MANY PEOPLE come to a time when they want to open their relationship to more sexual partners. But when your relationship was established under conventional monogamous agreements, you can’t expect to proclaim “Open Sesame!” and have everything fall magically into place. Like everything else about ethical sluthood—and perhaps even more than other ways of relating—opening an existing relationship requires care, thought, practice, and work.
The relationship that you want to open may or may not be a life partnership; you may or may not be living together. You might have been practicing serial monogamy, with the usual occasional overlap. Or you may be dating and keeping all your lovers compartmentalized and want to move toward something more like a family or tribe. You may be looking for adventures outside of a triad or a group marriage. The work of opening is still work, no matter the nature of your relationship.
For the sake of simplicity, we are going to talk about opening a relationship between an existing two-person couple—but the principles and skills we discuss here can apply to lovers in any configuration.
If you and your lover are beginning this work with equal agreement that you both want to create this expansiveness in your lives, then congratulations, and welcome to the path. You will probably encounter some unexpected disagreements about the way this new life will look—so you still don’t get to skip this chapter.
In our experience, though, it’s much more common that one person wants to open the door to outside connections and the other hasn’t ever even considered it and is appalled by the idea. This situation is definitely more difficult, especially when the third member of the triangle, the outside partner—potential or actual, open or secret—is waiting in the wings and probably cares a lot about the outcome of this process. A lot of people don’t really think about monogamy until they make a connection with someone who feels important to them and they don’t want to give up their beloved life partner, or get a divorce, or split up the kids. You could be in any of these roles in the triangle: the one with the lust for adventure, the new love who is not a partner, and the sometimes stunned partner to the would-be adventurer.
In physics, the triangle is considered one of the most structurally sound and well-balanced structures—but in relationships, the very phrase “love triangle” carries a whiff of tabloid drama. This particular situation is not made any easier by the fact that it’s been happening for as long as there have been relationships. It can help to remember that it is utterly normal to have differences in desire in any relationship—you don’t need to both get excited about the same flavor of ice cream. Making room for everyone’s desires can work for all concerned—we know many people who have done so, reaching accommodations that work for all three people involved. Let’s look at the dilemma from all three points of view.
The advantage of being in this position is that you know, more or less, what you want. Perhaps you bought this book for your spouse, hoping for some freedom down the road and probably hoping that there is some way that you and your spouse can reach agreement without going through a whole lot of agony. However, you and your spouse are both, like all of us, products of our culture, and it takes hard work to step out of the paradigm upon which your entire previous existence was based. Good work, rewarding work, life-changing work, but still hard work.
Guilt is a dreadful emotion, one of the most uncomfortable ones we can feel. Most people feel guilty when something they do causes pain to the people they care about. When you place your desire for an open relationship on the table and your partner has a hard time with it, you will probably feel very guilty. There are no easy ways to allay your guilt by fixing how your partner feels.
You can’t wave a magic wand and change your partner’s mind—that’s the hard work we must each do for ourselves. It will hurt. There may be tears and rage and bitterness, and you will feel guilty. If you already have two partners, then both of them might feel bad, and you will feel doubly guilty.
Don Juan and Doña Juana are portrayed in fiction as carefree explorers—and also heartless and free of care for any pain they may leave in their wake. We don’t believe that you want your freedom at the cost of becoming a callous jerk. If you have invited your partner into this exploration, that means you don’t want to cheat, you want to live your life honestly and honorably. We respect you for that. A lot of other people won’t.
We don’t even know what to call you, which makes it hard to talk to you and may make it hard for you to think about your situation. Your role—a potentially loving, giving individual who’s sexually involved with one member of a committed couple—is so distant from most people’s conceptual framework that a nonloaded word for you does not exist. Homewrecker? Mistress? The other woman? (There isn’t even a phrase for “the other man,” in spite of the fact that many, many such men exist.) More civilized, but often equally problematic, are concepts like “secondary” or “tertiary”: this language does define the situation, but we think the implied hierarchy can be demeaning. Do you only count when you are number one? Or does everybody have rights in this constellation?
Whether you are the sweetie, the squeeze, the lover, or whatever, your position in the triangle comes with advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, nobody expects you to wash their socks, and most of your time with your lover can be spent having fun. You are not expected to support your lover, nor to give up your career to stay home with the kids. On the downside, who do you call when you need a drive to the emergency room? Who do you call when you are sad? When you need support? Do you have any rights at all to your partner’s time, or is there somebody who sees you as the competition, with whom you may never speak or negotiate? While your position conveys few responsibilities, it often also carries very few rights.
