MOST SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIPS, from casual acquaintanceship through lifetime monogamy, are based on assumptions that are really unstated agreements about behavior: you don’t kiss your mailman, you don’t tip your mother. These are the unspoken rules we learn very early in our lives, from our parents, our playmates, and our cultures. People who break these unspoken rules are often considered odd, sometimes even crazy, because the values and judgments behind the social agreements about how we relate to one another are so deeply ingrained that we are usually not even aware that we have made any agreement at all.
In many day-to-day relationships, like your relationships with neighbors and coworkers, it’s probably fine to rely on those implicit, built-in agreements. But when you’re trying something as complicated and unprecedented as ethical sluthood, we think it’s very important to take nothing for granted. Talk with the people in your life about your agreements, and negotiate the conditions, environments, and behaviors that will get your own needs met and respect everybody’s boundaries.
You’ll often hear people talking about the rules of their relationships. But “rules” implies a certain rigidity, that there is a right way and a wrong way to run your relationship and that there will be penalties if you do it wrong. We understand that there are many different ways that people may choose to relate to each other, so we prefer to use the word “agreements” to describe mutually agreed-upon, conscious decisions, designed to be flexible enough to accommodate individuality, growth, and change. These agreements are sometimes a little fuzzy, particularly if you’re used to the hard edges of rules. A little fuzziness is okay; your agreement will either get clarified later if it needs to be—or it won’t, in which case it’s probably clear enough.
How do you know when you need an agreement? You can tell by listening to your emotions. If something comes up that leaves you feeling upset or angry or unheard or whatever, that’s an area in which you and your sweetie may need to discuss making an agreement. We suggest that you let go right now of the idea that you can predict every single situation that might come up in your relationship and make a rule to cover it—just forget it. Many perfectly good agreements get made by twenty-twenty hindsight: a problem comes up, and instead of arguing over whose fault it was, the people simply make an agreement to try to prevent that problem from coming up again or to deal with it when it does.
Our friends Laurie and Chris have become extraordinarily flexible agreement makers through practicing a lot:
We met at the Renaissance Faire and made a pretty deep connection right away. Although we didn’t feel ready to jump into marriage right off, we did get handfasted [an ancient Celtic rite of romantic commitment] about five months after we met. Our handfasting included an agreement that if we still wanted to be together a year and a day later, we’d get married. And we did.
When we first decided to get handfasted, Chris proposed an agreement in which we’d be free to be sexual with other people during Faire, but at no other time. Laurie felt shocked by his desire to do this, and insecure about what might happen. So we decided to postpone a decision until the next summer’s Faire, after we’d gotten married.
During the first year of our marriage, the agreement was for Faire only, and then after that we extended it to the weekend preparatory workshops as well as to Faire itself. At one of these, Laurie met a guy with whom she got fairly seriously involved—it was our first ongoing relationship outside the marriage. At that point, things opened up all the way to where Laurie was spending a lot of her time with her other lover, and Chris didn’t like it much; he felt that he wasn’t getting enough time with Laurie.
So we renegotiated. We decided that either of us could sleep over with another partner twice a month. We felt that twice a month was often enough for fun, but not so often as to encourage a threateningly strong bond with someone else. That’s been working pretty well for a while, although we’ve compromised on a case-by-case basis a time or two.
We’re still working out the bugs—among other things, we’re hoping to become parents pretty soon, and we’re not sure how a baby will affect our relationship. But our agreements have always been at least tolerable, and at times they’ve offered a relief valve that’s kept us from fleeing the relationship in terror!
Chris and Laurie have had two children in the eleven years since this interview and are still together and still happily slutty.
So what constitutes a good agreement? In our opinion, the single most important hallmark of agreement is consent, which we define as “an active collaboration for the pleasure and well-being of all concerned.” In the case of polyamory, this consent often includes that of people not directly involved—other partners, children, and other people whose lives are affected by our agreements.
Defining consent can sometimes be tricky. If someone consents under pressure, we don’t think that meets the “active collaboration” criterion. And you can’t consent to something you don’t know about: “Well, you didn’t say I couldn’t fly to Boise for two weeks with this flight attendant I just met” does not constitute consent.
