More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory (52 page)

There is tremendous potential for hurt or resentment when our definitions of "sex" are misaligned. Sexual boundaries are among the most personal and intimate ones, with the potential to cause grave damage if crossed. Different kinds of sexual activity also involve different levels of physical risk. Mismatched definitions of "sex" create fuzziness around risk boundaries. We're better off overanalyzing how we define sex than not to be analyzing it enough. So we need to be able to discuss sex and sexual acts openly with our partners, without fear or shame. Unfortunately, most of us have not grown up accustomed to doing that, so it can be hard. The anxiety of talking openly about sex, though, pales beside the anxiety of having sexual boundaries stepped on, even inadvertently.

Two keys to having low-stress conversations about sex are being direct and asking questions. Listen and ask questions about how your partners define sex. Coded language and euphemisms only muddy things and create embarrassment. Here are some questions to open the discussion. Do you consider kissing sex? How about making out? Erotic massage? Clothed or unclothed fondling? Oral sex? Anal sex? Mutual masturbation? Same-room masturbation? Text or cybersex? Sharing sexual fantasies? Phone sex? What kinds of activities do you want to know about? At what point do you consider someone a sexual partner? If you ask about a prospective partner's sexual past, do you and she have similar ideas about what makes someone a lover?

SEX AND VULNERABILITY

Sexual risk is not always physical. We usually become emotionally attached and vulnerable to our lovers. As people who have explored cybersex can attest, physical touch is not necessarily a prerequisite for emotional vulnerability.

FRANKLIN'S STORY
Sex has always been strongly linked to emotional intimacy for me. I tend to get attached to my lovers, even if that's not my intention. Many years ago, I was traveling abroad to visit one of my partners. She and her other partners and their other partners and I all traveled to a remote castle in France, where we stayed for about a week.

While we were there, I met a lovely woman—a member of the extended poly network, linked to my partner through one of her partners. She and I connected quickly. I am normally cautious about extending physical intimacy to people, because I know I tend to get attached to my lovers whether I plan to or not. In this case, I extended more intimacy more quickly than I normally do.

Later we had a disagreement about something that should have been inconsequential. She said some things that should not have been able to hurt me, but did—because I had already let her in. I had permitted her too far inside my own boundaries, because we had been physically intimate, and that made the things she said far more wounding than they needed to be.

Some people can engage their bodies without engaging their hearts. Whether you can do this can be hard to predict, though. Whenever we let someone physically close, we've let them through a layer of our boundaries; Franklin has met several people, mostly former swingers, who once believed they could have sex entirely detached from intimacy, then found themselves getting unexpectedly attached to a casual lover. Nobody is immune to emotional vulnerability through physical vulnerability.

SEX AND EMOTIONAL BOUNDARIES

The boundaries that come up most often around sex involve STI risk, and we'll talk about those in a bit. But people have emotional boundaries around sex that need attention too. If you have a partner who has, or is considering, another lover, do you want to know what sexual activities might happen, or is that something you don't care about? When do you want to know that someone may become a new sexual partner? Some people like to be informed well in advance. For other people, if they're told sex might be a possibility during an upcoming date, that's enough.

How do you want to be informed? Do you want an in-person discussion with your partner before she takes a new lover, or would a text message do saying "Hey, having a wonderful time, think we might end up in bed"? Is it enough just to be told the next day? You will need to communicate these preferences clearly. Because people have different ideas about what is "sex," miscommunication can happen with surprising ease.

AMY'S STORY
Franklin's partner Amy was in a poly relationship that included an agreement about informing her current partner, Stephan, before she had sex with a new partner. She and Stephan did not agree on what this meant—though at first they did not know this.

Amy went on a third date with an old, close friend. A decade previously, the two of them had danced around the idea of a relationship, and now, they were discovering that their chemistry was stronger than ever. Back at her place they engaged in some heavy petting, but did not have intercourse.

Stephan believed Amy had violated their agreement, even though no intercourse had happened. To him, Amy had broken their agreement by failing to notify him that sex
might have been possible,
even though Amy believed that no sex had
taken place.
Because of this incident, Stephan decided Amy couldn't be trusted to honor agreements, so he wanted her to agree to restrictions on when and how she would see other people. Their relationship ended as a result of this conflict.