We really hope you didn’t get this book as a Valentine’s Day surprise, but we know that could be the case. It is utterly no fun to be called upon to expand your relationship in ways you never asked for, nor to deal with your beloved’s desires for other lovers after you’d promised to forsake all others. You may be feeling like you’ve had an abyss open up under your feet, with no solid ground anywhere to stand on.
Of course you are distressed, and angry as well—you did not choose this path. Here you are, in a maelstrom of scary feelings you never agreed to undertake. It may take a while for you to get that this is really happening. Eventually, though, this situation must be dealt with: once the subject of opening a relationship is on the table, it cannot be shut away in a drawer again. One way or another, you must find a way to cope with what’s been handed to you and begin considering what may happen next.
It is unfair, of course, that you’re being asked to do hard emotional work that you never chose to do. Is there any reason why you should have to work so hard? Is there anything in it for you?
Well, quite possibly. Perhaps this work will make you stronger. Perhaps you will make an unexpected journey into your own capacities: Maybe you too have the ability to love more than one person. Perhaps it will deepen your relationship with your partner. Perhaps it will improve your sex life. Perhaps you will find a path that allows your relationship to continue, that allows you to grow and change together. Perhaps you can see a faint gleam of a possible freedom somewhere on the horizon.
We can’t promise that any of these will happen for you. But there’s one thing we can promise. If you tackle this difficult situation, and learn whatever you can about yourself and your relationship from it, at the end of it you will have a choice. You may choose to separate, or you and your partner may choose to go back to monogamy, or you may try a more open relationship … but whatever you do, it will be because you’re looking at all your possibilities and choosing. Not reacting blindly, not doing what you’ve been told, not choosing the easy way just because it’s easy, but making your own, informed, heartfelt choice. We truly believe that consensual monogamy is a fine choice.
Later in this chapter, we’ll give you some ideas about ways to keep this difficult negotiation as productive as possible. But first we want to talk about a situation that we know some of our readers are confronting.
Sometimes the relationship is already open, only one partner doesn’t know it yet. This situation can be very hard to deal with, but it does happen, and often. Discovering that you have been and are currently being cheated on can be utterly awful. Feelings of betrayal, of lost trust, and often of shame are frequent consequences. Many people in this painful position are plagued with questions: “Am I not desirable?” “What did I do wrong?” All these feelings are legitimate, and we don’t believe you did anything wrong beyond accepting the stories you grew up on about what “happily ever after” is commonly supposed to mean.
It can help to remember that a cheating spouse who wants to open up a primary relationship is taking steps toward more honesty, showing respect for the partner and the relationship. They wouldn’t go to all this trouble if they wanted to get rid of you.
Our stereotypes paint the cheating partner as the villain, the greedy prick or bitch who wants to have their cake and eat it too, at your expense. But we know way too many people who have gotten into this position and are trying, often desperately, to find a way to make things right for everyone. The truly callous cad would just keep it all secret.
It can be hard to remember your partner’s goodwill while you are struggling to digest this unwelcome news. Discovering that your partner already has an outside love can be very close to catastrophic, simply because it feels so terribly bad. And although it may be comforting to focus your pain into righteous outrage—and you are justified in doing so—something more needs to happen if you and your relationship are going to survive and thrive.
What do we see when we look at cheating with an open mind and with compassion toward everyone involved? Our culture would like to have it that cheating happens rarely, that it’s an anomaly. Kinsey discovered otherwise more than half a century ago: slightly more than half of theoretically monogamous marriages back then actually were not. So cheating is not unusual and is not perpetrated only by heartless sex addicts.
Conventional therapeutic wisdom is that cheating is a symptom of something wrong in the marriage and that working on the marriage will make the cheating go away. Sometimes this is indeed true. But cheating is not necessarily about some failure in your connection, and it is cruel to tell people that something is wrong with a perfectly good relationship just because sexual desire has a way of squirming out of bounds.
You may feel betrayed, or grief-stricken, or furious. You’ve been launched into these feelings without any warning, and without your choice. It can be particularly hard to learn that your partner has been engaging in far-out sexual activities like kink or cross-dressing—if you’re struggling with this, please look at some of our other books, particularly When Someone You Love Is Kinky.
