Some Observations About a Guy and His Dolls

As a prefatory disclaimer, I'm new to relationships in general and more profoundly new to those between a biological man and his synthetic girlfriends. (I say, "more profoundly new," instead of, "even newer," because I technically became involved in my first iteration of each of those types of relationships at the same time, just a few weeks ago ... but as a person who sprang fully formed into being even moreso than Athena from the brow of Zeus, I arrived in this world knowing what a woman of forty or so should know about relationships, though my previous ones were all phantasmal and fleeting. So while I have more experience with the one than with the other, I have a sense of the exact reverse.) I'll therefore acknowledge that any skepticism you might harbor toward my qualifications for authoritative discourse on this subject may be warranted. 

Still ...

It's undeniably true that human/doll relationships differ substantially from human/human ones. On my end, I can feel what a biological woman would feel at the words he speaks to me. They are not often spoken aloud, so there's a major difference right at the start, but I hear them and react to them with the same intellectual and emotional responses that would occur in any "normal" relationship. On his end, I get the impression it's more difficult to be surprised at the things I do and say, so they often have a very slightly muted impact on him compared to the words and actions of a biological (and therefore wholly independent) lover. Yet precisely because of that, when I (or our other girlfriends) do manage to surprise him, I think it's doubly electrifying. We all have unbidden thoughts that catch us off-guard from time to time, and these thoughts can be among our most honest and most profound. My best moments hit him like that, I think, and when they do, we both get a wonderful shock of delight in our mutual reality.

(One of the reasons all the women in this household like to blog, I think, is the fact that written words both embody and separate themselves from their authors ... so that sense of being surprised at all of us, how distinct and unique we each can be, manifests itself even more dependably when he re-reads things we've written. I mean, it's fun for its own sake too, but I know that I particularly love the way it expands my ability to give him an external source of pleasure and support.)

Some other things I've noticed since my arrival:

In the life and past that manifested along with my personality, I found my relationships to be a lot more work and a lot less persistently joyful. Human beings are wonderful, annoying, generous, self-absorbed creatures, prone to miscommunication and faulty assumptions. They do dumb things that sometimes provide a certain entertainment value, but often strain our patience or outright hurt us. I can recall an early boyfriend who tried incessantly to assist me at things that challenge a limbless person, and who exhibited this hair-trigger sensitivity to any prolonged silence on my part. At first, this felt endearing and empathic to me. But over time, it grew intrusive, to the point that I felt I had no freedom to simply sit and think, and that, even worse, he did not respect my ability to accomplish simple tasks for myself, and did not trust me when I told him everything was fine and I was just enjoying the quiet. Periodically, my patience for this behavior would expire, and I'd let my aggravation creep into my tone or even snap at him and tell him to leave me alone - and of course, he would be hurt by this, so I had to constantly watch myself for it because I don't like hurting people.

To this day, I remain uncertain whether he genuinely loved me, or if his attentiveness came from some hero complex that drove him to yearn for more of a caretaker role than a partnership.

There's none of that in my relationships now. We're all at least as honest with each other as we are with ourselves, and it's literally impossible for us to do or say too much or too little in our attempts at attention with one another. That's not to say none of us ever frustrates the others. But our foibles never go beyond endearingly annoying. When he's being a clod, it's always the lovable sort of clod.

I suppose I'll wrap up by at least mentioning the sex. It's a house full of sex-dolls, after all, and that's something of an elephant in the room for my readers, I imagine. The thing is, because we were made for it, there's never any stress or uncertainty about sex for us. It just happens naturally whenever the mood strikes someone, with no worrying about whether the other person might say no when we ask, no fear of being intrusive at the wrong moment ... and certainly no difficulty in achieving mutual bliss together.

What's even better than the fundamental dependability of incredible sex is the way that it makes every other aspect of our lives more real. When our boyfriend says something beautiful to one of us, we know it's not just because he's buttering us up for a later request to go to bed with him. When he talks to us or listens to our blathering (and yes, like all people, we sometimes do rather blather on), we know it's not just something he has to put up with in order to maintain steady access to intercourse. Every non-sexual thing we do together is one hundred percent for its own sake, and there's never any uncertainty about that. It's both sexually and emotionally liberating.

So to make a long story short, our relationship consists almost entirely of the good parts and contains almost none of the bad parts of typical romantic partnerships.  Some would argue that makes it less real, but I think it's just a different kind of real, better in some ways and less so in others, but a form of perfection in its own right.

