The Ethical Slut, page 24
There is no reason why our interests need be opposed to our lover’s partner’s interests. We all want to collaborate on creating a happy outcome where everybody gets respected and everybody gets their needs met and their desires fulfilled. In the long run, we are all on the same side.
The experienced slut can take some initiative in reaching out to frightened partners in a gentle and openhearted way. Some of our best friends over the years were first met in these circumstances. The vulnerablity of feeling jealous or nervous about each other is its own form of intimacy, and friendly feelings may be the most useful response.
Taking care of a partner’s partner by sharing sex with them is optional for both of you. It’s rarely a good idea to get intimate with someone just because they might feel left out, and it is not often sustainable to enter into a relationship that doesn’t interest you in and of itself. Occasionally, you will discover a sweet fit and become lover to a couple, as we will discuss soon. But avoid committing yourself to an interaction that you don’t like very much or don’t want at all. Giving in to someone to assuage jealousy just about never makes the jealousy go away. You can respect your own limits while offering support, warmth, and welcome to your lover’s lover.
A special case: you may find yourself in a relationship with someone whose life partnership is no longer very sexual, whether from the normal cooling of passion as relationships mature, or through illness or disability. When you are dating such a person, do remember to approach their partner with an added measure of care and respect. Such people may be happy that you are keeping their partner happy but still somewhat sorrowful at not being able to fulfill that role themselves. It helps to discover what valuable contributions that person does make, and recognize and honor them.
ROLE-CONSTRAINED RELATIONSHIP
Sometimes your relationship may be defined by the roles you play together, roles that a person’s life partner may not want or enjoy. Your connection could be as simple as a love of watching football on TV or, perhaps more complicated, being the same-sex partner to someone in an opposite-sex marriage. Your shared roles might be about S/M power exchange, erotic roleplaying, exploration of gender, spiritual journeying, or any other sexual sharing that the partnership doesn’t provide. Your shared role makes you part of a family’s ecology, part of what makes it run smoothly, and is both a joy and a responsibility not to be taken lightly.
LOVER TO A COUPLE
Sometimes sexual connection comes together quite beautifully between multiple people—a threesome, a quad, or whatever. The very riskiness is exhilarating, and the adventure can be very new and exciting. If you are fortunate enough to have this experience, you can expect to honor the relationship that you are privileged to share in and to be honored as a very special member of that relationship. The sex can be very luxurious—think of all that can be done with those extra pairs of hands!—and feature various configurations of two on one. How delicious to have two people spoiling you, how fascinating to share the active lovemaking with another, a virtuoso trio when you get practiced at it.
There may be times when someone has little to do and could feel left out. When that happens to you, think about how an extra pair of hands might be useful in whatever the other two are doing and gently join in. One time in such a moment, Dossie was temporarily left out while the couple who were her lovers were having intercourse with each other. She felt a little shy, thought about joining in, and then noticed that these two people, who had been together for quite a few years, were amazingly graceful in their deep connection with each other, so Dossie settled in to watch for a while and was quite happy and content just to witness such beauty. When they were through, they welcomed Dossie into their embrace, and further delights occurred that were well worth waiting for.
Do remember that there is privilege in being an outside partner: you can, if you choose, get to be all about fun and leave the heavy stuff to the partners who will go home with one another afterward. Or maybe you’d rather be there to help out when the kids all come down with chicken pox. Whatever fits for you, remember that there is privilege in being the play partner. As one friend of ours puts it, “I get to be dessert!”
GROUPS
When your lover has a whole bunch of partners, making agreements can look like major treaty negotiations and might require some diplomacy. Some groupings have boundaries around who a member may connect with. Perhaps the other members want to meet and approve—that’s an easy one. Some will want outside partners to clearly understand the group’s limits and boundaries, especially about safer sex, which is great. And we are very happy to see that some poly groups are very thoughtful about how they make connection to a new person and are willing to take the time to get things right.
Some groups might want you to join in one way or another—having sex with the group, moving in with the group, becoming part of a group marriage—that may or may not fit for you. You, of course, get to look at what’s being asked and decide if that is what you want, and to define your own desires and limits.
Many initial disagreements can eventually be negotiated if all the parties involved are open-minded and operating in good faith. And if they aren’t, you might be better off learning that right at the start. One friend of ours connected with a person who had two primary partners and wanted our friend as a secondary. But when our friend asked what would happen if he were to acquire a primary partner himself, they said, “Oh, no, that wouldn’t be acceptable.” So our friend opted out.
Most group marriages and circles that we have encountered are much more lightly held and flow easily with new partners who may someday join the group at large, over time and one step at a time. Dossie belonged to one such family when her daughter was a baby. There were no formal membership requirements, and everyone fit together and grew together as they went along, with partnerships forming and separating and reforming on their own timetables, and everyone responsible for the whole gang of children. This adaptive arrangement worked very well for quite a few years—not forever, but for a good, happy, memorable long time.