In order to achieve this kind of active consent, it is critical that everyone involved accept responsibility for knowing their own feelings and communicating them—but this isn’t always easy. Sometimes feelings don’t want to be pulled to the surface and examined—you may simply know that you feel bad. Give yourself the time and support you need to get to know that feeling, perhaps using some of the strategies we discuss in chapter 13, “Roadmaps through Jealousy.” If you feel that you need help in defining what’s going on for you, it’s okay to ask for that help, possibly by asking a partner or a more neutral friend who understands multiple relationships to devote some time to hearing you out. Physical or verbal reassurance often makes a huge difference, and sometimes a wise friend or therapist can ask the right questions to help you untangle a complicated feeling. Once you start listening to your own feelings, you’ll have a much easier time getting your needs and desires out there where everybody can hear them and make agreements to help meet them.
Most of us need some support in asking for what we want. When we are involved in making agreements, we need to feel sure that the needs we reveal will not be held against us. Most of us feel pretty vulnerable in and around our emotional limits, so it’s important to recognize that these limits are valid: “I need to feel loved,” “I need to feel that I’m important to you,” “I need to know that you find me attractive,” “I need you to listen and care about me when I feel hurt.”
Blaming, manipulation, bullying, and moral condemnation do not belong in the agreement-making process. The process of making a good agreement must include a commitment from all concerned to listen to one another’s concerns and feelings in an open-minded and unprejudiced way. If you are waiting for your partner to reveal a weakness so that you can exploit it into ammunition to “win” your argument, you are not ready to make a satisfactory agreement.
Legalistic hairsplitting is another enemy of good agreements. We know one couple whose agreement was that either of them would let the other one know within twenty-four hours if they were going to have sex with someone else. One of them called the other one from another city to let her know that he’d had sex with someone else the night before. “But you said you’d give me twenty-four hours’ notice!” she cried angrily. “I never said twenty-four hours before,” he pointed out. This loophole-finding legalistic behavior left neither individual feeling that their agreement had worked for them. The moral: be clear, be specific, and above all negotiate in good faith; this is not about cheating any more.
Agreements need to be realistic and clearly defined—if you’re not sure whether you’re keeping an agreement, it may be time to redefine that agreement. It is unrealistic, for example, to ask your partners never to enter into sexual interactions with people that they care about “too much.” There is no way to define “too much,” and few of us conceive of our polyamorous utopia as a world in which you are only allowed to share sex with people you don’t care about at all. None of us can truthfully agree to feel only this way or that way: our agreements need to have room in them for real emotions, whatever they may be. A more concrete agreement would be to limit outside dates to once a month, which might serve the same purpose.
Agreements do not have to be equal. People are different and unique, and what pushes my buttons might be perfectly okay with you. So one person might find it very important that his partner not stay out overnight, whereas said partner might actually enjoy an occasional opportunity to watch the late movie all alone and eat crackers in bed. One friend of ours says,
Bill and I have very different needs when it comes to relationships. I feel no need to be monogamous; I’m quite comfortable having sex with people I like, but they’re not affairs of the heart—whereas his sexual connections are either very casual, like at parties, or very deep and long-term. We’ve formed agreements that meet both of our needs—mine for friendly partners and fuck buddies, his for long-term secondary relationships.
Fairness does not mean perfectly equal. Fairness means we care about how each person feels and make agreements to help all of us feel as good as possible.
When thinking about agreements for an open relationship, most people start out by listing what their partner should not do: don’t kiss her on the mouth, don’t treat him better than you do me. Some “thou shalt nots” are necessary: agreements need to be made, for example, about sexual connections with relatives, neighbors, and coworkers. But many negative agreements are really about protecting your partner from feeling hurt or jealous, and we’re not big fans of these, although we recognize that they sometimes have their place as an intermediate step. We think that the best agreements to protect your partner from emotional pain are positive: let’s have a special date next weekend, I will find time to listen to you when you hurt, I’ll tell you how much I love you again and again.
Everyone needs a sense of emotional safety to succeed at feeling secure in open relationships, but thinking up agreements that will help both partners feel emotionally safe can be confusing. In the process of unlearning jealousy we will all at some time be asking our partners to take some risk, to agree to feel some painful feelings, to fall down a few times in order to learn how to ride the emotional bicycle of truly free love.
