## Questions

Answer in a google doc, a pastebin, or similar.  Can also email me at makyo@drab-makyo.com - I'll also need to know whether or not I can quote you directly (any input is still good!), and if so, how you'd like to be addressed and credited!

1. Describe your current relationship status
2. Describe in brief your path to where you are now in terms of relationships
3. Did furry help with your path to your relationship configuration? If so, how?
4. Are there any ways in which furry hindered your relationships along this path? If so, how?
5. Are you comfortable talking about your relationships within the subculture? If so, why? If not, why?
6. Ditto for outside the subculture.  Are you comfortable talking about your relationships outside of furry?
7. How comfortable are you with your current relationship configuration?  Does it fit? Do you wish you could go further but feel you can't? Do you think you've gone too far?

## Answers

'''
Loxrus:
Paul Fox, [Sep 21, 2016, 8:34 PM]:
1) Currently loosely single. Two or three social relationships bordering on the romantic to lesser or greater extents, in which sexuality and affection are well within bounds.

2) Lots of being very, very cautious with my heart. I make friends with someone, and in some cases that will lead relatively organically to mutual attraction; this has been the case with all relationships as above.

3) Yes - not only are all of the people I am arguably in relationships with furries, but furry itself very much taught me the value of being close to people, that it was safe to desire to show affection physically, and that societally nonstandard relationships were very much acceptable.

4) The very first person I ever had anything approaching a relationship with was also a furry - they wound up utterly shattering my heart when they abruptly decided they weren't interested in me anymore, in favor of someone who they later had a child with.

5) I am. If anything, the context of furry and the very low likelihood that people will argue that I should be monogamous, more committed, or straight means that I feel much safer discussing my desires and experiences within the furry subculture.

6) On balance, I'm actually not sure whether this question and the last one are asking about speaking about my relationships as determined by the other partner being inside/outside furry, or on the other hand, whether I'm comfortable speaking about them inside or outside of furry social contexts. If the former, I've actually never really had any relationships outside the community - there's been one near-miss that I'm willing to talk about, though I'll likely wind up being slightly vague.

7) Reasonably. It fits me, sort of. I definitely wish that I could go further, but the feeling I get from all of the people I'm involved with is that they don't want to take things with me substantially further, for varying reasons, some of which I don't know. I occasionally get the sense that it would be nice to be someone's primary until I remember that I have no idea what I'd be doing with that much of someone's time, energy, and affection.

You may absolutely quote me directly; please address me by "he" pronouns and as Lorxus. If there's anything else you'd like me to talk about, please let me know.

-----

Kyle R.:

Hey There!

Just emailing you with answers to your questionnaire, regarding your 'In Love With Furry' article. I give you consent to quote me on any of these answers, and you can credit me as Kyle R. / @PizzaSkunk. Please contact me at this email if you have any further questions, or if you need any clarification on anything!

1. Describe your current relationship status

I just celebrated two years of dating with my partner, Adri, aka 'AdrioftheDead.' They are a Non-Binary Asexual. I am also in a quasi-relationship with Brad, aka 'Myoti,' another Non-Binary person. They are married with a wife. All parties understand this small relationship web and consent to it.

2. Describe in brief your path to where you are now in terms of relationships

I very briefly dated a couple of people in high school. In 2007 I started a long-distance relationship with a girl living in southern California, whom I met through the furry-themed MMOSG Furcadia. The relationship lasted for 7 whole years, during which we engaged, where we only were able to see each-other for a week or two each year. Although difficult, we were able to have a very stable relationship up until the last year of the relationship. She fell out of love with me in 2014 as I was getting ready to move out to San José, where she was going to school.

At the same time, I had been talking and bonding fairly frequently with Adri in the last year or two leading up to my big breakup, and we also hung out on a few occasions in 2014 after my 7-year relationship had ended. I had not intentionally been flirting with them with the intent of romance, and Adri couldn't tell whether I was flirting or not, so in September 2014, they sent me an intentionally vague invitation to date them. Seeing as I was still recovering from my last relationship, I told them I'd think on it. A week or two later, I agreed, and we quickly became enamored with one another.

