How To Tell If You're Cheating On Someone

You can’t cheat on someone using the Internet, everyone knows that – that was just cybersex. You can’t cheat on someone who’s polyamorous, they fuck everyone anyway. You can’t cheat on someone if you’re a girl dating a guy, and you slept with a girl, because we all know girlsex doesn’t count. Oh, hey, that was just a blowjob, baby, that’s different.
There are fifty ways to leave your lover, and about five hundred ways of justifying cheating in a world full of crazy poly swinger leather-whipping cuckolds. Once you step into non-traditional sexual area, you’ll find whole relationships devoted to guys sending their wives out to be serviced by strange black men with huge cocks, humiliated daily, all in the context of a loving committed relationship…
…and yet cheating can still happen, even within those boundaries.
Look, folks, cheating isn’t about sex . Cheating is about breaking fidelity.
And fidelity is “Whatever you’ve agreed to do as a couple, either explicitly or tacitly.”
That doesn’t necessarily involve sex. If you’re a swinger couple and your rules are “You can fuck anyone you like, but don’t fall in love,” then in many cases “Going out for espresso and holding hands at Starbucks” is more of a violation than “Sucking his dick on camera.”
This fidelity applies to all relationships, but non-sexual cheating becomes of more import in open relationships – when exclusive sex no longer is the thing that defines you, then the non-sexual things become much more critical. Poly is rife with weird corner cases like that. Did you promise to see that movie with me? Did you go see it with her instead on a date?
Son, you just cheatamated.
The reason cheating is so toxic that it erodes trust. If you’ve broken your word once, then suddenly every other thing you say gets called into question. You say you love them, but is that true? You say you were at work, but is that true? It’s exhausting, and eventually you can’t date a cheater, because life is just too busy to independently verify every fact your lover presents. Eventually, you gotta sleep.
So why people so intent on telling you this wasn’t cheating? Simple: because if you’re a cheater, then everyone agrees you’re an asshole. But if you can redefine the rules of cheating so that you didn’t quite understand that this was off-limits, well, then! You can hold your head high! And, more importantly, you can keep getting your rocks off and enjoying yourself!
…right up until your partner finds out.
That’s the thing. It’s possible to accidentally cheat. Maybe you genuinely didn’t understand how much that movie meant to your partner. And those are hurtful, but contain such aspects of genuine misunderstanding to the point where you can almost – almost – not call it cheating, even though it’s still an act that wounds your partner deeply.
(Still. If your partner cheats a whole lot by constantly not understanding your emotional needs and forgetting all the promises that meant so much to you? Well, then maybe it’s a series of genuine mistakes – but damn, you can’t keep that shit in your life. You have to have someone who knows what’s important to you.)
But you wanna know how you can always, always tell if you’re cheating?
You don’t want to tell your partner.
Cheating is breaking an emotional bond, and if your first reaction is “This is something so special it’s just for the two of us, why should I have to tell him about it?” or “Oh, he’s not ready to hear that right now” or “I just don’t want to deal with the fallout” or “This is hot, and I’m completely fine with him knowing, but I’m just gonna erase my chat history and password-lock my phone and not actually get around to mentioning it ever,” then 99.9% guaranteed you’re cheating. Regardless of what you’re doing.
Hey, you don’t have to share every detail with your partner – Gini has some wondrously hot sex with her boyfriend, but the fine details would make me jealous, so she doesn’t share. And I know she loves him, without having to know every sweet whisper and promise between the sheets.
Likewise, Gini and Angie both know that I sext women periodically. I don’t tell her the fine details of what I got some beautiful woman in Florida to imagine me licking. But if there was a point where I’d promised, “Some day we’ll be together” or I got actually jealous when someone I was sexting was seeing someone else, then that would be something I should mention.
Because that’s outside the boundaries of what we personally have negotiated. I can sext, but not fall in love. I can kiss, but not penetrate. That’s all a unique negotiation between us, and what’s cheating for any single set of people is not necessarily cheating for another set.
There’s also a fine line to be drawn here, because if I suddenly realized I deeply loved someone I was sexting with, I know this discussion with Gini and my girlfriend Angie would be uncomfortable. But I’d also know that it had to be done, and would make sure that it got done.
If I didn’t do it, kept putting it off, then every day I’d be stepping deeper into cheating territory.
There’s a lot of debate about whether cybersex is sex, or casual sex is sex, or whipping someone is sex. That’s not the question. The question is, “Would you be okay telling your partner about what happened?”
If there’s something you’re hiding, then chances are extremely good you’re breaking some kind of fidelity.

