If you were to judge monogamy by the shit that pops up in relationship advice threads, people would have a bad impression of it as well!
That’s the truth.
My day job is FinTech/tax adjacent, so I have to give you collectively (and your collective web of relationships) credit for making the home ownership work. The overwhelming majority of humans can’t make tenants in common between two people work.
Personally, I’'m not particularly close with my family for other reasons, so being ‘out’ isn’t a real concern - given a wife and girlfriend in that long-term context, I’d write the requisite will / medical POA to be fair, and to ensure that blood relatives aren’t executing either.
I’m somewhat close with folks at work, but I WFH for a company that’s fairly progressive. One of the people I started with recently asked us to address them in a specific way, and I couldn’t be happier for them. If I called my boss “Joe,” and they asked me to call them “Mr. Smith”, that’s no different.
I very much like your strategy of “truthful but no obvious” There isn’t a need at work for a full-fledged explanation of my home life, but I also work with good people who don’t blink at the miscellaneous terms I (or they) use to describe the people who are important to us. That’s how it’s supposed to work - we all share what we feel comfortable with, and other people share in our joys/sorrows regarding the same. Only the level of detail changes, really.
Thanks for the input - I agree that poly isn’t the problem, people are the problem.
This particular person had to learn the hard way how to say ‘I love you, I will not leave you, and with that in mind, I’d like to fuck _____’ More difficult than it seems, but hardly a torpedo to the relationship - barring a random announcement out of nowhere.
Married 13 yrs as of the end of October. We’ve played with others, and have standing permission to “get things going,” but I find the wedding ring to (understandably) be a turnoff. My personal preferences mean that it’s difficult to meet people I’m interested in and who are likely to believe any reasonable explanation for ‘even though I’m wearing a ring, we are all on the same page.’
It is by definition much easier for my wife / both of us, to find a man who is both interested and dealing in good faith than for me to approach a woman successfully.
I don’t harbor any jealousy or concern with regards to my wife, she simply has an easier time with it. One can blame that on the lies that cheating men have told over many centuries, I’m sure.
I’ve encountered a number of women in whom I’d be interested, but… I refuse to take my ring off just to have a chance at meeting someone. Not just because “reasons” and “ethics,” but also because I know for a fact that up-front disclosure is the better path.
“No, I wasn’t wearing a ring when I met you, but I’m married,” is not the way to start off a poly relationship from where I sit. It is, however, an excellent way to scare off the folks who are open to the same.
Neither of us is looking for threesomes per se, and neither of us is willing to dissemble and then later ask forgiveness of the third party.
Haven’t posted all that much on the topic, so… Fuckit. We’ve been married for almost fifteen years. We found a play partner around the five-year mark. That lasted as long as it lasted, and was a great deal of fun - both in person and via internet, subject to collective needs. That person could have handled things better, and I could have handled their less than ideal behavior better. I own my part, there. It wasn’t intended to be long term, and that’s fine - it introduced us to both the lifestyle and the risks, and I am cognizant of what I did right and what I did wrong at the tine.
We’re in a more liberal town than where we spent much of our marriage, but it’s still tough to meet people. Some of that is due to my WFH arrangement, as I don’t get out as much as ‘normal’ folks, but I would absolutely not sleep with someone I worked with anyway - I’m a professional, it has the potential to get really ugly, and could very well ruin my reputation.
Dating sites have proven unhelpful, though much of that was while living in “Kettlecorn, KS” where my wife grew up. Trying to do this in the midwest is ‘hard mode’ to say the least.
I’m not even looking for women a fraction of my age (and I’m not that damn old to begin with), but any introduction brings with it the risk of judgement / ‘If you weren’t married…’
I consider it a damn shame that consensual poly is not more mainstream - people will meet people, and have chemistry, and have sex as a result. Advance consent, in whatever form the couple finds appropriate, prevents literally all of the unpleasantness, feelings of betrayal, etc.
Not an expert at this stuff, but also fairly sure my experience is not incredibly outside the norm.
Not per se necessary to prevent it - either listen to the on-site rep from MT, who raised concerns in OTL that were disregarded, or make that day warmer. All other things being equal, without the crisis, we would have learned a great deal - but not at the cost of several lives.
It haunts me to this day that an improved version of STS would likely still be an option for launches, if only McDonald had been listened to.
I can fault the company, but he made a good faith effort to stop it because testing hadn’t been done at the current temperatures, AIUI.
On the ohter hand, those lives vs [GHWB | Dukakis | anyone else] directly impacts OTL - Arguably, we’d never have a Trump presidency, but Duke is simply a gentler, faster version of the same.
Not sure we wouldn’t still get Bushes, or Gulf War, but certainly what we ended up with would be more tempered, and there’s a real benefit to that. All these years on, perhaps we’d still have the ‘old school’ Republican party instead of the “I’m not a fascist, I swear!” Republican party.
I appreciate the separation between those two concepts, and find that too few people look at it that way.
Every last one of them needs to be booted off Ukrainian soil, of course - that also goes without saying - but the Russian Army has a long history of lying to their citizens, promising money that never appears, and pulling small numbers of people from e.g., remote villages so that surviving families believe they’re one of the few and don’t see the larger losses at scale.
I can’t locate my well-thumbed copy of Grau at the moment, but I’m reasonably sure he substantiates the above at least as far back as Afghanistan.
