The Ethical Slut (30 page)

With any individual, you might be dating frequently, regularly, irregularly, or rarely. That rare time might be a very special thing—quantity doesn’t always equal quality. When everyone is single and no one is auditioning for partners, then each relationship is free to seek its own level, and there may be fewer obstacles to flowing into exactly the relationship that fits for the two of you.

Just because you are single and not planning on changing that right now, please don’t take your lovers for granted. Let them know how
precious and valuable they are to you. Convention says we should be more reserved: we say let’s change that convention. We love hot dates, and we also love warmth.

You may be dating someone who has a long-term, life-sharing partner—married or living together. When you are dating that person, there is someone else whose feelings must be taken into account.

Perhaps you find yourself in the position of sleeping with someone who’s cheating. Whatever you think about the ethics involved—different sluts make different choices on this one—it is certain that difficulties can arise when your lover’s partner doesn’t know about your connection. Contortions may be required to keep the partner from finding out—and even with all the cleverness and forethought in the world, there is no sure way to keep such a big secret forever. This kind of secrecy imposes pretty severe limits: if the relationship consists of weekly trysts at the no-tell motel, how much connection can really take place? If the relationship goes well, someone may very well wind up wanting more. It’s the “outside” lover in a secret affair who will most likely get abandoned if anybody gets caught.

Perhaps your sweetie is in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement; many couples new to nonmonogamy try this one in an attempt to feel safer. In our experience, this can create problems for all concerned. First, most people find their lovers in their social networks, so keeping them all separate can be difficult or impossible. Or lies must be told to protect the agreement—and then it’s back to the cheating paradigm we just discussed. Maintaining untruths, even when you’re asked to do so, will create distance in any relationship and is particularly damaging to live-in partnerships, where secrets are a lot harder to keep.

On the other hand, when everybody involved is informed about your involvement, things are often easier. Even if things start out uneasy, being out of the closet offers the possiblity of working toward learning to be more comfortable for everyone involved. If your lover is part of an experienced poly couple, both of them will know their boundaries and be able to let you know what their limits are, which can make for a lot more clarity. If they’re new to this kind of relating, good faith
and a willingness to talk through problems can get you through most if not all difficulties.

Your authors have found that we are happiest when everybody knows and acknowledges everybody. Common courtesy is essential, as is scrupulous avoidance of anything that smacks of competition or one-upmanship. Catfights are only fun in porn.

Both of us much prefer to meet our partners’ partners and make friends with them when at all possible. Sometimes they are not entirely sure that they want to be friends with us, and occasionally they’re pretty sure they’d rather not, but with patience and good will, most of them come around. After all, we have at least one thing in common: we both love the same person.

There is no reason why our interests need be opposed to our lover’s partner’s interests. We all want to collaborate on creating a happy outcome where everybody gets respected and everybody gets their needs met and their desires fulfilled. In the long run, we are all on the same side.

The experienced slut can take some initiative in reaching out to frightened partners in a gentle and openhearted way. Some of our best friends over the years were first met in these circumstances. The vulnerablity of feeling jealous or nervous about each other is its own form of intimacy, and friendly feelings may be the most useful response.

Taking care of a partner’s partner by sharing sex with them is optional for both of you. It’s rarely a good idea to get intimate with someone just because they might feel left out, and it is not often sustainable to enter into a relationship that doesn’t interest you in and of itself. Occasionally, you will discover a sweet fit and become lover to a couple, as we will discuss soon. But avoid committing yourself to an interaction that you don’t like very much or don’t want at all. Giving in to someone to assuage jealousy just about never makes the jealousy go away. You can respect your own limits while offering support, warmth, and welcome to your lover’s lover.

A special case: you may find yourself in a relationship with someone whose life partnership is no longer very sexual, whether from the normal cooling of passion as relationships mature, or through illness or disability. When you are dating such a person, do remember to approach their partner with an added measure of care and respect. Such
people may be happy that you are keeping their partner happy but still somewhat sorrowful at not being able to fulfill that role themselves. It helps to discover what valuable contributions that person
does
make, and recognize and honor them.

Sometimes your relationship may be defined by the roles you play together, roles that a person’s life partner may not want or enjoy. Your connection could be as simple as a love of watching football on TV or, perhaps more complicated, being the same-sex partner to someone in an opposite-sex marriage. Your shared roles might be about S/M power exchange, erotic roleplaying, exploration of gender, spiritual journeying, or any other sexual sharing that the partnership doesn’t provide. Your shared role makes you part of a family’s ecology, part of what makes it run smoothly, and is both a joy and a responsibility not to be taken lightly.

Sometimes sexual connection comes together quite beautifully between multiple people—a threesome, a quad, or whatever. The very riskiness is exhilarating, and the adventure can be very new and exciting. If you are fortunate enough to have this experience, you can expect to honor the relationship that you are privileged to share in and to be honored as a very special member of that relationship. The sex can be very luxurious—think of all that can be done with those extra pairs of hands!—and feature various configurations of two on one. How delicious to have two people spoiling you, how fascinating to share the active lovemaking with another, a virtuoso trio when you get practiced at it.

There may be times when someone has little to do and could feel left out. When that happens to you, think about how an extra pair of hands might be useful in whatever the other two are doing and gently join in. One time in such a moment, Dossie was temporarily left out while the couple who were her lovers were having intercourse with each other. She felt a little shy, thought about joining in, and then noticed that these two people, who had been together for quite a few years, were amazingly graceful in their deep connection with each other, so Dossie settled in to watch for a while and was quite happy and content
just to witness such beauty. When they were through, they welcomed Dossie into their embrace, and further delights occurred that were well worth waiting for.

