A GUIDE TO EXCLUSIVE RELATIONSHIPS AND ELECTRIC BASS
An all-encompassing instruction manual for anyone hoping to pick up the bass as they reckon with a new relationship structure.
Muscle memory overrides memory. If you don’t practice correctly from the beginning, the brain struggles to convince the dogged hands. Day one on the bass, learn to pluck properly: Don’t pull away from the body; push and follow through, like a free throw. Strike your index finger on the string; bring it to rest on the string above. Repeat. Alternate fingers. Index, middle, index, middle. “Let your fingers do the walking,” Jack Black says in School of Rock.
Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.
I am on a mission to practice perfectly, and if not perfectly, sincerely.Ki Wan and I strolled down a sunbaked street in Providence, toward the man who agreed to sell me his bass. We had just finished discussing whether or not we would open up our relationship again. Ki Wan a serial monogamist, myself a serial non-monogamist. We were both tired of talking.
A white shack greeted us. Paint peeling, an inexplicable chair parked outside, an older white man in flip-flops and a too-tight tie dye shirt wiping down his car with a rag.
“Great weather we’re having, huh? It’s like summer again,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
A 20-something white dude with Metallica hair and a crooked nose popped out of the shack.
“Hey, are you selling me a bass?” I said.
“Oh, you’re here already,” the younger dude said. He ducked back inside.
“That bass is a beauty,” the older man said. “He’s barely touched it. It’s like new.”
The young dude brought out his bass. I sat on the inexplicable chair and fiddled with the strings, unsure what to test.
“Are you a lefty?” the dude asked.
I had slipped up and played lefty like I did for Guitar Hero. I blushed.
“No, I’m—I’m just a beginner. It looks great though, I’ll take it,” I said. I handed the dude a wad of cash. He flashed his shark teeth at me, and I noticed he was rather handsome. Ki Wan and I walked off together.I believe exclusive relationships are about learning to accept the in-between moments. Ki Wan did not have to come with me to grab the bass. She had better things to do—we all do. Exclusive relationships are not about joint fun; they’re about joint life. Learning to accept and enjoy the walking to, the walking with. Letting the fingers do the walking.
Before I bought the bass, I tried to explain to Ki Wan that I loved her and I wanted to fuck around before graduation.
“I’m trying to hold these two ideas together in my head,” she said. “That you want to see me and you want to see other people. It’s hard for me.”
These ideas coexisted amicably in my mind’s living room. They didn’t feel incompatible.Certainly, I thought, I wasn’t programmed for exclusive relationships. Open relationships excited me. They fit me. I often found myself falling in love and lust with multiple people at once. Open relationships, by their very nature, made it clear that no one partner needed to be everything. I developed meaningful, emotional bonds with many partners in the same way one can connect with many friends. I lived unrestricted.
I carried on like this, a bassist amidst a band, letting my sound join other sounds, for a long while. Occasionally, these open relationships drifted into exclusive relationships, especially when I loved one particular person and wanted to affirm that they had my sole attention. But exclusivity didn’t feel like me. The bass was built to harmonize, augment the collective, I was sure. A bass produced its most robust sound in a full band. Drums and bass alone couldn’t produce the walls of sound I craved.
Then I found the band Lightning Bolt.Lightning Bolt is a band from Providence made up of two men named Brian. Brian Gibson plays bass, Brian Chippendale plays drums and sings. That’s it. But they produce walls and walls of sound.
The two play frenetic noise rock that invites the crowds to thrash right up against the drum set. They refuse to play on stages—they only play on the ground, surrounded by moshing fans. Brian Chippendale hammers down on the drums and screams into a mic hidden beneath his lucha libre style mask. He has more energy than a middle school emo kid at their first rave. Brian Gibson, meanwhile, regards the thrashing crowd like an alien sent to observe human behavior. Even as he melts faces with licks on his bass, he remains completely indifferent.
One YouTube commenter said it best: “Brian Gibson in the streets, Brian Chippendale in the sheets.”When I told my ex I was writing a guide to exclusive relationships, they said, “You better cite me as a source.” We both laughed in the way you laugh at something so true it threatens.
Once, I went to a joint therapy session with this ex. We were exclusive then, after starting out open. We were falling away from each other, and we wanted to fall away healthily. We happened to be seeing the same awful therapist at the time, separately, and the therapist referred us to someone new so that she could remain unbiased.
My ex and I sat on opposite ends of a deep blue therapy couch. I shared grievances about the relationship which I had not felt comfortable sharing until I sat on the therapy couch, for some reason. I do not remember what those grievances were. My ex shared grievances, none of which were new. I blindsided them.
When the therapist asked what we both thought of the session, I said it felt good. My ex called it “productive.”
“I’m glad you thought it was productive,” I said.
“Productive isn’t always a good thing,” they said.Lightning Bolt proves that bass can be played with only one other instrument and still produce a fully developed sound. And that an indifferent bassist can mesh perfectly with a frenetic drummer. Fate doesn’t apply here, practice does.