As with my relationship with Brad, I had admired them as an artist for several years before I met them working in the Artist Alley at FWA 2015. We hit it off well, and we started chatting online frequently as close friends. After a few months, they confessed they had deeper feelings for me, to my surprise. After some discussions with Adri and Brad's wife, we agreed upon a amorous relationship, with the understanding that Adri came first to me, and that Brad's wife came first to them.

3. Did furry help with your path to your relationship configuration? If so, how?

Of course, yeah! I had met my ex that I dated for 7 years on Furcadia. I first met Adri at a Midwest Furfest in 2010, where I commissioned them for a badge and chatted a bit. I met Brad at Furry Weekend Atlanta in 2015. Although my ex was not really into the fandom, Adri, Brad, and myself all love and embrace it for better or for worse.

4. Are there any ways in which furry hindered your relationships along this path? If so, how?

My ex-fiancé was not particularly enthused about the fandom, despite playing Furcadia frequently when she was in middle school and early high school. She just loved animals a lot. She occasionally would claim that I was not interested in her, but rather her character/fursona. It was frustratingly difficult to convince her otherwise.

Otherwise, the furry fandom has done nothing but boost my current relationships; it gives us a common hobby and interests, and a fun way to express ourselves.

5. Are you comfortable talking about your relationships within the subculture? If so, why? If not, why?

Yes, absolutely! It is more often than not fairly easy to explain that I'm dating a Non-Binary person, and that we're both Asexuals. There is a more concentrated amount of people in the fandom who understand these orientations, genders, and sexualities than outside of it.

6. Ditto for outside the subculture. Are you comfortable talking about your relationships outside of furry?

Not particularly. It is considerable more difficult to bring up the fact that my partner is Non-Binary and Asexual to my family or coworkers. Most of my friends understand it well, but otherwise, I am constantly keeping my partner's gender ambiguous by purposefully avoiding terms like 'girlfriend' and referring to them by female pronouns around others. Add in the fact that I'm in a poly-amorous situation and it becomes a rather complicated can of worms to open up around most people, who will assume I'm straight and monogamous. Most of these same people also have a difficult time accepting and understanding anything besides straight, cis, and monogamous, so I will almost always refrain from opening up about the subject.

7. How comfortable are you with your current relationship configuration? Does it fit? Do you wish you could go further but feel you can’t? Do you think you’ve gone too far?

I am extremely comfortable with my current relationship configuration. Adri and I are very happy with each-other, and Brad and I enjoy our relationship very much as well. I honestly can't complain very much at all about it. I do want to engage to Adri and marry them, but that may not be for quite some time do to financial constraints. So in that sense, I would like to go further, yes, haha. I don't desire more relationships; I certainly don't want to spread myself too thin. Things are great the way they are.

-----

Adri:

Describe your current relationship status -
Taken, living with my partner of two years since March of 2016

Describe in brief your path to where you are now in terms of relationships -
Generally, my relationships leading up to this one started and ended about the same--LDR, met online or at a convention, dated for a handful of months to a year, broke up. My current relationship started about the same, but we were peripheral friends for a few years prior to dating. He and I had both come out of really bad relationships at the time, and we reconnected online and became closer friends in working through our respective break ups.

Did furry help with your path to your relationship configuration? If so, how? -
My partner and I met (as friends) during a furry convention in 2010. I had only just started attending furry cons that year and didn't know that many people in the fandom. I'm an artist, and I did a handful of pieces for him--the first of which being a conbadge he commissioned from me during the aforementioned convention in 2010. He still has it. :)

Are there any ways in which furry hindered your relationships along this path? If so, how?
There have been relationships I've had where I've had to downplay my involvement in furry to a more "respectable" level so as not to draw ire from or embarrass my partners. Thankfully, I do not have to do this with my current partner, and he, being a furry himself, actively encourages my own involvement in furry.