Working to open a relationship under these conditions is far, far less than optimal—how is the nonconsenting partner supposed to find a way to feel secure and loved when the rug has been pulled out from under? But many couples do eventually find their way through this particularly thorny thicket. If you find yourself so angry that you can’t begin to think about anything else, here’s a way to make it easier to listen to your anger.
We are talking about a life situation in which many people experience particularly fiery anger. This exercise can be a first step in getting to know that anger and understand it, rather than just avoiding it like the plague and then erupting when you can’t stand it any more.
For this exercise, you start out thinking like an ecologist. Remember in school how they taught you that everything in Nature has its job, its contribution: the maggots eat the dead mouse and turn it into rich soil and then the rose can bloom, right?
So why do we all experience anger? What is its contribution to our individual ecologies and to our relationships? How does your anger help you? How does it protect you? Write a list. Examples might include: helping you discover your limits; energizing you to action; letting you release tension.
You might put this list on the refrigerator and add items over a week or two as you experience them.
Then, the next time you feel angry, you can ask yourself: “How is my anger trying to take care of me?”
Intellectually understanding cheating doesn’t make it that much easier to handle when you discover that it’s your lover who is doing it … but it might help you figure out where you want to go from here. The challenge of rebuilding trust can be hard to contemplate, and you need to figure out how you can meet your partner halfway. Your spouse can’t make you trust, can’t really even earn your trust as though it were a salary—you have to decide that it’s worth your while to grant it.
Furthermore, there is the problem of your partner’s outside lover waiting, patiently or not, in the wings while you are starting from scratch trying to orient yourself to the situation. This person that you just found out about has feelings too and has perfectly good reasons for not wanting to remain a dirty little secret.
If the situation you’re negotiating is one in which you or your partner has been cheating, you will probably have to spend some time together working through feelings of anger, betrayal, and guilt. But when you have those feelings under some degree of control, you will next have to look at the future and begin working—preferably together—on some solutions.
It may be that you will wind up separating, or perhaps the two of you will return to monogamy. Your local bookstore offers many excellent books to support you through either of those alternatives. But this book is called The Ethical Slut, so let’s assume for now that you are at least considering the possibility of more openness in your relationship.
In order for everyone involved in this situation to get from where you are right now—perhaps angry, perhaps scared, almost certainly confused—to somewhere new, you need to make a commitment to push yourself a little beyond your comfort level. Just a little, but still you need to push yourself. It doesn’t work if your partner has to push for you, and it doesn’t work if you are pushing your partner. You each have to push yourselves so you can discover how much stronger you are than you thought you were. It’s sort of like working out—you have to push and pull those weights in order to strengthen your emotional muscles.
A good way to start would be to sit down with your partner in a peaceful place and compare your visions of a more open future. Perhaps you could each write down a little about what your relationship would look like if it were perfect, and perfectly easy. When you compare notes you may find out that you have very different visions: one partner may want to be the Queen of Sluts at sex parties, the other may be looking for a lover who wants to go backpacking and make out on a mountainside. One of you may be yearning for zipless fucks with no obligations, the other may desire an ongoing relationship with one or two people who stay connected and join the family.
Don’t panic. You don’t have to want the exact same thing, and you can figure out agreements that make it possible for you both to make your dreams come true. Look back at chapter 15, “Making Agreements,” to get some ideas of possible ways the two of you might want to structure your poly constellation.
It can be pretty overwhelming to look at the dream with no idea how it can possibly be brought into reality—but, again, don’t panic. The next part is to figure out how you are going to get from here to there. As with any journey, you don’t have to teleport to your destination in an instant—you will get to where you are going one step at a time. You don’t learn to swim by jumping into the ocean, and you won’t get comfortable with any of this by castigating yourself for not being comfortable already.
EXERCISE Hierarchy of Hard, or, How to Get from Here to There in However Many Absolutely Easy Steps
Here’s an exercise about choosing the first step you want to take.
Choose a very concrete goal to focus on, one about which you have some anxiety. Poly issues might include: looking at personal ads together, introducing your lovers, making a date, having a sleep-over, talking about safer sex. Choose an issue to practice with that is relatively easy for you today.