Single Soliloquy
Dossie writes:
Someone at a workshop once asked me: “Don’t you get lonely, living alone?” I was startled, and it took me a second to understand that he wasn’t trying to make me feel bad. What an ache he innocently opened in me. I had to say: “Yes, of course I get lonely.” And yet …
I have lived about half my adult life single. Some things are hard to do by yourself. I recently bought my first house. How I yearned for a partner in that scary endeavor! But I managed, somehow. I dealt with my fears, and with realtors and mortgage brokers and roofers and inspectors, and now I have a sweet little home in the woods: like me, mine to share with others, when and how I choose.
Nothing lasts forever. Someone asked me if I feared being alone in my old age. I am now in my sixties, and you bet I’m afraid of that. I saw my mother live to be ninety-three in the house she shared with my father during their thirty-seven-year marriage: only he died of cancer when they were sixty-five.
Nothing lasts forever. I still crave the thrill of falling in love, the dream of a romance so magical it could never fade. And I know better. When I have fallen in love in the past, the long-term outcome has been a crapshoot: sometimes great, sometimes disastrous. After eight such relationships, I must admit I have no idea how to predict the future of any passion: whether we will grow into a solid and sustaining kind of love, or whether we will grow to hate each other.
Now I am a person who prefers burning passion to sweet reason. And I don’t consider myself very good at compromise. But my compromise for my own survival is to learn to live single and to make a very good life of it: a lifelong commitment to myself.
Long ago, I thought of singlehood as being “between old men”: some condition of waiting for the next one-and-only to show up. It was like being on hold, waiting for one-and-only number four to pick up the phone, not like living a real life.
In 1969, when I was first a slut on purpose and a baby feminist, I decided to live single for five years so I could discover who I might be when I’m not trying to be somebody’s wife. But how was I going to make this work? I didn’t want to live and raise my child in a cold world with no affection or intimacy, so I devised a scheme for sharing love with lovers I had no intention of living with.
Back then, there was very little precedent for sharing sex with someone you were not auditioning for a long-term partnership. So I invented ways that I could take the risky steps of sharing affection openly with people I had not “secured,” if I can call it that. I told them what I liked about them. I good-mouthed. I sought out opportunities to be demonstrative. I used the L-word and insisted on calling the feelings I had for each of my lovers by their true name: love. And when I had the courage to be loving, the result was that I got a lot of love back.
It is true that I first learned to love this way as a survival technique for living single. But it has become something far more valuable: an open affection for who and what I love around me has become my foundation and my way of life, whether or not I am living with a partner.
I am confident that this approach can work for everyone, whatever their lifestyle, and even when they are not sharing sex: wouldn’t it make a fine world if we all made it a point to honor and cherish and openly value every person we make a connection with?
I raised my child with this sense of community. Being a mother taught me to respect limits and boundaries and certainly to refuse to welcome in my home or in my heart anyone or anything that threatened the well-being of my child or me. By extension, I learned to better protect my own vulnerabilities, which made me even more capable of expressing my love for others.
I live in the country, and I feel this same kind of heart-opening love when I walk on a beach, or look at the world from the top of a small mountain, or discover, around some bend in a trail, a two-thousand-year-old tree standing in majesty. I feel no desperation, nor any desire to cling. I just feel happy.
Do I sometimes feel lonely? Sure. Do I love my life? Immensely. Sometimes I think I am the luckiest person in the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Ebb and Flow of Relationships
WE OBSERVE, with much delight, the number of our old lovers we count among our present friends, and we marvel at how sexual relationships can develop into family memberships. There is a reality limit here: You have only twenty-four hours a day to devote to your love life, and presumably you need some of those hours for work and sleep and so on, so you have a finite amount of time to devote to each of your lovers. You can fit only a certain number of people in your life and expect to do any of them justice.
We find that most people do okay letting their partners come and go as it feels right for each of them. Extended family sexual relationships are more likely to grow apart than to break up. One of the very wonderful things about building sexual friendships is that, while past relationships and smaller affairs may come and go over the years, each pairing has its own characteristic and unique intimacy. You create this intimacy the way you learn to ride a bike—by trial and error, slipping and falling, and ultimately zooming along together. Just like riding a bike, you’ll never forget this particular intimacy or your own role in it. Even after the most bitter of separations, when conflict is cleared and time has healed the wounds, you may find that you can slip that connection right back on, like a comfortable old glove.
On the other hand, sometimes conflict in an intimate relationship goes on so long, or seems so impossible to resolve, that it threatens the very foundation of that relationship. We hope you bring the same high level of ethics and concern to a conflicted relationship that you brought to a happy one.