Are you comfortable talking about your relationships within the subculture? If so, why? If not, why?
That depends. I'm generally comfortable talking about my current relationship, but, given my gender status (non-binary), I feel as though I have to be choosy about how much I disclose to strangers who have not already introduced themselves as queer, trans or gender non-conforming.

Ditto for outside the subculture. Are you comfortable talking about your relationships outside of furry?
With the exception of my current relationship, not comfortable at all. And, again, considering most people I know outside of the fandom aren't aware of my gender status, including family members, I have to be choosy about how much I disclose.

How comfortable are you with your current relationship configuration? Does it fit? Do you wish you could go further but feel you can’t? Do you think you’ve gone too far?
As of writing this, I'm very comfortable with my current relationship. I get along well with my partner and am at ease around him. We continue to bond through mutual interests and do our best to talk through our problems. From my previous relationships, I'm learning not focus on the 'what ifs' or dwell too hard on what will be--instead, I choose to live in the moment and appreciate my current relationship for what it is now. Some circumstances could be better, but nothing is ever 100% perfect. Whatever happens will happen, and I'm comfortable and content in the meantime. That's really all I could ask for.

-----

Hilikus:

Hi there! I finally have some time to get to your questions. You can definitely use direct quotes if you find anything of use. And you can just use my 'sona's name Hilikus as credit.

1. My current relationship status is complicated. Recently broke up but still spending a lot of time together. I still love him, and we still have sex often, but I guess I'm giving him another chance while keeping myself an escape route for fear of being hurt again.

2. I dated a few girls in high school because I was insecure about my sexuality and it helped me ignore my true self even though I had sexual relationships will guys since junior high. I soon found out about kink and the fandom's NSFW material served those needs well. It all became a blend but the fandom started becoming a larger and larger component. It began as just the porn, but I wanted to be an actual part of it.

3. The fandom helped me meet people who I could really relate with. Yes, I like the same things as any guy outside, but the people I meet in the fandom, even liking those same things, are just different. It's also extremely gay, which helps when that's what you're looking for in a mate.

4. I never had to lie to an SO about being furry. It was a pretty clean line between not being in the fandom and dating someone outside, to making the entry into the world of furs, to then dating people inside.

5. I'm super comfortable talking about relationships within the fandom. Not sure exactly why. Maybe because I'm sex positive or that I have nothing to hide.

6. Talking to people outside the fandom about relationships I have is fine too. I don't care what people think about it. If I need to mention the fandom, I will. It's such a large part of my life. But a furry boyfriend is still a boyfriend; still someone that you love. And people outside the fandom can still get that.

7. My current 'relationship' is a mixed bag. I'm confused and not sure what I want or need. I'm in so deep, but I don't regret any of the time.

If you have any more questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Meow :3
'''

## Essay

It began, as many things in my life do, on the Internet.

This is, you must understand, before I had dived headlong into furry with enough zeal to turn me from a boy into a fox by way of dragon.  That would come later, but not too much later.

No, this is a year or so before I'd started getting into animal people on the Internet.  I had joined a site called, and I say this with a cringe, 'Puberty 101'.  I cringe because, even though it was specifically designed to be a site for folks 20 and under to talk about romance, hormones, and sexuality, it was almost certainly a breeding ground for all of those monsters we heard about on the early days of the internet.  The pedophiles and the predators, eagerly waiting in this new extension of their beat-up white vans to offer us whatever passed for candy in exchange for vague sexual acts that would destroy us as children and land the perpetrators in jail.

It was later renamed GovTeen, thank goodness.

Nonetheless, there I was, signing in under the name '!xabbu' in order to quietly, carefully come out as bisexual, later as homosexual.  I was among my people, there.  I could go to one page on the forum and ask a question about Visual Basic, then go to another and find out that there were people like me who were Guys Who Liked Guys.