A Thought On Female Friends And Crushes

If I have a female friend, usually there’s some mild attraction, since the reasons I would want someone as a friend have a lot of overlap with the reasons I’d want them as a lover.
Not always.  But the thing is, I’m intensely sapiosexual – which is to say I value people’s thoughts over their bodies.  (I have attractions to women who I literally do not know what they look like, but hoo boy can they express themselves.)  So for me, friendship is in a very real way a form of attraction.  I don’t necessarily share the fundamentals of that attraction with them (most of my female friends don’t want to know), but it’s there, a constant backbeat of desire.
And yes, it gets tiring on occasion, all these silly crushes fulminating in my mind.  I don’t know how to turn it off.  Attraction is as attraction does; the most I can do is not follow up.

Surviving Cons: A Guide For Socially Anxious Writers

On the way back from cons, some people play music.  I replay the most awkward conversations I had at the con.
Over and over again.  I think about what I could have said instead, and remember the startled look on their face as they realized what an oaf they were talking to and moved on, and slowly become convinced that the entire publishing industry has silently vowed never to publish any story from me because of that stupid thing I said to Paul Cornell.
This is what it’s like to be socially anxious.  At the con, literally every word I say has me convinced I’m making a fool of myself.  Am I?  No.  People have called me an extrovert, envying my ability to make friends, and my readings are well-attended… so clearly I’m not alienating everybody.
But how do you function at a convention when your brain is screaming at you to shut up?
Step #1: Ignore Your Brain and Go Loud.
Your brain is telling you to shut up – but for writers, cons are about getting attention.  You’re supposed to insert yourself into conversations, talk with strangers, go out of your way to be heard.  This is the only way to make friends.  If you wait silently for someone to ask, “What’s your opinion?” you will be waiting until well past the end of the con.
So you need to remember that a con is a performance.  You are not you.  You are playing a version of you, slightly amplified for public consumption. This version of you will do more than hover around the edges of conversations, smiling jovially – this you will volunteer opinions, for her whole goal during the con is to make friends with other people, and you can’t do that through silence. Even if you think what you have to say is stupid, throw it out there.  The nice thing about cons is that the weirder the opinion, the more conversation it generates.
Me?  I actually have a con outfit I wear to trick my brain into being more social.  When I put on my con hat and badge, I am Con Ferrett – it’s much like Con Air, though full of Con Hot Air – and this helps me socialize.
You may be afraid you will dominate conversations and make people hate you.  This will not happen, because you are socially anxious.  What you are actually doing is making your way past the people who are actually dominating the conversations. To be heard in a crowd you’ll have to be aggressive, so go aggro.  (And it often helps, if you get into an interesting conversation, to splinter off so you’re talking one-on-one, which is so less stressful than group gabs.)
Step #2: Recognize Nobody Cares That Much
It’s a con, and that dumb thing you said?  People forgot it.  They do that.  As a socially anxious person, you’re conditioned to believe that everyone spends as much time analyzing your words as you do… but they really aren’t.  They’re caught up in the conversation, and that joke you made that fell flat isn’t something they’re obsessing over – they’ve moved on.  So should you.
You’re going to say stupid things at cons, make statements that get ignored, sometimes get talked over.  Keep in there.  This happens to other people too, they just don’t let it stop them.
The only truly dumb thing you can do is to only talk about your book.  Don’t market to people.  Just interact.
Step #3: Prepare the Con Via Twitter
It’s hard for the socially anxious to talk to strangers.  But you can use social media to prime the pump, as it were.
See, if you can make a Twitter-friend, and have a couple of @-exchanges with some cool authors who are going to be at the con, then you have a built-in excuse to talk to them.  At best, they’ll remember your clever exchange; at worst, you’ll at least know what’s up with them.  A lot of the reason I do well at cons is that I’m active on Twitter, and Facebook, and various writer bulletin boards, and when I run into people they go, “Hey, we debated whether short stories were a viable way to break into novels!  Hi!”
This will not always go well.  Sometimes, you’ll meet someone who you’ve had grand discussions with online and they’ll just wave “hey” and move off.  It’s not a guaranteed thing.  But being active on social media means gives you a built-in network of people you sort-of know, who can then be catapulted into people you do know.
Also: don’t be afraid to check nametags.  Everyone does it.
Step #4: Recognize the Cycle of Cons
