Introduction
Last weekend I appeared on a panel at the PA Progressive Summit called Don’t Stop Believing: Managing Activism Fatigue. The panel was created by three psychologists who thought that it would helpful for activists to get some advice about managing the stress, anxiety, and exhaustion that often leads to burnout. I was asked to comment on their advice, based on my experience as an organizer. My remarks were well received so I’ve decided to write up my notes. I won’t try to present the ideas of my fellow panelists. They were very good but I don’t think I could do them justice. Instead will present the concrete recommendations I gave activists based on my own experience.
I was drafted to be on the panel in part under false pretense. After ten years as an political activist, organizer and sometime candidate—the first six of which I did as a volunteer while holding a teaching position at Temple—I decided to take some time off in July. I did this not because I was burned out, but because I had some ideas for books which I had put off writing for a number of years and the ending of one job seemed like a good time to get them done.
But since one of the books I’m writing is on my work on the HCAN and campaigns, I was eager to have this opportunity to reflect on the personal side of political activism and share some of my experiences—some of which go back to work I did forty years ago in my teens and twenties (especially that which I talk about at the end of this piece).
Learning what hard work is: the HCAN and other campaigns
Most of what I write here is based on my experience in the Health Care for American Now campaign—which was supposed to last about nine months to a year but which continued for 21 months. It went on so much longer than expected that we called it the Campaign That Would Never End and borrowed Shari Lewis’s tune to sing about it.
The HCAN campaign was the most intense work I’ve ever done. It was harder than writing a doctoral dissertation, partly because I spent a very long time completing a long thesis and partly because I can’t write more than five or six hours a day before my brain turns to mush. However I can do organizing work twelve to fifteen hours a day before collapsing as it comes in bursts of changing and mostly very short term activity—writing a memo or email or making phone call, etc.
The HCAN campaign was even more intense than the two primary campaigns I had run, for State Representative in 2004 and City Council in 2007. Those were exhausting efforts. In both of them, I worked long hours seven days a week and with very little sleep. But they were each about four and half months long. The HCAN campaign was even harder because it was so much longer and because we never knew when it would be over.
And the intensity kept getting ratcheted up. I recall talking about this over lunch with our national field director Margarida Jorge in Washington in late October 2009. We had just come off a period in which we were doing major events every two weeks around Pennsylvania. At one of them, I had been arrested with four other members of HCAN for blocking the door to CIGNA Insurance. We joked about how much harder we were working at that point than earlier in the year when, in comparison, it felt like were slacking off. Of course, earlier in the year HCAN held a major national rally to which I had helped bring 2000 Pennsylvanians. The day of that event I had worked from 3 am when the first bus left Pennsylvania to 9 pm when we finally found the disabled man who had wandered away from his group and missed the bus home. I made or received 309 phone calls that exhilarating day. But looking back it seemed like an easy day compared to what we were doing in October.
What enabled all of us in Washington and Pennsylvania to work as hard as we did during the HCAN campaign was the enormous responsibility we felt to our goal, the pressure we were under to keep pace with the fast moving legislative action in Washington, and the adrenalin generated by the excitement of the moment and the daily deadlines for action.
All that pressure, responsibility, excitement, and adrenalin, however, created the potential for burnout. Some of us on the campaign did get burned out. There were a few times when I asked and then ordered staff members or volunteers to take some time off. But while I was exhausted often, I never was burned out. In fact, one morning, my wife looked at me at breakfast and seeing how energized I was and said, “You really like the stress, don’t you.”
The truth was that I usually did like it. The HCAN campaign was a difficult but exciting time for me. So what I want to talk about is how I avoided burnout during it (and during the other high intensity political work I’ve done). Because I’m older than many activists and have a wife and daughter—and since families share in the burden of campaigns—I also want to talk about how I managed to keep my family together during these intense times.
Most of what I write below is not just advice about how to sustain oneself emotionally as an organizer and activist but also about how to be better at what you do. That’s not a coincidence. You can’t do a good job as an organizer when you are a burned out emotional wrecks, after all. And the effective you at your work, the less stressful and exhausting you will find it.
You need to talk
Activists and campaigners need time to talk. A lot of time. We need to go over the events of the day and process them both emotionally and intellectually. We have to express and get validation for the anger and frustration we have. We need to share the joys of the work we do. We need to test our ideas and our reactions to what others are doing against the advice of others. Sometimes we just need support. More often, we need constructive criticism.
