to take up enough space for 10 people...) And yet I thought we weren't going to have to do this, so I bought a computer instead of another bed, and I haven't had time to move forward on getting Knight a bedroom so this throws he and Joan together in ways that I don't think she minds but are... odd. (We... don't go into details, exactly, but the issues in her relationship with Knight echo the ones in my relationship, libido is a bitch... and she doesn't have another partner nor the prospect of another partner in... who knows how long.) So having my partner - who is physically affectionate in ways Knight hasn't been outside of NRE in the last two decades - around for weeks on end is gonna be hard for her. (I sort of wonder sometimes whether he's just fraysexual (attracted only to new people.)
And MiniMe is gonna be in everyone's faces - he *adores* Artist because Artist is really patient about playing video games with him - and I'm not sure that Artist *really* understands what that's gonna be like. He's been over a few times for evenings here while Knight was at Joan's place (when she had a place that wasn't mine), so I think he understand a *little* more than Joan realizes... but at the same time it's not... many many days worth of that. (She wasn't even really prepared for the amount of kid time the pandemic would bring. Who was?)
Fuck. This is all such a god damn mess. But... at least now I actually believe that Artist will *not* do what he did before. So there's that. And that's not nothing.
I got logged out and lost a whole lot of this post - but what it boiled down to was my instinct is that "In apocalypse situation, grab everyone you love and hunker down WITH not away from". This is the opposite of that. What the fuck do you do when all your emotional resources assumed community?