The Old Same Place
(1985–1986)
Through bitter strife, as man and wife,
We started life anew as friends.
I’d do things better over again;
I’d do things better over again.
—from “love of my life” by morning glory zell, 1993
MG: As exciting as it was, I had been deeply worried that we might end up footing the bill for an expensive expedition that would siphon off the nest egg that we had managed to build out of the Unicorn project. I wanted to use that money to buy land, to pay Alison for half of Coeden Brith so that we would finally be landowners and not just tenants. But we never could manage to set up a meeting with her to discuss this. Partly it was the eternal problem of no telephone, but we also got the impression that she might have been dodging this issue with us.
More and more it seemed that Otter was more interested in listening to Orion’s grand plans for spending our money to fund the expedition and then trying to recoup the money by selling a documentary. I remember a huge argument where Orion accused me of selling out the future if I didn’t go along with this plan. Why was I so opposed? Well, for one thing, we’d had some hard recent experience in trying to interest either Hollywood or the scientific community in real live Unicorns to no avail, even when the animals were standing there and crapping on their floors, so I seriously doubted that there would be a great overwhelming rush to buy a video of real live Mermaids from us, whatever they turned out to be. Otter originally proposed that we would create a complete budget for the entire expedition and then all the members of the expedition would contribute equal shares for making this thing go forward. But it quickly became apparent that most of the friends who wanted to go along could barely afford the airfare and maybe to pay something for their berths on the dive boat; but no way could this bunch of fellow Hippie explorers pull together enough dough to invest in renting a whole boat to sail a very long distance, as well as all the equipment, and to pay professional photographers to shoot a film. We were able to get a few outside friends to invest some money in buying shares of the profits (if any) of such an endeavor; but at the most, when the deadline came for putting the down payment on the dive boat, we only had raised about $12,000 additional funds for all our efforts.
Oberon told me at that point that he had talked to his father and that after the financial success with the Unicorn, his dad was considering funding this trip. He went off to talk with his father, and when he returned he told me that everything was taken care of and that we had a green light to go forward. As it turned out, that was not in fact the case, but I will be generous and say that there was perhaps a miscommunication between them.
OZ: The Mermaid expedition had cost about $30,000, and we paid over half of that out of the $50,000 we got up-front from the circus—the rest being paid by investors. After also paying off our bills and credit cards, and putting in a pond on the land, there wasn’t a whole lot left. We held our big Beltane Festival on the land, and we asked people to contribute $25 to help pay for the feast and the new campsites we had put in. It was a small charge to pay for meals and a four-day festival, but people just had a fit, because up until then we had never charged for anything. The idea that we would charge even a small amount that would just pay for the food was an outrage to people. But over two hundred people did come anyway—although many of them refused to pay, because Alison told them that they were her guests and did not have to pay for anything. So we went even further into the hole with that.
A few weeks after Beltane, Alison finally showed up. And we thought we were going to finally have our meeting that we had been waiting for. She had some Ecstasy, and offered it to us. Apparently she had gotten involved with this new fellow who had turned her on to that drug. They had bonded pretty tightly. What seemed to be going on, which we didn’t understand at the time, was that he wanted to move up to the land. He was basically talking her into getting rid of us and putting himself there in our place, which eventually happened.
Somewhere in the course of the experience of tripping and being opened up, she said, “Okay, I’ve decided that I want you guys to leave.” We thought that she had finally come to talk to us about selling us a piece of the parcel; we expected that we were going to be there forever. We were stunned. At that moment we were pretty broke, but the deal with the circus would give us nice monthly payments over the next four years. But instead she gave us an ultimatum to go and a few months to do it. She said, “Just be gone by the fall.”
OZ: Marylyn Motherbear, in a true act of generosity, invited us to come up and live at her family’s place, called Castle Yonder. But we had decided that we really ought to move off the land altogether and make a clean break. We started looking for a place to live in the Ukiah area.
