I.
When I was in college, I and my first girlfriend commiserated about how bad we both had been at monogamy.
If you’re monogamous, you’re not supposed to have sex with other people, even if they want to have sex with you. We both basically managed that, most of the time. But the problem with monogamy is that you don’t get partial credit. If you refuse sex outside of your monogamous relationship 95% of the time, but give in when you’re very drunk and they’re very cute, you don’t get an A in monogamy. Monogamy is pass/fail; not a single error is allowed.
We both felt this was an unreasonable expectation.
But even refusing sex wasn’t enough. You also had to stop yourself from falling in love with people, which felt like demanding that we stop thinking cats are cute. We didn’t have conscious control over our feelings; they just happened. Short of completely isolating ourselves from all cat pictures or other human beings, as appropriate, we didn’t know how it would be possible to stop.
We wondered whether all the monogamous people we knew had flawless self-control. That didn’t seem right. They weren’t, as a group, particularly self-controlled people: they kept oversleeping and missing classes, or failing to study for midterms and then flunking. Nor did they seem to have any particular mastery of their emotions, or even their dating-related emotions: when they were single, they regularly fell in love with inappropriate, unavailable, or cruel people.
Everyone else could do it easily. We couldn’t do it at all. We felt different from everyone else. We felt broken.
II.
I grew older. I left my mostly monogamous community and joined a mostly polyamorous community, and I stumbled across people who had the opposite of my problem.
To them, compersion felt like a sick joke. The sight of their partner kissing someone else always felt like an icicle stabbing their stomach. They compared themselves, constantly and involuntarily, to their metamours. If a metamour were prettier or smarter or more successful, they would be consumed with insecurity; if a metamour were uglier or stupider or less successful, they would be consumed with the thought that they were better and it still wasn’t enough to make their partner satisfied. Whenever their partner went on dates, they were convinced, absolutely convinced, that their partner would come home and say “I’m breaking up with you for my new partner.” Even the sight of a condom in a trash can could drive them to tears.
They searched desperately for the secret to preventing jealousy. Maybe they need to work on their self-esteem. Maybe more relationship processing would help. Maybe they need to go to therapy, or heal their inner child, or take ayahuasca. What if they Set a Boundary?
Everyone else could do it easily. They couldn’t do it at all. They felt different from everyone else. They felt broken.
III.
Sometimes people ask me, “Ozy, how can I be a prolific writer like you?” They keep expecting me to have an answer like “I have the self-discipline to sit down every day first thing in the morning and turn out 600 words,” or “I overcame my childhood trauma and internalized self-hatred and realized I have something of value to say to the world.”
They are very disappointed that the actual answer is “uh, iunno.”
I make suggestions based on my own experience, sometimes. I say “well, sometimes if I don’t have any ideas for a blog post, it’s because I haven’t been reading much or having interesting conversations.” Or I say “if I don’t have anything to say, I go on a long walk, and then usually a blog post magically appears to me.” Or I say “well, it turns out that if you literally schedule every minute of every day, you won’t have time to write, so be sure to have long blocks of unscheduled time or else take advantage of any fifteen-minute blocks you have.”
And then they’re like “but Ozy, I am reading and having conversations and going on walks and making sure I have empty space in my schedule, and writing is still so painful and unpleasant and it feels like every word is being pulled from my fingers like I’m extracting a glass splinter with tweezers. How did you solve this problem?”
Well. I didn’t.
IV.
I am a life coach, as some kind of sadistic ironic punishment Satan arranged for all the time I spent dunking on life coaches.
I was very concerned when people started hiring me who were successful adults with high-paying careers. Uh, I thought to myself, you have a real job with an office and a steady paycheck, you can put in an entire forty hours of work every week without once losing an entire afternoon to discoursing on Discord, and your resume doesn’t include any three-year gaps you desperately hope no one is going to ask about. I can help you... how, exactly?
To my shock, I discovered they also had problems. Not work problems; I’m in fact not able to help them with their work problems. But they have problems with maintaining friendships, or keeping up an exercise habit, or dating—situations where I’ve never had any issues.
What was more shocking to me was that the techniques I used to drag my brain over rocks to get myself to get any work done also helped them. “Have you tried setting a timer to do it for five minutes?” I would say. “Remember that doing the horrible thing is miserable for two minutes and then it’s over, while dreading the horrible thing is miserable for hours and you still have to do it after. Make sure not to fail with abandon: if you miss one day, just try again the next day. You can’t expect 100% success, but doing it sometimes is much better than not doing it at all.”
And they were like, “wow, I never thought of that! It really helps!”
I had assumed all this time that, for everyone, holding down a job required Herculean feats of not-failing-with-abandon and horrible-thing-doing and timer-setting. But many of my clients feel the same way about working that I do about dating. Sure, some parts suck: I still hate sending “do you want to hang out sometime?” messages, and they still don’t like when mysterious agendaless meetings with their grandboss appear on the calendar. But they find most of their job easy, intuitive, and even fun. In general, to them, working is Not That Hard.
In a certain narrow sense, I’m actually much better at productivity than my clients. They’re just solving a much easier problem.
V.
I would like to propose a common thread in all of these situations.
Sometimes you have a problem, and you observe that other people don’t have this problem. The natural conclusion is that they have some kind of special skill or technique that they used to solve the problem. If you’re successfully monogamous, you have mastered the art of self-control. If you’re successfully poly, it’s because you’ve figured out the secret to jealousy. If you write a lot, it’s because you understand productivity or time management. If you have a job, it’s because you’ve studied the Dread Secrets of Doing Horrible Things.
But, in reality, often people aren’t better than you at solving problems. They just never had the problem in the first place.
Monogamous people aren’t really good at gritting their teeth in a battle of will to avoid having sex outside their relationship; they just don’t usually crave extrarelational sex. Polyamorous people aren’t really good at not melting down when their partner goes out on a date; they just mostly aren’t that jealous. I’m not really good at overcoming writers’ block; I just write easily. My clients aren’t better at cognitive behavioral therapy than I am; they just don’t have to do cognitive behavioral therapy to themselves to get themselves to hit three hours of work in a day.
I find this thought comforting. It’s not that I have failed to learn some trivially easy skill that everyone else managed to learn in kindergarten, and it’s not that everyone else has some cool lifehack that they’re hiding from me out of spite. Sometimes I legitimately face a harder problem than other people do, and I would need to use a dozen tricks to approximate what they can do as easily as brushing their teeth.
If you have a problem other people don’t, you should make different decisions than they do. If you struggle with not having extrarelational sex, don’t be monogamous; if you struggle with jealousy, don’t be polyamorous.1 I don’t, in fact, work a conventional job; I try to find work that is reasonably accommodating of my horrifying Discord addiction.
You shouldn’t assume, if something is hard for you and easy for other people, that you can find a magic solution that will make it as easy for you as it is for everyone else.