Unexpected

I just deleted a thousand words about an argument Estrella and I had last night. Said argument interrupted my plan of putting it to my lovely wife the moment I returned home. But, I couldn't characterize the argument in any coherent way: it was about two years of sexual psychology and routine, and no attempt to summarize did them the slightest bit of credit. So, instead, I'm going to talk a bit about how we argue.

We don't.

I cannot remember ever fighting with Estrella. We do not agree on lots of things, and we come to loggerheads on some issues. But, I don't believe that we raise our voices, throw things, or personally attack one another. We don't have proxy arguments: fighting about garbage removal responsibilities when we're really fighting about not getting enough affection. I do feel guilty of perpetrating a few acts of passive-aggression, but even those are mostly because I feel angry or hurt, and don't know why yet.

Instead of fighting, Estrella and I talk. Specifically, we talk like unicorn-petting, pot-smoking, crystal-wearing hippie lesbians. Lots and lots of "I feel" statements, plenty of listening, a fair dose of "right on; I get it". Speak, listen, and validate.

I've worked very hard to feel comfortable in these sorts of discussions. By nature, I tend to argue rhetorically, logically, cerebrally. The rational debate of objective issues was dinner entertainment while I was growing up. I'm mad good at it, too.

Enter Lilith: my highschool crush who, through a twisty road, wound up living with me for a few months about a year before I met Estrella. She was a psychology major, doing social work. I thought I could resist, but I wound up falling back in love (lust?) with her. And that created all sorts of drama. The one good thing that came out of that drama is that I learned how to state my feelings without making them somebody else's fault. She spoke that way, and refused to listen unless I also did so.

At first, I found it infuriating. After all, I'd spent my whole life treating such discussions as problems needing a logical solution. But I rapidly saw that it made communicating about emotional needs possible in a way I'd never imagined. I found that if I said "I feel angry when you..." instead of "you make me angry when...", it was possible to move beyond whether or not I should feel angry to how we could go about arranging a situation in which I didn't feel angry. I quickly found that communicating like this even works with people who don't respond in kind.

Despite coming to accept it, I still find this method of communication difficult. It requires considerable effort on my part to regulate my speech, to ignore the part of me that wants to spread the negativity around. It's made even harder when I don't even know what the fuck I'm feeling. I find it most difficult when I need (or want) somebody else to make a change for me; it feels hard to say "I feel angry when I find your panties all over the floor" and not follow it up with "so could you not leave them there?" Instead, I have to have faith that the person I'm talking to will hear my pain and volunteer either a change in behavior or a compromise. Luckily, most of the time, just making the listener aware of my distress helps dramatically in assuaging it.

The only downside to my hard-won skill at nonaggressively making my needs known is that it doesn't fit my "gender role". The other day, I made the mistake of expressing my emotional distress to my boss after he asked why I walked out of a meeting in which I'd been told I was uneducated. Instead of the validation I reflexively expected, he asked whether I was a faggot or a girl. I guess he'd have preferred that I just call the other guy an asshole.

It was the first time I've been conscious of the patriarchy harming, instead of privileging, me.