While we were looking elsewhere, one thing came down that was devastatingly painful to us. We were told by the folks then living at Annwfn, which had been deeded to the CAW by Gwydion, that under no circumstances should we consider moving up there. Even on a temporary basis. To be told that by our own people, who were our Nestmates and water-brothers in our own Church, really hurt; and they would never tell us why. What we eventually found out (fifteen years later) was that it was a campaign that was waged by Orion himself. He had been up there as a caretaker, and had cheerfully helped us spend the money for the Mermaid expedition. But we could never understand Orion’s antipathy towards us; I always thought that he was my good buddy. This cast a shadow over our relationships with other people in the Church as well at the time. It felt like a deep betrayal. It was a closing of the doors by people we trusted and considered our closest friends.
MG: Right after Alison evicted us, I had just had a hysterectomy and I couldn’t walk very well. And that’s when we were told we had thirty days to leave. It got down to the wire, and there were rumors that Alison was going to call the sheriff. We were packing up our belongings and trying to find a place to live. Right about that time my grandmother died, and she left me a small bequest. It was just enough to put the first and last month’s rent down on a place to live. We had been searching for housing for months, and there was just nothing available that time of year. It was looking like we were going to have to move into a one-room shack behind a Mexican bar. But I had a dream one night that we would find a place where we could live with our family and our animals; in the dream it seemed as if this refuge would be “between two things”—we had a Unicorn, a whole menagerie of other critters, and at that point my teenaged daughter, Rainbow, was living with us too. She could have gone home to Gary, but she said she didn’t want to abandon us in our hour of need.
NARRATOR: By that time Morning Glory’s father had died, and her mother had moved up to Northern California to be near her. Polly then came to the rescue.
MG: Literally at the eleventh hour, I went down to my mom’s, and she had just found a place in the paper and called them up for us. I drove right over there as fast as I could. There, between the highway and the river, was this little place between the worlds. We went in. There were a bunch of people who wanted to rent the place, and I thought that I had to do something to make us more desirable than any of the other people that they could rent to. So I said, “Is it okay if we have pets here?”
And they said, “What kind of pets?” I told them we had a Unicorn, and I pulled out a picture of Lance and showed it to them. That pretty much sealed the deal. When I went back to see the landlady she had a whole collection of china unicorns, so the unicorn magick came through for us when we needed it the most.
OZ: We had expected to live out our lives in the woods when we moved to Greenfield Ranch. We thought we would die and be buried there. But we’d been there on a Mission, and now our assignment was over. That completed our whole Greenfield Ranch phase of our lives. But we retained the lessons that we learned, and the wisdom and the experience. The new Mission became to take it all back out into the world in a new way. When you’re an explorer you really don’t complete the Quest until you return to the place from whence you came with the gifts that you have gained from the adventure. Whether it’s maps of new territory or magical treasures that you have found, whatever it is you have to bring it back.
NARRATOR: Morning Glory and Otter Zell returned to live full time, once again, in the outside world. It was a different place from what they had left behind eight years earlier. The plague known as AIDS had appeared and there was no cure, or even hope, in sight. In his first four years in office, Ronald Reagan had not mentioned AIDS once while talking to the public, and had done nothing to impede its spread. When the Zells left the Ranch, Reagan was in the second term of his presidency and spending huge amounts of money to build up America’s military power.
But there were reasons to be optimistic. In 1982 The Mists of Avalon, the novel written by Marion Zimmer Bradley, had come out in hardcover. Bradley was friends with the Zells. They had been to literary salons at her house in Berkeley while she was writing it, and listened to her read early drafts of some of the chapters. She acknowledged them in the credits of the book, which became a national bestseller and helped to increase public awareness of Goddess spirituality. Witchcraft had grown in popularity while they were away from the Pagan community, as well.
It was time for them to pay attention to their families and friends, to get jobs, to find a new community, and reconnect with the rest of the world.