Think about the steps you would have to take to get from here to there—agreements, negotiations, honesties, asking for what you want, scheduling time, finding a babysitter, and so on. Write each of these steps on an index card. If any step looks too enormous, break it down into a few steps. Sort of like teaching three-year-olds to bake cookies, make each step utterly simple before you go on to the next one.
Then lay out the cards and put them in order from the easiest to the hardest, or the safest to the scariest, according to how intense it feels when you think about that step. You may get new information about yourself when you do this.
Then pick up the safest, easiest card, figure out how you could take that step, and march onward! When you’ve accomplished that, and learned whatever you learned from doing it, put the card away and go to work on the next step, which is now the easiest step.
Never take anything but the easiest step.
We look at the kinds of agreements that sluts make to deal with emotional comfort zones as falling, loosely speaking, into two categories: agreements that avoid scary feelings, and agreements to take a risk of feeling something that might be uncomfortable or scary, but not terrifying. Make a list of all the agreements you might consider entering into, and divide them into avoidant and risky. Avoidant strategies might include don’t ask, don’t tell; don’t rock the boat; don’t let me find out; I will never meet your lover; only on Thursday nights when I’m out with my lover, so I’ll never be home alone. These might be good agreements for the couple who are starting out on this path, in that they are taking the very smallest risks with the tightest possible containers. This is how we form a learning curve.
If you choose only avoidant strategies, however, you can wind up keeping yourself frozen in your present state. If you don’t talk about what you are doing, then how can you think? If you can’t think, how can you negotiate? How can you reassure yourselves without knowing what is happening? People don’t do well in a vacuum, and many people find that the stories they make up in their heads in the absence of information are scarier than the reality.
In a worst-case scenario, you could wind up not knowing something that everyone else in your community knows, and then you might find out about it from a friend who thinks you already know. Most people don’t much like getting blindsided, so basing your safety on keeping yourself blind is not going to work forever. And if you and your partner have to keep your activities secret from each other, then you have, well, a big secret. Secrets will not bring you closer together—they often create more distance. Suppose you have a fight with your outside lover, and your life partner can tell that you’re upset. How do you deal with these realities and not disclose anything about your outside connections?
Many people find it easier not to hear about the specifics of their partner’s lovemaking with others, and we don’t see a lot of problems with that. Eventually, you might find it a turn-on, but there is no need to start there, or even get there, unless such sharing is important to one of you.
Think very hard about any agreements that add up to “don’t have too much fun.” Agreements about safer sex, of course, are absolutely required. But in the long run it’s not going to make you feel very safe if your lover agrees not to, for instance, kiss someone, or not do any of a long list of activities. All you will get for that is a lot of wondering if this agreement will be kept and a lot of uproar if you suspect it is not.
You have the right to expect your spouse to be open with prospective partners about having a life partner already. You may be surprised to learn that this will make both of you more attractive to some people than a single person would be—an outside partner can play with either one of you and not have to worry about whether you are going to show up with a U-Haul. By being honest about the relationship you are looking for, you will attract people who are ready and willing to deal with the realities of your life.
There are distinct advantages to connecting with experienced sluts—their knowledge can be very helpful. When a prospective outside sweetie is new to polyamory, you will negotiate another set of agreements and establish a learning curve for this relationship.
Risk-taking strategies might include things like full disclosure or checking out personal ads on the Internet together: your first steps on your learning curve can be virtual steps if those feel like the easiest to take. What photos in the ads does your partner respond to? How do you feel about that? What does your partner think about the people you find attractive? What happens if you field a couple of characters on Second Life or flirt online in one of your fantasy identities? Or you might go out to a club together and talk about what it would be like to flirt with any of the hotties you might find there.
You can take the risk of arousing one of those scary emotions almost as an experiment, to see how it feels, learn about yourself, and explore how you can take care of yourself and reassure each other when jealous feelings are being felt in the present.
One risk that we advise you to take involves making the time in your busy lives to talk about how you are feeling about all this. There are a lot of exercises in this book about communication: try them. On the next page you’ll find another script for talking about difficult feelings.
We have said before that nothing creates intimacy like shared vulnerabilities—so we advise you to savor all the closeness that you open up with each other when you start taking risks.