Your family can help with this. But there is a limit to what they can do. For one thing your spouse or partner may not know enough about what you do to be really helpful. Or he or she may be so supportive that you can’t get the critical advice you need.
Or, even worse, your spouse or partner may have become cynical about politics and activism, in part from hearing you talk about all the terrible stuff you see every day. You are probably inured to all that awfulness. But your spouse or partner won’t be both because he or she wants to protect you and because you are more likely to share the misery rather than the joy of organizing with them.
And, at any rate, your family has other, more important things to talk to you about, especially if you have been working very hard and have not been with them as much as usual. They need to talk with you about problems at school and leaky faucets; about what to make for dinner tomorrow and who is going to pick up the groceries; about how to celebrate some event and where to take a summer vacation. You’ve been missing some of those discussions and it’s going to take a lot of energy to catch up. So you don’t want to interrupt them by focusing just on your campaign.
So what you really need to do is spend some downtime with your co-workers. Of course, you need to get home, too. But you’ll be more a part of your family if have some social time with your co-workers to talk about what you need to talk about in order to stay sane and be effective in your campaign.
When you are running a state wide campaign, like I was in HCAN, that’s hard to do. Here are two suggestions: First, not every moment of every conference call has to be focused on getting things done. Take some time at the beginning and end to let off steam. And second, get out in the field and spend some time with your organizers. You need to do that any way, because you need to see them in action, you need to see the territory they work in, and you need to meet with their volunteers and coalition partners. Doing this will also give you the social time you need with your staff and associates. And it will help build up a reserve of understanding and trust for when times get tough.
Get some perspective
When you are talking about the campaign with both your staff and family, try to remember this important adage: The campaign is never going as well as you think it is going when it is going well and it is never going as badly as you think it is when it is going badly.
Most campaigns, both in electoral and issue advocacy work, are roller coasters. If you allow yourself to take an emotional ride up and down every time you have a minor victory or loss, you will wear yourself out.
You will also lose the perspective that you need to do your job well. If you are blissed out by success, you won’t see the next dangerous curve ahead. If you are depressed by failure, you won’t have the optimism or energy to take advantage of the opportunities that appear before you.
Appreciate and love what you are doing
One way to stay on an even keel is to focus not on the whole campaign all the time, but to rather on the details. Loving your work is, anyway, all about loving each and every task you do. As Nabokov said, we have to caress the details in order to find joy in what we read, think, or do.
My wife was right that I liked the stress. But that was not because I love being nervous and worried but because I love the energy I have when I’m trying to meet the challenges that come every day. I try to find some pleasure in each and every momentary success. And I try to find the challenge in each and every momentary failure. (I’ve written about this before in Escaping Gravity.)
There is a story of Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasurer, Henry Morgenthau, wandering into the Oval Office from a side door as FDR was saying goodbye to some politicians he had just successfully engaged in some project. Morgenthau saw a broad but momentary grin of delight come over Roosevelt’s face as he took some pleasure in that interaction. Then, as FDR saw Morgenthau, he covered it up.
FDR was enjoying his own success at, let’s be frank, manipulating a particular situation to his own advantage. There’s nothing wrong with taking a little pleasure in making something happen that otherwise wouldn’t have happened without your work. In fact it’s necessary to finding joy in your work.
The other way to love what you are doing is to remind yourself of the larger purpose of your work. Organizers always talk about how we are motivated by the sufferings we are trying to eradicate and the justice we are trying to bring to the world. That had better be true if you are going to survive long in this work. Engage with the people you are trying to help and organize. Learn their stories and feel their pain. Remind yourself of them. And take a moment or two every day to keep in mind the connection between what you do and the needs and justice you try to serve as well and, also, of the broader currents of our cultural and moral lives that we are riding as we try create a better world.
I’ve written before about how politics can be a spiritual quest. I think it must be if we are to have the energy to do this difficult work. And you find the spiritual element in advocacy in both places I’ve mentioned: in the large purposes to which we are connected and in the details of our action. Cherish them both.
Don’t stress about what you can’t control
It’s very hard to focus on the details that are exciting or interesting to us or to think about our place in the movement for justice if we are worrying all the time about things we can’t control. There is no joy to be found in trying to solve unsolvable problems or in fretting about our inability to do so.
So figure out what you can and can’t control and focus on the former. Don’t worry about the latter.
Often times we think we can control some of the things closest to us when, in fact, we can’t. We think we should be able to get our coalition partners to take on the share of the work to which they have agreed. Or we think that our staff members should be able to carry out the tasks we give them just as we would have done. So we are disappointed when things don’t work out they way we would like.