FARIDA FOX: I think that moving off the land was the best thing that ever happened to them. Then they had to start dealing with a different reality, the one that the rest of us were all living in. They had to start seeing how they could blend their concept of things into the larger world.
And there were a lot of hair-raising things that happened and many things that were difficult. But there was more development that took place as far as really discovering what their true talents and abilities to do things were. I think they’re doing much more of the things that they were meant to be doing, and the things that they do best.
NARRATOR: When I was interviewing Oberon about their move from Greenfield Ranch, he referred to their new home as “the Old Same Place.” It was on the Russian River (which, in a reference to Tolkien’s Middle-earth, they called the “Rushing River”) at the corner of Highway 20 and the road up to Potter Valley. Once upon a time it had been a kind of a roadhouse, so there were a couple of farmhouses, a number of small cabins, a social area that had been the bar and restaurant, and a big lodge their landlord built for his family.
I didn’t have to ask OZ what “the Old Same Place” meant; that name is from a comedy recording, released by the Firesign Theatre in 1969, called “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye.” It was on side two of their LP How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. Getting together to listen to the Firesign Theatre was a ritual not just in CAW Nests but in dorm rooms and Hippie pads across the country. The records were intentionally multi-layered, so there were always new things to be discovered by listening to them over and over, and doing that with friends was a real bonding experience. Something like “the Old Same Place,” which doesn’t make much sense when taken out of context, can be simultaneously symbolic and hilarious to a Firesign fan.
There are a couple of reasons why I am mentioning these things. First, the experience of getting together with family or friends to listen to a story is not something that is a regular part of life for most adults today. But it is an activity with a long history, and it is very much a part of the Zells’ spiritual world. Telling a story to a group of people sitting in a circle is what they are all about.
And secondly, I think it’s important to point out that Morning Glory and Oberon have been through some tough times, and as we begin this chapter they are in one of the toughest. But something that has kept them going, and kept them together, is their shared sense of humor. No matter how difficult their lives have been, they have always been able to step back for a moment and find something amusing in what was happening. And that is a part of their magick.
And so I return you now to our story, which is already in progress . . .
OZ: During that same period of time we started reviving the Church. It hadn’t been very active in the years since we’d left St. Louis. We held festivals on Coeden Brith and Annwfn, but we didn’t deal with any kind of national organization or do anything on a larger scale. We rarely even had board of directors meetings or elections, just the legal minimum. Our biggest events during those years were the tree plantings that Gwydion held over New Year’s, where we planted thousands of trees. We didn’t do anything on a larger scale than what we did on the land. The day after Alison told us we had to leave, we held a CAW board of directors meeting on Annwfn to begin the process of getting the Church back on its feet. It was a matter of re-creating the whole Church from the ground up—not for the first time, nor the last. Indeed, we evoked the legend of the Phoenix as a metaphor for CAW’s second resurrection (the first having been in St. Louis).
We held our first Clergy Retreat at the Shaggy Mushroom temple (Gwydion’s old yurt) on Annwfn for the purpose of envisioning the new CAW as we wanted it to be. It was a very beautiful experience, as each of us in sequential order told of how we first came to the CAW—starting with me. I was profoundly moved as each of my beloved Waterkin recounted our first meeting (for, in every case, I was their first connection). We all shared water and had a big snuggle-pile that soon developed into sweet lovemaking. This was the most profound bonding experience we’d ever had all with each other, and with that foundation, we knew we could build a powerful Church.
Out of that experience and that wondrous weekend, we formulated our new CAW mission statement: “. . . to evolve a network of information, mythology, and experience to awaken the divine within and to provide a context and stimulus for reawakening Gaea and reuniting Her children through tribal community dedicated to responsible stewardship and the evolution of consciousness.”
We moved into the Old Same Place in the beginning of October. That was a big thing for us. We had been living on the Ranch for eight years! We got one of the three-bedroom farmhouses with a fenced-in backyard where we could put Bedivere (Lancelot was still at the circus at that time). There was an almost identical house right next to it, but it wasn’t immediately available. So Diane and Zack stayed with some friends on a farm.
