The Ethical Slut (21 page)

Try writing a letter you’re not going to send, expressing all your feelings and concerns. Janet keeps letters like this in the “Drafts”
folder of her email program; Dossie writes them in her word processor (which doesn’t have a Send button) and pastes them into an email later. Write out all your feelings, and then close the file and go do something else. Come back and add stuff, or edit things out, for a couple of days, and then check what you’ve written, making sure you’re owning your own stuff and using I-messages. We usually delete sentences that begin with the words “You shithead.” Later, when you can read the message and imagine your friend truly understanding whatever you are disturbed about, it’s time to send it.

We hope we do not have to remind you that your blog, or your MySpace page, or your private email list of a few dozen very intimate friends is not the place to rehearse this private correspondence. Struggle with it yourself—or, if that seems impossible, perhaps you can run it past one trusted friend, someone who would be acceptable to your lover too, to make sure you’re saying what you’re trying to say.

Dossie wrote such a letter recently to a lover of hers. She wrote the first draft at a time when she was terribly upset, on a Friday. She was busy over the weekend but managed to revisit her letter from time to time. By Monday, the issues were still there but, after some processing, seemed more manageable, so she called her friend on the phone and they talked … and resolved the issues quite easily and peacefully. The letter never got sent.

When you are willing to own your distress, it becomes possible for your lover to comfort you, to offer you reassurance and love, when things are hard. Even when you don’t agree about how you are going to handle an issue, you can still exchange love and comfort. We recommend that everyone be open about asking for reassurance, love, hugs, comfort, and stuff like that. Many of us grew up in families where we were taught not to ask for what we needed and were scorned, perhaps, as only wanting attention.

So what’s wrong with wanting attention? Isn’t there plenty? Remember about starvation economies: Don’t shortchange yourself. You do not have to be content with little dribs and drabs of comfort, attention, support, reassurance, and love. You get to have all the comfort and reassurance you want. You and your intimates can set yourselves up
to share lots and lots and lots and in the process learn how much more you have to share than you ever thought. So focus on abundance, and create a relationship ecology rich in the good things of life: warmth and affection and sex and love.

MOST SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIPS, from casual acquaintanceship through lifetime monogamy, are based on assumptions that are really unstated agreements about behavior: you don’t kiss your mailman, you don’t tip your mother. These are the unspoken rules we learn very early in our lives, from our parents, our playmates, and our cultures. People who break these unspoken rules are often considered odd, sometimes even crazy, because the values and judgments behind the social agreements about how we relate to one another are so deeply ingrained that we are usually not even aware that we have made any agreement at all.

In many day-to-day relationships, like your relationships with neighbors and coworkers, it’s probably fine to rely on those implicit, built-in agreements. But when you’re trying something as complicated and unprecedented as ethical sluthood, we think it’s very important to take nothing for granted. Talk with the people in your life about your agreements, and negotiate the conditions, environments, and behaviors that will get your own needs met and respect everybody’s boundaries.

You’ll often hear people talking about the rules of their relationships. But “rules” implies a certain rigidity, that there is a right way and a
wrong way to run your relationship and that there will be penalties if you do it wrong. We understand that there are many different ways that people may choose to relate to each other, so we prefer to use the word “agreements” to describe mutually agreed-upon, conscious decisions, designed to be flexible enough to accommodate individuality, growth, and change. These agreements are sometimes a little fuzzy, particularly if you’re used to the hard edges of rules. A little fuzziness is okay; your agreement will either get clarified later if it needs to be—or it won’t, in which case it’s probably clear enough.

How do you know when you need an agreement? You can tell by listening to your emotions. If something comes up that leaves you feeling upset or angry or unheard or whatever, that’s an area in which you and your sweetie may need to discuss making an agreement. We suggest that you let go right now of the idea that you can predict every single situation that might come up in your relationship and make a rule to cover it—just forget it. Many perfectly good agreements get made by twenty-twenty hindsight: a problem comes up, and instead of arguing over whose fault it was, the people simply make an agreement to try to prevent that problem from coming up again or to deal with it when it does.

Our friends Laurie and Chris have become extraordinarily flexible agreement makers through practicing a lot:

Chris and Laurie have had two children in the eleven years since this interview and are still together and still happily slutty.

So what constitutes a good agreement? In our opinion, the single most important hallmark of agreement is
consent,
which we define as “an active collaboration for the pleasure and well-being of all concerned.” In the case of polyamory, this consent often includes that of people not directly involved—other partners, children, and other people whose lives are affected by our agreements.

