Ornoth

Amongst the most annoying myths of our time is the commonly-held belief that women keep their living spaces cleaner, tidier, and better organized than men do.

Now I happen to be a man, and throughout my entire career my desk has been the cleanest one in my office. And my firsthand experience with the women I’ve lived with… Well, I’d like to relate a couple of my real-world experiences, for illustrative purposes. And for entertainment value.

I’ve always bought fresh orange juice, rather than frozen concentrate. However, a woman I once lived with would bring home those little cardboard “cans” of concentrate and pull one out of our freezer and leave it on a counter to thaw before mixing it with water to make OJ.

On one memorable occasion, she left one out to thaw on top of our microwave, which sat on the kitchen counter. She left it there long enough for it to thaw.

She left it there long enough for it to ferment.

She left it there so long that the pressure from the ongoing fermentation caused the sealed canister to violently explode in the middle of the night, scaring us out of a sound sleep and coating the floor, the counter, the microwave, the under-side of the kitchen cupboards, the wall, and yes even the ceiling with sticky, rancid, orange glop.

I don’t know about you, but that kind of thing just doesn’t happen in my experience living alone or with other men.

But lest you think that’s one isolated data point, let’s consider the fascinating habits of one of the other women I’ve lived with…

This example of the fairer sex operated on the assumption that one should only wash dishes as needed. You need a saucepan? Dig one out of the pile of grime-laden dirty ones that covers the kitchen table and spills across the floor, and give it a quick wash.

At the time, we lived in a ground-floor apartment where the front door went straight from the front yard into the kitchen. This was a certified boon for my housemate, because whenever she cooked something sticky, smoky, stinky, or even the least bit messy, she could throw the dish outside on the lawn before sitting down and eating her meal. The dirty dish would usually sit outside overnight, forgotten.

That worked great for four months out of each year. For the other eight months, the inevitable snows of a northern Maine winter would bury the dirty cookware overnight, benevolently hiding all evidence of her cooking ability.

Things got better and better for her as winter plodded on. She had to do less and less cooking, because there weren’t any dishes left in the house to use, and there weren’t any dirty ones to wash, either! A veritable feminine idyll.

Needless to say, we somehow survived those long Maine winters subsisting on instant Cup-a-Soup and no-name cheezy poofs. Then, in April the reluctantly receding snows would reveal a front yard littered with rusted pots and pans bearing the unrecognizable remains of Shake-n-Bake chicken and burnt mac and cheese. Two months later, after she worked up the fortitude to clean up the front yard, we would eat like kings for four months… until the snow flew again and our dishes started disappearing.

So before you buy into the hateful old sexist line that men are irredeemable slobs, I’d urge you to do a little empirical fact-checking. I think you’ll find there are a large number of women who cannot keep their living environment tidy (never mind sanitary), and an ample number of men who can and do… Even without the prodding of some mythical fastidious woman.

In this post I gave you a glimpse into the drawbacks of living with my ex wife. Two days earlier, in this post I gushed when writing about the 25th anniversary of meeting Ailsa, my first girlfriend. Well, lest you get a lopsided picture, I thought I’d relate a story that casts Ailsa in a very different light.

Ailsa and I lived together for a brief time after my divorce. It was another period of intense learning for me. Some of those lessons were rather pleasant, as I alluded to in my Valentine’s Day post; and then some of them were less than pleasant, like the explosion.

Imagine sleeping peacefully and being suddenly woken up in the dead of night by a loud explosion. Something like a gunshot, actually. When I got up to investigate, everything looked okay until I got to the kitchen, where nothing was amiss… except for the blood dripping from the ceiling and all the shelves.

After some very traumatic WTF moments, I discovered that, no, it really wasn’t blood; it was orange juice. But it was f-ing everywhere!!!

Apparently what had happened was that Ailsa had taken one of those cans of frozen orange juice concentrate out of the freezer and left it on top of our microwave to thaw a little, before mixing it up in a pitcher with water.

And then promptly forgot it.

For several days.

Nature taking its course, the stuff thawed, warmed, and eventually fermented in its surprisingly well-sealed container. When the internal pressure reached a sufficient level—which of course happened at 3am one night—the can exploded like a water canon in a mostly-vertical jet of warm orange slop.

It coated the under-sides of four rows of shelving as well as half the ceiling before giving in to gravity and splooshing the shelves a second time on the way down, then the microwave, the countertops, and eventually the floor. I have never seen a mess like that in my life.

Of course, I’d like to say Ailsa’s OJ and Linda’s cookware behaviors were isolated incidents, but these kinds of hazards never came up when I lived with other guys in college. But then maybe I’m just prone to dating women with underdeveloped survival instincts.

Euhhh! I still have nightmares about that…

So I'd like to take a few minutes and tell you about one of the most transformational events in my life, and how it has played out in a recent episode from my life.

My first series of anecdotes comes from my senior year in high school, and my first real relationship. Steeped in the intensity of the conflicting emotions of adolescence, I found myself to be an intensely jealous person. I wasn't just jealous of people, but anything that received the attention or affection of my girlfriend, Ailsa.

