OLNE 02: Preparing Yourself For OLNE
Introspection and Self-awareness
Recognize where you are in your personal growth and development, what you want in your relationship, and explore what you deeply desire, what you’re willing to explore, and what you adamantly are not willing to participate.
Becoming clear with these helps you communicate them with your partners so that you can recognize what channels you align and what channels you don’t align.
You should not align on all channels. Encourage each other to pursue those avenues, people and platforms where they can pursue those alignments if it’s significant enough for them at any time.
OLNE Vision Interview
The OLNE Vision Interview is a crucial, yet simple, activity to conduct primarily at the beginning of developing a sexual relationship that helps manage expectations for a satisfying and fulfilling relationship dynamic. In one sheet of paper, answer the following and present them with your partner:
- What is your long-term vision for yourself? What does your life look like 10 years from now?
- What sorts of things are you into intellectually, emotionally, and sexually?
- What sorts of things are you interested in exploring and what sorts of things are you unwilling to tolerate?
- Who are your top 4 partners or potential partners?
Write these answers down and share them with your partner or partners. Facilitate a nonjudgmental space of ‘communion’ – a place where it’s safe to share and rejoice in each other’s communication.
Do not seek to align with your partners. Prepare these questions before the interview so not to influence each other. The intention is to celebrate each other’s individualism and recognize where you may align and what avenues each might help the other pursue their desires.
Revisit this Vision Interview from time to time as they can radically change. Change is not only inevitable, it’s encouraged and celebrated in ONLE. Hold a space of radical support and personal growth regardless of whether the changes are aligned with either partners.
Personhood Growth
Personal growth and development are an essential aspect of OLNE for a successful relationship dynamic. “Personhood” growth is a manner of personal growth which involves character and personality along with the other aspects of your life.
Some aspects of your character:
- Authenticity: your comfort in communicating without fear of judgment or external expectations, therefore coming off as genuine and sincere. Never pretend, as pretense always comes off feeling pretentious.
- Emotional maturity and resilience: Emotional maturity is your ability to manage and respond to your emotions in healthy and constructive ways. It’s your ability to perceive emotional triggers, manage your reactions, and empathize with others.
- Empathy and Interpersonal Skills: Empathy and compassion are important aspects of your emotional intelligence critical to facilitating relationships. Empathy is showing understanding about another person. Compassion is empathy and a kind and appreciative, proactively caring response. Interpersonal skills include effective communication, active listening, collaboration, and conflict resolution. “Interpersonal” means person to person, i.e. people skills.
Authenticity
It should be a surprise to anyone that not more people are more authentic and sincere. The most respectful thing you can do for anyone, particularly those you love, is to present yourself as you are in its entirety. You honor them the respect of having to decide for themselves whether to take you as you are or not.
If, when, they do accept you as you are, they’ve automatically qualified themselves as being a great person to be around. The best people to be around are the ones that accept you as exactly who you are.
Emotional Maturity
Let’s extricate the definitions, beginning with ‘maturity.’
Maturity is the state of being further along in its development.
Separately, “intelligence” is your ability to acquire and apply knowledge.
‘Emotion’ is your “feels,” an instinctive or intuitive ‘feeling’ that’s apart from reasoning or knowledge.
‘Emotional Maturity,’ therefore, is your being further along, and advanced, in your emotional intelligence. It’s your ability to manage your emotions as they can only be managed rather than controlled.
Interpersonal Skills
While you never need to be anyone you’re not nor strive to pursue skills outside of your desires, interpersonal skills are wondrously helpful in facilitating relationships, not only for yourself, but for your partner. It also ensures a healthy community, whether it’s a community of two or more relationships.
Interpersonal skills involve communication skills and emotional intelligence. Communication skills involve listening, conversating, arguing, and organization management. Emotional intelligence involve empathy (your ability to transpose perspectives), compassion (having empathy and an intrinsic desire to help), and understanding people’s wants, likes, desires and boundaries.
- Communication management tips
- Being a good conversationalist is an incredible attractant. It involves an understanding of “give and take” dynamic. When in conversation, recognize who’s facilitating that conversation. You can refer to it as “holding space.” As the facilitator of that conversation, maintain an 80/20 dynamic where the conversation is about 80% them and 20% you. As the conversation progresses or deepens, it can move more towards 50/50 but always beware where that percentage is. If it ever becomes 80% about you and 20% (or less) about them, recognize it’s becoming a very boring conversation (even if you’re entertaining).