The Old Same Place had a beach that was totally private, and our landlord Johnny was pretty tolerant, so we could have skinny-dipping parties there as long as none of the other residents wanted to use the beach and objected to nudity. We had our Beltane Festival up at Annwfn and started having our summer Sabbat festivals on our beach: Litha (Summer Solstice—June 21) and Lughnasadh (August 1). We took over having those because it was not really a good idea to have campfires up on the Ranch in the summertime for events at Annwfn. The risk of California wildfires are a very real and present danger, and besides, the roads were all dusty and dry and not good for cars. So we started holding the Church’s annual membership meetings on the beach as well.
MG: We loved living on the river and doing rituals there; it lent itself to so many wonderful possibilities. We would have ceremonial baths and ritual baptizings; we had brightly colored clay pits dug into the soft beach sand to do body painting and mud baths; we could send inner tubes down part of the river to the beach, where the rafters would be greeted with ceremony.
NARRATOR: Another major change in the world had happened while the Zells had been in the woods: Apple Computer had released the first Macintosh in 1984. Imagine what it would be like to live in a world without home computers, to go away for years, and then return to find Macs waiting for you. That’s what happened to OZ. He jumped right in and got a job in Ukiah at the Green Mac, which was one of the first desktop publishing businesses. He quickly learned how to use a Macintosh 512 computer, which is extremely primitive by today’s standards but for those days was phenomenally advanced.
OZ: I started learning the desktop publishing programs—especially PageMaker. That was a big thing. There had never been anything like that before. I enjoyed doing that work, and I was very much in demand because I could create original art as well as do the layout and designs for the projects. Some of these were quite complex, such as intricate, pop-up 3-D card models of ferryboats, cruise ships, cable cars, and the Golden Gate Bridge for souvenir packets—I loved designing these, as paper models were something I’d been into since I was a kid. I also illustrated and formatted restaurant menus, New Age workshop brochures, book and record album covers, billboards, and even entire books.
After about a year or so, a vacancy came up in the house right next to ours, and Diane and Zack moved in there and became our next-door neighbors. And so we were able to completely unify our family at that point, and we did everything together. We ate dinners together. We watched TV shows together. We went to movies together. We traveled together down to San Francisco for rituals, sci-fi cons, and other events. We had three kids at that time—Morning Glory’s daughter Rainbow was living with us, plus Zack and my son Bryan, who’d come back after completing his stint with the Army.
This way our kids got to have siblings—being an only kid is kind of tough. It is ecologically appropriate for people to be satisfied with having one offspring, but it doesn’t entirely work for kids who are growing up. So the perfect solution is to have one kid from each of several relationships, and have the kids all grow up together; that way they get to have the brother and sister thing.
DIANE DARLING: I eventually moved up to the place that they had found, in another house on the little compound. We lived up there happily for quite a long time.
My house was Honeydew Cabin. My son was growing up. Morning Glory’s daughter was around some of the time, and Otter’s son was also around some of the time. Morning Glory’s mother, Polly, lived in Redwood Valley, and she was a big part of our family. She was a fundamentalist Christian, but she was a true Christian that Jesus would have recognized. She called herself Pollywog. So we had a lovely family. Otter was part of Zack’s upbringing.
At Thanksgiving we invited our Pagan friends who were like orphans to come over. We’d cook a turkey, and Morning Glory would always make her pumpkin soup. Of course we celebrated all the Pagan holidays, too. We basically wanted to celebrate anybody’s holiday, especially if it had food! Polly was a major Christian, so we would do stuff like get together to go sing Christmas carols around her trailer park. She was proud of us because we knew them all.
