The Ethical Slut (27 page)
Authors: Dossie Easton
We all grew up in a world in which there was assumed to be nothing between emotionless sport fucking and committed long-term marriage-type relationships, leaving the vast territory in between open to discovery by relationship pioneers of all stripes, including ourselves. What interesting ways of relating to people might we, and you, find between these two poles? When we include
all
of our connections in our picture of relationship, we expand the definition of what a relationship can be.
Each relationship seeks its own level when we let it. Operating on this principle, we can welcome each of our partners for precisely who they are: we don’t need them to be anybody else or to bring us any particular resources or skills. If you don’t want to play tennis with me, I’ll ask somebody else, and if you don’t want to play bondage games with me, again, somebody else will—our relationship will not be less for it. What we share is valuable for what we share. Period.
We like to be easygoing about sex, but what people mean by “casual sex” is perhaps too dismissive. Casual sex sounds like we are supposed to be distant: don’t get too close, don’t expect too much, avoid any expression of intimacy or vulnerability.
We are now hearing people refer to certain of their lovers as “friends with benefits.” A euphemism, perhaps, but an interesting concept. Why shouldn’t we share sex with our friends, making sex a natural part of the love and honor and faithfulness and openheartedness that we already share with friends?
We have learned the most, and had the most fun, and made the most wonderful, rich connections, when we have welcomed each new person into our lives just as they are, without trying to force them into the picture that’s labeled “relationship” in our brains. This has been true whether we’ve been single, coupled, part of a group family, or engaged in any one of the myriad other ways of relating that creative and loving sluts can devise.
We hear too often of folks who delight in a joyously slutty lifestyle until they “fall in love.” Then, perhaps prodded by cultural messages that love must equal marriage must equal monogamy, they dive into an attempt at a conventional lifestyle, often with disastrous consequences. At least one of your authors—you can insert Janet’s rueful grin here—has proven herself not immune to this kind of programming.
There is no reason why wedding bells, or the equivalent thereof, need to break up that old gang of yours. Many sluts find it possible to combine the committed stability of a life partnership with the manifold pleasures of sex and intimacy with others.
However, there is no question that being a slut within a committed relationship has some special challenges. So much of our cultural baggage tells us that commitment equals ownership—that, as the old bitter joke has it, a ring around the finger equals a ring through the nose. Even people who know better often find (sometimes to their surprise) that their expectations of a committed relationship may include the right to control many aspects of their partner’s lives.
While we’re going to write here about couples for the sake of clarity, all the principles apply equally to threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes. Relationships take their own shapes, but the best ones tend to share some basic principles: good boundaries, mindfulness, and a mutual desire for the well-being of everyone involved.
As you can probably guess, we don’t much like the idea that a relationship commitment specifies anybody’s right to anything beyond mutual respect and caring for each other. Yet once you divorce romantic love from the concept of ownership, what happens? One woman we know, who had never been in an open relationship before, was startled to find that many of her old habits have become irrelevant: “Why should
I bother to look for stray hairs on the pillow, trying to sniff out any trace of infidelity, when I know that if he has sex with someone else he’ll simply tell me about it?” Yet there
are
still issues of boundaries, of responsibility, of courtesy, that complement ownership and promote sustainability, which must be dealt with.
So, how do sluts in love build a life together?
Our friends Ruth and Edward remember:
We had a monogamous relationship for about sixteen years, then opened it up and started interacting with other people. Now we’re trying to figure out what we’re comfortable doing with other people and what we want to reserve for our own relationship. Sometimes, the only way to locate the boundary of our comfort zone is to cross it and feel the discomfort. We try to take small steps, so that the pain is minimal. We’re definitely committed to each other and are each willing to stop doing things that the other finds threatening.
Mostly, you take care of your own stuff, recognize and protect your boundaries, and make agreements to help yourself and your partner feel safe—but we’ve already talked about that. Here are some special problems that may come up for partnered sluts.
We’ve said before that each relationship seeks its own level. For some relationships, that’s a life partnership, which may include sharing living space, possessions, and so on. Others may take other forms: occasional dates, friendships, ongoing romantic commitments, and so on. Yet many folks find that they’ve gotten into a habit of letting their relationships slide inexorably into life partnership, without much thought or intent on their part. Well-meaning friends and acquaintances may aid in this process by assuming that you and your friend are a couple before you’ve ever decided to become one. In addition, many people get coupled by accident, by virtue of an unplanned pregnancy, an eviction romance where one partner loses a housing situation and moves in with the other, or simple convenience. Janet remembers:
In my freshman year of college, I met a guy l liked a lot—quiet and shy, but when he said anything, I really liked what he had to say. Finn and I wound up going out together a couple of times and having sex a few
times. When school ended, we wrote to each other over the summer. Then fall came and I began looking around for a place to live outside the dorms. The only room I could find was a double-sized room that I could afford only if I shared it with someone. So I called Finn and proposed that we share it, putting up a partition across the middle and sleeping on separate mattresses, and he agreed.
The first night there, Finn had already gotten himself a mattress, and I hadn’t yet—so I shared his. Somehow, we never did get around to getting another mattress. We wound up living together for a couple of years, then getting married. That missing mattress led to a fifteen-year marriage and a couple of kids.
While we’re all for coupledom for people who choose it, we like to see folks make their choices a bit more mindfully than this. We suggest that before you let yourself slide into something that you don’t really want, you do some serious thinking and talking, alone and together, about what is the best form for this particular relationship. Talk to each other about what love means to you and how you fit into each other’s lives.
