Boundaries again

Last night was odd.

A lover came in very early.  That in itself was odd.  He was already dressed formally, so I suggested that we meet at Frank's for a dance, while at the same time he asked if I wanted sex.  So we decided to go to Frank's to have sex.  (I'm kidding.)  I asked for five minutes to change and he went ahead.

Not again!

When I arrived at Frank's landing point, I crashed.  Of course.  And when I relogged, I got this IM:

[2012/08/03 23:13:44]  Flirt Sorciere: Excuse me for asking such a strange Q, but have we ever talked before, to the best of your knowledge?  I lost all my chat histories in the most-recent forced-"upgrade" of SL...

Sometimes, I wonder if there really weren't these Olympian gods looking down on humanity and playing tricks with us.

[2012/08/03 23:14:58]  Opal Lei: In fact, we have, and not in a good way.

Then I sent him the first two lines of our first and last conversation.  And I told him the date was Jan 1, 2011.

[2012/08/03 23:15:57]  Flirt Sorciere: Thank you for the information.
[2012/08/03 23:16:03]  Opal Lei: Sure.

Well, at least, he's more polite now.

Maybe he'll buy my book and realize that I actually used him as an example of what not to do.

Rudeness to whom?

It still took me a long time to rez things.  I went up the stairs and realized that Frank's had been renovated since I last went here and I didn't know where to go.  In fact, I was bumping on a wall that I couldn't see.

My date rescued me from the stubbornly immobile wall by teleporting me to where he was, but I still couldn't see his avatar.  Just his yellow dot on the mini-map.  Then his dot moved towards the dance floor and we continued to talk in IM.  Then I crashed again.

When I logged back in, I received an offline from him saying he was waiting to dance with me.  The yellow dot on my mini-map was gone and I asked him where he was.  Then he said, "i was waiting for you for dance and other woman sit in your place."

Apparently, he had summoned the dance balls and was sitting on the blue ball already, then he saw me crash, so he took the opportunity to go AFK while waiting for me to get back.  When he got back to his desk, this woman was already on the pink ball, dancing with him.

And he couldn't tell her that he was waiting for someone, because he thought that it would be rude towards her.  He apologized to me (and I sensed that he was sincere) and he reiterated that he really wanted to dance with me.  I told him that, by the same gesture of avoiding being rude to her, he was being rude to me.

It was at this point, a full fifteen minutes since he teleported me to his position, that he (and she) finally rezzed for me.

I don't mind that he dances with other women; we're not exclusive.  What I minded was that I wasted all that time changing clothes, teleporting to Frank's, fighting the lag, crashing a few times, and for what?  I wasn't even very pissed.  Just very irritated for wasting that time.

So I told him I'd leave them alone and wished him to "have fun."

Less than a minute later, he was inviting me to join him on the dance floor.  He finally told the other woman that his lover arrived and I'm sure *she* got pissed, but she wasn't there when I looked again.

I don't know if she remained at Frank's or if she decided to leave, but I decided he and I had to go elsewhere so she wouldn't be embarrassed publicly.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda

I'm sure there's a lot of "lessons" in just that one incident.

She shouldn't have assumed that he's not with someone, just because he's dancing alone for several minutes.  A quick IM asking, "Are you waiting for a friend or are you looking for a dance partner?" would have been sufficient.  It's not the bargain sale at your local department store.  You don't have to jump on anyone who seems available for fear that someone else will grab him.

He should have been more firm with her.  He could have easily told her, "I'm sorry, I'm not really available.  I was waiting for a friend to relog and rez.  Maybe you and I could dance another time, if you'd accept my friendship."  But, he's not that articulate with the English language either.  Besides, we all come from different cultures and we were all brought up differently, and I know that he comes from a culture that is concerned with politeness and diplomacy.  I also understand that he probably wanted to preserve the possibility that she would dance with him again in the future.  After all, he thought that she was nice too.

And what should *I* have done?  I should have skipped Frank's entirely and just had sex with him.  I would have avoided all that weirdness. ;)  On the other hand, I wouldn't have had anything to blog about, would I?

Who knows if it's good or bad?  ;)

Personal boundaries

Before I start, I just wanted to give an update. Racer and I went our separate ways because he said that, if I would not be his love slave, he didn't want me. So that was that.

New lover

But now, I have a new lover, also with Alt #11. I danced with this one before and I thought it wasn't going to develop into anything. But he saw me today at Sweethearts again when he logged in. (Apparently, he doesn't leave Sweethearts.) And almost immediately, he asked me to dance even though I was already in IM with two other guys. So I said I was going to wrap up my convos first. He waited. Both the other two also asked me for a dance but I said I was already asked. One of them actually waited for hours, hoping to get a dance afterwards, until he finally gave up and went to bed.

Even though he was already sleepy, new lover stayed with me for hours, and somehow the conversation felt as though we were negotiating terms for a romantic and sexual relationship. We went to Sunset Jazz then to the Africa sim for a balloon ride. I've been to the Africa sim many times before. A lover introduced me to that sim. However, I had never taken the balloon ride before today, and the last time I went on any rides with a lover was on the now-gone Acropolis sims.

I'll call this lover "Victor", because I told him that his avie (with the tux he was wearing today) looks like a Victorian gentleman, which somehow made me think of being ravished inside a horse carriage. Yeah, we'll be trying that RP sometime. *winks*

(Update: I'm changing his nickname to "Lucky Bastard" because, when he asked me for a dance, one of the convos I had to wrap up called him that. And after my week-long binge I gave him a custom "Etched" set with those words on it, as a thank you gift.)

Anyway, after he logged off, I logged in as Opal and decided to go to Franks since I was still dressed in that new gorgeous red gown that I bought from Son!a's for New Year's.