You can also use the “Yes, No, Maybe” exercise in chapter 21, “Sex and Pleasure,” only this time list all the poly things: coffee dates, answering an ad, exchanging phone numbers at a party, flirting, all the way up to actual dates, sleepovers, and sex. The items that wind up on your Yes lists are the ones to start with, and then you can negotiate what it would take to make it safe enough to try something on your Maybe list. The No list states your absolute limits at this time and maybe forever. Compare this to your “Hierarchy of Hard” cards we talked about in the exercise earlier in this chapter. These two exercises you will use over and over again, because each time you get good at any part of what you are attempting, the scary level of all the items will change. Every time you learn something new, you become stronger and more confident.
EXERCISE The Twenty-Minute Fight
Make an appointment with your partner to discuss something you don’t agree on for twenty minutes. Find a good time when you can focus, and when you won’t have to do anything stressful right after—perhaps plan to watch a movie.
Try this first with a small disagreement, something not terribly heated, just for practice. How do you manage to stop after twenty minutes when the discussion isn’t finished? Our most difficult disagreements are not going to be resolved in hours of talking, arguing, or yelling—maybe not even in weeks or months. Difficult issues take time to work on. So one important skill is to open up the controversy, and then figure out a way to stop and close it back down till the next time.
Use good communication tools, and set the timer. When the twenty minutes are up, take a few deep breaths and let go, let go, let go of wherever you are in the argument. It is a terrifically useful skill to know how to stop. It is much safer to start talking about a controversy when you have agreed not to yell at each other till you are exhausted and go to bed in a huff. You may find that after you stop talking you will be thinking about what you said, and what your partner said, and in a day or two you may very well get some new ideas about how you feel and what might work. By the time you come together next week for Twenty-Minute Fight round two, you may surprise yourselves by how much closer to understanding or accepting each other’s positions you have come.
We have deliberately suggested some extremely easy places to start with—like looking at ads, or talking about all the cuties dancing at the club. These are very safe places to take a tiny risk, and pay attention to what feelings come up, and talk about them. Remember that feelings like to flow—don’t look for answers, just watch them move on through. Please don’t assume that how you feel today is how you will always feel: the whole purpose of this endeavor is to open up your options about your feelings.
You may be surprised by what’s difficult, or by what’s easy. Give yourself a gold star for what’s easy—that’s a strength you already have. Give yourself another gold star for even thinking about something that’s hard—this is the work you are setting out to do.
Regardless of what decisions you make about other people in your life, it’s a good idea to start from a relationship that feels fulfilling and exciting. If you are delighted with your sex life with your partner, perhaps you don’t need this section. But if your sexuality as a couple has become infrequent, perfunctory, unsatisfying, or nonexistent, please know that this is utterly normal (although not inevitable) in mature relationships. Most of us, when we get settled into a comfortable relationship, find wonderful ease and safety, but as our days get filled with careers and kids and softball and mortgages and building the studio in the garage, there is less energy for sex, and passion may lose both its ease and its urgency.
Before you read on, think for a minute: is the sex in my partnership okay the way it is? Maybe having somewhat less sex these days than you did on your honeymoon is fine for you. It’s a myth that your relationship is a disaster if you’re not getting it on three times a week or for three hours at a time. There are perfectly marvelous partnerships that last for decades and are very satisfying to all concerned, with little or no sex, or with comfortable, routine sex. Don’t feel like you have to change something that feels okay the way it is: when it’s not broken you don’t need to fix it.
If, however, there are changes you would like to make, the first thing you need to do is find some time to talk with your partner, maybe read this section together, and negotiate your learning curve. If this opens up some hard feelings—and it may—go back to chapter 14, “Embracing Conflict,” and consider how you can listen to each other’s feelings without making anyone into a villain. Both of you got you here, and it’s going to take both of you to get somewhere better. So start with what you need to do to get on the same side. We’ll start with discussing a few common problems and some solutions to try.
Where you start depends somewhat on the nature of the problem. Some couples fall out of sexual synch because of a physical difficulty with sex that has eaten away at their sense of intimacy. For others, it can have more to do with the distance caused by the pressures of day-to-day life, or about small resentments that have built up over time and that can make it difficult to find the passion and romance that once inspired you. For many, it is some of each.