You may discover that while you enjoy one another’s company and have fabulous sex, your habits regarding housing, money, possessions, and so on are wildly incompatible. In such a situation, you could do what generations of people have done—move in together and spend years trying to change one another, getting frustrated and resentful in the process. Or you could reconsider some of the implicit assumptions you have brought to the relationship. Do you have to live together? Why? Why not instead enjoy your friend for the things you like about him and find someone else with whom to share the other things? Sluthood means, among other things, that you don’t have to depend on any one person to fulfill all your desires.
If you know that you’re a person who tends to slide into coupledom, we suggest spending some serious time trying to figure out why you’ve fallen into this pattern and what you hope to get out of being part of a couple. It’s a very good idea for everyone to learn to live single—to figure out how to get your needs met without being partnered, so you don’t find yourself seeking a partner to fill needs that you ought to fill yourself. You might also consider experimenting with some
relationships unlike those you’ve tried in the past—instead of looking for Mr. or Ms. Right, try dating some people you like and trust but don’t necessarily love, or maybe love in a quieter way than chills running up your spine.
In this, as in just about everything else we’ve told you in this book, the key is to build your own sense of internal security. If you like yourself, love yourself, and take care of yourself, your other relationships can arrange themselves around you, as perfectly as crystals. We hope that if and when you get coupled, you do it on purpose.
One of the questions facing coupled sluts is the issue of whether to enter into the special, legally sanctioned partnership called “marriage.” In an increasing number of states and countries, even being in a same-sex relationship no longer exempts you from having to address this question: same-sex marriage has been legally sanctioned in several states in the United States, in Canada, and in an increasing number of countries in Europe and elsewhere, and we utterly approve. Your authors, however, think it is very important that everyone look very closely at what apples we are buying when we reach out for the marriage-rights piece of the American pie. Some of those apples have worms.
Marriage, as it now stands, is the inevitable outcome of government imposing its standards on personal relationships, legislating a one-size-fits-all prescription detailing how people in sexual or domestic relationships ought to run their lives. Here in California, for example, we have community property laws, which means that whatever income or debt either spouse creates during the marriage belongs to both spouses. We know a woman whose soon-to-be-ex-husband deliberately threw them into bankruptcy because she was planning to leave. Other states have laws just as arbitrary: in some places, if you live together for seven years you’re married whether or not you want to be, by what is called, with startling narrow-mindedness, “common law.”
Marriage is, we’re told, a sacrament—a loving ritual where your faith and your community bless your union. Why, then, is our government, the one that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” requiring us to get marriage licenses?
If marriage is sacred, as we think it is, why is legal recognition of a relationship, along with privileges like health insurance and inheritance, restricted to those who are willing to shape their lives to conform to somebody else’s design?
If we ran the world, we would abolish marriage as a
legal
concept, allowing people to enter into contract relationships as allowed by the perfectly adequate laws that already govern other forms of legal partnership. Sample contracts could be provided by institutions, attorneys, churches, publishers, and support networks. Those who wished to perform marriage as a sacrament could do so under the auspices of whatever religious or social institution felt like a good fit for them. Under such a system, no agreement would be taken for granted; sexual exclusivity, money sharing, inheritance, and all the other issues currently covered by inflexible marriage laws could be consciously chosen. We really like conscious choices.
There is, of course, always a need for laws about the basic responsibilities adults have for children and other dependents. Tax breaks and other support should still be available to those caring for children and dependent elders, who really need them. It’s sort of like supporting public education: we have a hard time imagining a better use for our tax dollars than meeting the needs of the disabled, the aging, and our next generation.
Love is a wonderful thing, and we think it would be even more wonderful if we all acted like responsible adults and entered into thoughtful arrangements about the physical and financial foundations of our lives. If we really took care of business instead of letting a pro forma piece of paper dictate our decisions for us, we would be much freer to love in whatever ways fit for us.
The commonest form of relationship in our culture, and many others, is the couple: two people who have chosen to share intimacy, time, and perhaps space and possessions for now and the foreseeable future. While couplehood has a great deal to be said for it—it’s a lot of work building a life, and many hands make light work—it also offers some special challenges.
The ideas in this section are written for two-person couples for the sake of simplicity, but most of them apply to threesomes and moresomes as well.
One problem that sometimes arises between partners in sluttery is competition to be the most popular, a concern most of us have carried around in the bottom of our psyches since junior high school. Sometimes partners compete with each other to see who can score the most or the most attractive of conquests—an ugly picture.
We cannot reiterate often enough: this is not a contest, this is not a race, and nobody is the prize. One strategy to cut through any feelings of competitiveness is to play matchmaker for each other, to invest yourself in your partner’s sexual happiness as you do in your own—some polyfolk use the word “compersion” to describe the feeling of joy that comes from seeing your partner sexually happy with someone else. Remember the climax of
The Big Chill,
in which a woman character sets up her best friend with her husband so that her single friend could have a baby?
Janet recalls meeting a new Internet acquaintance for coffee and hearing her describe a pet sexual fantasy that was startlingly similar to Janet’s then-partner’s. Janet set up a first date for her new acquaintance and her partner for later that week, and the two of them (with Janet joining in later on) went on to have a long and intense relationship.
Dossie was once out on a date with a longtime lover of hers when she noticed an attractive person trying to catch her eye behind her date’s back. She explained the situation to her date, who had a stroke of genius. He strode over to the young man in question and with great dignity announced, “My lady would like you to have her phone number.” The young man looked terrified at the time, but he called the next morning. Dossie has made use of this strategy repeatedly since then and recommends it highly: they always call!