Good boundaries around sex must also be made knowing that everyone has a right to privacy about the details of their intimacy. There's no hard and fast line that clearly separates one person's right to be informed from another's right to privacy; setting these boundaries requires compassion and negotiation. Certainly, you have the right to know about your partner's sexual activities with other people in general terms, but at the same time, the details of intimate acts are things that your partner and his partner can reasonably expect to keep to themselves if they don't want to share them.

APPROACHES TO UNBARRIERED SEX

In poly relationships, often people have a select few partners, or perhaps one partner, with whom they will have unbarriered sex, and they use various forms of protection with others. For some folks, unbarriered sex is an intimate form of bonding.

Some people assume that certain kinds of relationships, such as marriage, come with an unspoken understanding that the partners will dispense with condoms and other barriers. But unspoken assumptions should never substitute for explicit negotiation. Polyamory means examining all of our assumptions about sex. If a married couple wants unbarriered sex, that may be awesome, but it's not necessarily right for everyone or every circumstance.

Another tacit assumption is that partners who have chosen unprotected sex will have unprotected sex forever. Poly people have even (of course) made up a term to describe the decision to have unprotected sex:
fluid bonding.
The word
bond
implies, to many, a promise that this will be ongoing.

Not all poly people use the term
fluid bonding;
many prefer to simply talk about using barriers or not, specifically to divest the idea of unbarriered sex from the emotional overtones that the term
fluid bonding
carries. They prefer to view unbarriered sex as a risk-management decision and, like all agreements, as something that can be renegotiated if necessary. Other people are deeply invested in fluid bonding and consider it an important part of intimacy.

EVE'S STORY
When I started seeing Ray, I was fluid-bonded with Peter. Ray and I were tested for STIs at the beginning of our relationship, and again six months in. I had recently had the HPV vaccine, and Ray was using condoms as a birth control method with his wife. So after the second set of tests, Ray, Peter and I sat down and agreed that Ray and I would have unbarriered sex. We agreed that we would inform each other when we had a new sexual partner, and that none of us would have unbarriered sex with anyone outside our trio without first discussing it with the others.

About six months later, Ray had unbarriered sex with a friend at a party. He called me the next day and told me. I said we would have to begin using barriers for another three months, until he could be tested again, and then we would need to discuss whether we wanted to fluid-bond again. I was hurt, because I valued the ability to have unbarriered sex with Ray, and I felt he had casually tossed that away. But I saw the issue as a risk-management problem that we could work through.

Peter, on the other hand—whom I told a week later (before I'd had an opportunity to have sex with either him or Ray)—considered Ray's decision a serious betrayal, especially because Ray had not taken the effort to tell Peter personally. Peter had a much more serious view of the "bond" element of a fluid bond than Ray or I had understood. But more than that, the broken agreement became a flashpoint for anger that had long been simmering for many other, unrelated reasons.

Eve, Ray and Peter ran into difficulty because unbarriered sex meant different things to each of them, with differing levels of emotional significance, and because they weren't all in agreement about protocols for disclosure regarding what might lead to resuming use of barriers.

When you're considering unbarriered sex with a partner, you want to be clear about your approach and expectations: whether you are making a risk-management decision that's open to future negotiation, whether the step you are taking has emotional significance for you, and whether you expect the agreement to be temporary or permanent. Perhaps most important is to agree in advance on what protocols you will follow when someone makes a mistake—because they will—or breaks an agreement.

WHEN UNBARRIERED SEX HAS EMOTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE

A common poly arrangement is for partners who have chosen to have unprotected sex with each other to pass rules prohibiting unprotected sex with others. Sometimes this is actually an attempt to control emotional intimacy. We aren't suggesting this is always true, but it's something to be aware of when discussing sexual boundaries. A conversation about safer sex shouldn't become a covert way to try to control your partner's emotional connection with others.

An agreement within a group to keep a barrier wall to the outside world, but not among one another, is called a "condom compact." This agreement has a poor reputation among poly people—because of the guilt, sense of betrayal and drama all around if one person breaks it. Having so much emotional weight hanging over the situation creates a big incentive for the violator not to tell the others, poisoning honesty and potentially exposing the whole group to STIs when they thought they were safe.

Instead, the approach both of us take is that any of our partners are free to have whatever kind of sex they want with whomever they want, provided they are honest about it. We then take charge of our own precautions. We communicate our sexual health boundaries, and our partners who value being able to have unprotected sex with us respect those boundaries. Should a partner choose not to, then we may choose to use barriers with that partner. This arrangement protects the right of all the people involved to make choices about their own bodies and level of risk, and to take responsibility for their own protection.