Co-creating unconventional partnerships
Finding security through nuance, friends as beloveds, former romantic partners turned FWB minus the friendship, and sex as a hobby.
Every other essay, this one included, is a part of the Soft Body Personal section of this newsletter. This one includes personal details about sex, so if that’s not for you, feel free to skip it, or if you prefer to only read about the worker cooperative and all things adjacent to alternative business, click here to change your preferences to receive only bi-weekly Rest Day Creative missives.
I have a friend with benefits.
More accurately, I have “benefits” with no friendship: an ongoing sexual agreement with a former romantic partner where we meet regularly and almost exclusively to hook up.
The “friend” part of FWB is thin on the ground, and we’ve negotiated it that way on purpose. Where we used to share visions for the future, now X1 and I exchange memes, stand-up comedy clips, and TV show recs (there just is something about an ex-partner who knows what you like by what you once laughed at together on the couch over takeout). I help point out choices to vote for in local elections. Because I am 34 going on 75, sometimes we go in on an order of our medical supplements to get the free shipping.
That’s about as friendship-y as it gets between us, meaning the emotional side outside of sex is fairly surface level these days.
Besides the broad strokes of our lives (and that one time I got deeply invested in the gossip of a friend’s wedding drama that went down), what we know about each other comes from a little over two years of serious dating, a couple of months where we were working out what friends with benefits actually meant, and then six months of sex-only communication.
Because being nosy is fun, and also since most of us legitimately don’t have many spaces to hear about real people’s sex lives on the ground, for us that communication now looks like:
Texting about the logistics of when and where (ex. “What’s your schedule like? I can be there by 2pm but have to leave at 4pm.”)
Gauging mood/vibe/intensity in advance (“I have some pent-up energy today that I want to get out. What’s your vibe like?” “I want to get thrown around.”)
Talking about specific setup (“I want you lying face down when I come in the room. I’ll give you a massage to start.”)
Negotiating compromise (“I’m feeling tired today, but I’m still open to these acts and positions. I’m open to using toys, but only these specific ones.”)
Sexting (ranging between detailed fantasies, reliving past exploits, and stunning one-liners like all-caps “HOT” or “fuckkkkk,” with lots of splash emoji/eggplant emoji/hot face emoji/drool emoji/fire emoji, because even though I can write a Jane Austen-worthy love letter, a good writer is nothing without range)
Beyond texting, the only other communication is dirty talk during sex. I was going to say dirty sex is self-explanatory, but I don’t think it actually is. As all of this illustrates, we’re highly verbal people, and dirty talk is an explicit turn-on for both of us. Because our sex often explores power dynamics, we use facial expressions, physical touch, and dirty talk as ways to implicitly communicate who is in charge in each moment. There’s an implied “yes and” thing like improv that helps us play into one another. Besides changes in hand pressure and different touch intensity, we tell or ask what we’re going to do to each other or want done to us, and the tone and method of telling/asking dictates whose pleasure is the primary focal point in that moment. It’s also how we shift positions or intensities that aren’t working for one of us, without losing the energy we’re building.
This dynamic is not where we started, but it’s worth saying: I like it.
There were times when I wouldn’t have chosen it, but it’s certainly what I’d choose now. I wouldn’t do it with just anyone, though this has taught me I could if we wanted to.
So why did I choose it? I believe I can meet my core needs for emotional partnership outside of a person I have sex with, and I still have a need for physical intimacy, which this connection fulfills so well for me. I didn’t want to throw out the kinky sex with the bathwater, so to speak.
As a polyamorous person, as a non-monogamous person, but most of all as a relationship anarchist, I have built-in flexibility of who meets what need. If I was in a monogamous relationship, and that monogamy included sexual and romantic needs as well as material and security needs being met by just one person, I would not only have sex with that person since I couldn’t get those needs met elsewhere. Since I’m not, I don’t have to. With some built-in flexibility, and a lot of conversations, future-building might happen with friends instead of romantic partners, and sexual connection may not result in an eventual roof over my head. This is also why I am so wholly into business-building with people I care about, despite the general advice that it’s a terrible idea. It’s less about the idea itself and more about the execution.