It's where I met Danny, a lovely, nerdy soul who would talk to me for hours on end about computers, about sex, about living in New York.  This sidled casually into dating in a way that struck me as absurd at the time.  Having been in my fair share of relationships by now, I know how often it is that a friendship turns into more.  We would call for hours at a time, talking about this or that, just being young and in love.

Eventually, I wound up coming out to my mom through the not-so-subtle tactic of leaving a book full of stories of folks about my age coming to terms with their sexuality on top of her stack of mysteries.  Scared shitless as I was, I did so right before heading down to stay the night with my dad; I couldn't bear to handle that as a face-to-face conversation with her.  She called me that night at my dad's to confirm that I was actually coming out to her, saying that we would talk the next day when I was back at her place.

Then I called Danny and cried over the phone with him.

It was a scant few months from that point in my life to the time when I discovered furry.  Danny and I eventually drifted apart --- our trajectories were never wholly in line, though I treasure everything about our time together, and will always miss him[^danny].

Furry was something that had never really jived with Danny.  He knew what it was, of course --- word travels, and all --- it just wasn't his thing.  When we drifted apart, he drifted into drugs and hacktivism (although that word had yet to come to exist at the time) and I drifted right into the waiting arms of furry.

Within furry, I started meeting folks right away.  Gone were the days of pining for a boyfriend on the GovTeen forums, I found myself hip-deep in a dating pool of folks with whom I could talk for hours about something that we both shared an interest in.

I promise I'm not just wandering.  I started this by saying it all began on the internet, and truly, it did.  I came into my own as a sexual person, a romantic person, and an adult through my interactions on the internet, and through 99\% of that time, furry was there as a large part of my life. Furry as a social fixture, furry as an integral part of the online experience for me.  Through furry, I came to a deeper understanding of love and relationships than I think I would have come to had Danny and I just stuck it out and found a way to work together.

I think that relationships within a subculture are going to be stronger than those bridging interests.  There was Danny, and later Matt, and in college there was Kayla, but in the end, the stress of dating across boundaries of identity such as that always became too much of a stress on the relationship to maintain.

With that thesis under my belt, I started to ask around to see what it is that draws furries to other furries --- or to other non-furries --- and how the fandom interacts with the ways in which we play out our relationships.  Does the fandom strengthen relationships?  Are relationships within the fandom harder to talk about outside the fandom?  What is it we get out of sexual and romantic relationships that can differentiate the two?

I really am in love with furry, have been for years, but it's worth taking a look at why, and the consequences of that relationship.

-----

Relationships within furry are a study in shared interests and shared stories.

It can be easy to overlook at times, but furry today is inherently participatory.  In the fandom's early years, it was exactly that: a fandom.  The members of the furry fandom consumed media, for the large part, to the point where anyone who participated beyond a certain level would have been called a furry lifestyler, or even a therian.

This changed over time, of course, and those who would consider themselves fans of furry media became less common within the subculture than those who would consider themselves furry lifestylers, or just plain "furries", a label that shifted from signifying the anthropomorphized animals to the membership of a community surrounding those anthropomorphized animals.

This is the reason that I tend to eschew the word 'fandom' in favor of 'subculture' or 'community'.  We've moved beyond being fans of something and into the realm of identity.

It's not surprising, then, that friendships, romance, and sexuality would also be bound up in memberships within furry.  After all, if identity is involved, it becomes hard to ignore that aspect of one's self for something as integral as a romantic relationship.  I mentioned before the relationships that I've had with non-furries and how the stress of dating across boundaries of identity; this came down to a lack of shared stories.

!{Stories of furry relationships}

-----

!{Shared interests and data}

[^danny]: Danny passed away in April of 2014, a fact I didn't learn until recently.  This is one hundred percent a footnote and totally tangential, but every time I remember this, want to tell someone and share a bit of the joy I had.
