The Ethical Slut (19 page)

Imagine seeing the beauty and virtues of a beloved and letting go of how their strengths might meet our needs or how their beauty might make us look better.

Imagine seeing another in a clean light of love, without enumerating the ways in which that person does and does not match up to the fantasy we carry around of our perfect mate or dream lover.

Imagine meeting another person in the freedom and innocence of childhood and playing together, without plotting how to make this person give us the kind of love we wish we could have gotten in our actual childhood.

But … but … but. What if you open your heart to someone and you don’t like what happens next? Suppose that person gets drunk? Or treats your open affection with scorn? What if this person doesn’t fulfill your dreams? What if this one turns out just like the last one? Suppose all those things do happen. What have you lost? A little time,
a brief fantasy. Let it go, learn from it, and go find someone more worthy of your love.

Love doesn’t much take to being stuffed into forms, which is what everybody’s fantasies and imaginings are: custom-built plans for a constructed individual they’ve created to solve all their problems. Your authors have dream lovers too. But people are not made of clay or stone, and it won’t work well to approach them with a chisel. Look what happened to Pygmalion.

How many times have you rejected the possibility of love because it didn’t look the way you expected it to? Perhaps some characteristic was missing you were sure you must have, some other trait was present that you never dreamed of accepting. What happens when you throw away your expectations and open your eyes to the fabulous love that is shining right in front of you, holding out its hand?

Clean love: love without expectations.

Washing your love clean doesn’t require advanced spirituality or weekly psychoanalysis. You’ll probably never let go of every single attachment—at least we’ve never managed it. But maybe you can let go just for an instant: your history, worries, frets, and yearnings will still be there to come back to when you need them. Just for now, take a look at the nifty person who is standing right in front of you.

NOTHING BUILDS INTIMACY like shared vulnerability. Write this on your bathroom mirror. We’ll never discount all the wonderful things that we get from sharing love—laughter and happiness and sex—but nothing deepens intimacy like the experiences that we share when we feel flayed, with our skins off, scared and vulnerable, and our partner is there with us, willing to share in the scary stuff. These are the times that bring us the closest together.

Some people find it surprising to learn that a slut can experience overwhelming insecurities, but the truth is that sluts are just as nervous as anyone else, and skills to allay our anxieties were not taught us in our cradles.

Your own freedom might turn out to be a lot easier to accept than your partner’s. It certainly does not follow that just because we can date others with equanimity that we will be equally calm when our partner takes off for an exciting evening with somebody else. Going out and staying home are separate functions, like eating and cooking, each with its own rewards, and each requires specific skills to accomplish.

When problems arise, a good question to ask yourself is “What am I hoping to get out of this situation?” Why are you doing all this hard
work to become a slut? The answer depends on your own individual situation, but for many of us, the payoff is our own freedom, and we have to learn to give freedom to our partners if we’re going to get it for ourselves.

Giving and getting freedom means we also need to have some good ways to deal with the inevitable conflicts that will arise when strong emotions are at stake. There are lots of good ways. Start by checking in with yourself on what you already know about conflict. You already have very strong ideas about this; you learned them, literally, at your parents’ knees, if not cringing in the corner.

Studying the scripts you had to live by in your childhood will explain a lot about how you react to anger and conflict today. Accept yourself: as a child, you had no choices; you had to fit in, somehow, to your family’s script. How did you keep yourself safe?

Was this never an issue? People who grew up in healthy families are often both easygoing and unafraid. (We’re not sure we’ve ever met anyone that healthy, but it sounds great in principle.) The downside of growing up in an unusually healthy family is that it can be hard to understand why everybody else gets so scared.

Most people, though, learned to hide for their own safety, or to fight back to protect themselves, or to become small and pathetic so that people would take pity on them. If you have any of these responses to conflict—defensiveness, rage, withdrawal, weepiness, whatever—it is certain that you developed them for a good reason.

Once you understand how you learned your reflexes, more choices open up. Talk with your partners—what are their scripts? What’s going on when A really wants to hear how B feels, only B is trying to get safe by hiding? Maybe you each have different skills you learned about dealing with conflict—maybe you could learn new ones from each other.

Thinking about how intimate bonds are cemented by sharing vulnerable feelings brings us to perhaps the ultimate act of intimacy: fighting. Many people believe that fighting between partners is to be avoided at all costs, but most relationship therapists would disagree.

Fights between partners appear to be a universal experience; not many people actually enjoy them, but they seem to be necessary, a constructive element in the building of solid relationships, like the fires that make new growth possible in old forests. Only by fighting can partners struggle with their disagreements, express their most heartfelt feelings, and negotiate change and growth in their relationship.

There has to be a way to communicate anger in a long-term relationship, and there has to be a way to struggle with disagreements. How many times have you had a bitter argument with your partner, and when it was over, felt closer than you had before?

So the problem, as we see it, is not to avoid fighting, but to learn to fight in ways that are not destructive, physically, morally, or emotionally. A good fight is very different from abuse: in a good clean fight, there is respect for safety and mutuality so that both people get to express their feelings at full volume and come out the other end stronger and closer than before: bonded by fire, as it were.