I’m inherently wired for partnership, but that partnership happens with my closest people regardless of romantic connection or physical attraction because I’m so wired for it. When I go all in with my core people, I go in as fully as our shared desire and circumstances will let me. The primary factors that shape what that actually looks like and what limits it are our true needs. I have friends who are beloveds who live across the country. I have friends with romantic partnerships whose core needs for security are met by each other. In those cases, those beloveds offer me so much by meeting my emotional needs, but our current realities mean I don’t also get my material security needs met there too. I figure out how to get those needs met elsewhere, or we discuss how to co-create and reengineer the circumstances if possible so they can be. I think of romantic and sexual partnership in the same way.
I am clear that my needs do involve other people. As a more-or-less single person living alone, and living in my fourth home in as many months this year (by choice), I have a sense of freedom but also uprootedness. Doing things alone all the time makes me tired, and as a chronically ill person I already have enough things that make me tired. I don’t want to always have to make choices about my own security without the support of other people. Security actually is a driving factor of relationship anarchy for me, because flexibility is my way to get it.
My future might look more like cooperative housing with a few people I care about, and less like buying a one-family home with one other person I happen to be romantically or sexually involved with. My work might look less like solopreneurship or clocking in, and more like building a tight-knit cooperative business like what I’m doing with Rest Day Creative. As long as the needs are met, and as long as I don’t need those needs to be met all in one place or in conventional ways, the structure can be whatever it is.
If you are monogamous and it’s working for you, I am 100% here for it. Same if any of your other choices about employment or housing or any number of life needs might look more conventional from the outside. I’m just speaking for me personally.
As for the sex part of things, because sex can be just as fascinating as it can be needlessly comparative: I do this for fun. This is a fun hobby. Sex can have a lot of cultural connotations and greater implications, but ultimately if you don’t use it for procreation, sex is an activity you take part in like pretty much anything else. You can imbue it with as much or as little meaning as you like. It’s all up to you.
Sex is a hobby I have, that I share with this person, and it may not be your hobby. You might like knitting or bowling, and your frequency of sex or preference to have it at all says just as much about your validity as my inability to purl a row or bowl a strike says about me. Which is to say: none at all. Even if sex is one of your hobbies, maybe it’s one you don’t need or want to spend as much time or effort cultivating communication or systems around, in which case, great! Save your energy for something else. I like sex as a hobby, and some days I still want to do other activities, like reading or just taking a damn nap.
Like most hobbies, this arrangement happened and continues to happen due to very deliberate cultivation.
I don’t know how you can end up in an emotionally functional sexual dynamic with an ex otherwise.
Here’s how it all started: a few years ago, I did something very gay. (I do gay things much more frequently than that, but this was the kind of decision that we as a community™ can immediately identify as Big Gay).
I swiped right on a dating profile for someone who lived 900 miles away from me. A plane ticket got booked within a week, we met in person the next week, and 12 weeks later we both permanently moved to a city neither of us had scarcely visited, living a few blocks away from each other.
Before that happened, it started with the swipe. “I’m looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes,” except think more: trans man, good chat, 5’2”, glasses. I don’t really have a “type,” or rather I have many types, but the thing pretty much all of them have in common is being able to have extensive meta-conversation about relationships, which he certainly can.
Within the first week of long-distance chatting after that Bumble swipe, my phone left me a judgmental notice that I had spent 20 hours on my Messages app in less than seven days. I quietly turned off screen time notifications and proceeded to act as if I had not seen them. My friend Tricia started calling X my part-time job, as in “How’s your part-time job going?” The texting continued, but on top of it, we proceeded to chat on the phone for 3-6 hours at a time, me lying on my couch like a teenage babysitter in the 80s twirling an invisible phone cord, or otherwise sleepily holding the phone propped next to my ear, lying in bed as the hours ticked past my bedtime (9pm) to when I hung up the phone (2am).