Lord, don’t even get me started on NC property insurance. Their solution to increasing rates for many years was to mandate that rates couldn’t exceed x, based on what they believed was appropriate.
Protip: It wasn’t appropriate. I’ve been out of that game for long enough now that I don’t know if they ever fixed it, but it was bad - basically if you couldn’t write a policy within x% of the expected rate, the risk had to be ceded to the state’s reinsurance facility, which drastically limited the available coverage.
People do that to me at work frequently - I know you have me on speaker, that’s fine, but you’re in your little private office so no worries…
Nope, Jerry from Billing is sitting there listening to every word, and will jump in and offer “assistance” on topics he knows fuck all about. The person I’m actually trying to assist will of course take Jerry’s input over mine… So why didn’t you just ask him in the first place?
The “good” news - and your landlord might benefit from hearing this in advance - is that as I understand it, you’ll be paid salary for any shutdown period, after it’s resolved. Could be a meaningful amount of money depending on how long. Making sure the ll understands that could buy you some time, but depends on them.
I’ll assume you don’t qualify for any assistance programs given a gov salary and a second job plus your wife’s income. But…. Check anyway. Some states are rather more generous.
I THINK you might be eligible for unemployment during any shutdown, but generally there’s a waiting period of a week, it’s max 2/3 of income with a hard cap, and I cannot cite a source that says you do qualify. Worth diggging into, very state specific.
I’ve taken to gig work, so that the misc money I spend on myself doesn’t come off “rea” income. With a second job that might not be practical, but might be for your wife if you live in or near a relatively safe city. I ignore gigs in my hometown entirely, I make more in the nearest major city and they have “hourly” pay there so I make something worthwhile even without a tip (25% of orders don’t tip, roughly, from my experience).
As far as your mental health, which is the real focus here…. A couple things come to mind.
It’s short term hardship, you need to get through days or weeks - not a way of life. Understanding and actually internalizing that has helped me through some significant rough patches.
If at all possible, don’t short groceries or the miscellaneous money your wife spends on little stuff, including her. You don’t function well without decent food. Aldi is one possibility, can be cheaper for some things.
I’d expect family to be sympathetic to the potential shutdown, but I understand feeling like you shouldn’t ask for more. Guess what, though - they know the position you’re in already, and the potential shutdown is public knowledge as well. OTOH, that’s assuming they are decent humans and that they have the money in the first place. I don’t and can’t know if either are true.
Gotta be honest, selling stuff is a) getting ripped off, b) depressing af, and c) you’ll have to spend money to replace it down the road. It’s to be avoided if at all possible, for all of those reasons.
You’ve already rented a room, that’s more than I’d be able to do - I WFH so the spare room is my office, and the only place I can maintain some confidentiality of data, which is a base expectation of the field.
Don’t know how far behind you are on utilities, but most states make it fairly easy to find just how far you can push “past due”, and what arrangements can be made.
Some states require reasonable payment arrangements to split the bill across future months, some don’t. Worth exploring. You want to keep the lights on, at nearly any cost, because usually they’ll expect entire past due amount plus deposit to reconnect. Same for gas/water, as applicable.
Comcast has offered 10 day extensions to me,for internet only. Have to chat and ask for it, though that may vary by state as well
Also…. Remember there’s no guarantee a shutdown will occur, or last a long time. As we saw, last minute action is very possible. Also, if I remember the timeline correctly, we passed a 45 day CR and there are still 30 ish days left before that happens.
Food pantries if needed - no one there is judging, they wouldn’t volunteer if they did. You almost certainly will walk out with way more stuff than you expected. You’ll need to fill in holes, but that’s a short term way to reduce your grocery bill by a meaningful amount, since most staples are there.
Take care of yourself, it matters. The mental health side of this creates a slippery slope that’s easy to descend into and hard to get out of. Even if that just means sometimes buying a thing you particularly like as a reward for getting through the week. Compare the cost of me making a crab cake once a month, with the cost of additional therapy because I tried to live with zero extras. Silly example, but total self-denial is positively brutal to your brain, and tends to turn desire into cravings.
Wish I had more advice, but I hope something in there helps. You probably took a gov job at least partially because it (generally) offers stability, I’m sorry that our leg branch can’t seem to maintain that.
One more thing - unless you’re likely to get a giant pay bump, now is probably not the time to look for a new job. That takes time to spin up and find the right one, and the long term hit to eg any pension is significant. It also doesn’t solve immediate issues, since generally checks are delayed a pay cycle or so for processing.
Again, I’m sorry this is happening to you, and I wish I could do more for you and your colleagues. You have no dog in this fight, and neither your nor the military’s paychecks should be impacted.
A handful of good fountain pens, a few inks that I really love, and good paper. Those are fairly small amounts of money, and ongoing purchases, but good tools that just work and make me happy when I use them are highly valuable to me.
The priciest pen - which writes amazingly - is not necessarily the one I value most. I get the most use out of a $17 pen, and a $25 pen - multiple of each, really, because i must have allllllll of the inks.
Doesn’t take much - or much money spent - to make me happy, really, and I consider that to be one of the few positive aspects of adulting. Once I figured that out and started focusing on quality over quantity in general, life improved dramatically.
That would be a client side issue - your browser is using Google Docs to display the pdf. What’s in the repo is a pdf only, that works equally well in Foxit or whatever you like.