Sometimes we focus on the failures of our partners or staff members because they are so close to us that we think we should be able to get them to do what we want. The politicians that are more distant are, of course, even harder to control. But it is our frustration with the those politicians, and our sense of being out of control, that leads us to focus obsessively on keeping control of those nearby.
It’s important to remember that organizations and people are limited. Organizations, for reasons of their own, sometimes can’t carry out every task that a coalition wants them to do. And individuals are better at some things than others. It’s important to help your organizational partners to play the most effective role they can in a campaign. And it’s also important to get staff members and volunteers to do the best and most important work they are capable of doing. Much of the work of organizing is in coalition building and in training, motivating and holding staff members accountable.
But there are limits to what you can do. Some things won’t get done as you want them done. So you are most likely to be effective and happy with your coalition partners and your staff and volunteers if you ask them to do what they want to do and are what they are good at doing. Let organizations and staff / volunteers contribute to your broader work in a way that suits them.
Having realistic expectations of coalition partners and staff and loosening our control over them will help you keep your frustrations in check. It will help you get more and better work out of them. And it may even lead them to take on more responsibility and work with more creativity and passion.
If, on the other hand, an organization or staff member or volunteer creates too many problems and disappoints you too often, don’t try to change them. Just move on without them.
An HCAN coalition partner had a volunteer who drove me and everyone else crazy. The less he knew, the more he talked and the more insistent he became. In two or three weeks of working with this person on events it was clear that our relationship was not going to work out. But I couldn’t just fire him because he was a volunteer working with a national activist group. (That’s always the big problem with volunteers: you can’t fire them.)
So I went to a DC staff member of the activist group and said please, find me someone else. He understood the problem and the annoying person was not on the next conference call. No one said anything on line but a few people called me after the call and said, “Is he gone? Are you sure?” They were very grateful that I pulled the plug on him.
Recognize that sometimes you are working with the wrong people, not necessarily because they are not good and effective organizers but because they can’t or won’t do what you need someone to do in the place you have them. Or maybe they just don’t click with you and others. Maybe it’s your own limitations that cause the problem. But if you are running a campaign you can’t fire yourself. So don’t be afraid to sever those relationships. And don’t wait until you are boiling in anger before you sever them or do so in a way that expresses hostility. Try to address the issue honestly, listen to what they have to say, and then if you can’t fix the problem, move on without them.
Riding the movement
The last two points—not stressing about what you can’t control and loving what you are doing by seeing its place in a larger movement for justice, come together for me in this way: sometimes we just have to ride the movement we are on.
I’ve written about this at length elsewhere and won’t belabor the point here. But I do want to say that sometimes activists have to be a little willing to be a bit receptive or passive. That’s not easy for us. But when we are in the midst of an ongoing campaign, especially one in which we have mobilized large numbers of activists and volunteers, we just have to give up some control and let the passion and energy we have helped create take its course.
That doesn’t mean you stop trying to plan events and actions that make the most sense to you. But you have to acknowledge—and be grateful for—a movement and energy that you can’t wholly control. Movements of this kind are rare—think of the Occupy Movement. Sometime they happen at the least expected times and with little planning. They can be encouraged and directed but can’t be controlled. If you try to control them, you may kill them. So just ride them and be glad if they are pointing to a better world.
Prepare for the down times or take time off
The hardest moments I have as an organizer are the mornings when I don’t have an immediate task in front of me. Often they are on the days after a major event which has been absorbing all my energy for some time.
I often look forward to those days because they will give me a chance to catch up on all the tasks I’ve had to put aside while focused on the immediate tasks before me.
But, when I actually get to them, I’m usually exhausted. And without the adrenalin rush of a deadline to get me going, I simply get anxious because I don’t know what to do first and I don’t have the energy to do anything.
Of course, the first thing I might do in this circumstance is some planning about priorities. The trouble, however, is that planning is among the most anxiety producing parts of our work. Prioritizing the list of things you wants to accomplish gives everyone, not just Jews, shpilkes. Planning is not what you want to do when you are exhausted.
There are two possible solutions.
The first is to make sure you make regular time for planning so that when you come to one of these days, you have something on your list to which you can attend.
The second is to take the day off. When else are you going to play hooky, when you have an event two days away? It’s far better to take the day off and have some fun, than it is to spend the day avoiding work because you don’t know what to do first and don’t really want to do anything. If you spend the day surfing the web you are guaranteed to feel awful at the end of it.
