The phrases “no drama” and “no expectations” are really starting to bother me…
at least how they’re used in the kink scene.
Obviously no, I don’t want my relationships to consist of shouting matches or have someone declare they love me on the first date. But I often don’t get the feeling that that’s the context in which these phrases are actually being used.
“No drama” seems to mean anything from “Don’t stalk your ex to their cabin at Leather Camp and then yell at them in front of all their cabin mates at 4:00 am” to “No, I don’t want to have a difficult conversation about our expectations for our relationship” to “We don’t want to hear about how you were abused”.
“No expectations” is a phrase I initially embraced when I started having lots of casual sex and was trying to work out how I actually felt afterwards. (I’d initially believed that, as an assigned-female-at-birth person, I couldn’t have sex without falling in love with someone, and my personal truth was turning out to be far more complicated.) “No expectations” was a good mantra to fall back on when the sex turned out to be bad, or I got stood up on a first date, or when people forgot we were going to be hooking up at an event, which are all kind of unavoidable when you’re first setting out to figure out what the big deal about relationships is.
But as time goes on, I find that some expectations are actually worthwhile to have. I expect you not to be a sexist douchebag. I expect you to understand that we can’t fuck without some form of birth control AND taking steps to minimize STD exposure. And finally, I expect you to actually be there for a scene when you say you’ll be, even if this is a one-time hookup and we plan never to see each other again. I don’t expect “love” or even “liking”, but basic respect, sex ed and punctuality are the bare minimum I’m willing to settle for.
How I usually see “no expectations” used, though, is in the way I used to use it as a mantra, which can sometimes be no help at all. “I think I am developing feelings for him…” or “This person doesn’t seem to be treating me very respectfully, but we only agreed to causal sex…” aren’t things that can easily be worked out by yelling “NO EXPECTATIONS” at them. Like Holly said in her “Geek Social Fallacies About Sex”,
“This is when it’s time to tell your partner ‘hey, we need to talk, I’m feeling an emotion!’ Solving the problem may involve changing your relationship boundaries, it may just involve talking it out, or it may mean you have to end the relationship. But the solution is never ‘that is an incorrect emotion, please stop experiencing it.’”
I’d prefer something like, “Expect nothing, but be prepared for everything” or even something like Captain Awkward’s “Boundaries, dude. They save lives”. (Even though that particular article didn’t have anything to do with sex, it kinda sums up her whole outlook on boundaries in general, so yeah, go read her blog if you haven’t already).
I know a lot of my followers on here are in the kink scene and on Fetlife (where I most often see these two phrases in print), so I’d love to see how you feel about them. Do they bother you? Seen any examples of where they were used well? Or are they just memes that got overused until they’d lost most of their original meaning?
Whether or not I was the right person to write to (and this is where I make my seasonal disclaimer that I am licensed and qualified at nothing), it’s good that you wrote to me, because one of the ways that we survive sketchy situations is to tell our stories to other people. The act of telling the story and naming what is going on is powerful in itself and sometimes that matters way more than who you tell the story to. Inside your house these behaviors and the way your Dad makes you feel might start to seem normal after a while – look at how he’s got you questioning whether you’re the one who is out of line or whether you have a good reason to feel what you feel? But outside of your house, when you tell other people? We’re here to sound those alarm bells with you: NOT NORMAL. NOT OKAY. UNTRUSTWORTHY.
It’s not your job to fix your dad or your family. It’s not your job to keep the secret that everything is happy in your home, or to keep the peace.
So yeah, a goodly portion of the people I love most in the world – the people who have stuck by me and believed in me through everything, the ones whose kids will grow up knowing me as Auntie, the ones who took me to Paris, the ones who helped me move, got me jobs, worked on my movies, pulled me out of my shell during sad times, cheered me on during great times, who first encouraged me to write, this amazing urban family – came to me directly or indirectly through ex-boyfriends. I’m getting a little weepy (in a good way) as I write this. Maybe our specific kind of romantic love didn’t last forever, it still changed the whole course of my life profoundly for the better. Love is not wasted in the end.
Some kinds of pain hit you hard and fade quickly…like a hit from a cattle prod. Some pain hits you and seems to fade only to freakishly worsen, and then mark, and then leave deep bruises as time passes, like a cane strike. And other wounds are dormant, there and unknown, until abruptly brought to the surface to terrify with their manifestation. And I’m working my way through all of that shit.
We live in a society where there’s this idea that you’re either in a long-term relationship or taking steps to get there. But if you read diaries, what you find is, that’s not what a lot of people are doing.
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Arianne Cohen, author of The Sex Diaries Project, talks to our Jessica Bennett about what she learned reading the diaries of 1,500 Americans. (via cheatsheet)
Adding this to my pile of ebooks to read.