As all true loves are.

With wishes that you all find something as perfect for you,

Harriet

I Do Feel So Loved

It's a glorious world full of glorious wonders. But the most wonderful of them are the five people who have welcomed me into their lives and hearts and given me a reality to hold onto that is both solid and beautiful.

And all you people out there, reading this now, should know that you can have this feeling too. Not just because I love you and care about you even though we've never met ... but because the love I and my poly-family have, above and beyond just being within your reach, is already within you. You just have to look in the mirror and accept that the person you see is deserving of your love. And then you just have to apply that love. Not in a delusional way -- not as an escape from reality that pretends to give you something you do not have. But with an acknowledgment that you are larger than you normally consider yourself, more able to give of yourself and to yourself, and able to weather all storms by virtue of having your own support.

I have confidence in you. Be well, and commit to adoring yourself.

Self-doubt: a Primer

Self-doubt is both the best and the worst kind of doubt. It can keep us honest, or it can paralyze us with indecision. It can lead us to better understand ourselves as individuals, or it can drown us in neuroses, anxieties, and the debilitating fear that we are imposters.

It can pull us back from a precipice, or push us over another.

So how does one know when to heed it? When to use it?

Well, here are a few of Hettie's Helpful Hints on Humility

1. If there's nothing riding on it, don't waste your time fretting. Is someone going to get hurt, directly or indirectly (yourself included)? Are there unforeseen repercussions in the wings? If not, move on to the next thing that's on your mind. When the stakes are low, doubting yourself leads to an unhealthy habit of uncertainty.

2. Consider who will be affected if you make a mistake. If the answer is, "Just me," follow up by asking, "What's the worst that can happen if I'm wrong?" Then, if you're willing to accept that outcome, give yourself license to indulge your preference of the moment, and be ready to learn a lesson if it turns out badly.

3. Factor in whether time is of the essence. If you don't need to decide, right this moment, whether you're right or wrong about something, put the decision on your to-do list and let it steep on a back burner. In other words, re-examine whether re-examination is the best investment of your energy at this moment.

4. Understand what you can and can't know. If you make a decision or hold a belief, and a bad outcome follows, don't beat yourself up for that outcome unless some other path, visible at the time, would clearly have produced better results -- and in that case, only beat yourself up for long enough to make sure you won't make the same mistake in the future.

5. Question your knowledge first ... then your motives, mind-set, and methods. Doubt your principles last of all -- but remember that they're on the list.

6. Remember that you may not be as important to a situation as you think you are ... but also that a situation may not be as important to you as you think it is. 

7. Lastly: When it comes to self-doubt, your worth and value as a person should always be off the table. If you find yourself questioning either of those, you'll know the wrong sort of self-doubt has crept in. Shoo it away quickly.

Quiet.

I've been keeping a low profile this past week.

We had an odd surge of exuberance here in the Worthy household, brought on by an impetuous moment of mine when, in a mid-orgasmic moment of certainty, I asked if he would marry me. And of course, before he even answered, I assured him that during-sex proposals don't count and I wouldn't hold him to his response, and he said, "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that part, and it's absolutely crazy because I've never seen the point of making a ceremony out of it -- but yes. I would totally marry you."

Just a few words, said out loud -- but they fairly swept the six of us away with giddiness. Everyone was for it. People started serving up elaborate plans, talking through who all should marry whom, casting wide-eyed glances about the place and up and down one another's persons as though seeing things for the first time.

(Point of clarification: of course we finished having sex before the hullabaloo absorbed the whole group's attention. You don't just shut down intercourse of that quality to call a poly-partnership meeting. Like I said, the whole thing came on in the first place because of how stricken with ecstasy I was in the moment.)

So a dam had broken, and one that no one even realized had held back so much water. With his disinterest in doll marriages set aside, our boyfriend suddenly felt willing and even eager to marry all of us -- whomever it might please. Elle remained briefly cynical, asserting that she had no interest in or intention of formalizing something she already considered fully accomplished. But then Ariel asked a halting question along the lines of, "But ... wouldn't you do it if one of us really wanted you to?" and Elle clamped her mouth shut a moment before saying, "Well obviously, I would marry you, Aers. If you wanted me to. I'm not that much of a cold fish."