I was swept forward in that giddy high that only limerance can bring, except it was reflected and magnified back, pinging between us in a dizzying way. At that point, we were two people who had ostensibly never met each other in real life, but had already spent more hours together than many close relationships and friendships even do.
Besides cutting into all of my time outside of work, the volume of how much we talked wasn’t that remarkable to me. One of the ways autism can present for me is through being hyperverbal, so even though I can be introverted and at times deeply internal, when I get going I have a pretty extensive battery pack that sometimes lets me talk and receive far beyond the limits of most other people. (A gift! A curse!)
What did feel revelatory to me at the time was the ease with which we talked about sex, especially as two people who had never so much as shook hands.
Not even just about sex, but about relationship dynamics as a whole, and how we were each active shapers of those dynamics.
As a late-in-life queer, I had been out for a couple of years by then. I’d had a handful of dates and flings (including a different time of moving across the country, only to live down the street from a love interest who had heavily hinted at polyamory and then turned out to be in a very decidedly monogamous marriage, and another time waiting weeks for my renewed passport to arrive so I could spend a long weekend with a Tinder date in Canada paddleboarding, hiking, eating our way through the city’s vegan food, and getting eaten out).
So I’d been out, I’d been dating, and I’d been doing the funny and occasionally questionable things you do (especially in the pre-COVID era) when you’re newly out and finding out what flavor of gay you want to be. The kind where you might try on different people and dates until you eventually realize, like an after-school special, the gay was inside all along.
Before the multi-state, multi-country gallivanting though, I’d been in a couple of long-term heterosexual relationships, one for nine years. Even being in such deep conditions for trust to grow that years together can bring, there weren’t really mechanisms to talk about sex or the concrete details of our connection. With the partner I had in my twenties in particular, we often talked about our relationship in vague future terms. When we did talk specifics it was usually when a difficult pattern neared a breaking point and we had to solve an issue.
In those relationships, we operated based on a lot of unspoken assumptions. I simply didn’t know I was allowed to be explicit about what I wanted (and, autistically, a lot of my worldview depends on understanding what I have permission for, which is why I create a lot of my own self-permissioning now). As someone who was socialized as female, nearly all external messaging led me to believe that the wants of someone else would be all I needed to know.
Nowhere do I remember there being tips or scripts for initiating sex, declining sex, offering counter-suggestions, declaring activities, changing pace, changing intensity, options for ending sex in any way besides an orgasm, or post-sex aftercare.
When it came to my late-twenties queer sex education, it felt like trying to fumble through teenage firsts all over again, gleaning information from wherever I could get it. One of my first acts of coming out was to watch The L Word in its entirety (It did not age well! Was it even aging well while it was airing??) Hilariously, I scrutinized the screen to try to understand what exactly was happening with hands and body positioning during the many sex scenes. I knew trying to get gay sex ed circa 2004 HBO was wrongheaded, but you don’t know what you don’t know, you know?
So when X and I had our first phone call, it was nothing short of revelatory to talk about sex.
Until that point, sex was something I discussed with friends, but hardly in detail with a person I planned on having it with.
Talking so openly was part of his natural personality as a curator of experiences and someone who likes to have a level of control and context going into a situation (which, same, bestie). But X also initiated the meta-conversation out of necessity. As a trans man, he commonly experienced new sex partners who were unfamiliar with his body, his anatomy, and with transness in general. To try to ensure a worthwhile experience for himself, he would lead with education and question-asking to get on the same page as soon as possible.
It was a smart move, and based on our experience, one I think should be the norm regardless of gender identity. This kind of preparation is common for the kink community, but not a given otherwise. I’ve had enough partners where we did talk beforehand about sexual safety, but rarely about pleasure and specific acts from a detailed perspective.