EXERCISE Eight Steps to Win-Win Conflict Resolution
One way you can make agreements to respect emotional limits is to ask for whatever might make you feel a little bit safer—reassurance, compliments, affection, a special ritual for homecoming after a date—and then when that works and you feel a little safer, take another step toward even more safety, and soon you will feel safe enough to expand your explorations further and further. Each tiny step in the direction of freedom will eventually get you there. One of the things that works about reassurance is that once we understand that our partner, or partners, or maybe even also their partners, are willing to help us with our feelings, we feel more secure and need less and less protection as we go along.
The single most important thing to remember about agreement making is that the purpose of an agreement is to find a way in which everybody can win.
We’ve done some asking around among our friends and colleagues to find out what kinds of relationship agreements have worked for others. Here is a partial list of agreements we’ve heard from some very successful sluts.
Notice as you read it how many different kinds of agreements it contains—some are sexual, some are relationship-oriented; some thou shalts and some thou shalt nots; some logistical and some sentimental. Just so you know that we’re not recommending any of these, you should also note that some are mutually exclusive. We’re presenting this list as a discussion opener, not as how it ought to be. Everybody has to make some agreements about sexual health and safer sex.
Our experience is that we need some kind of predictability to deal with the stresses of open relationships. Most people can handle a nervous-making situation much better if they know when it is going to happen and when it is going to be over. You can plan to do something supportive with a friend, go to a movie, visit Mom, whatever—and tell yourself that you only have to handle things for this chunk of time, and then your sweetie will come back and maybe you can plan a celebratory reunion.
Most people have a hard time dealing with surprises, which can feel like land mines exploding. Very few of us would be comfortable living with the possibility that our partner might go home with someone else at any time, from any party we go to, from the restaurant where we thought we were just going for a cup of coffee—no place, no time would be secure. One partner of our acquaintance was working across the country from his spouse during a time when he was first struggling to deal with his jealousy. He made an agreement to know when his partner was playing with someone else because, as he put it, “If I know when she is out with someone else, I also know when she isn’t, and then I can relax most of the time.”
If you feel that planning takes too much of the spontaneity out of your life, then think about declaring one night or one weekend a month to be open season—then you can make a decision whether to join your partner in cruising or sit this one out in a quieter milieu. An agreement to be unpredictable at some specified time is, after all, predictable.
There are probably a lot of things in your life on which you feel no need to reach agreement. Everyone deals with differences in relationships all the time, as any night person married to a morning person can tell you. However, lack of agreement can feel less comfortable in the close-to-the-bone field of sexual relationships. When feelings run high, particularly about sexual issues, it’s easy to want to believe that your way is right and that all other ways are wrong.
One way to avoid the trap of turning a difference into a moral argument is to look carefully at ownership: who owns what in this disagreement anyway? What is A’s investment in this particular choice, how is B feeling different about it, and what are we afraid might happen if we can’t agree? Try to get really clear on how each person feels before you even think about what you want to do about this issue at hand. Understanding your own and your partner’s emotions will lead to new and better ideas for agreements or resolution.
It can help to remember that you have been living with differences and disagreements with everyone in your life ever since you met them. When you discover a sexual difference with one person, it has probably been there all along, and yet you still like each other and share a lot of good stuff. Remember that you’ve been getting along fine without this particular agreement. If you’ve made it this far, you can live with the lack of agreement a little longer. Let time be your friend, and when difference is difficult, allow yourselves the time to thoroughly explore the feelings that are driving the disagreement and arrange to lead a rewarding life while you do it. You really can agree to disagree. Between the “yes” of full agreement and the “no” of full disagreement is a whole big gray area of no-agreement-yet, or tolerable-disagreement, or even who-cares?
Sometimes you will eventually find it possible to make an agreement, and other times you won’t. Occasionally, however, you will hit an area in which agreement is both necessary and impossible. For many people, the whole issue of nonmonogamy may be one of these; childbearing is another frequent point of contention. We suggest flexibility, and compromise seeking, possibly with the help of a qualified therapist.