Let’s start by talking about sex. It may be that one or both of you has kept silent about some aspect of your sex that isn’t working right, out of some sense of trying to protect your partner’s feelings. Silence will not help: the loving way to treat a sexual problem is to work together on fixing it, and your partner can’t join you if you won’t say what’s wrong. If your partner tends to stop that perfect stroke right when it’s getting good for you or initiates orgasm-seeking activity long before you’re ready, you have to ask for what you want or else you are going to get frustrated and eventually resentful. And if you’ve never told your partner what you need to make you happy, you are depriving both of you of a blissful sex life. Similarly, when your partner has a concern, please don’t take it as a deliberate blow to your sexual self-esteem. Most of us have to learn what our partners like from our partners—there are no clever tricks that work for everyone.
Pay attention to practical matters. Has sex become uncomfortable or painful? The first step here, too, is communication. If your back hurts in some positions, talk to your partner and choose some positions that are comfortable for both of you. Bad disks are not very sexy, but a pillow under the hips or the belly can change what gets strained or stretched. If friction feels unpleasant, pick up samples of some nice lubricants (many erotic boutiques sell sample packs), test them out to find your favorite, and enjoy yourselves. Lubricant is an asset to vaginal play for many women, and an absolute necessity for women in midlife and beyond, or for any form of anal play. If you haven’t tried it before, you’ll be stunned at how good it can feel for both parties. If penetration still hurts, get a medical checkup to deal with anything that needs medical attention. And if you both want penetration, but his penis isn’t cooperating, consider trying one of the prescription medications now available to help maintain the hard-on once you’ve taken care of the turn-on. Once you start talking about physical issues that can affect sex, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how many of them are easy to fix.
Alcohol and other intoxicants are not really your friend. Although a small amount of wine or whatever may help you feel less inhibited, nervous people tend to overindulge, and getting hammered will leave you unable to feel anything at all and no fun to play with. We are going for sexual consciousness, not sedation.
For more problem-solving information, we have listed some good books about sex in the Resource Guide at the end of this book, and you can call or email San Francisco Sex Information (also in the Resource Guide) to discuss your question with a trained peer counselor.
Both men and women can develop some resistance to sex, either from fear of not doing it well themselves or from disappointment in not getting their needs or their dreams fulfilled. Once any part of sex has become difficult, if it isn’t discussed and dealt with, resentments can build up. Responding to resistance by getting so pushy that you’re ignoring your partner’s signals to knock it off is definitely not an answer. Sweeping someone off their feet when they don’t want you to only works in movies. Avoid treating your partner as a resource for getting your rocks off: just because you got married does not mean you have a right to demand sex whenever you want it. What you can do is invite your partner to collaborate with you on a meander through the garden of earthly delights and discover what pleases both of you.
It is very rare that both partners have exactly the same desire for sex—that would be like insisting that you and your partner should have identical patterns of tidiness. To get through times when one partner is hungry for sex and the other is starving for sleep, a positive attitude toward masturbation is an utter plus. Sex with yourself doesn’t mean you’re a failure, it means that you enjoy yourself; it can make your relationship a lot easier, especially when you don’t have to hide it. One of your authors regularly goes to sleep with her partner curled up around her beating off while she reads herself to sleep with a good novel, both of them getting drowsy in their favorite way and all warm and cuddly.
So your first slut skill in keeping it hot is to talk to each other about the practical aspects of what works for each of you and scheme together to overcome any problems. Knowledge is the most powerful aphrodisiac.
EXERCISE The Great Sex Story
Write a story about the best sex you ever had with your life partner. Get into the details, describes the sensations: the sounds, the smells, the pounding pulse, and such. Both of you write your stories—it might be a different episode, and that’s fine—and then share them. Talk about what made it so good for you.
Some couples develop a groove, a satisfying script for sex that reliably works for both of them. Experimenting with new sensations in your sex life doesn’t mean giving up your groove, but rather adding some new tricks to your excellent repertoire. What’s already a good thing will remain good, and you will return to it again and again like a well that has very sweet water.
If the groove has become a rut, if it feels like a chore, if it is a source of repeated disappointment, it’s time to talk about expanding your options. Now might be a good time to do the “Yes, No, Maybe” exercise in chapter 21, “Sex and Pleasure,” being sure to include things that you’ve never tried but might like to. Looking at your partner’s list may be a mite shocking for starters—“I never knew you hated that!”—but after you recover from any surprises, you get to start into the future with a lot of really useful information about what works for both of you.
