SLUTS RELATE in as many combinations and styles as you can possibly imagine, and more. Is there a typology of relationships that could possibly include every wonderful possibility? Obviously not. We believe that every relationship is unique unto itself, and thus even an attempt to think in types and forms is not going to express the essential truths of what happens when we love people.
Here is one particular and fairly unusual relationship we cherish:
Your authors have been lovers, coauthors, and best friends for sixteen years, and we have never lived together. We have both lived with other partners during those sixteen years and have both been single together for only a brief time. Our relationship is a treasure, and no other partner gets to object—we’ve been doing this for a long time and we do not intend to stop. Of course, if we wanted to live together we probably would have by now, so we are also no threat to any life partner. (As long as you don’t get threatened by reading in extensive detail about your partner’s sexual adventures with her coauthor—this is a problem only a few of you will ever face.) It is nothing short of a miracle to us that our partnering has been so fruitful and so serene and so intimate and so explorative over all this time. We both agree that to live together would run a terrible risk of spoiling a good thing.
Everybody ought to have a coauthor. But even if you don’t write, you might find yourself making connections that remind you of some of the possibilities we will discuss here.
While all connections can be guided by the basic principles we’ve discussed in earlier chapters, new skills and concepts may get developed by brilliant sluts who want to explore the rewards and challenges of any particular lifestyle. In this chapter, we will discuss some of the many ways of exploring open sexual lifestyles and making your connections sustainable. Even if it doesn’t seem like what you want has much in common with any of these ways of partnering, we suggest reading the whole chapter—there are ideas for all of us in the experiences of any one of us, and sometimes a voice from somewhere else can give us just the piece our puzzle was looking for.
We all grew up in a world in which there was assumed to be nothing between emotionless sport fucking and committed long-term marriage-type relationships, leaving the vast territory in between open to discovery by relationship pioneers of all stripes, including ourselves. What interesting ways of relating to people might we, and you, find between these two poles? When we include all of our connections in our picture of relationship, we expand the definition of what a relationship can be.
Each relationship seeks its own level when we let it. Operating on this principle, we can welcome each of our partners for precisely who they are: we don’t need them to be anybody else or to bring us any particular resources or skills. If you don’t want to play tennis with me, I’ll ask somebody else, and if you don’t want to play bondage games with me, again, somebody else will—our relationship will not be less for it. What we share is valuable for what we share. Period.
We like to be easygoing about sex, but what people mean by “casual sex” is perhaps too dismissive. Casual sex sounds like we are supposed to be distant: don’t get too close, don’t expect too much, avoid any expression of intimacy or vulnerability.
We are now hearing people refer to certain of their lovers as “friends with benefits.” A euphemism, perhaps, but an interesting concept. Why shouldn’t we share sex with our friends, making sex a natural part of the love and honor and faithfulness and openheartedness that we already share with friends?
We have learned the most, and had the most fun, and made the most wonderful, rich connections, when we have welcomed each new person into our lives just as they are, without trying to force them into the picture that’s labeled “relationship” in our brains. This has been true whether we’ve been single, coupled, part of a group family, or engaged in any one of the myriad other ways of relating that creative and loving sluts can devise.
We hear too often of folks who delight in a joyously slutty lifestyle until they “fall in love.” Then, perhaps prodded by cultural messages that love must equal marriage must equal monogamy, they dive into an attempt at a conventional lifestyle, often with disastrous consequences. At least one of your authors—you can insert Janet’s rueful grin here—has proven herself not immune to this kind of programming.
There is no reason why wedding bells, or the equivalent thereof, need to break up that old gang of yours. Many sluts find it possible to combine the committed stability of a life partnership with the manifold pleasures of sex and intimacy with others.
However, there is no question that being a slut within a committed relationship has some special challenges. So much of our cultural baggage tells us that commitment equals ownership—that, as the old bitter joke has it, a ring around the finger equals a ring through the nose. Even people who know better often find (sometimes to their surprise) that their expectations of a committed relationship may include the right to control many aspects of their partner’s lives.
While we’re going to write here about couples for the sake of clarity, all the principles apply equally to threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes. Relationships take their own shapes, but the best ones tend to share some basic principles: good boundaries, mindfulness, and a mutual desire for the well-being of everyone involved.