It took me about ten months before I learned this lesson on the HCAN campaign. When the light bulb went off I made a resolution. Whenever I had one of these days I’d pick up my kid from school and do something fun with her. I never felt guilty taking time off from work if I was with her.
By the way, it’s generally a good idea to take a day or part of a day off when work isn’t going well. Sometimes we just are not on our game. I have a friend who is a brilliant wood worker. He once told that when he is working on a difficult job, especially when it involves expensive veneers, he gets up in the morning and works on another project for an hour. He wants to figure out if “I’m a wood worker or a klutz today.” And if he is a klutz, he takes the day off. Doing advocacy work requires us to be closely attentive to the goals, interests and moods of others. Sometimes we are just not up to it. So, on days when I think I’m likely to be an interpersonal klutz, I do paperwork or planning instead of talking to people. Similarly on days when I find writing difficult, I hit the phones. And when nothing is going well, which happens from time to time, I just take the rest of the day off.
Setting priorities
Having mentioned that one way to deal with those days when you don’t have something that needs your immediate attention is to make time for planning and priority setting, let me say a bit more about how doing so contributes to your emotional well-being and effectiveness as an organizer.
There is always far more that we activists could be doing than we have time or energy to do. If you evaluate yourself in terms of how well you are doing by looking at your list of everything you would like to do, you will always be disappointed in yourself and your campaign. Having clear and realistic priorities enables you to sustain your energy and confidence by meeting the most important goals. And, of course, it also helps you be a more effective organizer because you figure out how to sensibly spend your limited time and energy.
Priority setting also helps you avoid spending too much time on the tasks you like as opposed to those you need to do. Most activism and organizing involves some work that focuses on moving a political program and some work that focuses on maintaining the organization by which I mean administrative tasks like payroll and reporting, organizational maintenance tasks like recruiting and supporting board members and staff and, of course, fund raising. All of us like one set of tasks more than the others. And most of us dislike one of the most important tasks, fund raising.
So in the process of setting priorities, it is important to take three additional steps. One is to set measurable benchmarks that help you make sure you don’t let some of the critical tasks you don’t like slip by. For example, when I was responsible for fund raising for an organization, I had a minimum quota of fundraising calls I made every single day.
Second, if there are some tasks you don’t like or don’t enjoy, then find staff members who are especially good at them and delegate the work to them. I really hate filing reports—financial reports and work reports to the organizations that support my work. So when I ran an organization for which these reports were important I found a great, highly organized person to do them for me.
The third thing you can sometimes do is find creative ways to work around the need to do some of the work you hate. The national HCAN campaign required weekly reports and I’m a little embarrassed to say that I never filed one of them. To her credit, Margarida Jorge, the field manager at HCAN once told me that she just couldn’t hassle me about that because we were doing everything she wanted us to do and more.
But I also found a work around that enabled me to give Margarida what she absolutely needed from me. Those reports were, I realized, important for two reasons—to make sure that HCAN contracted partners were doing the work they were being paid to do and so that the national HCAN staff could report to their funders, board, coalition allies and, at time the Democratic leadership in Congress, about our work. Since a critical part of our plan in Pennsylvania was to sustain our activists during the long campaign by using blog posts and emails to show them that they were part of a large and coordinated effort, I was pretty assiduous about documenting our work with text, photos, and video. So I simply sent those blog posts to Margarida and she had what she absolutely needed from us. (She certainly was never going to get a time sheet from me!)
Setting priorities can also help with another problem—limiting the demands of the national campaigns and other partners who support you. Sometimes those demands are unreasonable or conflicting. I’ve done work for national organizations that simply demanded far more out of me and my team than they deserved given the limited support they were giving us.
I’ve also worked for an organization that funded my work but also constantly made conflicting demands on me. It was an organization involved in a number of different issue campaign some in partnership with other groups and some that it had initiated itself. The organization had serious problems prioritizing its work and would constantly take up new projects and drop or modify others without much warning. That meant that it made conflicting and changing demands on me and my staff, demands that sometimes came from different people in the national organization. So my attempt to set priorities for myself was also a way to manage the conflicting demands of our that organization. I shared my priorities with the organization in part to force it to get their own priorities for me in order. It worked for a time but when I found that this disorganization was leading it to ignore our agreements, I decided to disentangle myself from them.
Avoid anxiety transfer
Setting priorities, then, is critical to being a more effective activist and also a way to deal with the anxiety that arises from being overwhelmed by all that one might do.
