Monogamish

In the rush of excitement about today's Supreme Court rulings overturning a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act and enforcement of Prop 8 in California, Slate has produced an appalling little article pointing out that many gay relationships and marriages are not, in fact, monogamous. She describes, for example, Dan Savage's self-description as "monogamish."

What's appalling is not this key point (although it's questionable), but the author's titillated shock at those adventurous gays and smug certainty that no such arrangements could ever be made among straight couples. "In some far off ideal world," she writes, "this kind of openness may infect the straight world, and heterosexual couples actually start to tackle the age old problem of boring monogamous sex. But do any of us really believe that?"

We will, for the moment, let slide the unfortunate use of the word "infect" to describe something gays might be doing to straights. Instead, let's focus on this 1950s attitude about women's sexuality. In the era of What Women Want, 16 years after publication of The Ethical Slut, nearly a decade after the end of Sex and the City, who is still astonished by the idea that a woman might embrace non-monogamy?

Relationships involve choices, not all of them easy. Monogamy is a choice that many couples make. But it's a choice, not a gender- or orientation-based inevitability. By now it should no longer be controversial or surprising to recognize that women have their own sexual desires, and their own agency in responding to those desires. Monogamy is no more an inevitability for straight women than non-monogamy is for gay men.

Making work workable

The New York Times has a report on widespread worker discontent in America. According to a Gallup study, 70% of full-time workers either hate their jobs or have checked out completely.

The surprise is that it's bosses who make the difference:

Gallup has found that
managers who focus on their
employees’ strengths can
practically eliminate active
disengagement and double the
average of U.S. workers who are
engaged nationwide.

Motivation and engagement in any relationship can come from focusing on people's strengths and helping them to grow and develop, whether those people are formally in a subordinate role or not. It's also incredibly satisfying to engage with people that way. And if you are part of the 70%, you might want to consider engaging your manager by focusing on his or her strengths.

After all, your manager might also be in the 70% percent. Your manager might dread going to work each day to face a bunch of unhappy employees. A little authentic communication between human beings could work wonders. It's risky, but it just might be worth it.

Writing a manifesto and other ways of figuring out who you are

Lifehacker has a great article on choosing your direction in life. They offer four tips:

1. Think about where you'll be in five years.
2. Write your personal manifesto.
3. Volunteer or shadow someone in a job you're interested in.
4. Dig into those side projects.

These are great ideas, and the one that stand out to me is number 2. It's the one I've heard least, and it just might be the most powerful.

I've never written a manifesto, but I've done a couple of related exercises: declaring myself as a possibility, and writing a personal brand statement.

A while back, in a Landmark Education course, I declared myself as the possibility of intimacy and adventure. Without getting into the tortured syntax, we can see that finding a juicy, resonant concept as your guiding principle can certainly help you to make choices in the real world. When I found that grad school was starting to overwhelm me, for instance, I realized that I needed to add in more intimacy and adventure: I made plans to study in Korea, started asking classmates to dinner, connected with others as language partners, and ultimately ended up dating a Chinese woman who will go with me to Beijing this summer. Intimacy and adventure indeed!

Personal branding is something I teach at Google. Each time I teach the course, we go through the exercise of writing a personal brand statement, and I refine mine. Simpler and shorter than a manifesto, a brand statement can be a path to understanding what's important to you -- again, a guide to real-world choices. In my case, I found that I want my brand to be someone who's a guide, mentor and teacher. That's why this blog exists for you to read. 

However you do it, figuring out what matters to you -- and then checking again often, and refining -- can help you choose what to do from moment to moment. 

Or, as Dolly Parton once put it, "Figure out what you're doing, and do it on purpose."

Hitting the wall

We all hit a wall sometimes.

This week I traveled to the Google Boston office to teach a course called Managing Your Energy, developed by The Energy Project. It's a full-day course that delves into some deep areas, and by the end of the day, I was exhausted.

Totally drained, I could feel a wave of despair creeping up on me. Rather than try to run away from that feeling or shut it down, I decided, in that moment, to embrace it and care for it.