- Listening is different from ‘hearing.’ Hearing is your taking in the data through your senses and interpreting it. Listening is your ability to take that data and communicating with them your understanding of what you’ve ‘heard.’ This can be done in many ways, primarily through ‘active listening’ – the manner which you signal to them whether by body language, sounds or by words, that you’re in communion with them. To be in communion is the sharing and deepening of your intimacy.
- I do not argue. Arguments result in individuals strengthening their position of their argument since that is, after all, how they’ll be able to argue, which results in their developing a bias and emotional investment in their position. Instead, learn about their perspective regardless of whether it suits you or you’re in agreement. Remember that our decisions and positions are not in our control (since our psychology, emotions, and circumstances are determined by our biology, neurology, genes, culture, upbringing etc). Explain your protocol, method and reasoning to why you’ve come to that conclusion and find out whether you can come to a compromise. If you can’t come to a compromise, this is completely okay and neither parties are required to. At that point, ensure you have a protocol or system in place that supersedes and solves any stalemates. This is why organization management is critical.
- In organization management: all things that are organized structures, are an organization – whether it’s an organization of two people, a family, a small corporation, a large corporation, a political party, a state, a country, etc. Organization stand to have better dynamics when there’s a formal structure in place to default to (e.g. a situation where there’s no compromise). This makes everyone involved happier. Even when someone is not in the favor of the structural management, they can at least rely that there’s a structure/process/system in place that they can rely on. We’ll explore more on this on the Chapter in Organization Management.
- On emotional intelligence
- Empathy is your ability to transpose perspectives. This means your ability to view the world partly or entirely from the perspective of the person whom you’re communicating with. No one in their own mind believe they’re inherently wrong and you’ll always find yourself in situations where you don’t share the same perspective with others. Empathy is recognizing this is completely okay and the goal of communing and communicating with others isn’t to change their minds (you can’t change people, only they can change themselves). Empathy is about appreciating others for who they are and accepting them where you do.
- Kindness and compassion are sometimes viewed as weakness. These are ironically highly emotionally intelligent character traits, not to mention enlightened. We also recognize that nothing we do is actually selfless and altruistic, and I don’t suggest you be those things. In fact the opposite. I empower you to become enlightenedly selfish: a recognition that everything we do is self-interested and it’s also very self-interested to facilitate a healthy and happy community. Your [selfishly] helping others and recognizing very few people in the world are really out to get YOU is a highly intelligent thing. Most people are inherently good and we’re all merely the byproduct of chance from things we have zero control.
- We define ‘intimacy’ as, “how well we know another.” Full stop. That’s what intimacy is. The very fundamental aspects of intimacy is how well we know another’s desires, wants, likes, and dislikes. Intelligence, being the acquisition of knowledge, is recognizing those things about another person and being able to be in community with them while accepting and honoring those things about them.
Overcoming Common Fears and Concerns
Jealousy
Jealousy is a compound emotion, not a primary one. It’s a compound emotion of 2: fear of loss and rage from feeling that fear of loss.
Many believe jealousy is inherent in loving someone. They forget the very first moments when they’ve begun to love them, how fundamental love was to the definition we give it: our wanting for our beloved’s happiness, well-being and actualization. Jealousy for them, over time, grew more sinister as the sensations “fear of loss” and “rage from that fear of loss” grew so that their belonging to them became more important than their “beloved’s” happiness, well-being and actualization. Hence, they employ conscious and unconscious behaviors to inhibit their partner in pursuing what makes them happy and actualized.
Jealousy is sinister. It’s anti-love in all important respects.
You overcome jealousy by recognizing the fundamentals of OLNE is your genuine desire and wanting for your beloved’s happiness, well-being and actualization regardless of your involvement.
Demonstrating the aspect of your support for their pursuit of what makes them happy and fulfilled without your involvement becomes critical in demonstrating to them this unconditional love.
It must be demonstrated. Otherwise, no one will believe your love to be nonconditional. For you to demonstrate it, your love must truly be nonconditional and your desire for their happiness and actualization must be genuine.
Insecurity
“There is no security beyond the grave.” That’s a colloquial way of saying there’s no such thing as security.
Security is just a sensation – a feeling.
There is no amount of wealth, network, resources that will give you security. Just a feeling of it.
e.g. how many billions do you need to be able to have security when you’re on a plane assuredly crashing into the earth at 500 mph?
You can be Steve Jobs at the age of 56 with more money than you’d know what to do with and have no security from pancreatic cancer.
‘Insecurity’ – the anxiety one feels because of uncertainty is a confidence problem. When it comes to relationships, we overcome insecurity through increasing confidence and managing expectations.
Confidence
‘Confidence’ is how well you can rely on something to be true.
