The Ethical Slut (20 page)

You might want to write out your feelings, or draw them. The quality of the art is irrelevant; this is for you. One of your authors has journal sessions that start with frankly insane projections complete with terrible accusations and gradually grow into a remarkably nonjudgmental investigation of what she and her partner were fighting about, sometimes ending with new insights about what upset her so much.

After fifteen minutes, check in with yourself—are you feeling better? Your time-outs could take longer the first few times until you learn what works for you and gain some confidence in your process.

When you are ready to come back together, do something easy and comforting. Go for a walk in a park, or get your favorite takeout, or cook something together, or watch a video in a companionable way. Make an appointment to resume the discussion that triggered the time-out.

The process of a time-out is seldom elegant, pretty, or even remotely resembling okay. We need to take time-outs when we are in emotional overwhelm and definitely not at our best. Be ready to forgive each other for being human. Be ready to forgive yourself. The results are well worth it when you come back together ready for harmony and understanding.

A good fight starts with the understanding that in order for a fight to be successful, both people have to win. If one person wins a fight and the other loses, the problem that caused the fight has not been resolved. It is naive to imagine that just because you’ve “lost,” you’ve given up your interest in whatever issue is at stake. When you feel overpowered, outgunned, or shouted down, you will be resentful, and the problem will go on being a problem. The only real way to win is to come to a
solution where all parties concerned feel that they have won. So in a good clean fight, each person’s feelings get heard and considered, and solutions are decided on by agreement, not rhetorical “might makes right.”

We make a fight fair by agreeing on rules and limits, and by respecting everyone’s right to express their feelings and opinions, including our own. It is usually helpful to schedule a time to fight and make an agreement to do so; it does not promote constructive hostilities if we waylay our partner in the bathroom or on the way out the door to work. We need to schedule discussions at a time when we can give them our full attention.

Scheduling fights has the added advantage that you can prepare for them, organize your thoughts, and know you have a time when this particular issue will be dealt with. If you feel bad about the grocery bills on Tuesday, and you know you have a date to fight about it on Thursday, it’s pretty easy to put your stuff aside until then. Most people don’t put their stuff aside very well when it seems that their issues will never get dealt with.

“Whaddaya mean, schedule a fight? Don’t they just erupt, like volcanoes? And when we have a fight, we are not likely to obey any rules or respect any limits, right? Aren’t we talking about intense emotional outbursts?” Well, yes, we are, but we don’t believe that you can settle any issues when you are in an intense emotional state. When your feelings erupt, it is important to acknowledge them and pay attention. However awkwardly you may be expressing yourself, this is your truth; you obviously feel strongly about it, so it’s an important truth.

Good communication begins with everybody talking about their feelings, long before they get to discussing the pros and cons of any solutions. Good communication is based on identifying our feelings, expressing them, and getting validation that our partner hears and understands what we are saying, whether or not they agree. Emotions are not opinions, they are facts—truths about what people are experiencing.

Try speaking in sentences that begin with “I feel.” There is an enormous difference between saying “you are making me feel so bad” and “I feel so bad.” The I-message is a pure statement of feeling, and
there is no accusation in it. When your lover doesn’t feel attacked and doesn’t need to feel defensive, he or she is free to listen to what you’re actually saying. Conversely, if your sentence starts with “you,” and especially with “you always,” your partner may well perceive an attack and respond defensively.

The words “I feel” then need to be followed with an emotion—sad, mad, glad, angry—or a physical feeling like queasy, tense, wound-up, shaky. Messages that begin with “I feel that” more often express a belief than a feeling, as in “I feel that we should not be enjoying so much sex,” or a covert you-message, like “I feel that you are crazy.” We are often tempted to describe our emotions in words that end in “-ed,” as in “I feel judged/attacked/betrayed.” This is a covert you-message: “You are judging/attacking/betraying me.”

Most of us resent it when another person tells us how we feel—whether or not they are correct is immaterial. It is a violation of our boundaries when another person presumes to tell us what our inner truth is. Dossie trained with a supervising therapist who used to point his finger at clients and say, “I know what your problem is!” You probably already know how you feel when someone does that to you. Try, instead, asking a respectful question. “How are you feeling right now? I’m wondering if you’re sad.”

We can’t ask our lovers to hold still while we sling accusations at them, using them as a target for our frustrations; that would be asking them to consent to being abused, and they would be right to resist. But we can ask them to listen to how we feel, because putting aside their own agendas for a few minutes and listening to our feelings is a doable task for the listener. To learn how to use I-messages, try talking about an issue that is current for you without ever using the word “you,” and without talking about what anyone else is doing, but only about your own feelings. This technique takes a little practice but is less difficult than it may seem at first.