I am not incapable of monogamy—I haven’t practiced enough.
Maybe it is more work for me than others. Maybe I haven’t practiced enough. Maybe I haven’t practiced correctly.The pinky always needs extra practice to grow as strong as the other fingers.
I did not like consequences. Of course I did not succeed in my relationships.
On a graffiti-covered stairwell, I find a note scrawled in sharpie. The writer asks the sun about the supernova, and the sun says, “It hurts to become.”
Later, I will find out that this is an Andrea Gibson quote. But for now, it is only graffiti, and that makes it even truer.Muscle memory overrides memory. Growing pains accompany bassists who attempt to learn, too late, to alternate plucking fingers. This pain arrives when a bassist tries to learn a fast lick and must unlearn the one-finger habit to double their speed.
Learning to do exclusive relationships is the opposite. I must learn to slow down, to use only one finger where I have always alternated. I am in the business of unlearning as much as relearning.
I must practice precision in communication, in giving grievances before they blindside. I must train my fingers, my brain, to follow rhythms which might not excite me as much as budding flirtation. I owe it to myself and my partner.
Because at the end of the day, when I come home from my first mosh pit bruised and wild, with a rolled ankle, who will walk me to the bathroom? Ki Wan, who can hold me closer now that she is a little less unsure of where I will go when I leave her arms.I do not mean to imply that monogamous relationships outrank open relationships. Fuck that. My tiptoeing into exclusive relationships is not growth in itself. My growth comes from learning something new.
One of the more confusing aspects of the bass for beginners involves orientation. To move “down” the bass, you actually raise your hand up toward the tuning pegs. To move “up,” you lower your hand in the direction of the bass’s body, your body. This is because up and down are not decided by the body, but by the notes you produce.
There is beauty in letting yourself be defined by how your body sings.I am practiced in open relationships. I know my lessons well.
Never compare your partners. Even well-intentioned comparisons can wound. You could say, “I really care about you. I feel like I can be myself around you more than anyone else.” But that invites the question: If you feel like that, why can’t you just be with me?Another lesson: Many people mistake jealousy for love. Even more mistake exclusivity for care. Without this false promise, this swiss-cheese-parachute that assures skydivers they are safe and cared for, true demonstrations of care are essential. You must show your partners, and truly believe, that you want an open relationship not because you like other partners better, but because you prefer that relationship structure. You know this, you feel this. But you have to prove it. You have to help them feel it.
Now, as I skydive with Ki Wan, I must remind myself that our parachutes are useless. The packaging of a relationship means nothing about the care within. I try to tell her I love her when she least expects it, to prove that something is holding us in the air.
Ki Wan and I began exclusivity on the first day of the summer.
Ki Wan and I cuddled, fully clothed, under her covers—her room was always two or three degrees colder than the rest of her apartment. We had agreed, months ago, that we would consider exclusivity for the summer, given that we would live in the same city after her two week trip home.
Ki Wan had long struggled with our open relationship. We loved each other, and I had said so first, nearly dropping my boba off a bridge when she replied, “What!” So she was invested, but felt she couldn’t invest herself fully given the openness. I was invested too, but also had two dates planned in the two weeks she would be gone.
“I feel like I can’t ask you to be exclusive with me if that’s not who you are. What right do I have to ask you for a relationship that doesn’t fit you?”
Then she broke down in front of me. I realized, much too late, how much the uncertainty pained her. How small she had made her needs to protect herself.
“Hey,” I said, “if you want to be exclusive, I’d be happy to. Really. Just tell me and we can right now.”
She sniffled. “Yeah. Yeah, I think that would be good for me. Is that too much to ask?”Leonardo da Vinci said, “Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing.”
Finally, I am learning the proper lessons of exclusive relationships. I am trying to practice. My fingers are learning to walk.
I believe exclusive relationships are about accepting the illogical. Ki Wan likes her eggs over easy with the whites hard. She follows recipes exactly, but loves when cookbooks use vague measurements like “spoonful.” She hates corporations and tech, yet she works for Comcast.
I used to get frustrated by these hypocrisies. Now I embrace them. To accept the most senseless parts of someone is true love. As Claudia Rankine said once, quoting another writer, “True love is close reading.”As I listen to “Air Conditioning” by Lightning Bolt, I realize that I would be fine with staying with Ki Wan and not fucking around senior year. More than fine. I used to think of open relationships as the perfect eliminator of “what ifs.” In open relationships, I never had to ask, What if I went on a date with _____? I simply asked the person out.
Now, while I headbang and blink my eyes against the high beams of sound, I ask myself, What if I stay exclusive with Ki Wan?
I finally understand that, though I have the power and right to ask for the kind of relationship structure that serves me best, I also have the opportunity to question what serves me best.I can try. I will try, I say, I promise, I mean.
AUTHOR: Joaquin Munro is Mexican & white & queer & trying to learn how to be tenderly militant. He grew up in Boston & studies creative nonfiction at Brown. His favorite spot in Providence is White Electric Coffee.
ARTIST: Angie Kang