Last Wednesday, I spent most of the day with a dear friend whom I had met in California during the pandemic. They were here for several days to visit their partner’s family and made time to spend a day with me. It was one of those “gems” although it started out with me bursting into tears only a few moments after my friend arrived at my place here in Colorado. 

We had never seen each other outside of California and even since I’ve moved away we’ve seen each other only a couple of times when I’ve gone back to California. So seeing my friend here, in my new home or “my element”, was very special for me but also overwhelming. Several factors contributed to my hypersensitivity at my friend’s visit: the fact that I’ve been spending so much time by myself this summer, getting used to and even basking in my solitude as it’s feeling comfortable and safe, but also getting unused to interacting with people, especially on a close, intimate level; my fear of loss since this friend would then be going back to California and I probably won’t see them again until next year, at the earliest; my fear of sharing deep, intimate feelings or thoughts or emotions with this friend, which is something we usually do, but then also having to put up with the separation; hormones (damn them!). We got over the hump, though, and had a very nice day together. And I think three main factors contributed to this, three factors that I see being common to other relationships that feel particularly comfortable and/or safe to me: firstly, my friend said explicitly that we needn’t go deep into emotions if I/we didn’t feel like talking about them; then, the fact that we spent almost the whole day, i.e. many hours, together; and last but not least, that for part of the time we spent together we did active things together. 

I think these are all key factors that I see also in my close, comfortable relationships with my climbing (or hiking or running) buddies. Unlike the artist friend who visited me last week, these people are cis-men so for the most part they were socialized differently and not really encouraged or taught to “sit around and talk about emotions”. That actually turns out to feel much more comfortable and safe to me. The three or four cis-male buddies who are close to me and I do talk about emotions with one another, but it’s always while doing active things together. And most of the time we meet up, we’re spending many hours together, often a whole weekend day together, or at least a few hours at the gym and then happy hour together. Thus, our meetings have come to have some sort of built-in ritual: meet up and often carpool to some place together (or warm up at the gym), which provides a warm-up or ice-breaker to our meeting & relating to each other (what I was feeling the need for when my artist friend visiting from California showed up at my front door last week); share an activity together that gets us into our bodies, which provides a bonding time whether we talk about emotions or only about the weather; cool-down, either literally stretching after the workout or figuratively by going to get food and/or drinks together. I need these steps: they help me ease into the relationship and then ease back out of it; doing something active together helps me self-regulate (and probably helps both me & my buddies co-regulate together), if we talk about deep stuff; and spending several hours and/or possibly a whole (weekend) day together feels meaningful because it’s such a concrete, explicit commitment taking so much time out for each other. (The trip I did for the half-marathon activism/protest in April with a couple of friends was also this kind of experience for me.) 

I don’t know what all this means about me, my relationships, or how I function. I realize I’m in a phase where I’m really dissecting the way I relate to relationships — or maybe looking at things through different lenses and removing the filters that are usually given to us for relationships. To a certain extent, I’ve done this my entire life, but I think I’m doing it much more radically now, also thanks to one of my non-binary European friends who is ace and the books on asexuality they recommended to me and that I’ve started reading.

At this point, I’m feeling very confused about how I function in, and relate to, relationships; so this is just a sort of flow-of-consciousness ramble about some of the things I’m noticing that work (or don’t work) for me in close/intimate relationships.