When it’s your turn to listen to how your lover feels, put yourself in listening mode. Remember, feelings like to be heard and validated, so don’t analyze or try to explain things. Just listen, and you may be surprised to hear something you didn’t know. You can learn how the world looks from someone else’s shoes, you can appreciate that person’s feelings, you can validate that person’s position and express understanding.
Then the solutions can flow more freely and more naturally. There are no wrong solutions, and no right ones: only the agreements that fit well with how we all feel.

You don’t have to do all this on your own—many wonderful books, classes, workshops, and other resources are available. It’s a good idea to put aside some time and energy to learn about communication and to do it with the person you’re trying to communicate with.

There are many excellent weekend workshops focusing on communication for couples; many churches offer weekend marriage retreats, and some medical centers offer classes in couples’ communication and anger management. Workshops and classes are worth attending even if they don’t specifically address sluttery. We’ve never known a couple who went to a communication or intimacy workshop and didn’t gain some good new skills and insights from it. Some workshops exist specifically to work on issues arising from nonmonogamy. Don’t hesitate to take these workshops, and remember that the facilitator has expertise in creating safe environments to explore highly charged issues. Many couples repeat these workshops when a new issue has arisen in their lives. We encourage you to take a class or a workshop, or to join a support group suitable to your needs. Just knowing that others struggle with some of the same issues that you do can help.

Support, ideas, and information can also be found through online groups and tribes. See
chapter 17
, “Making Connection,” for ideas on how to find these.

A more expensive, but still excellent, option is to do some sessions with a couples’ counselor. In general, we recommend this as a second-level alternative, after you’ve already done some classes and workshops,
unless you have privacy concerns that make classes and workshops difficult for you.

Screen any of these resources about whether they’ll be accepting of your open relationship. Some old-fashioned psychologists, and the leaders of some workshops and retreats, may believe that your lust for many people is a symptom of psychological disturbance; you may not feel adequately safe and supported in such a hostile environment. If you need help finding a sympathetic therapist or group, try asking your friends or checking the Resource Guide at the end of this book. Most therapists now have websites where they list their skills and experience and something about their philosophy: you can email them to ask what their experience is in working with polyamorous relationships.

We strongly recommend that you investigate these types of help sooner rather than later. Just about everyone can use an occasional communications skills tune-up, and if you wait until your relationship is in crisis, you’ll face much harder work than if you’d been practicing your skills all along.

In some Native American cultures it is customary to wait several minutes after a person speaks before responding: it is rude and disrespectful to fail to think about what the person has said, and to speak immediately would indicate that you have simply been waiting for the speaker to be quiet so that you can then attempt to change his or her mind. We recommend taking some time before responding to any serious communication, especially when it’s important to the speaker. Maybe if you pay attention you’ll hear something new.

People often approach a disagreement as if it were urgent that it be resolved right away. They strive for a resolution within minutes of discovering that they don’t agree about something—something that they have in fact never agreed on.

But you’ve probably been living with that disagreement for a long time, and a little while more is not going to make a lot of difference. Thus, consider this strategy: acknowledge the disagreement, give each of you a chance to state your feelings using the principles you’ve learned in this chapter, and then take two days to digest what you’ve learned.

When you return to discuss the disagreement, you will probably be in a much calmer mode. You may have a clearer understanding of what is important to you and an appreciation of what is important to your beloved and why. Thus you may find yourself in a much better state to negotiate a solution that might make everyone happy.

Dossie sees this phenomenon all the time in her therapy practice, when she sends clients home from a session in a state of disagreement that seems intolerable. She instructs them to hold this new knowledge for a couple of days and then see how they feel. Often they come back the next week reporting that it became easy to find a solution. So sometimes it will be most fruitful to wait two days before going on to consider solutions you might want to try, as in the
“Eight Steps to Win-Win Conflict Resolution”
exercise on
this page
.

Or after two days, maybe it will have become so easy that you won’t need a special script to come to an agreement. Remember, where emotions are concerned, time is your friend.

Sometimes our feelings are so complicated that it seems impossible to deal with them in face-to-face conversation with our beloved. Under such circumstances, you may want to write a thoughtful letter, either snail mail or email, to let your honey know the entirety of your concerns in a measured way that can be absorbed and processed at the recipient’s own pace. This correspondence isn’t a substitute for actual conversation, but it can be a good precursor to it, a way to open up the discussion that may feel a bit safer to start.

It is vital, however, that you send this letter only after you’ve had time to think about it. The downside to correspondence is that it can’t convey all the fine points of communication—facial expression, body language, touch. The upside is, or should be, that a letter can be composed carefully, without undue emotional overload. If you click “Send” or drop the envelope into the mailbox before you’ve had a chance to think about its contents, you’re taking on all the downside without any of the upside.