Boundaries

I was standing quietly in the corner by the stairs, checking out profiles when I suddenly got an IM that said:

[2011/01/01 23:58] Flirt Sorciere puts some mistletoe over head and boldly kisses her while saying "Happy New Year"!

That pissed me off. I wanted to choke him. Instead, I said, "You can easily get slapped that way."

How would you feel if you were just quietly standing in public and a complete stranger comes up behind you and kisses you? It's a transgression in my personal space. I'd consider that a form of rape. He didn't even give me a chance to react and prevent him from kissing me. Even the vampire in the Africa sim at least asked for my permission first.

Some people would say it's just SL. I'd say how is that different? Just because I'm in SL and my avatar is just made of pixels, it doesn't mean anybody can do with my avatar as they pleased.

This guy's rez date was recent, so I asked if this was his first account in SL. He replied "no". If he were a real newbie, I would have forgiven him. I would have thought that he just didn't know what the proper etiquette is in SL. But if he's been in SL a while, that behavior is inexcusable.

If he did that in real life to a complete stranger, his face would be slapped, his foot stomped on, and his balls kneed. And deservedly so. And if I had a boyfriend with me, he would probably have been beaten to a pulp too.

The guy disappeared soon after. I guess he finally realized what he did was not welcomed at all.

Personal space

Last week, I started uprooting some of the Linden plants on my parcels in Aglia and Zeuzera and replaced them with prim plants and trees from Organica and Botanical. I've been reluctant to make too many changes in Aglia because I want to preserve that parcel's history. Well, at least its history as it pertains to me. :)

For now, I've set down autumn trees which will change in a few months. Or maybe not, depending how I feel. And I'll probably reroute the stream and switch to better sculpts for the water. In any case, the re-landscaping is not quite done. And I won't be touching the main structures, like the glass house, the deck, and the gazebo. At least, not yet. I feel some pride in the fact that they've withstood time.

My neighbors in Zeuzera saw the changes I made to that parcel and noticed that I've updated the dividing wall. I met them when they first moved in, when they asked if I would smooth the dip in the terrain at the border of our parcels. Later, they purchased the parcel I had a bit north when I needed room in my tier. They wanted to purchase the rest of my parcel in Zeuzera but I refused. It is my buffer, in a sense, protecting the main parcel which is the first land I bought. When my neighbors saw the updated wall, they asked if I could remove it instead. I had made the walls transparent on their side, so I didn't see a reason why I should remove them.

To their credit, they've done a wonderful job with their parcels. There are layers of landscaping areas and lovely hidden nooks among the foliage of the trees and rocks. But the sculpted cliffs that surrounded their paradise was transparent from my side yet showed strips of some of the faces perpendicular to the border. And it looked ugly from the wrong side. I explained this and they agreed. Instead, they offered to landscape my parcel as well.

I'm sure they meant well with that offer. And I thanked them but declined. Besides the issue of choosing between opening up my parcel so anybody could rez on it (so I would have to waste my time checking if newbies had left junk on the parcel) or adding strangers to my private group (which would reveal some alts that I don't want revealed), I felt insulted by the offer.

I have never said anything about their trees overlapping at least a meter into my land, which makes me feel like they were invading my personal space. It's not as though my parcels look awful. One of the things they said when they moved next door was that they liked the fact that I built a garden. And for them to build right on my land and impose their idea of a garden on me feels insulting.

I'm sure that's not their intent. They were probably just trying to be nice. But that makes assumptions about what people want out of SL. They probably assumed I just want a pretty place to live in. But it's more than that.

The end result doesn't matter as much as the process itself. I don't just want a pretty place. I want a pretty place that *I* built and put together, using pieces that *I* choose, placing them where *I* want. Only then can it feel as though the space were really mine. This is not a public parcel, although I allow people to spend time in it. It is there for *my* pleasure, not for anyone else's. And, therefore, it should be just the way *I* want it to be.

In fact, I don't spend much time in that parcel anymore, because I had moved my workloft to another sim, and the pavilion I set up for me and my lover is in yet another sim. But I keep Aglia and Zeuzera because they have personal meaning for me. And, because of that, those spaces are more *personal*.

It's not the space or the object or the avatar that matters, but the meaning we associate to them, the emotions that get attached to them. A virtual shrub of gardenias is just another pretty thing until a lover gives it to his beloved. A gazebo is just another nice place to sit in, until friends gather in it and share wonderful conversations in it. A song is just another pleasant sound, until a man dedicates it to a woman because it reminds him of her.

It is the same with these parcels.

Illicit

Since I was a young woman, I had promised myself that I would not mess with married men or men who are otherwise committed.

In SL, he is not partnered, but he just got out of a relationship. In RL, he is not married, but he is in a long-term committed relationship.

The question I did not resolve in September comes back to haunt me. If I have an affair in virtual reality with a man who's married (or committed) in real life, do I burn in virtual hell or real hell?

How separate, really, is SL from RL? The emotions are real; that, I know. And those emotions that come out of SL affect our moods in RL and, therefore, affect RL. Time spent in SL relationships is time taken away from RL relationships. Likewise, our beliefs, our behavior, our individual culture, our upbringing, our attitudes, all these come from RL and affect SL.

So I think I've learned something else about that mysterious line between SL and RL. It is not a foot-thick lead wall. Instead, it is a porous membrane. Things seep through, both ways. The membrane stretches towards one side or the other. And, yes, the membrane can burst with enough pressure.

That is why the guilt is there. I am stealing his time away from his RL gf and I am stealing my time away from myself.

And, for several days now, I've been swatting Jiminy Cricket away. Then, last night, I put the cricket in a jar. Last night, I started an illicit affair.