ZACK DARLING: Otter used to have Archimedes, the great horned owl. He had this perch behind Otter’s easy chair, and he would just sit there and chill throughout the day. He had a broken wing because he had been hit by a car. We got him through Critter Care, which was this group that we were part of that took care of animals that had been hurt. Archimedes was our watch owl—we used to say that if anybody came and robbed the house, he’d watch ’em. The Jehovah’s Witnesses came over one day, and they were sitting there yakking with Otter, and Archimedes turned his head and looked at them. The woman was totally shocked, and said, “Your owl is not stuffed!”
And Otter said, “What kind of a man do you think I am? I wouldn’t have a dead owl in my house! That’s disgusting!”
OZ: Archimedes was a wonderful member of our little family. We got him very shortly after we moved to the Old Same Place. During the daytime, he stayed in the house, mostly sitting quietly on a perch I made for him behind my big comfy chair (with a litter box on the floor below). In the evening, I would take him out into the big aviary I built over Bedivere’s corral. I would have to kill a rat for him every night, and place it on the platform in front of his owl-house. So I also had to raise a colony of rats—for both Archimedes and Fluffy, Diane’s enormous Burmese python.
Owls are marvelous birds to have as house pets, as I discovered when I was a kid and brought home little screech owls to live in my bedroom. Archimedes was calm and mellow, and would never dream of biting or hurting anyone. I took him around to schools just to introduce kids to him. We did the same with Fluffy.
Archimedes and Octobriana—our awesomely intelligent tortoise-point Siamese cat we’d acquired when we first moved to Greenfield—were quite competitive, and were constantly playing “Gotcha!” with each other. I think it was because they were different versions of the same archetype—night hunters of small mammals, with huge eyes and round heads, as well as moveable ears. I think Octobriana, however, regarded Archimedes as some sort of an insult—a parody of a cat, as it were.
Often Archimedes would sit on the inside sill of our big picture window, looking out in reverie at the world he couldn’t return to. Octobriana would be outside, and spot him there. She would sneak quietly up to right underneath him, and then she would suddenly leap up onto the outside sill right in front of him with a flourish. Archimedes would nearly topple backwards in startlement.
But one day he got his revenge. Octobriana was curled up asleep on Morning Glory’s comfy rocking chair, at the other end of the sofa from my chair and Archimedes’s perch. I saw him watching her thoughtfully, rocking back and forth on his feet. Then he quietly hopped over to the back of the sofa and edged along it until he was on the arm. And with a sudden flourish of wings and clacking of beak, he leaped onto the arm of the rocker, going “Boo!” Octobriana levitated a foot into the air and took off with all legs spinning. Whereupon Archimedes, very well pleased with himself, sauntered calmly back to his perch and preened. For the rest of the day, I could hear him periodically chuckling to himself: “Gotcha! Hee hee hee.”
Morning Glory, Diane, and I got to be very well known in the local community. In addition to my participation in the chamber of commerce, I even joined the Odd Fellows. People would come to us for readings, spells, advice, mediations, magickal training, initiations, rituals, and so on. We did presentations in the local schools for such occasions as Hallowe’en. With a supportive team of other members of the Church and the Ranch, we created major public rituals, celebrations, and events—such as the Human Be-In; the Summer of Love twentieth anniversary; a Hallowe’en haunted house; a Beltane Maypole dance and festival; weddings and funerals; installations of political offices; and presentations to local groups, such as during National Women’s Week.
As a family, we were a bonded team. When Zack got into trouble at school, all three of us “parents” would show up to talk to his teachers. We’d go to his soccer games and concerts. It was pretty clear to everybody that we were a family. And it was not that unusual, in that there were a lot of kids whose parents had been divorced and remarried, but were still friends, so it wasn’t at all uncommon for kids to have three or four parents. We even home-schooled Zack for a while. He was having some academic problems at school, so we took him out and did the whole independent study program.
ZACK DARLING: Otter was my science and history teacher. The lessons that he gave me were so much better than any schoolwork I had ever experienced in a classroom. It wasn’t exactly home-schooling—it was called independent study. I was officially enrolled in the school, and I was getting school credits for it.
