Work

These relationship things are work, I tell ya.

When you open them up to polyamory, it raises the stakes, and the workload, considerably.

This is why we need communication, even when we'd really like to crawl in a hole and lick our wounds. Silence fosters negative thoughts - it's the perfect growing medium for fear and doubt, kind of like the jack-o-lanterns on our steps are for growing funky red mold.

Add to that the fact that it is sometimes difficult to separate where we have issues - it it because of a new/other relationship, or is it something internal? And can we really separate them, after all? Is the issue mine, yours, or someone else's? If it's someone else's, are they working with us to find a resolution, or just dumping it on our laps and letting us do the work?

Sigh.

Open, honest communications at all time and with all involved. Not negotiable.

Part of what has caused some hurt around here in the last few days is a lack of communication, complicated by a veil of misunderstanding and hurt that alters everything we hear and experience. Because Someone and I both have quite a bit of negative history from before we met, we have to be aware of this filter and work extra hard not to take things at their worst. Most of the time, we do fine...but now and then one, or the other, or both of us, will be in a bad headspace and take everything wrong. It all becomes a judgement of how worthless we are.

We've had a sort of perfect storm of that kind of thing here at the Casa. We're recovering, but only because neither of us is willing to let anger or hurt break us. We're still a little prickly, a little sensitive, but we're getting better by the minute.

Even when we want to hide from it, even when we really don't want to get into the murky darkness and feel around for what's really hurting us, we put our big-kid panties on, hitch up our britches, and (eventually) wade in...because yeah, it's work, sometimes nasty work, but it's absolutely worth it to know that there is nothing left to question, that we know where we stand - side by side.