Defining consent can sometimes be tricky. If someone consents under pressure, we don’t think that meets the “active collaboration” criterion. And you can’t consent to something you don’t know about: “Well, you didn’t say I
couldn’t
fly to Boise for two weeks with this flight attendant I just met” does not constitute consent.

In order to achieve this kind of active consent, it is critical that everyone involved accept responsibility for knowing their own feelings and communicating them—but this isn’t always easy. Sometimes feelings don’t want to be pulled to the surface and examined—you may
simply know that you feel bad. Give yourself the time and support you need to get to know that feeling, perhaps using some of the strategies we discuss in
chapter 13
, “Roadmaps through Jealousy.” If you feel that you need help in defining what’s going on for you, it’s okay to ask for that help, possibly by asking a partner or a more neutral friend who understands multiple relationships to devote some time to hearing you out. Physical or verbal reassurance often makes a huge difference, and sometimes a wise friend or therapist can ask the right questions to help you untangle a complicated feeling. Once you start listening to your own feelings, you’ll have a much easier time getting your needs and desires out there where everybody can hear them and make agreements to help meet them.

Most of us need some support in asking for what we want. When we are involved in making agreements, we need to feel sure that the needs we reveal will not be held against us. Most of us feel pretty vulnerable in and around our emotional limits, so it’s important to recognize that these limits are valid: “I need to feel loved,” “I need to feel that I’m important to you,” “I need to know that you find me attractive,” “I need you to listen and care about me when I feel hurt.”

Blaming, manipulation, bullying, and moral condemnation do not belong in the agreement-making process. The process of making a good agreement must include a commitment from all concerned to listen to one another’s concerns and feelings in an open-minded and unprejudiced way. If you are waiting for your partner to reveal a weakness so that you can exploit it into ammunition to “win” your argument, you are not ready to make a satisfactory agreement.

Legalistic hairsplitting is another enemy of good agreements. We know one couple whose agreement was that either of them would let the other one know within twenty-four hours if they were going to have sex with someone else. One of them called the other one from another city to let her know that he’d had sex with someone else the night before. “But you said you’d give me twenty-four hours’ notice!” she cried angrily. “I never said twenty-four hours
before
,” he pointed out. This loophole-finding legalistic behavior left neither individual feeling that their agreement had worked for them. The moral: be clear, be specific, and above all negotiate in good faith; this is not about cheating any more.

Agreements need to be realistic and clearly defined—if you’re not sure whether you’re keeping an agreement, it may be time to redefine that agreement. It is unrealistic, for example, to ask your partners never to enter into sexual interactions with people that they care about “too much.” There is no way to define “too much,” and few of us conceive of our polyamorous utopia as a world in which you are only allowed to share sex with people you don’t care about at all. None of us can truthfully agree to feel only this way or that way: our agreements need to have room in them for real emotions, whatever they may be. A more concrete agreement would be to limit outside dates to once a month, which might serve the same purpose.

Agreements do not have to be equal. People are different and unique, and what pushes my buttons might be perfectly okay with you. So one person might find it very important that his partner not stay out overnight, whereas said partner might actually enjoy an occasional opportunity to watch the late movie all alone and eat crackers in bed. One friend of ours says,

Fairness does not mean perfectly equal. Fairness means we care about how each person feels and make agreements to help all of us feel as good as possible.

When thinking about agreements for an open relationship, most people start out by listing what their partner should not do: don’t kiss her on the mouth, don’t treat him better than you do me. Some “thou shalt nots”
are
necessary: agreements need to be made, for example, about sexual connections with relatives, neighbors, and coworkers. But many negative agreements are really about protecting your partner from feeling hurt or jealous, and we’re not big fans of these, although we recognize that they sometimes have their place as an intermediate
step. We think that the best agreements to protect your partner from emotional pain are positive: let’s have a special date next weekend, I will find time to listen to you when you hurt, I’ll tell you how much I love you again and again.

Everyone needs a sense of emotional safety to succeed at feeling secure in open relationships, but thinking up agreements that will help both partners feel emotionally safe can be confusing. In the process of unlearning jealousy we will all at some time be asking our partners to take some risk, to agree to feel some painful feelings, to fall down a few times in order to learn how to ride the emotional bicycle of truly free love.