(I know, right?)
I used to think I wouldn’t… That I’d have a little rule that I wouldn’t sleep with anyone at BMI…
[Edited to add: Tbh, these posts are a little meandering, and I don’t think it really gives any real ‘information,’ or new POV about sexual assault. It’s kind of just me trying to work stuff out from my head out loud. I’m leaving it up just for posterity of the whole thing. But if you want more in-depth stuff (or stuff that makes more sense), you can check out all the posts in the sexual assault series.]
But there was this connection with this guy, and I started to justify how it didn’t feel like there’d be “trouble,” because I didn’t see a power dynamic that was off between us.
[Obviously, oh the irony! I had no idea it would turn into an abusive relationship, where power is everything.]
But at the top, on paper, we seemed like equals. This person wasn’t a teacher or a person on a panel deciding my fate. Neither of us are in charge of any sort of “promotion” of any kind of the other one.
Random lil BMI thing – It’s even semi-kinda-sorta-encouraged (or, well, at least joked about) on the first day to date each other or whatever.
We get this little speech about how “you might find your writing partner here… Aaaaand, you might find your other partner [*wink, wink, nudge, nudge, elbow, elbow*], just like Bobby and Kristen Anderson-Lopez [a married couple who met in BMI] did.”
And I don’t know. While I’m trying not to give sexual assault guy’s identity away, I will say he wasn’t a composer. He could’ve been a lyricist, book writer, an auditor, someone in another year, friend/family of someone in the class. But he wasn’t a composer.
And that piece of information is important because composers (and kind of book writers to a smaller extent on certain project(s) later in the year) are the only people you directly work with as a lyricist.
So I thought, “maybe my rule only has to be that I’ll never sleep with a composer in the program. But if I am guaranteed to never have to work with this person, what’s the worst that can happen?
And this is where I’ll pick up tomorrow!