Confidence is not bravado. Confidence can only come from experience. Confidence without experience is arrogance since it can only come from best estimates.
Confidence, the feeling, therefore, comes from certainty. When you’re absolutely certain, your confidence is bulletproof, is effortless, and it radiates onto others. Confidence is a ‘knowing’ rather than an ‘estimating.’
When it comes to insecurity, one of its primary culprits is your lack of certainty of that which you’re insecure, whether if it’s in your relationships, yourself, or your safety.
Find the thing that you don’t have certainty about (hence causes the sensation of insecurity) and get clarity about it.
This clarity gives you certainty.
A critical and essential aspect of self-confidence and relationship-confidence you need clarity is expectation management.
Expectation Management
There are 3 aspects to ‘expectation management.’
- Manage what you expect of yourself
- Manage what you expect of others
- Manage what others can expect of you
Managing these are the key to your overall happiness and fulfillment in yourself and your relationships.
- Manage what you expect of yourself.
Think of your personal expectation management as whether they’re appropriate or aggrandized.
If they’re appropriate, they’re based on sound reasoning. You develop something called “reasoned confidence.” Reasoned confidence is the certainty you get because you’ve gone through good reasoning to have it. Part of that reasoning is by demonstration. Part of it is best estimation. - Manage what you expect of others.
Humans are wonderful that there are no two alike. Even genetically identical twins develop very different circumstances from gestation and have radically different outlooks as they age. Imagine non-identical non-twins.
Recognize that even those whom you have plenty of commonalities are drastically different from you in many other areas. Do your best not to make presumptions.
Presumptions are the enemy of expectation management.
The less presumptions you make, the happier and more fulfilled you’ll become. This is even true with people you’re incredibly intimate since even we can be different based on the time of the day and day of the month.
Managing what you expect of others requires your ability to communicate well in the realms of genuine curiosity about them and a desire to commune (be in community) with them. - Manage what others can expect of you.
Your ability to manage what others can expect of you is an S-tier skill.
On a grading level of A, B, and C – A being a high echelon and C being a low quality grading… S-tier is one that’s a ‘Special’ or ‘Super’ echelon that supersedes a high grade.
The more appropriate, concise and complete you can communicate with others what they can expect of you, the more confidence-inspiring you become. To inspire confidence is to instill others’ confidence in you.
This is a skill and it’s a skill, like all high-level skills, that can be used for harmful manipulation. So long as your intention is for the betterment of all parties involved and that you remain strictly within the realms of what others can truly rely on you upon, you’ll be able to maintain an effortless (requiring no undue effort) and happy existence and relationships.
Societal Stigma
If there were a drawback or challenge when facilitating an OLNE relationship, it’s that it’s against social norms. The standard model which most everyone adheres and base their entire identity and livelihood around is the paradigm in which they live. Their limited knowledge of relationships (in the sense of how it can be facilitated) forms a stigma around the notion of “open love and non-exclusivity”.
For a completely comfortable approach to the decry of others who don’t understand the wonders of OLNE, consider the following…
Validation
To seek the validation of those you don’t know nor admire is insane.
e.g. A painter, at the final strokes of his painting, looks to his pet goldfish and asks what it thinks of his art. The pet goldfish swims about in its little circular bowl. The painter looks at the goldfish and the painting and rips it apart saying, “You’re right. It sucks!”
To seek the validation of ‘observers’ whose opinions have no value or bearing on you as a person or your work, is literally insane.
Most people look to the validation of others who they’ll never get to know, meet, or care about, who they don’t admire or respect. This is absolutely insane.
The only opinion that matters are those from people you admire. These people can even be your constituents or subservient as you can admire their admiration for you, so their opinion matters.
This is an important distinction since there can be relationships where you’ve due respect for them in some areas, yet no admiration in others. So you make a delineation whether their opinion truly matters in this area.
Reasoned Confidence
Reasoned Confidence is the certainty you exude because your position if founded on sound reasoning.
Reasoning is an explanation, justification, thinking, and understanding utilizing the process of logic. The process of logic is systematic approach to thinking where you analyze information, identify patterns, utilize established rules and knowledge to come to a well-substantiated conclusion.
When you have reasoned confidence, you can approach anyone or any body of people, and be able to comfortably propose the manner which you approach your situation. This is among the values of our work with OLNE, that you develop this confidence because what you have is truly something special and what relationship you hold is something most people inherently, and often unconsciously, desire.
So while you may not get the validation of your peers, family, or community for the relationship you have, simply remember that the most important thing is that you’re validated by the results of your own decisions and your relationship is based on the happiness and actualization of those that are your beloved.