Being a Pagan kid was really challenging, because there were a lot of Christian kids in my school and I found myself under scrutiny. The Christian kids would always want to debate me, or they would just call me “Satan worshipper.” That put me in a position in which I needed to learn a little bit more about it than the other kids because I felt a need to articulate it. So at a young age I had to come up with a lot of information about Pagans, Witchcraft, and Magick, and the history behind it and how to help people understand it. I told the Christian fundamentalists that it wasn’t really possible for me to believe in Satan, because he wasn’t part of my religion.
GAIL SALVADOR: I went to Ukiah High for a year. It made me appreciate my nice, liberal schools in Eugene. My mother and I did not get along very much. We fought a lot. We had kind of a love/hate relationship. She was kind of a Stormin’ Norman, because her father was that way. So that’s what she knew.
I never identified with the names that they gave me. “Rainbow Galadriel” is not me. I chose the name Gail really quickly the morning I was registering for Ukiah High. I had this epiphany that I was going to a very small, redneck high school in a redneck town, and I was going to be the new kid, and my name was Rainbow. And I thought, “Oh God, I can’t face it. I can’t do it.” I thought that I could seize the opportunity for a fresh start. Right then and there I wrote “Gail” down on the registration forms. It was basically a shortened version of Galadriel, because I was not a seven-foot-tall blond Elf queen. I still have Rainbow as my legal middle name. When I was about sixteen, I had my name legally changed to Gail.
I felt like I pretty much blew off my entire sophomore year at Ukiah. I had this learning disability that I never got help with until I got to college. I struggled and worked really hard to finish high school. It was not easy for me. But I was determined not to be a dropout like a lot of my friends. I had been hanging out with all this riffraff, the rockers and stoners in Eugene, and then I went to Ukiah.
In Ukiah I started liking the preppy aesthetics. So when I moved back to Eugene I decided I wanted to hang out with the preppies. I started dressing preppy and being very label-conscious. I cut my hair differently and looked really conservative. A lot of people had a hard time with my name change when I came back. They didn’t understand why I did it. But they didn’t have to live with it, and I did. So I switched social groups, and that really helped me finish school.
CERRIDWEN FALLINGSTAR: Gail and I continued to be in contact. She felt like I was the voice of sanity from her childhood. At fifteen she went to go live with the Zells for a year or so and go to high school. She called me up one night, all angry and freaked out, and said, “I went out on a date last night. And my mother handed me a condom at the door! I said, ‘Mom, I’m not that kind of girl! You want to know what gets me orgasmic? Shopping malls!’” She was totally rebelling and going to the other side: materialism. She would call up periodically to complain.
MG: My idea as a parent was that being a mother of a daughter meant giving my daughter the kind of possible tools to develop herself, including sexually, in ways that would be safe and whole and together. So that she wouldn’t have to end up pregnant or with a disease or all screwed up with guilt and a whole lot of stuff that was inflicted upon my generation. It’s always like that—we always try to give our kids what we would have liked to have had when we were growing up, but they have a whole separate constellation of needs. So, it’s like we give them what we would have wanted to have as opposed to what they need.
So I was trying to give my daughter the benefit of the sexual freedom and birth control information that was not available to me as a teenager, which women had fought so hard to gain access to. But instead, she felt that she was being rushed into sexuality, which was never my intention. She didn’t yet have a handle on how to really express her differing needs and often pretended to be a lot more knowledgeable than she really was at the time. I was also pretty hard-headed and strident about my viewpoints. We did enjoy sharing heavy metal music together though, and went to a Dio concert together.
I certainly felt it was her right to change her name when she came into her selfhood; after all, I did. Frankly, I think she chose well: a gale is a kind of storm, and, being a Scorpio, it really fit her personality a lot better. It’s kind of funny because Gary and I had actually considered naming her Stormy at one point, but then we figured we should cut us all some slack and go for something a little more cheerful.