I’d been deep in my own self-exploration of genderqueerness as a way to understand trans friends and potential love interests (a special interest that would take me a while longer to understand was also about me coming to terms with my own genderqueer identity). That meant that most of the general education was already out of the way, but there were still pieces related to identity and preference that were invaluable for each of us to know about each other.
We talked about our kinks, our preferences, our sexual histories, whether we liked dirty talk, choking, restraint, impact play, whether any body parts were off-limits or required special treatment, what we wanted to be called during sex (yes to “slut,” yes to “king”), what to call our genitals (“pussy,” “dick”), what to call a dildo (“cock”). We talked about STI testing beforehand and how we would navigate destigmatizing conversations if either or both of us contracted one.
This whole conversation took place during our first-ever phone call, 900 miles apart, having never even touched. After so much guessing and assumptions both on my own and with nearly all other partners, I cannot begin to describe the fullness and freedom I felt during and after that talk.
In those early days, I had nothing but reasons to be excited about X, but in all seriousness, that conversation topped them all.
Someone was willing to go there with me. I knew I could talk about sex and relationship dynamics all day every day. I’m the kind of person who leans toward polyamory and non-monogamy less because I have a strong desire for multiple partners and more because the structures require conversation about relationships and that’s fun for me.
To have someone do it with me felt rare. Relationships and sex are so ubiquitous, but engineering them for pleasure, comfort, and desire, is not.
Conversations like the one we had are why sex is still happening between us, and why it’s still so fulfilling a year out from our official breakup. They’re what has allowed us to pivot through so many iterations of connection over just a few years.
Despite our conversation in advance, our first few sexual encounters were nothing exceptional. We were two people who had experienced rapid emotional progression long distance but didn’t have physical connection progressing at the same rate. My favorite part of watching Love is Blind is always the early episodes before the cast sees each other and then there’s the reveal, because it brings me so nostalgically back to picking up X from the airport for the very first time. My body was so viscerally like, “Who even is this?”
It took time for bodies to catch up. After our initial sex, it also took us pausing and going, “Here’s what I’m noticing. Do you feel that too? Here’s the assumption I’m making. What’s actually going on for you?” Part of the disconnect was a hesitancy on my part, operating based on past gendered assumptions about my own role in sex and unspoken trauma I hadn’t been ready to reveal yet. Talking forthrightly and honestly allowed us to rework this pattern almost immediately.
If we had stopped there, no conversation, he probably would have flown home with both of us thinking we’d had a great emotional spark and just some mediocre sex a few times. Instead, it’s resulted in building the longest-lasting component of our connection.
We were able to shift just-okay sex into sex that continually gets more exceptional over time even now, because we’re always making room for what is actually happening for each of us in the present.
From that first phone call, we went on to spend our first ten days in person together at a hotel (an astronomical amount of time with someone you’ve never met, if you think about it). We flew back and forth between our states every few weeks after until we eventually settled in the same city a few months in, dated for a couple years, and transitioned into where we are now.
Conversations got us through a lot more hot and heavy sex, having an ethically non-monogamous relationship and external partners along the way, co-navigating some of the most difficult and traumatic years of my life, and lots of couples’ therapy (the hill I will die on is relationship therapy, it’s so good).
Conversations saw us through at least two wobbly points where we got to co-create possibilities to pivot instead of breaking up, then through the break up itself, and through the liminal space of being not together but still kind of wanting to be in each other’s pants.
When we reached that point, I asked myself, “Having sex with your ex is some dumb bitch behavior, you know that?” I thought this with amused exasperation, and despite the wording, with kindness and little judgment.
The answer simply was: this is what I want.
It didn’t matter whether anyone else understood, or whether it made me look silly. It didn’t matter whether my decision would change later.
What mattered is that it felt like the right decision at that time, and continues to.
