The Ethical Slut (28 page)

We have pointed out before that it is impossible for anyone to predict what depth of feeling may potentially exist in any sexual relationship.
Many people new to open relationships try to limit outside sexual encounters to a casual, recreational level to avoid the terrifying specter of seeing your partner in love with, or at least crushed out on, another. It is true that sometimes an outside relationship will threaten to become primary and supplant the existing partner. When this happens everyone involved will feel horrible, especially the partner left behind: it really sucks to spend months or years struggling to own your jealousy and working hard on your fears of abandonment, only to be actually abandoned.

But it is not possible to predict when or with whom a crush, or any other deepening of feelings, might happen, and most crushes pass in time and do not need to lead to breaking up. We certainly do not want to draw the boundaries of our agreements so tightly that we exclude everybody we like. There is no rule that will protect us from our own emotions, so we need to look beyond rules for solutions and for a sense of security.

It can help to do a reality check on your fantasies and expectations. New relationships are often exciting because they
are
new, glowing with sexual arousal, and too untested to have uncovered the inevitable conflicts and disturbances that come with true intimacy over time. Every relationship has a honeymoon phase, and honeymoons do not last forever. Some people get addicted to the honeymoon (which you may hear called “limerence” or “new relationship energy” or NRE) and wind up flying from partner to partner, always imagining that the next partner will be the perfect one. Such unfortunates may never stay with anyone long enough to discover the deeper intimacy and profound security that comes with confronting, struggling with, and conquering the hard parts of intimacy together.

Our friend Carol wisely notes:

Remember, please, that fantasy is not reality, and enjoy your fantasies while you maintain your commitments. When your expectation is that a crush is a brief, if wonderful, experience, you and your partner can live through one with relative equanimity and without destroying your long-term stability and love with each other.

Not all couples live together. In recent years it has become more common that couple-style partnerships, with all the closeness and longevity of couplehood, may nonetheless span two or more households. Dossie has extensive experience living this way. Sometimes this situation comes about by happenstance: school or career commitments, for example, may create geographical distance. Other couples have made a conscious choice, like one duo of our acquaintance who have maintained a ten-year bond by deciding about three years ago that they should live in separate dwellings. According to them, this saved their relationship.

This life choice, we think, may well become even more common in the future. In times of financial security, sharing a house is no longer an economic necessity. Individuals in these couples may well be sharing a home with housemates, not necessarily wasting resources living alone. While some of them are polyamorous, others may be more or less monogamous. Arguments about who sleeps where become unnecessary when everybody has their own beds, but that’s not the main reason these couples cite for living separately: most of them simply feel that their relationships work better that way. Your authors, for instance, have been coauthors and lovers for sixteen years and have never chosen to cohabit: we understand our relationship to be a magical gift that daily living might well destroy (if Dossie’s inexplicable need for clean dishes didn’t do the trick, Janet’s devil-may-care attitude toward past-due bills certainly would).

We should not assume that such relationships represent a failure of intimacy or commitment. Rather than look for what is wrong, we
might want to examine what is uniquely adaptive about these partnerings and what special skills or wisdom have developed from these new, assumption-challenging partnerships.

Often such partners create rituals that maintain their connection when apart—agreements about phone calls, ways of reaffirming love at comings-together and leave-takings, keeping caught up with the news in each other’s lives, marking one space or time as “theirs” and another space or time as belonging to one or the other of them.

Making this arrangement work requires some skills in scheduling and keeping time commitments, so differences between individuals in how they handle time and punctuality must be worked out. Differences in patterns of sexual desire can become problematic when opportunities don’t happen every night.

How do you respect your partner’s space in this arrangement and feel secure in your own? Do you have to go home when you want a little distance, or can you figure out a way to maintain your own space in a house that belongs to one of you? How much stuff do you get to keep there?

People often have differences about how much staying-in-touch they are comfortable with when they are apart—some people chat on the phone or text or instant message two or three times a day, while others would find that too distracting.

All of the differences that all couples need to manage still need to be managed when they live apart: differences in gregariousness, tidiness, work patterns, focus on careers, how money gets handled, how often you have your mother over for dinner—no two people have identical patterns in any, much less all, of these items. And, sorry, living apart is not automatic protection against couple bed death. Nor is every time together automatically an occasion for sex, even though we often wish it were.

We suspect that couples living separately will not be that different in their sexual lifestyles from those who live together. It can, however, make being together much more of a special occasion, so people tend to respect these times and be willing to invest a little effort into making them special.