I had a long train ride ahead. I put on my headphones and listened to Paul Simon -- really listened, letting the heartbreaking lyrics touch me -- and I let my mind wander where it wanted to go: to lost loves, to sorrow for friends who have suffered unspeakable abuse at the hands of a brutal government, to sadness about getting older and seeing my parents get older.

There are times when we can, and probably should, let ourselves go this way. When despair takes over your life, it's a disaster. When it takes over your late afternoon on a train ride, it can be a kind of melancholy sweetness.

Science-based life advice

A pair of sociologists have come up with science-based advice for grads. It's a powerful antidote to the usual "follow your dreams" stuff. For example:

College graduates are often told: “follow your passion,” do “what you love,” what you were “meant to do,” or “make your dreams come true.” Two-thirds think they’re going find a job that allows them to change the world, half within five years. Yikes. 

This sets young people up to fail. The truth is that the vast majority of us will not be employed in a job that is both our lifelong passion and a world-changer; that’s just not the way our global economy is.

I would add that the pressure even to know what you love, what your passions are, or what your dreams are when you're graduating from college is mistaken. When I graduated with a degree in creative writing, I assumed that I ought to want to be in publishing, which it turns out is like loving food and thus deciding to work in an abattoir. It was only through a series of odd decisions and happenstance -- deciding on a whim to go off to India instead of figuring out my career, coming back from India just as the dot-com boom was taking off, following a girlfriend to Korea to teach English for a year -- that I gradually came to know what I love and care about.  

The keys seem to be flexibility, friendship, and listening, rather than a relentless focus on any particular goal, such as children, a house, or changing the world. (Via BoingBoing.)

Positive, not polyanna

Can you stay positive without being naive?

Business Insider has a set of charts meant to restore your faith in humanity. A lot of the data is US-focused, and there are points where you can find clouds in the silver linings. But overall the data BI highlights is credible evidence of things getting better for lots of people.

We all know there are awful things in the world. There is too much suffering, too much cruelty, too much sorrow.

But naivete cuts both ways. Focusing on the negative and staying blind to the positive is just as naive as doing the opposite. Only by noticing where -- and how -- things are getting better can we apply the lessons and do our part.

Letting desire flow

A new study (picked up by BoingBoing) makes the case that BDSM practitioners are actually better adjusted psychologically than the population at large. The reasons given are speculative, but the researcher argues that "BDSM play requires the explicit consent of the players regarding the type of actions to be performed, their duration and intensity, and therefore involves careful scrutiny and communication of one’s own sexual desires and needs."

It's one study, and these studies should always be taken with a grain of salt. Still, what stands out here is that there's some scientific evidence that exploring desire -- in thought and in action -- can lead to greater happiness.

We often look at desire as something to move beyond. Shouldn't we be helping society or focusing on our families or working harder? Isn't craving the source of our suffering, as the Buddhists might say?

Mark Epstein, a psychologist and Buddhist writer, argues in his book Open to Desire that we can't simply turn off desire. Desire is part of who we are, and exploring our deep and sometimes frightening desires can be a path to self-knowledge.

In so many other contexts, we're ready to encourage the intimacy of close communication and the adventure of pushing our own limits, even to the point of intense physical pain. Skydiving? Sure! Running a marathon? Hey, awesome! Taking a long weekend to spend some time with your partner? Sounds wonderful!

If we step back from the cultural shaming and pathologizing, is BDSM really any different? It's likely to hurt less than running a marathon (and is actually kind of less likely to make your nipples bleed), it's not nearly as risky as backpacking across Latin America, and it will probably create more intimacy and openness in a relationship than going to see The Great Gatsby together (a different opportunity to hang out together in a dark room while wearing ridiculous outfits).

The main point is to stay open to who you really are and what you really desire. If there's something inside your own mind that scares you, instead of shutting it away, you might want to try walking toward it and making friends.

Update: While we're on the topic ...