While I’m on the subject of anxiety, let me warn you about a certain kind of person you meet too often in the activist world: someone who is so anxious that their anxiety is contagious. These people have two annoying habits.
One is to demand that other people rise to their level of anxiety. When there is a problem they get excited. They raise their voices and speak in a pressured way. And if other people around them aren’t as excited they think no one is taking them seriously. So they get even more excited.
This is a real problem for me, personally. When faced with a serious difficulty, my first inclination is the exact opposite. I get cooler and try to focus analytically not emotionally on the problem at hand. Of course, that drives the anxiety prone folks bonkers because they don’t think I’m taking them seriously.
The second thing these folks do is engage in anxiety transfer. They find a time to go through all the things that worry them so that they can relieve their own anxiety. In the process, though, they give it to someone else.
I once had a superior who would call me every Friday afternoon and talk to me for two hours. We’d go over everything on our list for that week. And I mean everything, not just the high priority items but the low ones. Even if I had had a good week, and gotten all of the high priority items done, by the end of the conversation I was depressed about all low priority things I hadn’t gotten to and about all that remained undone.
This was a crazy exercise. What’s the point of identifying our highest priorities every week if we don’t evaluate the week in terms of whether we made progress on the high priority items? And what do we accomplish by making our subordinates feel bad at the end of every week. Well, my supervisor did accomplish one thing: She transferred her anxiety to me. She went off and had a nice Friday evening while I went home to my wife and daughter miserable and depressed.
When I realized that I couldn’t get this behavior to stop I decided that I needed to find the most graceful way out of this impossible position.
Delegating, to and from
I’ve already talked about how delegating is critical to dealing with the pressures of activism. But lots of us have trouble delegating. There are two different reasons for this. Some of us are control freaks. We simply don’t trust others to do a task as well as we can. Others of us have trouble asking people for help.
I’m not a control freak but if I were I’d try to get all the help I could in overcoming it. Advocacy and electoral campaigns will kill you if try to do everything yourself. My sense is that the inability of control freaks to trust other people is a deep rooted problem that affects their lives in all respects not just their work.
If you have control freak tendencies but not the full blown syndrome, then with a little self-awareness, it’s possible to overcome it. Sometimes this tendency is the result of short term thinking: It can take more time to teach someone how to do something than to do it yourself. But if you teach someone once, they’ll be able to take on that task and related ones in the future. Learn how to delegate and trust other by spending some time to think through what you want them to do and by giving them explicit instructions. When they succeed, you’ll build up some trust in them. You will probably find that in the future you can give less explicit instructions, especially if you make yourself available to take their questions. And you will also find out that giving your subordinates greater leeway encourages them to do their work with more energy and creativity.
My problem in working with staff is that I don’t like asking people to do things. Knowing this, I try to remind myself to ask. And I compensate by finding people to work with who are self-motivated. Also I create situations in which people will volunteer to take on tasks. For example, rather than set out everything that needs to be done on a project I’ll leave this up to discussion and when people point out a critical task I’ll ask them if they can cover it.
What if the shoe is on the other foot? Working under someone who is a control freak or has such tendencies can be even more anxiety producing and dispiriting than being one yourself.
I once worked for someone who had control freak tendencies. I was not happy at first because nothing I did seemed to satisfy her. I slowly figured out how to overcome her trust issues. When I took on a task for her I wrote out elaborate plans. I made sure to ask her a lot of questions. I tried to anticipate what she might worry about on a project and told her how I was dealing with it. I did good work. And I wrote long reports about what I did. Pretty soon she got tired of all my planning and reporting and just wanted me to do the work. She had gained confidence in me not just by my doing good work but my showing her that I could think about the projects she wanted me to do as she would do them.
And, of course, one by-product of this process was that, as I learned to anticipate her concerns and questions I became a much better organizer. The woman I worked for was very smart, very experienced, and extremely good at our work. So I took what might have been difficult relationship and made it a positive one.
Real human interaction
Let’s be honest, to a large extent activism involves treating other people instrumentally, that is, getting them to do things for the campaign you are on, which means for you. We spend our days inspiring, asking, cajoling, and demanding that people to do things. We are constantly looking for how we can influence others either directly or indirectly. Even when we think about people who are not our immediate concern, we may focus on how we can use them to get someone else to do something.
This is not the nicest way to treat other people. Indeed it can make us callous and uncaring about others. And that can lead us to neglect the importance of real human interaction to our lives and souls.