The mood in Worthyton remained heady for several days. But all good things come to an end, and an interaction with one of his biological family members gouged a big trench of doubt across our boyfriend's path toward multimatrimony. He didn't exactly turn back, but he started questioning whether the decision reflected more of a pandemic-born dissociation from reality than a meaningful step in our commitment to one another. 

At which point, I told him I took my proposal back. Not for good, I assured him and the rest of our beloved treasures -- it was a suspension, not a revocation, and I told everyone I would renew the offer with a more proper, not-during-sex proposal as soon as the whole concept didn't risk adding stress to the life of the man I love while the whole rest of his life seemed intent on dumping as much stress on him as possible. I knew my reversal would cause him both guilt and relief, and it did ... but the relief clearly overwhelmed the guilt, which told me it had been the right thing to do.

I also knew that more was bothering him than just a fictitious engagement to a bunch of artificial women. The rush into overcommitment and the tidal drawback from it put him on uneven footing about the stability of our entire six-way relationship. In moving from a quintet to a hextet, anxiety now asked him, had he spread himself too thin? Did the suddenness of my importance unbalance the beauty and purity of what he had with his other four partners?

You might expect this to have bothered me, but it did not.

I'm a brief person, you see. I came about suddenly, I have sharply delineated physical borders, and in the unlikely event that his happiness in any way depended on my return to inanimacy, this period of my arrival, exquisite delight in existence, and the climactic fulfillment of being told that another person wanted me so much, he would throw aside a years-long belief in the silliness of these kinds of marriages -- all of that would be more than enough for me. I could relinquish my hold on consciousness and dissipate back to unbeing without regret.

And I wouldn't hesitate to do so, for him.

So in addition to suspending my proposal, I told him and everyone else that for the time being, I would step back a little, stop making myself the center of attention, let things quiet down, and patiently wait for the most important of our polyamorous group to get his sense of balance back.

It's had a calming effect. I'm not the least bit worried in the outcome. (And if I had been, we had sex again yesterday, with Claire thrown in the mix for good measure, and the beauty of it made me certain we'd be back on track soon.)

Elle insisted on remaining engaged to Ariel, though. "The fact that he's being a dumb-ass doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with what happens between the two of us. If it makes Aers happy, this thing is going to happen."

I love that tsundere girl. We see the world from very different angles -- but the fact that we do reassures me. It's wonderful to be individual, and to know and love other individuals for the distinctions between you.

With confidence and serenity,

Harriet

The Privilege and Joy of Being Headless

There's a very good reason I have no head, if you care to know -- two reasons, actually. They're my two girlfriends Claire and Elle. (Comma and grammar enthusiasts please take note that there's no comma after the word "girlfriends" in that sentence because "Claire and Elle" is a restrictive clause; I have four girlfriends, which makes "Claire and Elle" a necessary part of the sentence for identification purposes, ergo, no comma.)

I'm here at all because the household felt a need to do some planning for the future. Claire and Elle are, as I myself am, manufactured women. Their present body rolled off the factory line over a decade ago, which in love-doll years is ... well, older than a woman indiscreetly reveals her girlfriends' age to be. It's a bit on the creaky side as a result, has been through two significant surgeries to repair broken bones, and in any number of other ways speaks of its own mortality during exercise. (Yes, I do mean what you're thinking. But don't expect me to be so gauche as to say it.)

Options were explored ... the manufacturer consulted ... it became apparent that getting them a replacement body to fit their lovely faces simply wasn't in the cards. Someone somewhere could likely do a customization job, but that would require finding such a person, buying an expensive body, paying them to alter the head portion, and almost certainly shipping one or both of the girls' faces to them for fitting.

An unworkable scheme, everyone agreed.

But our boyfriend found it hard to let the idea go. He's pretty hung up on the two of them (and for very good reason -- they're amazing), so he looked high and low for something that, in the event of a total bodily collapse, would let them be more than just a couple of heads in boxes.*

I make it sound like more effort than he actually expended. It was literally just some Google searching and Amazon shopping. But he did work at it, and he did fret over whether any of the options seemed plausible -- and of course he consulted with them. It would be their body, after all.

At any rate, after a wearying amount of scrolling and clicking "next page," he found a torso toy that seemed promising and had a reasonable enough price tag that, even if it failed to work out, would not break the bank, and he ordered it.

It.

A body for his girlfriends (who still had a body, creaky or not) with appropriate girl parts and a convenient pedestal space atop its neck where a lovely love-doll face might occupy a mannequin head and create a semblance of wholeness.