If it’s your first time at this convention, it’s going to be awkward.  You don’t know many people, so you’ll spend more time alone than you’d like. First times at cons are always like this.
But your goal is to pretend to be extroverted enough to make some friends.  Then, the next time you go to that con, you’ll have more people who you know, and those awkward silences will be shorter.  Generally, by the third time I attend a convention, I’ve met enough people that I can’t check into the hotel without running into someone who’s happy to see me.
But that first con’s a slog.  Doesn’t mean you’re a loser.  Just means you’re starting out fresh.
Step #5: Walk The Floors, Walk The Floors, Walk The Floors.
The nature of cons is that they’re composed of many brief conversations.  You talk to a group of four people, then two of them have to go to a panel and the third goes to dinner.  Then you’re alone again. If you are unused to cons, you may feel like this is specific to you, and give up and go back to the hotel room.
Do not do this.  This isolation is normal.  Though you will feel like the biggest loser in the whole damn world when, for the fifth time that day, you’re alone again.
Yet this is how cons operate.  When you find yourself alone, walk a circuit through the con, trying to run into somebody you know.  The thing about talking to someone you know is that it’s an agglomerative process; standing in the hallway, some third person will show up, and hey!  You’re talking to them!  And if that conversation goes well, you now know someone else at the con to talk to the next time you’re walking around. (See also: the cycle of cons.)
Every con usually has one bar where everyone meets, one lobby where people have to walk through to get to their panels, and a con suite where people stock up on food.  If you walk between those three areas, your chances of running into someone is good. (And remember, by “running into someone” we mean “finding someone you know and striking up a conversation.”  Start conversations, don’t wait for them.)
(Also: get people’s phone numbers, when possible.  It’s nice to be able to text con-friends to say, “Hey, what are you up to?”)
If you run into no one, hang out in the con suite and take a trick from my lovely wife: find the loneliest person in the room, the one who’s sitting looking as forlorn as you are, and strike up a conversation.  They’ll usually be thrilled to make a friend, and you’ll find yourself less lonely.
And when I say “walk the floors, I mean it.”  Panels are wonderfully fun to watch, but they’re static; you watch people interact.  You will make very few acquaintances attending panels, though they do provide great conversational grist if an author makes an ass out of themselves.
Step#6: Find An Outgoing Friend.
There are extroverts at cons who love to introduce people to each other.  If you can become friendly with one of those people, they will introduce you around, serving as your social lubricant, making your life far easier.  I myself recommend the services of one Nayad Monroe, but she may be booked.
Do not abuse your outgoing friend.  You don’t want to latch onto them like a leech.  If they wander away, don’t follow, just talk to the people left behind in their wake.
A note to those of you lucky enough to be friended to best-selling authors: if you have one of those, don’t expect them to be your in.  Once an author gets sufficiently large, he will mean well, but he will be so overloaded with obligations that even though you’re good pals, you’ll be mostly ignored at the con.  Cons are work for them, and it’s nothing personal that they can’t hang with you as much as they’d like.
Step #7: Plan Your Meals In Advance.
Dining is a social event at cons, and “Who is dining with who” becomes a matter of great import.  While you can luck out at conventions, sometimes glomming onto great groups (“I had dinner with George Martin!”), usually you’ll wind up casting about for people to eat with and feel pathetic. It’s stressful and sad, asking people repeatedly, “So, you got dinner plans?” and having them all say no.
So plan who you’re eating with before you get there.
Again, this is where social media helps, especially if you’ve Twitter-friended people you’ve met at past cons and can put out the call in advance.  But the effort of trying to find people to dine with often exhausts a slender store of energy.  And speaking of that….
Step #8: Recharge.  Relax.  Withdraw. 
As a socially anxious person, you’re probably saying, “This seems like a great deal of energy.”  It is.  I’m often wrecked for two or three days after a convention.
So guard your energy levels.  If you’re getting tired, go back to your room and read a book.  Sleep in in the mornings.  Carry snacks to keep your blood sugar levels up.  Yes, a con is a performance to some extent, but there’s a very real and very tender you behind this slightly more-outgoing person, and you need to protect that lovely you.  Some people are going to be talking 24/7, staying up until 4 a.m. every morning yammering on to vast audiences – that’s not you.
This is a lot of effort you’re going to, and a brave thing you’re doing.  Respect the work.  Respect yourself.
Step #9: Read The Comments. 
I’m throwing this open to other socially anxious writers to ask: what do you do to get past your neuroses at cons?  What helps you out?  I’m open to all suggestions.