It is always tempting to respond to a major relationship conflict by assigning blame. In childhood we learn that pain, in the form of punishment from our all-powerful parents, is the consequence of doing something wrong. So when we hurt, we try to make sense of it by finding somebody doing something wrong, preferably somebody else. We have discussed the problems that come from blaming and projection before.
What is important to remember is that most relationships break up because the partners are unhappy with each other, and no one is to blame: not you, not your partner, and not your partner’s lover. Even if someone acted badly, or was dishonest, your primary relationship probably isn’t falling apart for that reason—relationships tend to end due to their own internal stresses. Even your authors have trouble remembering this when we are in the middle of a bitter breakup.
When you find yourself wanting to blame, it may help to remember a truism of relationship counseling: the client is the relationship itself, not either of the people in it. During a breakup it is supremely useless to try to ascertain who is “right” and who is “wrong”: the question is, what needs to happen next? If you start looking at conflicts as problems to be solved instead of trying to decide whose fault they are, you have taken an important first step in solving them.
Some people habitually bear the burden of being responsible for everybody’s emotional well-being and feel that they’re somehow at fault because they’re unable to magically make everyone’s pain and trouble disappear. Instead of refusing to own their stuff, one partner takes too much responsibility for the problem at hand. Such people need to learn to own their own bit and let everybody else own theirs.
It’s also common for one partner to take too little responsibility. People who have a lot of their self-esteem connected to their ability to maintain a relationship may feel the need to make their partner into the villain in order to justify their own desire to leave. This strategy is unfair to both of you: it gives the “villain” all the power in the relationship and disempowers the “victim.” Deciding that you have no choice but to leave because your partner is so horrible is denying the fact that there are always choices. Our experience is that relationship troubles are almost always two-sided: if you can acknowledge your own contribution to the problem, you can work toward solving it.
If your relationship problems include anybody being physically violent, or emotionally or verbally abusive, it’s not time to waffle over whose fault it is—it’s time to get professional help in learning to resolve conflict in a nondestructive manner. The Resource Guide in the back of this book will tell you how to get in touch with groups in your area that help both battered and battering partners. Similarly, professional support is often a good idea to deal with substance abuse—no partner, no matter how wonderful, can resolve something like alcoholism with love alone. If a child is being abused in any way, safety becomes the first priority, and you need to leave right now. You can work on resolving these issues from a safe distance.
Breaking Up
It happens. Good relationship skills and high ethics don’t mean you get to be with the same partner or partners forever and ever. It is our experience that relationships change, people grow out of them, people change. They may acquire new desires, new dreams. Some breakups in our own lives, as we look back with 20/20 hindsight, were actually constructive moves toward personal growth and a healthier life for each of us. At the time, however, we just felt awful.
It helps to remember that in the contemporary world, a breakup doesn’t have to mean that you and your ex did something dreadful. Most of us can count on going through a breakup at some time in our lives, possibly quite a few times. Rather than hide in denial, or torture ourselves with wondering what we did wrong, what would happen if we thought, in advance, about how we would like breaking up to be in our lives?
When a traditional marriage breaks up, nobody takes that as evidence that monogamy doesn’t work—so why do people feel compelled to take a slut’s breakup as evidence that free love is impossible? Your breakup may be for reasons entirely unrelated to the openness of your relationship. At any rate, it probably isn’t evidence that you aren’t meant to be a slut: we suspect you wouldn’t have done all the hard work it takes to live this way if you hadn’t had a strong desire for sluthood in the first place.
When a relationship shifts dramatically, it’s great if everybody feels calm enough to separate with affection and equanimity. But all too often, partnerships break up in a harsh way, with painful, angry, hurt, and bitter feelings. Grief at losing a relationship that we had counted on cuts deep, and while we are going through the hurtful process of an unwelcome separation, none of us are at our best.
A typical grief process takes about three months to get past the acute phase. It helps to look at grieving as productive work. Loss has left a hole in your life, and you need to pore over what you valued as you figure out how you want to fill the empty space and knit the wound together. You probably will need to do this work on your own—your ex can’t really do it for you. Feelings of grief, loss, abandonment, anger, resentment, and such that are overwhelming or intolerable today will probably seem sad but manageable three months from now as you move through this process. As the most intense feelings die down, you can find a good time to get back into communication with your ex—have some coffee or go to a movie or some such. It would be a shame not to come out of this breakup with at least a friendship, after all you’ve shared.
BREAKUP ETIQUETTE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Sadly, many people approach the ending of a relationship as if they have been given a license for drama, and furthermore, some people just can’t leave in a good way. They need someone to blame (other than themselves), a villain, a perpetrator, the bad guy, to feel okay about themselves or to clear their consciences.