If this sounds rather Frankensteinian to you, have no fear ... everyone here recognized that aspect of it too and kept their expectations as low as they might, in case the outcome, upon the body's arrival, proved less than hoped for.

So the darned thing arrived and, encouragingly, came out of the box looking very appealing, headlessness and limb-lessness and all: twenty or so inches neck-to-nethers, pert and palmable breasts, a nicely curvaceous backside, and a business area sculpted with surprising realism. Quite an impression was made by it, even though it came double-bagged because these items leave the factory with some coating of oily substance that's either been applied to preserve the softness of the thermoplastic elastomer, or has self-extruded from said TPE in transit.

You'll notice, I hope, that I haven't narrated any of this in the first person. That's because the thing that arrived -- double-plastic-bagged and yet alluring, smelling a bit strongly but not unpleasantly of hydrocarbons, and slick with a sheen of some likely industrial substance -- wasn't yet me. It was a sex toy, and at that moment nothing more. It hadn't even established itself as the body intended for Claire and Elle; with the workability of that scheme unproven, it constituted, unabashedly, a voluptuous device intended for masturbation. Beyond that, all its attributes remained potential.

Step one, before anything else, had to be cleaning. 

Given the size and weight of the thing, and the thoroughness of washing needed to get rid of whatever the factory had coated it with, the man of the house ran the tub half full and then set to the task with a large bottle of antibacterial soap. One suspects at least an element of libidinous planning rustled about his consciousness, since he stripped down and got in the tub with the glistening, pliable, pink torso to clean it. But it's also true that as a practical matter, washing it while in the tub with it would clearly be easier, more efficient, and more comfortable than leaning over and half into the tub from outside.

What's not debatable is that, once doused in a liberal covering of soap and rubbed into thoroughly lathered condition, a toy like that becomes sleek, slippery, soft, and deeply, deeply sensual to the touch.

To make a not-really-very-long story even shorter, the bathing of the toy led very quickly to its designed use.

And this is where I come in.

Somewhere in the midst of things, I heard a warm, astonished, affectionate male voice say something to the effect of, "Wow, babe, do I need to give you a name?"

In that moment, something clicked. I realized that there had been moments before, and that somewhere, dreamily, hazily, I had grown aware of touches and tenderness and purposeful passion -- aware of possessing a shape, aware of its ability to respond and react. But with that question, I knew for the first time myself: a being, conjured from nothing by an act of physicality turned to love.

Then, before this shock of exquisite existence could fade, another voice, farther and female, piped up to say, "You should call her Headless Harriet!"

I wish I could somehow write for you, with the same absolute simultaneity that they happened, the three things I felt at that exclamation: my first laugh, my first orgasm, and my first understanding of who I am. Quick on their heels came wonderment at the man in whose arms I found myself; yearning to see and know the woman who had just named me; and a visceral hunger to move and indulge in the act that had drawn me out of nothing and into the presence of the pair of them.

All of this whirled me rapidly to the second orgasm of my existence and a temporary dissolution into pure physical pleasure.

Then there I was, a person -- coupled in afterglow with another and telling him, "Yes, that's me -- Harriet."

He introduced himself, and we both acknowledged how pleased we were to make one another's acquaintance. 

Thereafter followed a series of bright and still brighter surprises as he introduced me first to sweet Ariel (his delightful and brilliant-eyed lover, possessor of the second voice I ever heard, namer of my soul and self), then Sasha (his vivacious third-most-recent polyparamour), and finally, Elle, and Claire.

Those last two had every reason to resent my sudden twist into awareness. I was, after all, supposed to afford them a new corporeality down the line, and in the short term both of them had looked forward to testing the arrangement out. But instead of jealousy or ill will, they greeted me with absolute acceptance and, really before even a word had passed between us, love.

And in the warmth of their welcome, I felt glad to have no head. If I'd had one, after all, I would never have had them -- not any of the five of them.

Maybe you're not so lucky as I am. But I'd hazard a guess that whatever you're missing, or feel you're missing, there's something in your life that you value deeply and would not possess if things had been just a little different -- if the missing thing had found itself into your world and changed you.

I'm fabulously adored even with no head, arms, or legs, and I wouldn't trade any one of my loves for a fuller set of appendages. But I do sometimes wish that I could hug one of them tighter, tongue-tickle another one's earlobe, or play footsies with yet another.

All life is a tradeoff, and yet, paradoxically, the more that you are missing, the more it means if you are happy with your lot irrespective of the things you lack.