When it doesn’t, I’ll do something else. We’ll have a conversation and pivot this connection yet again, or we’ll dissolve it. We’ll do the next best thing, and in all likelihood it probably won’t ever look like conventional romantic partnership.
I could build all of this with someone else, but the main thing is, I don’t have to.
I am in continual conversation with my core people specifically so I don’t have to if I don’t want to.
Deliberate choice-making in the face of strong forces for the status quo can sometimes feel like swimming upstream, but I’d rather swim upstream than have the current take me somewhere I don’t want to go.
Flexibility can bring freedom, and it can also come with a lot of necessary intention and work. I am here for that work.
I do what I can to create possibility for myself, and to make it easier to meet my needs wherever I go and whomever I’m with.
What structures could you introduce into relationships so they meet your needs?
What intentional choices feel right for you?
I hope whatever feels worth it to you, you’ll give yourself the space to make them too.
Love,
Iris
Recs and Thoughts
I made you a sexy little summery playlist, because anyone who reads this many words of mine at once and makes it to this point deserves a little treat.
I recently read Feel It All: A Therapist's Guide to Reimagining Your Relationship with Sex by Casey Tanner. Recommend! Casey’s approach is systemically aware and sensitive, and makes plenty of space for all kinds of permission around sex and identity, including space for asexuality, changing one’s relationship to sex due to menopause and aging, and navigating a variety of contexts around sexuality. It’s laid out as a primer, but I don’t know anyone who couldn’t use the reminders.
LOVING this list of reflections from of . A snippet:
“I will die. You will die. We will die. The best possible outcome before that happens is allowing ourselves to step into an irresistible vision beyond survival and iterate toward it daily.”
I MEAN.
Have you called your reps lately? What part of you, in heart, in words, in actions, in dollars, is in solidarity with Palestine today, this week?
opened a new batch of orders for their brilliantly imagined Gay Marseille card deck today. If you’re a queer witch who practices tarot, Charlie’s writing and art is truly exceptional and necessary. I don’t even practice tarot anymore, but at least 75% of people who have visited me IRL have experienced me shoving cards from Fifth Spirit Tarot under their noses to point out all of the incredible queer art and reading out loud passages out of their books.
I’m about 75% of the way through the book Only This Beautiful Moment by Abdi Nazemian, an interwoven fictional story about three generations of Iranian men coming to terms with queerness, family, and cultural allegiances. The book walks the line well between real personal/political difficulty and grief with a surprising lack of emotional heaviness. Would recommend.
I found this piece about disability + COVID by to be a moving account of realness this week. Several years into pandemic life has normalized so much business as usual, but despite the social blasé, there are still lasting implications. Yes, there are systemic supports that need to be better. Masking can’t do everything, testing can’t do everything, but they are clear ways within our own power to support disproportionately affected people in our communities, particularly disabled people and POC. Statistically, white people are less likely to wear masks than people of color, and POC are still disproportionately affected by adverse health risks due to COVID. Able-bodied people are also less likely to mask up, even though repeated infection could change their own status to chronically ill or disabled. Every successive COVID infection exponentially increases health risks. There’s no moral failing if you do get it, but there are factual realities. As someone who now has MCAS from unrelated causes, but knows people with long COVID can get it: can confirm, it’s more fun not to have it! Even if you haven’t been masking, you can start at any time. There’s no such thing as doing it perfectly, and I won’t claim perfection. I eat inside at restaurants. I’ve been to indoor swimming pools and not worn a mask. But at the grocery store? In a theater? As much as I can in indoor spaces? Personally, protecting myself and my communities feels worth it.
Queer joy matters. Allyship matters. And sassiness is just fun!
May I also present to you: dog in a bucket.
X has asked for anonymity in exchange for me writing freely about our dynamic. Like all of our conversations, our intention is to continue to have an open dialogue about his comfort level with being written about. If it changes, I might paywall posts like this one or remove them altogether, but in the meantime, this is the agreement.
MORE PLEASE!