Many couples date for some period of time, perhaps even years, before moving in together. Are they then to be considered couples
who lived separately by choice, or were they merely getting ready for the “real” stuff? Some couples, after dating for a very long time, may look at what living together would look like and decide that it would be a bad idea—maybe all those differences would work out better in separate spaces. This decision can be hard to make in a society where living together is practically the definition of relationship.

One question people often ask such couples is: “Then how do you know you’re a couple?” They know by how they feel about each other and, by extension, how much of their lives they are sharing. We’d like to see a world where all of our relationships are honored and valued and where it is understood that a couple’s love and their journey together is in no way less important just because it occurs in two houses rather than one.

Your relationship with your lover’s lovers brings up points of etiquette that Emily Post never dreamed of. One couple we talked to noted, “It’s important that we not be totally grossed out or disgusted by one another’s lovers—especially if it’s going to be long-term, it helps if we can all be friends.”

Dossie notes,

Should you meet the third party? We vote yes: if you don’t, you’ll almost certainly wind up imagining someone cuter, sexier, more predatory, and more threatening than anyone could be outside a Hollywood erotic thriller. Besides, who knows?—you might wind up liking him or her.

Do your best to fall in like. If you take against one of your partner’s lovers, things can get very messy, and happy balances can get hard to find. We sometimes regard lovers whom we do not instantly adore the way we do in-laws. We may not exactly love our brother’s wife, or our mother’s new husband, but we recognize that this person has joined our family and has rights and feelings just like everybody else, so we find ways to be cordial at the various gatherings that we all attend.

Some of our best friends are people we met because someone we were fucking was fucking them too. You may even find yourself considering forming a liaison with this person yourself—we talked to one woman whose first experience with open relationships took place when her girlfriend was sleeping with another woman and our friend wound up falling in love with the other woman. “My girlfriend got kind of cranky about this,” she remembers wryly. “We’re all tight family now, but it took a decade to get here.” We suggest a few moments of soul-searching to make sure your motivation is loving or lustful rather than vengeful or competitive—then, if you “test clean,” go for it. It’s really not too surprising that you like the same people your partner likes, and mutual attractions like these can form the nucleus of a long-lasting and very rewarding little tribe.

On the other hand, we sometimes see sluts who feel that they
have
to be sexual with their lover’s lovers. In some cases, both parties in a partnership have an agreement to play with a third party only together. Such agreements require that both partners have veto power over potential thirds—being sexual with someone you find
unattractive or unpleasant is a very bad idea for you and for them. On the other hand, basic slut ethics should not allow you to abuse this power to prevent your partner from having sex with anyone at all by vetoing everybody: a strategy that may seem tempting, because until you unlearn jealousy, all outside engagements can look very threatening. Sometimes you need to gather up your strength, face down your fears, and unlearn by doing.

You may simply feel that since your partner likes and lusts after this person so much, you should too—to assuage your partner’s guilt or to satisfy some obscure sense of fairness. Please don’t. If you simply don’t feel hot for your squeeze’s squeeze, don’t let yourself be driven into a position where you feel you have to fuck out of politeness: there are many other excellent ways for people to relate to one another. Cook a nice dinner, go to the movies together, play cards together, or find some other way to help this person feel accepted into your life.

Which brings up an important question: how much responsibility do you have for helping your lover’s lovers feel secure and welcome? We’ve both spent many long telephone conversations reassuring our lovers’ lovers that, yes, it’s
really
okay, and have a great time, honey. We think that your own needs should be of primary importance to you, and if you really just can’t be welcoming and supportive then simple civility can suffice. On the other hand, we also think it’s gracious to be as friendly as you can without having to grit your teeth and force a smile. At minimum, we suggest that you try to provide some reassurance that this is not a competition, that you are not being harmed by anything that’s going on, and that you are able to take care of your own emotions—in other words, a promise to own your own stuff and not blame the third party. After all, such people come into your life because you share something very important: the belief that your partner is the hottest thing on legs. They presumably have better things to do with their time and energy than sitting around plotting how to destroy your happiness.

Some couples take meeting and interviewing prospective partners very seriously, and we suggest this strategy when your model of polyamory requires that you include any new partner in your family. People with children, for instance, care a lot about who comes home to the house and could wind up as an uncle or an auntie to your kids. Some poly
people will not consummate sex with a lover until all these issues have been dealt with, and those are fine decisions to make if they fit your lifestyle: long engagements can be a very good idea.

After the crush is over, some people will find a long-term place in your life, often unexpected, like the lover who has become your kid’s favorite uncle or your partner’s business partner. Others may leave, and when they leave with warm feelings, they may come back again in the future, when once again there is a place for them in your life or for you in theirs. Thus the infinitely connected polyamorous slut builds his web of extended families and tribes.