DIANE DARLING: Morning Glory and I were very happy, because we were both bisexual, and we each had a wife, which was so cool for us. We would gang up on Otter when he would start to get too out there. Otter and Morning had a very contentious relationship. I was never a part of that because I am so not the drama queen that she was at that time.
MG: Living next door to Diane was great because I had a best girlfriend and eventually co-wife to share everything with. We were both into animals (especially horses), magickal and ritual stuff, medical stuff, and women’s issues, as well as polyamory. It was during this time as part of an attempt to explain the rules of the road that OZ and I had painstakingly hammered out together, that I came to coin the term polyamory. At the time there were a half-dozen different words being used to describe what we were doing, but a lot of them seemed to define themselves by what they weren’t doing—non-monogamy, for example—and I always think it’s better to have a single, clear, positive word to use when attempting self-definition.
Otter and I still fought a lot, because we were two really strong egos that continually came into collision. We wanted to forge a magickal partnership—the vows that we swore at our wedding had to do with coming together as a single unitary being. We were working on melding our souls, and we were really going for it. And in doing so—it’s not exactly what you would call a natural process. But we were convinced that we could make it happen, and we weren’t going to quit.
I suppose it can all be boiled down to the words great expectations. The problem with expectations is that you project what you want to create onto something, as opposed to appreciating what it is now. In order to forge a lasting bond, we had to get over our assumptions about what that bond had to be before we could actually manifest it. So we fought for ten years over what it was and how we could still maintain our discrete personalities, while melding ourselves into a cosmic union. We would have these amazing, magickal sexual bonding events in our lives, and then not long after that we would be having a really horrible argument that would go on for hours and hours, and days and days, and be really painful.
This went on all the way through Greenfield and till we moved to the Old Same Place. Then it really came to a peak. One night we’d had one of these huge arguments that had started out with us planning to go out to have this wonderful evening together, and then instead, we had a big argument. This went on till like three in the morning, and we were both finally exhausted sitting in the bedroom, and I had my head in my hands and I said, “Why do we always do this? Why do we always fight like this?”
And OZ looked up and he had this clear look on his face, like he does when he has a visionary breakthrough, and he said, “I think I actually know, but you probably won’t let me get the words out or you probably won’t listen if I tell you.”
I was completely drained emotionally. I got very quiet and then I said, “I’ll listen to what you say without interruption. I really do want to understand.” Because what we were arguing about—even though some of it was actually productive like learning how to lay down rules, and how to conduct a triad relationship fairly, how to go about making a genuine apology when necessary, and how to be in an honest relationship 24/7 with each other—a lot of it was just tailspinning and arguing about trivia.
And so he said, “Well, I was on the debate team when I was in high school. And you were on the debate team when you were in high school. And we both really love a good debate. And we click into that debate mode, and everything else goes out the window. And we lock horns, and we’re carried away by the process of affirmative versus negative.”
He said that, and it was like a giant light bulb went off above my head. I said, “You’re right. That’s absolutely it! We get locked into a pattern that we were trained for. And when we turn that ability against each other, it just spins itself into this huge, devouring, catastrophic black hole.” So at that point I said, “Well, you know, what we need to do is find some way that we can play for ten points and then quit.”
And he said, “Yeah, because we’re never going to not argue; we are never going to agree on everything. But it doesn’t have to mean the end of the world. It doesn’t have to mean that we don’t love each other, that we don’t want to be together, and that there is something wrong with us. It’s just that we’re having a debate. And we need to create some distance from it, instead of having every single disagreement be a cosmic event.”
From this breakthrough, we were able to heal our wounds and work towards better ways to deal with our arguments. We did a lot of study, took classes, went to workshops, read a lot of books on new ways that we could interact together that would maximize the amount of productiveness in our conflict, and turn the conflict around so that it would be productive (as opposed to destructive). So we weren’t tearing each other apart. What we were working on was taking a hypothesis, and tearing that apart, and testing it, and recombining, until it was something that we could both look at and say, “That’s good! Now we’re both in agreement.”