The concept of “fair fighting” was first expounded by Dr. George R. Bach in his wonderful book,
The Intimate Enemy: How to Fight Fair in Love and Marriage
. Published in 1968, the book is terribly outdated, but the material on communication, and detailed descriptions of constructive ways to share your anger with a partner, is priceless—this book is a classic. You might also consider reading any of the books listed in our Resource Guide at the end of the book. Whatever book you choose, reading a book together with your partner will put you on the same page, with some of the same information, and get you
talking about how you communicate about what’s important to you, like how you feel.

So: if feelings like to be heard, and anger is a feeling that can be very hard to hear, how can we vent anger without creating more trouble than we relieve?

How is it that we sometimes get triggered into very strong emotions, particularly at times of intimate conflict? We all do it; it’s not just you. Dossie recalls at nineteen having panic attacks that seemed to come out of nowhere, until one day she noticed that something had moved fast near her face. Her father was prone to sudden bursts of temper accompanied by a hard slap across the face, and Dossie realized that whenever something moved suddenly near her face—even her lover—some part of her believed that she was about to get hit. Once she understood this, she became able to look around and see that nothing was threatening her in the present, and these panic attacks disappeared.

New research into brain functioning has given us a lot of very useful information about how triggering works on the physiological level. We have an organ called the “amygdala” in the middle of our brains, right under the hypothalamus, that does the job of remembering situations associated with strong emotions, both pleasurable and terrifying, and setting us into action. The most familiar form of this phenomenon is
its greatest extreme, the flashbacks experienced by abuse survivors and combat veterans.

The amygdala has a direct line to the pituitary gland and can set off our emergency response systems before our intellects can catch up. Adrenaline pours into our bloodstream, norepinephrine floods our synapses, our cells release all their sugars into our veins to give us energy to fight or run, and everything instantly feels terribly, terribly urgent. Triggering is particularly common, and intense, in intimate arguments, where all of our old triggers we learned as children, when we were truly helpless, may get stimulated.

The first thing to recognize is that nothing can get resolved in this adrenalized state. The flight-fight-freeze responses to adrenaline give us tremendous energy to survive a crisis, but not very much in the way of common sense.

But all is not lost. Two things happen during this physiological stress response that we can learn to use. The first is that if we can occupy ourselves for fifteen or twenty minutes without restimulating the stress reflex, our physiology will return to normal and we will return to sanity. The process of taking a time-out to get calm again is described below.

Better yet, every time we succeed in spending that fifteen minutes taking care of ourselves in the kindest way we can muster, we actually physically heal our amygdalas—by growing more fibers that deliver soothing neurotransmitters—and thus increase our capacity to soothe ourselves in a crisis. So practice, practice, practice being kind to yourself.

Here’s how to take a time-out when you and a partner get triggered. Find a way to stop and separate, then find a kindly way to take care of yourself for about fifteen minutes without retriggering your emergency system, until your adrenaline gets back to normal and you feel relatively calm.

There are some agreements you will need to negotiate beforehand with each of your partners. First, everyone should understand that a time-out is absolutely not about whose fault this is. If what you’re doing or talking about is what triggered the emergency overload, then both of you need to stop doing that in order to stop the adrenaline. Stopping can be difficult: someone is almost certain to feel abandoned,
cut off, interrupted, or unheard. Remember, this is for fifteen minutes, not forever.

Since you will probably need to be at least in separate rooms for a few minutes, a prior discussion as to what room each of you might want to be in is a good idea. Where are your computers, your books, your reading chairs? If someone likes to listen to music or watch television, are headphones needed to provide quiet for the other? If someone needs to go outside, it’s useful to agree on a phone call within twenty minutes to check in and make sure everybody’s all right.

Some people like to agree on a safeword to call a time-out; maybe “time-out,” or perhaps “red,” or maybe something silly that might help defuse the anger. If you laugh when you say “pussycat” when an argument has gotten out of control, maybe that’s a good thing.

If you have kids, and they are home, who will be responsible for them? Children may get nervous or want reassurance when the adults fight, which is in no way wrong. But they might feel needy or clingy at a time when you’d rather be free to focus on your own needs.

Make an agreement to honor a time-out with silence. Trying to get in one more thought is likely to trigger another adrenaline release and prolong the problem.

You’ll want to talk these things over with your partner to plan your initial practice at time-out. Then, look for an occasion to practice. You might decide to call a time-out over an issue that is only a little bit disturbing, just for practice.

When you feel your most familiar uncomfortable emotions flaring up and you recognize you’re being triggered—perhaps at the level of irritation or frustration, perhaps rage or grief—call a time-out. Strong emotions often appear very fast and can be very hard to predict, so as soon as you remember the option when you start flooding with feelings, call a time-out.

Wrench yourselves out of the conversation and go to your agreed-upon places. Do whatever you’ve thought might be calming, and not retriggering. Take a few deep breaths and remember to exhale thoroughly; reducing the carbon dioxide in your lungs will help the adrenaline subside. We like activities that occupy the mind—neither of your authors has much luck with meditating when we’re feeling triggered; if you can
do it, go for it, but don’t put yourself down if you can’t empty your mind right now. We tend to turn to a novel or magazine, surfing the Internet, solitaire, music, or maybe an old movie. Try to steer clear of things that create more adrenaline: be careful of “shoot-’em-up” games or music with violent lyrics. Some people do very well with dancing out anger to raging hip-hop, while others find it too stimulating. You will learn from experience what works for you.