Sharing Calendars

I recently started sharing my Google Calendar with a few people. This was initially a little scary, because I put everything on my calendar. Any event that I might want to remember goes on there. It's how I organize my life.

And since I'm an open relationship person in a world where open relationship people can have any variety of ideas about how connected they want to be - or don't want to be - to the other romances in their lovers' lives, I've been reluctant to share my calendar with the people I date, even though it would make it a lot easier for all of us to navigate our multiple-relationship plan-making issues.

But I did start to share my calendar with certain close friends like Kat and Kar and Maria, just because it would make it easier to make plans, and it would also be a way of just passively allowing each other to know what's up in our lives. It was a way to be closer!

For awhile I figured I'd just keep it to that kind of close friend, and not share my calendar with anyone else, specifically anyone who might be jealous if they saw who else I was seeing. But I realized that an interesting thing has been happening in my relationships - I'm tending to get into relationships with people who are truly unconcerned about jealousy issues, and who on the contrary are excited to hang out with the other people I date. This really suits my own temperament, because I also feel that jealousy is not a devastating problem, and I'm excited to hang out with my lovers' other lovers.

So I invited Lena and Lauren to share my calendar. Originally I was hanging out with Lena yesterday, and we were talking about the difficulties of making plans when there were multiple relationships to navigate. And we both felt that sharing calendars could have weirdness, the way leaving a toothbrush at someone's house, or meeting their parents, are potentially some kind of 'step forward' in a relationship; but we both also felt that it really didn't have to have weirdness, and could be no more than a convenience.

Just on the topic of meeting parents - I've inadvertently freaked out quite a number of women with that, because I don't attach any significance to meeting my parents beyond the fact that my parents are cool and we should hang out with them; while the other person was thinking, "OMFG is this boy planning our wedding??? It's our second date!!!"

So I shared my calendar with Lena, and she shared hers with me, and then this morning I wondered who else I might want to invite to share my calendar; so I invited Lauren too. But then Lauren had an interesting response - she felt like having that kind of information about me was a little too invasive; and the fact that I'd shared it seemed a little out of character.

So we talked about it a bit, and she decided she was cool having the info about me if I didn't mind, but she didn't feel comfy sharing her calendar with me in reciprocation. So that's how we ended it - she'll keep hers private, and I've shared mine with her.