Do remember that there is privilege in being an outside partner: you can, if you choose, get to be all about fun and leave the heavy stuff to the partners who will go home with one another afterward. Or maybe you’d rather be there to help out when the kids all come down with chicken pox. Whatever fits for you, remember that there is privilege in being the play partner. As one friend of ours puts it, “I get to be dessert!”

When your lover has a whole bunch of partners, making agreements can look like major treaty negotiations and might require some diplomacy. Some groupings have boundaries around who a member may connect with. Perhaps the other members want to meet and approve—that’s an easy one. Some will want outside partners to clearly understand the group’s limits and boundaries, especially about safer sex, which is great. And we are very happy to see that some poly groups are very thoughtful about how they make connection to a new person and are willing to take the time to get things right.

Some groups might want you to join in one way or another—having sex with the group, moving in with the group, becoming part of a group marriage—that may or may not fit for you. You, of course, get to look at what’s being asked and decide if that is what you want, and to define your own desires and limits.

Many initial disagreements can eventually be negotiated if all the parties involved are open-minded and operating in good faith. And if they aren’t, you might be better off learning that right at the start. One friend of ours connected with a person who had two primary partners and wanted our friend as a secondary. But when our friend asked what would happen if he were to acquire a primary partner himself, they said, “Oh, no, that wouldn’t be acceptable.” So our friend opted out.

Most group marriages and circles that we have encountered are much more lightly held and flow easily with new partners who may someday join the group at large, over time and one step at a time. Dossie belonged to one such family when her daughter was a baby. There were no formal membership requirements, and everyone fit together
and grew together as they went along, with partnerships forming and separating and reforming on their own timetables, and everyone responsible for the whole gang of children. This adaptive arrangement worked very well for quite a few years—not forever, but for a good, happy, memorable long time.

Dossie writes:

Someone at a workshop once asked me: “Don’t you get lonely, living alone?” I was startled, and it took me a second to understand that he wasn’t trying to make me feel bad. What an ache he innocently opened in me. I had to say: “Yes, of course I get lonely.” And yet …

I have lived about half my adult life single. Some things are hard to do by yourself. I recently bought my first house. How I yearned for a partner in that scary endeavor! But I managed, somehow. I dealt with my fears, and with realtors and mortgage brokers and roofers and inspectors, and now I have a sweet little home in the woods: like me, mine to share with others, when and how I choose.

Nothing lasts forever. Someone asked me if I feared being alone in my old age. I am now in my sixties, and you bet I’m afraid of that. I saw my mother live to be ninety-three in the house she shared with my father during their thirty-seven-year marriage: only he died of cancer when they were sixty-five.

Nothing lasts forever. I still crave the thrill of falling in love, the dream of a romance so magical it could never fade. And I know better. When I have fallen in love in the past, the long-term outcome has been a crapshoot: sometimes great, sometimes disastrous. After eight such relationships, I must admit I have no idea how to predict the future of any passion: whether we will grow into a solid and sustaining kind of love, or whether we will grow to hate each other.

Now I am a person who prefers burning passion to sweet reason. And I don’t consider myself very good at compromise. But my compromise for my own survival is to learn to live single and to make a very good life of it: a lifelong commitment to myself.

Long ago, I thought of singlehood as being “between old men”: some condition of waiting for the next one-and-only to show up. It
was like being on hold, waiting for one-and-only number four to pick up the phone, not like living a real life.

In 1969, when I was first a slut on purpose and a baby feminist, I decided to live single for five years so I could discover who I might be when I’m not trying to be somebody’s wife. But how was I going to make this work? I didn’t want to live and raise my child in a cold world with no affection or intimacy, so I devised a scheme for sharing love with lovers I had no intention of living with.

Back then, there was very little precedent for sharing sex with someone you were not auditioning for a long-term partnership. So I invented ways that I could take the risky steps of sharing affection openly with people I had not “secured,” if I can call it that. I told them what I liked about them. I good-mouthed. I sought out opportunities to be demonstrative. I used the L-word and insisted on calling the feelings I had for each of my lovers by their true name: love. And when I had the courage to be loving, the result was that I got a lot of love back.

It is true that I first learned to love this way as a survival technique for living single. But it has become something far more valuable: an open affection for who and what I love around me has become my foundation and my way of life, whether or not I am living with a partner.

I am confident that this approach can work for everyone, whatever their lifestyle, and even when they are not sharing sex: wouldn’t it make a fine world if we all made it a point to honor and cherish and openly value every person we make a connection with?

I raised my child with this sense of community. Being a mother taught me to respect limits and boundaries and certainly to refuse to welcome in my home or in my heart anyone or anything that threatened the well-being of my child or me. By extension, I learned to better protect my own vulnerabilities, which made me even more capable of expressing my love for others.

I live in the country, and I feel this same kind of heart-opening love when I walk on a beach, or look at the world from the top of a small mountain, or discover, around some bend in a trail, a two-thousand-year-old tree standing in majesty. I feel no desperation, nor any desire to cling. I just feel happy.

Do I sometimes feel lonely? Sure. Do I love my life? Immensely. Sometimes I think I am the luckiest person in the world.

WE OBSERVE, with much delight, the number of our old lovers we count among our present friends, and we marvel at how sexual relationships can develop into family memberships. There is a reality limit here: You have only twenty-four hours a day to devote to your love life, and presumably you need some of those hours for work and sleep and so on, so you have a finite amount of time to devote to each of your lovers. You can fit only a certain number of people in your life and expect to do any of them justice.