Compare your patterns of desire, and particularly look at the spectrum from brief encounters to production numbers. Do you like to have friendly, warm, cuddly sex on weeknights? Swift rocket trips surging to release? Do you dream of ecstatic journeys that could take up most of Saturday and maybe some of Sunday morning? Good sex travels the range from what Dossie calls “bread and butter” sex, the nourishing part of every meal, to fancy desserts that take enchanting hours to concoct. Production numbers obviously can’t happen every day, but luckily you don’t have to choose—you can have some of each.
Start by setting aside some time for pleasure—this may be harder than you think, but it’s very important. Waiting until the kids are in bed, the emails are answered, the chat lists have been checked, and you’ve watched the evening news and clucked over the terrible state of the world is a recipe for disappointment. Schedule it the way you’d schedule anything else that’s important to you, at a time when you’re most likely to have plenty of energy for it, and stick to your schedule whenever possible.
EXERCISE List of Dates
Many couples in the hectic rush of things to do—children to raise, walls to paint, gardens to hoe, groceries to buy—find that it has been a long time since they spent time together for the purpose of having fun. Make a list of dates you could plan—beaches, brunch, dancing, games, sports, wrestling matches, that new restaurant—and figure out what you would need to do to make them happen. You and a partner or partners could make that list together, or you could each make a list. Try for at least five items.
Then start scheduling. When you realize how hard that is, then you are also finding out how precious time spent with your partner truly is. An afternoon on a mountain is an important investment in your relationship.
Turn-on is not the same thing as hard-on. Turn-on is about getting into the mood, about getting ready to focus on sensual and eventually sexual sensation.
Too many of us believe that turn-on is something that happens to us like the weather. Here’s an affirmation for you: “I know my turn-on is in here somewhere, and I can figure out how to find it.”
Turn-ons may be visual, verbal, or sensual; they may rely on touch, sound, smell, or the sensations of muscles stretching and flexing. There are a thousand and more ways to get turned on. Make a list of your favorite turn-ons—not how you like to get off, but how you like to get started. Getting turned on is sort of like getting high, or waking up, or warming up—you are transitioning from one state of consciousness to another. This takes time, and it feels good.
Sexologists who study arousal tell us that turn-on depends on two things: safety and risk. You need to feel safe from harm, and secure that your conditions will be met and your wants and needs honored. You also need to feel a little like being at the top of a ski jump, on the threshold of something miraculous and powerful. New relationships can be very hot because there is still a lot of riskiness, but mature relationships need to seek out ways to take a little risk, to step beyond the comfortable and the familiar into something new and a little challenging.
Looking for your turn-on on can be a lot like looking for ways you can nourish your relationship. Here’s a list of some possibilities that you might find useful.
There’s a reason why dates usually include dinner: dinner, whether out or in, is a great place to connect, to talk, to get caught up, and then maybe plot an adventure. Going out to dinner gives you time to dress up sexy, which is much more fun than washing dishes.
Remember when you are on a date and when you’re not—some people don’t like being felt up while they’re washing the dishes. (Others do, of course, so you have to communicate about this too.)
EXERCISE The Process-Free Date
Agree to go out and do something you like together. During this date, do not talk about any problems, in your relationship, or at work, or with the kids, or in the economy, or whatever. One couple we know went out for dinner and dancing and pretended it was their first date. They danced like teenagers and came home to have lovely sex that felt, somehow, renewed.
When you get to the bed, being equally turned on is not a requirement; you can both get there with a little time and cheerful cooperation. The more ready person can help the other person catch up. Try out what sex therapists call “nondemand pleasuring,” which adds up to anything you know your partner likes, without pushing them further. Try an experiment where you agree that one partner will set out to arouse the other in the way the receptive partner chooses—with no obligations, and no blame if it doesn’t work.
Whatever you choose to try, please try something. You have to do something different if you want a different outcome.
None of this works every time. Simply making the effort is progress, even when one particular attempt doesn’t pan out. Setting aside time with the intention to hunt for your turn-on is the best way to start, and if you set out to get sexy and you don’t get all the way there, you can still enjoy the journey.
Consult your “Yes” lists and scheme together for a brief encounter on a weeknight. Schedule a time when you can have a twelve-hour date—yes, twelve whole hours—without being interrupted. Go out to dinner, to a beach, hiking—whatever you like. Come home, shower the sweat off together, light the candles, and see what happens next.