Lens Flare vs. Film Scratches

So Eric Meyer posted an interesting response to my Instagram rant the other day:

I have a theory that the popularity of their faux-aging filtration is that it triggers our often unconscious assumption that age increases worth. It makes that picture of you and your bros doing beer shots at the bar seem more important and special because only the best, most special pictures are kept long enough to age. You must’ve been one special crew, to have that picture still around and looking like that.
And when you combine that with the arty framing and subject matter of half of Instagram, where you have a tilted washed-out sepia shot of a beer glass on a table in a garden, man, it’s like you just produced one of the lost works of Ansel Adams.
This is why I’m not so sure that people will look back and laugh the way we do at, say, synthdrums or autotuning. Those were brand-new things that captured our shiny receptors for a while, then wore them out with overuse. The veneration of aged artifacts runs a lot wider and deeper.

The thing is, I’m not sure this will turn out to be true.  The reason the Polaroid look is so popular now is because this generation associates it with faded Polaroids, which is what signified “old” when they were children.  But the upcoming generation of five- and six-year-olds will not see Polaroids a lot – we’ve shifted into the era of disposable camera photos, which don’t look all that different.  To them, this Polaroid look will most likely be interpreted as “Why did everyone in the 2010s bleach their photos out of color?”, in much the same way that we look at the 1960s as a riot of clashing colors (ignoring the African roots) and the 1970s as a bunch of horrible disco suits.
But it could also be that this technical limitation becomes the shorthand notation for “age,” and they absorb that into their psyche.  I mean, lens flare was basically defeated in the 1970s, but it had been ingrained in people’s consciousnesses so much that movies started putting it in because “lens flare” signified “hot, unbearable sun.”  It’s gotten to the point where they artificially insert this effect, at more cost than it would take to leave it out, into videogames.
You see these sorts of technical glitches making their way into the modern consciousness.  I was watching a Disney trailer where everything came to a sudden halt, and they used the “needle scratching across the record” noise to indicate that the music had shut down.  But this was a movie for eleven-year-olds.  They barely know what a CD is, let alone an album.  Yet that noise will outlive the technology, having become a shorthand to a generation that won’t even know what it was originally for.
Whereas other glitches don’t make it.  Oh, you’ll see the “scratchy film” look occasionally in videogames to indicate old film, but you’ll also see stuttering DVDs and hand-held cameras to use that.  I doubt the scratchy look will become a universal.
So there are two paths for the Instagram look: it becomes a cliche, and thus laughable, or it becomes shorthand for “aged” and retains its veneration.  And I’m not sure which path it will go.  The future still holds many fascinating mysteries, and that’s why I’d like to be alive to see it.

Why Mitt Romney Was Scheduled To Win The Debate

I knew Mitt Romney would win the debate about a month back, because I saw what happened to Obama and Kerry.
See, in 2004, everybody knew who John Kerry was: robot Frankenstein flip-flopper.  We all knew he was stiff, couldn’t relate to people, constantly vacillating, a mess of a campaign. The man was an incompetent, a sad loser elected by some mystifying luck to hold the Democrat’s flag this year.  He would get destroyed during the debates.
Then he showed up and spoke pretty well.  Hey!  People were surprised that he wasn’t that bad!  He got a bounce in the polls.
Likewise, in 2008, Obama was too callow to play in national politics, a boy with no real experience, a shell of a man who would collapse at the first real touch of challenge.
Then he showed up and spoke pretty well.  Hey!  People were surprised that he wasn’t that bad!  He got a bounce in the polls.
Then in 2012, the narrative was that Mitt Romney’s campaign was in shambles, the man making gaffes left and right, Mitt too clueless and too rich to relate to anyone.  He’d look like a doof at the debates.
Then he showed up and spoke pretty well.  Hey!  People were surprised that he wasn’t that bad!  He’ll doubtlessly get a bounce in the polls.
The point is that the media loves a narrative about winners and losers, and magnifies everything going in.  Once Mitt starts to lose, that becomes the defining point of his campaign, and it becomes such a speaking point that people tend to forget that you don’t get to run for President of the United States without sounding good to someone.  And what happens every time at this point in the campaign is that the guy who’s been smeared the most actually gets to step out from underneath all of everyone else’s impressions and speak directly to America…
…and guess what?  They actually aren’t nearly as doofy as they’ve been made out to be!  And people go, “Oh, this guy is way better than I thought he was!” and revises their estimates of him. Every freaking time.
Now, I hear tell that Romney won fairly decisively this time around, for two reasons: first, while Obama is near-unstoppable if he has a chance to prepare, he is not quick on his feet.  That doesn’t mean he’s dumb, any more than the George Bush Sr. was dumb because he didn’t speak well off the cuff.  People have various strengths, and Obama is very smart but not particularly good at the cut-and-parry of debates.
Second, Romney sounds good if you know nothing.  I overheard his spiel about “We’ll cut everything that makes us beholden to China,” and damn if that didn’t sound sensible!  Now, his solutions were fucked – as has been noted, cutting the funding to PBS is like trying to regain space on a 500-gigabyte hard drive by deleting text files, and his idea of “Let’s kick it back to the states, who are also now going broke!” is a recipe for collapse.  But if you don’t know that stuff, it sounds good.  And that’s what we’re always fighting against – the people who don’t know anything and like simple solutions.  That’s why Clinton’s speech was so passed around – it was a good synopses for people who knew no better.
Will this victory lead to Romney’s victory?  Didn’t for Kerry.  Doubt it will for Romney.  But you write off Mitt at your peril.