But if agreement simply cannot be reached, we think the skills you learned in trying to reach agreement can come in very handy as you practice not-blaming, not-judging, and not-manipulating, as you work to change or even end a relationship that cannot reconcile its differences.
Some people agree to end a relationship and then discover that later on, when the stress of parting has eased, they can agree on a new kind of relationship with the same person. Others cannot. But either way, forthright and open-hearted discussion of disagreements and agreements will lead to a cleaner and less stressful outcome.
You and your sweetie might have different visions about what polyamory will be for you. For one person, it could be a lot of recreational sex, one-night stands, or party play; another might yearn for one primary and one special secondary relationship. Some people enjoy many relationships that make extended families out of their lovers and their lovers’ lovers; others look for a three- or four-person group marriage.
Negotiating difference, however, can be done and is being done successfully every day. So what if one person wants S/M, or tantra, or wild orgies, and the other wants walks on the beach at sunset? Once you’ve opened your relationship to other people who may be more accepting of those desires, anything is possible—Dossie has worked with a number of couples with these kinds of differences. Agreements may be asymmetrical, to account for different desires and different feelings, and each individual may need a different kind of reassurance. The relationship-lover may feel shy and unhip, the party animal may feel judged or threatened by long-term partners, and each needs to have their own feelings validated and cared for.
So how do you find an agreement that will work for everyone? A good place to start is by defining your goals. A goal is not the same as an agreement; your goal is what you’re trying to accomplish, and your agreement is the means you’re using to try to get there. For example, if your goal is to prevent anyone from feeling taken advantage of, your agreement might be to ensure that nobody’s personal time, space, or belongings are being infringed on. So start with getting clear on what feels like infringement to each person involved, and use that for your guidelines.
Often you will discover a goal by tripping over a problem: “Last night, when you and Sam were in our bedroom together, my feet were freezing and I couldn’t get in there to get my bedroom slippers.” The goal is to prevent this problem from coming up again—what kinds of agreements might help achieve that goal? Answering these questions will require an honest (and often difficult) look at what the real problem is: is it that your feet are cold, or that you resent being kicked out of your own bedroom, or that you’re feeling threatened and left out?
Once you’ve defined your problem and your goal, it’s time to start figuring out a good agreement. It might be appropriate to do a trial agreement, to put a time limitation (a weekend, a week, a month, a year) on your newborn agreement to see how it feels to everybody concerned. After the time is up, you can sit down again to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and whether to continue your agreement or revise it or scrap it.
In our experience, it’s rare for an agreement to last a lifetime without change: human beings change, and so do agreements. The way you can tell that your agreement needs to change is when someone doesn’t agree to it anymore. Janet and one of her partners, for example, began their relationship with an agreement that they could be sexual with other people, but that they couldn’t fall in love with anyone else. Then one of them did. (In hindsight, this seems like a fairly silly agreement—as though you could simply decide not to fall in love!) She remembers,
There was a period in which we were having “check-ins” one or two times a day. This was a situation neither of us had ever planned on. We found it was very important to stay in the moment and to stay with tangible things—yes, it feels okay if she sleeps over while I’m out of town; no, it doesn’t feel right for you to bring the two of us to the same party. We found, during that experience as well as similar ones that came later, that the words “in love with” made us both feel kind of panicky—that agreements that dwelt on measurable factors such as time, behavior, and space worked better for us.
Expect to try out some agreements and find out that they don’t work, and expect to need to change them. You will get better at this process with practice, and in time you may know your own and your partner’s needs so well that negotiating agreements will be easy. But in the beginning, while you are learning, tidiness won’t count anywhere near as much as tolerance.
When you first set out, some of these discussions may get quite heated: remember, anger is an emotion that tells you what is important to you. What is constructive about these difficult times is what you learn about your partners and about yourself.
Remember that there are many good ways to structure your sluttery. Structure is not what makes you safe from hard feelings—your ability to take care of yourself is what counts. So whatever structure you choose, hold it fairly loosely. Your agreements are not taking care of you; you are.
Don’t get discouraged—all the successful sluts you see who seem so carefree have fought over their agreements. You too can work your way through this tangled web of assumptions and emotions and learn to love with openness and freedom.