intimacy & time 🕰️

one of my partners is a talented, intelligent philosopher with a passion for time and its passage. "clock time is the enemy" is their motto. since meeting them, this phrase made its way into my vernacular. before we met, we had no idea that the other's profession dealt with time. or in my case, never-ending cycles and loops. or if you’re a fan of the good place, you’re familiar with the concept of time’s passage as jeremy bearimy. i worry about how there’s never enough time to do the things that i want. or how complicated things are when time enters the picture.

time plays a central role in our lives, whether we realise it or not. the chinese understood this when they came up with the dynastic cycle. this is a framework for understanding the turnover of various dynasties. (tbh, eastern history is rich and rife with pre-BCE treasures.) astrologers conceptualise time by tracking planetary cycles. we map them to various events in real-time (including events in our own lives.) we, as humans, grapple with time as we age and grow into ourselves. my relationship with time flows and is as intimate (if not more) as the ones i share with humans in my life.

meeting new people as a polyamorous person takes an inordinate amount of time. dating feels like a second job, one that I’d like to opt out of when saturated. yet, when things go well, i embrace whatever amount of time i spend with people i actually like. when i like someone, i want to pour myself into them (as Venus demands of me!) this process demands executive functioning skills to juggle many moving scheduling parts. which in turn, requires even better communication to execute. timing isn’t always ripe for new connections. i’m too busy tending to my existing relationships, both to the human and non-human, and most of all: with myself.

a suitor of mine and i embarked on a date where we just walked around for hours and talked until the wee hours of dawn. it reminded me of my favourite movies (the before trilogy) and the temporality of love, romance and intimacy. while my unabashed favourite out of the three films is the middle one, the last entry in the series (before midnight) makes me realise and truly understand how deep intimacy and security are earned.

when we think of 1:1 relationships, the first thing that comes up for a lot of people is the concept of attachment styles. attachment theory refers to child-caregiver dynamics at its core, but society took on the challenge of adapting it for adult relationships. the more i engage in healing relational trauma, the more i conceptualise attachment styles to be flexible. my caregivers helped me default to a disorganised attachment style, but with certain people, i share secure attachment. however, with most folks, i find myself flitting between anxiety and avoidance. i can probably count the number of secure attachments i have on one hand.

secure attachment is earned.

in fact, I’d venture that the only way to have security is to put in the hard work. in before midnight, we experience the realities of an idealised romance. our two protagonists spent the last 18 years orbiting around each other. when we encounter them in this film, their conversation clues us into the intricacies of their romance. it’s a challenging watch (for me) due to the visceral tension during the film’s peak. their fights are brutal because they know exactly what to say to piss the other person off. there’s an understanding in the body language and facial expressions that gives any trace of hidden emotion away.

i re-watched before midnight and noted how it underscores my most secure relationship: the one i share with my fiancé. there are more differences than parallels. for one, t and i met online, and not on a train to vienna. however, it doesn’t discount the nine years that we share together (much like jesse and celine.) over the span of almost a decade, my fiancé and i work to understand each other, and furthermore, use this intimate knowledge to compromise and work things out.

our relationship opens us to richer, deeper and more meaningful conversations. before we opened up our relationship to polyamory, our lives revolved around caretaking. we talked about our jobs while circling around our various interpersonal connections. while we still chat about the mundane, we now find ourselves reflecting on how we want to spend our time meaningfully and wax about the world around us. honesty and transparency lead to earned security and intimacy.

i cannot pretend that we are immune to stress or bad days. there are times that love (in and of itself) is not enough to keep the relationship going. t and i borrowed the phrase “I love you and I like you” from the infamous leslie & ben from parks and recreation to underscore the depth of our connection. sometimes there are moments when we don’t like each other, and we’ll be upfront about it. we don’t even have to say it— t huffs hot air out of his mouth, or i’ll pout and whine until i get my way. but we know that and we’re in love anyway. real love takes hard work. it takes concerted effort and an immense amount of labour to compromise. with the more-than-human, it requires more patience and the understanding that not every desire will be catered.

since becoming a professional astrologer, my perception of time has gone from linear to cyclical. as i age, my relationship with time becomes less fearful, and one of reverence. one of my friends and colleagues, maeg keane, wrote an excellent thread on twitter (linked above) about how astrology views time as cycles, as looping and weaving threads. the way that humans actually perceive time that isn’t a capitalist construct differs from the way that western society dictated for us.

i’m left to unravel the spools of damage that clock time enacted onto my existence. a lot of this pain took place before my conception, and radiates through my bones, ingrained in my DNA. what does my attachment to the aftermath of time on my family do to myself in the present? how do these things affect my future? these are all questions i pose for myself (and for my loved ones) when i started to pull the narrative thread of time apart from its home and begin to weave it into my own tapestry.

if we reject the concept of clock time, we’re left to make up our own definitions of what it means to us. for astrologers, it means following the endless threads that make up the tapestry of the world. for death workers, it could mean living each day in precious relation to others as we’re constantly ticking down to our own mortality. for myself, it means an abundance of things— but not in the linear, straightforward sense.

how have you been relating to time? how does time help you contextualise your own relationships (to yourself, others, spirits, nature, etc?)