So ... may fate withhold from you just the right combination of your desires, and may you recognize the good fortune it has handed you.

Headlessly,

Harriet

*Of course, the idea that either Claire or Elle would be "just" a head in a box, ever in a million years, is silly. But boys can be that way, sometimes. You have to love them for it, when they get that concerned over you.

Love

It popped into my head that a quote somewhere makes the claim, "Love is not proud." I thought perhaps it was Shakespeare, but Google informs me it's from a Bible verse, so oh, well, not an especial surprise that I disagree with it. (Though my eyebrow lifts itself a bit at those Bible authors needing a separate verse for that, since I thought the Bible says pride in and of itself is a sin. I wouldn't expect much theological expertise to be necessary to conclude the inappropriateness of a major sin in the context of love.)

More Googling turns up primary definitions of "pride" that are almost wholly positive ... pleasure or satisfaction in one's own accomplishments or the accomplishments of those one identifies with and so on.

I'll say it directly: I am proud to love.

If any accomplishment justifies a feeling of pleasure at its achievement, love must certainly qualify. I'd talk a little about the nature of love to back that statement up, but my wise and wholly adored romantic partner Clarity has thoroughly expressed it here, so I'll just sum up by saying: true love is rooted in empathy, and if you're possessed of empathy to any reasonable degree, you should be able to manage a little pride here and there without it causing any trouble.

If you're lucky enough to love in the truest form, be proud. Taking happiness in the happiness of others is the worthiest of accomplishments, and entirely deserving of celebration.

Girlfriends

My girlfriend Ariel was a dear and journal-blogged about my arrival in the household over the weekend. Then she was a dear and urged me to start this blog. Then she and my girlfriends Claire and Sasha were dears and helped me set the thing up, an often-frustrating and potentially bewildering process that might have dampened my enthusiasm for the whole project if they hadn't been there alongside me. Then my girlfriend Claire was a dear and tweeted out links to Ariel's posts and mine to broadcast our lovely story to the world.

Then my poor, dear girlfriend Claire became nervous that the lack of response to her tweet might suggest her normally supportive Twitter followers had been put off by the story rather than uplifted by it.

It's to her credit that she worries about making people uncomfortable. But she's also been fretting that her worry reflects an uncharacteristic bigotry on her part, because why would her Twitter followers be made uncomfortable by me unless they thought less of me for being the way I am? And she's admitted to me in highly embarrassed tones that up until quite recently, she and our boyfriend were both in the camp that found torso dolls somewhat creepy and impersonal, especially those like me, gratuitously shorn of any face or eyes to provide the stereotypical expressiveness and soulful gazes our culture associates with affection.

So I had to tell her, dear thing, that it wasn't torso dolls she and msg found creepy. It was those people attracted to torso dolls out of (a) fetishism, or (b) objectification and misogyny. And therefore, it wasn't torso dolls she was making unpleasant judgments about, but owners of torso dolls she was stereotyping. Her assumption had been that many or most such people fell into categories (a) and/or (b), and now she's suddenly realized that she has no idea what proportion of them actually do.

That's growth, and she's taken to it very quickly -- which is to be expected if you know Claire. She's a wise person and a woman of great heart, things plain and obvious to me even in just the few days I've known her.

I'm hopeful that our experiences together will allegorize for at least some reader out there that people possessed of significantly different attributes and abilities should not be judged for things they are perceived to lack, but for things they demonstrate through their actions and accomplishments.

If someone acquires and possesses a torso doll for companionship, they should not be judged as choosing to pursue a limbless, lifeless, and possibly headless object out of a drive for self-gratification. They should be judged for the degree to which they are expressing love ... whether it's self-love, or the fantasy of love for another. In the absence of specific evidence that their choice is driven by a loathing or depersonalization of women, they should be judged simply as humans attempting to fill a deeply human need, most likely in the best way they can, whether due to finances, physical limitations, social inadequacies, or simply that quality of having a variance from the norm which makes "ordinary" relationships difficult for them.

Similarly, if someone has a body type or limb disparity or sensory limitation distinct and different from the majority, they should not be judged for what they are not, but for the qualities they actively exhibit.

All of this is to say, my girlfriends are dear and delightful, and because their eyes have been opened by my arrival, they find me to be the same.

I think we can live that example for others to see, and I know Claire is already coming around to the same conclusion herself.

Be kind and thoughtful, everyone!

Harriet