We can also treat ourselves instrumentally as well. I’ll never forget the first time I was comfortable enough in doing a campaign event or in making speech that I could almost step outside myself and observe the impact I was having on others. That’s not an entirely bad thing since self-observation can lead one to improve one’s performance and, as I pointed out above, there is some pleasure to be found in seeing ourselves do a good job. But if you look at yourself mostly as an instrument for accomplishing your purposes in a campaign, the emotion you bring to that activity will eventually be false. (Look at Mitt Romney if you want to see a good example of that!) Everyone will see that you are insincere. And you will lose your ability to find real joy in your activity or to respond to the emotions of the people with whom you are working.
So it is critical to make sure you don’t forget what real human interaction is, that is, what it is to simply share your time, ideas, and experiences with another human being for the sheer joy of that interaction and nothing else.
That’s why when I’m doing organizing work I try to make time each and every day for my family or with friends. I try never to miss dinner with my family and I try to spend some time doing fun things with them a few times a week—going out to dinner, taking a walk, visiting a museum or seeing a movie or play. (Movies are a bit of a problem. During the HCAN campaign I went out to dinner and saw a movie with my wife and daughter almost every Friday. But I slept through large parts of those movies.) Especially if you are absent a lot during an intense campaign, your family is going to use this time for domestic problem solving and planning. As I said above, you need to respect that. But you should also help your family understand that you need time just relax and be with them.
Work and family so dominate our lives these days that sometimes we forget friendship is central to a good life as well. We need people who are not involved in our projects, whether they are political or domestic, with whom we can talk about our lives in a more distanced way. So I try to find time every day or so to spend an hour with a friend, over lunch, coffee, or a drink. Often they are political folk who are not on our campaign and with whom I can get a bit of a reality check about some of my concerns. But I try to steer our conversations away work and, instead, try to reflect with them about our lives and the world around us.
A note on campaign sex
Sex is one of the best ways we have of making real human contact with others and, especially. our romantic partners and spouses. And that’s one of at least three different reasons that intense political activism tends to make us hornier than we would otherwise be. A second reason is that sex is a great way to seek relief from the anxiety of campaigns because it is relaxing, pleasurable and thus a wonderful distraction from the problems of the day. Third, the high levels of adrenalin that comes with engagement in an intense campaign directly heightens sexual desire.
Sometimes the heightened sexual desire that comes from intense political activity is in conflict with the exhaustion that also comes with intense political activity. It doesn’t take much creativity, though, to figure out how to deal with it. Morning sex is a great way to start a day of political activity. And, if you and your partner can manage it, taking off in the middle of the afternoon is a good way of sustain your energy for a long day of organizing.
But, as good as sex can be for us, electoral and issue advocacy campaigns can have a strange or distorting effect on our sex lives. So it’s worth taking a moment to understand how that happens and how to deal with it.
One problem is that activism can leave us so hopped up that campaign sex is faster and more frenzied than non-campaign sex. That can make it intense and fun. But remember that if your spouse or partner is not on the campaign, he or she might not appreciate that kind of sex all the time. Instead he or she will see it as pressured and impersonal. Quickies have their place. But you and your partner will be more relaxed and have more fun if you remember to take your time, appreciate the moment, and draw it out.
Another, more serious issue, is that that horny people working closely together on campaigns are going to be attracted to each other. And, people who have been spending most of their time treating each other instrumentally can take that same attitude into their sexual relationships.
A mutual attraction is, by and large, a good thing if you don’t have another relationship and if you recognize that an attraction during a campaign may not last beyond it. But it can also lead us to engage in sexual relationships that are ultimately disappointing or that can undermine families or long term partnerships.
So if you are single, don’t let a fling generate expectations about a long term relationship. Sometimes that happens, but it is more likely to happen—and you are less likely to get hurt if it doesn’t—if you are honest with yourself and your partner about what has brought you together during a campaign.
If you are married or partnered, take your new found enthusiasm for sex home with you. It’s the least you can do for a partner who is probably suffering from your absence and inattention. That’s true even if you have an open relationship—a campaign that is taking up so much of your life is not the time or place to be exploring the boundaries of open relationships.
If you are single, don’t hit on married people unless you are sure that the person is in an open relationship and don’t do it at all if you are in the same city as your potential partner’s spouse!
And whether you are single, partnered or married, be aware that you are dealing with another human being not someone who is there to comfort you. Campaign sex is much better for your body and soul if it really is a human not an instrumental encounter.