For example, one of the popular songs when we were dating was Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger", which came out with "Rocky III". Ailsa loved it so much that whenever it came on the radio, she'd stop whatever she was doing (even if it was necking with me!), turn the volume up, and sing along at full volume. It didn't take long for me to absolutely despise that song, with a blind hatred that burned fierce and blinding.

Another of the things that she loved were irises. My mother had coincidentally planted three or four such flowers along the side of our driveway, and one day when Ailsa and I weren't doing so well I got so irritated by their reminding me of her that I pulled up all the flowers, bulbs and all, and smashed them into oblivion with a sledgehammer right in the middle of our driveway.

These certainly aren't the only such stories, but they serve to underscore how irrational, how overpowering, and how instinctive my jealousy was at that age.

Now, fast-forward twelve years, when Ailsa and I began dating a second time, and lived together for a short time. Both of us had been through marriage and divorce, and we'd begun exploring various sexual fringe groups: she'd spent some time in the lesbian community, and we were beginning to explore both BDSM and polyamory together.

As we attended various "play parties", she commanded attention from some people, and I commanded it from others. Each of us met new people and were accepted into new groups that we wouldn't have been able to enjoy if we'd operated separately. It became very apparent that we both benefitted socially when we allowed one other to make contact with other people.

Now, under these circumstances, you'd think that jealousy would be an immense problem. After all, we're talking about your primary partner being pretty explicitly affectionate with someone else, right in front of your face! However, we both realized that we'd each get our own share of attention, and that we were committed to one another in a way that was much stronger than the more casual exchanges we had with folks outside our relationship.

This really hit home for me when Ailsa developed a serious (but at the time unspoken) infatuation for another woman she knew. Knowing that I'd gotten the lion's share of attention from people outside our relationship, I knew it was only fair that I give her the green light to see where their relationship might take them. I also knew that my relationship with Ailsa wasn't threatened, so I let it go ahead. It really was a completely new frontier for me, being able to completely support my partner's interest in another person.

And once I got that far, I found myself in a position where I didn't just passively authorize their relationship, but actively put the two of them into situations that had romantic potential. Since I'd already decided that it would be okay with me that Ailsa take on another lover, that extension only made sense. And besides, it was fun!

The most powerful part of the situation, which cemented it permanently into my behavior, was the feedback I got. Because she knew it was okay with me, Ailsa was free to share the heady excitement of her new relationship with me, which was an absolutely wonderful way for me to experience positive reinforcement for the freedom and support I'd given her. Seeing the woman I loved, flush with the thrill of a new romance, was incredbily moving, and I found myself in the almost unbelievable position of supporting her relationship and not feeling even a hint of the jealousy that I otherwise would have expected.

It has been only recently that the made-up term "compersion" has appearred in polyamorous circles to describe this very unique feeling I experienced: the abundant joy of seeing someone you love falling in love. Most people (certainly virtually all monogamists) in such a situation will respond from a place of fear, selfishness, denial, resistance, and possessiveness. Taking polyamory to heart enabled me to respond in a completely different way: from a place of love, trust, support, and sharing. And what a wonderful energy I got in return! This kind of basic transformation of your relationships is why I consider polyamory a far, far more integral part of who I am than mere "passtimes" such as BDSM and bisexuality and so forth.

What this episode did was firmly establish the perspective from which I treat the people I care about. Love is not about possession or control, which is what 95 percent of people practice (even though they do not admit it); love is about making another person's happiness just as important as your own, and really acting that way.

Now let's fast-forward another seven years. After four years of dating perhaps the most wonderful woman I've ever met, I'd pretty much decided that Inna was the love of a lifetime, something I had been absolutely unable to envision after the failure of my marriage. And yet, at the same time, Inna (a monogamist) was becoming more and more convinced that I was not the person she wanted to grow old with, and that we needed to stop seeing one another in order to give her enough room to see other people. She and I had a number of long discussions about how and why she thought this outcome would make her happier in the long run. For me, coming from my world-view, that was the most important factor: her happiness.

Many of my friends wondered how I could surrender my own hopes and desires for the relationship, and support Inna's desire that we separate. I'm sure that some of them surely think that my lack of a dramatic, possessive, selfish tantrum proves that I don't really love Inna, but in fact they've got it exactly backwards. The only reason why I can give up my dreams of a life together is because I love her so much, and because her happiness is so very important to me.

Between my divorce and my relationships with Ailsa, I've developed a very simple but unique philosophy, which has been tested and, in my opinion, proven correct in my relationship with Inna. If you love someone and they want something, you have a simple choice: you can either support their desire and help them pursue what they believe will make them happy, or you can establish yourself as an obstacle between your partner and their happiness. You might even be able to get away with standing between your partner and her happiness for a period of time. But every time you do that, you will prove that her happiness is not important to you, and in the long run she will tire of your selfishness and leave you. In short, the typical monogamist tactics of jealousy and selfishness and possessiveness are self-defeating long-term strategies.

So for me, the answer is clear: always remember that "love" means valuing someone else's happiness, and always do your best to help the people you love achieve the things that will make them happy. That's how you act from a place of love, not from a place of fear.