5 Levels Of Relationship Comfort I Never Want To Reach

I get it, I really do. Finding true love is a wonderful thing; having a best friend, someone to share in emotional and physical intimacy, the blending of two lives — a special kind of closeness, if you will.

I get it and I want that, too. I just don’t want all of that. Some of that closeness is just much too close for me, and there are a few relationship comfort levels I never want to reach with my partner. Ever.

Consider this relationship advice for your partnership:

1. Watching my partner use the restroom

Don’t even try to sway me on this one. I hear your perspectives and I’m deeming them invalid. I don’t care that it’s a natural part of life and “everyone does it.” Do it with the door closed.

There’s no part of me that wants to see or smell what just came out of my partner’s digestive tract. I realize that a medical issue or illness may change this at some point, and I’m certainly not uncompassionate enough to shun someone because of poop, but on a regular basis, I don’t want to make this a part of my life.

2. Farting around each other

This to me is just as bad as the toilet. This is basically the bathroom’s foreplay, and I don’t want anything to do with this. Even if my partner is cool with me farting around him, I’m not cool with it.

Farts are like sex-death pheromones, and my partner can just keep his butt breath to himself, thank you very much.

3. Sharing the details of my menstruation cycle

I’d like to think of myself as a proud, feminist woman who embraces her body for the life-giving vessel that it is, but that doesn’t mean I need to share everything it does with my partner.

I have a friend who went camping while on her period and was scared that bears would be attracted to her tampons buried in a hole somewhere in the woods. She made her boyfriend come with her every time she peed so he could take her bloody tampon, put it in a large Ziploc bag, and take it back to the tent.

They slept with a bag of bloody tampons in their tent for five days, which didn’t even phase them because he knew everything about her period right down to routinely examining her flow in the toilet.

No. Absolutely not. I can be comfortable with my body without wanting someone else to be just as comfortable with it. He can buy me tampons, chocolate, or rub my back, but then I’d like him to back off and let me take care of the rest.

4. Giving up appearances

I never want to get stuck in the daily grind where we just give up impressing each other. I’m certainly not saying “let’s watch TV in a mini dress and a tuxedo,” but I don’t ever want to get to the point where my partner never sees me in anything but sweatpants and a t-shirt.

I want to retain a little bit of the phase where we try to impress each other because if we aren’t willing to impress each other, there’s always someone else who is. So the “we’ve been together long enough that anything goes” level of comfort? I never want to get there.

5. Ogling other people together

Right now, I practice a polyamorous lifestyle and I’m absolutely fine with the men I date pursuing other women. But if I were to end up in a monogamous relationship, I wouldn’t want to watch my partner sexualize other women.

I see a lot of my monogamous friends and their partners openly chatting about the different people they find attractive under the umbrella of “eh, we’ve been together long enough, we know we aren’t really going anywhere.”

Nope, I wouldn’t be okay with that in my own monogamous relationship. If I’m going monogamous and saying “one is enough for me,” then I wouldn’t want to make my partner feel like he wasn’t enough to look at. So, fantasies? Please keep them to yourself.

Do I want someone to share my life with? Yes, I do — just not all of my life.

Eden Strong is a writer and regular contributor to Lifetime Moms, XOJane, Scary Mommy, and more