As you can probably guess, we don’t much like the idea that a relationship commitment specifies anybody’s right to anything beyond mutual respect and caring for each other. Yet once you divorce romantic love from the concept of ownership, what happens? One woman we know, who had never been in an open relationship before, was startled to find that many of her old habits have become irrelevant: “Why should I bother to look for stray hairs on the pillow, trying to sniff out any trace of infidelity, when I know that if he has sex with someone else he’ll simply tell me about it?” Yet there are still issues of boundaries, of responsibility, of courtesy, that complement ownership and promote sustainability, which must be dealt with.
So, how do sluts in love build a life together?
Our friends Ruth and Edward remember:
We had a monogamous relationship for about sixteen years, then opened it up and started interacting with other people. Now we’re trying to figure out what we’re comfortable doing with other people and what we want to reserve for our own relationship. Sometimes, the only way to locate the boundary of our comfort zone is to cross it and feel the discomfort. We try to take small steps, so that the pain is minimal. We’re definitely committed to each other and are each willing to stop doing things that the other finds threatening.
Mostly, you take care of your own stuff, recognize and protect your boundaries, and make agreements to help yourself and your partner feel safe—but we’ve already talked about that. Here are some special problems that may come up for partnered sluts.
We’ve said before that each relationship seeks its own level. For some relationships, that’s a life partnership, which may include sharing living space, possessions, and so on. Others may take other forms: occasional dates, friendships, ongoing romantic commitments, and so on. Yet many folks find that they’ve gotten into a habit of letting their relationships slide inexorably into life partnership, without much thought or intent on their part. Well-meaning friends and acquaintances may aid in this process by assuming that you and your friend are a couple before you’ve ever decided to become one. In addition, many people get coupled by accident, by virtue of an unplanned pregnancy, an eviction romance where one partner loses a housing situation and moves in with the other, or simple convenience. Janet remembers:
In my freshman year of college, I met a guy l liked a lot—quiet and shy, but when he said anything, I really liked what he had to say. Finn and I wound up going out together a couple of times and having sex a few times. When school ended, we wrote to each other over the summer. Then fall came and I began looking around for a place to live outside the dorms. The only room I could find was a double-sized room that I could afford only if I shared it with someone. So I called Finn and proposed that we share it, putting up a partition across the middle and sleeping on separate mattresses, and he agreed.
The first night there, Finn had already gotten himself a mattress, and I hadn’t yet—so I shared his. Somehow, we never did get around to getting another mattress. We wound up living together for a couple of years, then getting married. That missing mattress led to a fifteen-year marriage and a couple of kids.
While we’re all for coupledom for people who choose it, we like to see folks make their choices a bit more mindfully than this. We suggest that before you let yourself slide into something that you don’t really want, you do some serious thinking and talking, alone and together, about what is the best form for this particular relationship. Talk to each other about what love means to you and how you fit into each other’s lives.
You may discover that while you enjoy one another’s company and have fabulous sex, your habits regarding housing, money, possessions, and so on are wildly incompatible. In such a situation, you could do what generations of people have done—move in together and spend years trying to change one another, getting frustrated and resentful in the process. Or you could reconsider some of the implicit assumptions you have brought to the relationship. Do you have to live together? Why? Why not instead enjoy your friend for the things you like about him and find someone else with whom to share the other things? Sluthood means, among other things, that you don’t have to depend on any one person to fulfill all your desires.
If you know that you’re a person who tends to slide into coupledom, we suggest spending some serious time trying to figure out why you’ve fallen into this pattern and what you hope to get out of being part of a couple. It’s a very good idea for everyone to learn to live single—to figure out how to get your needs met without being partnered, so you don’t find yourself seeking a partner to fill needs that you ought to fill yourself. You might also consider experimenting with some relationships unlike those you’ve tried in the past—instead of looking for Mr. or Ms. Right, try dating some people you like and trust but don’t necessarily love, or maybe love in a quieter way than chills running up your spine.
In this, as in just about everything else we’ve told you in this book, the key is to build your own sense of internal security. If you like yourself, love yourself, and take care of yourself, your other relationships can arrange themselves around you, as perfectly as crystals. We hope that if and when you get coupled, you do it on purpose.
One of the questions facing coupled sluts is the issue of whether to enter into the special, legally sanctioned partnership called “marriage.” In an increasing number of states and countries, even being in a same-sex relationship no longer exempts you from having to address this question: same-sex marriage has been legally sanctioned in several states in the United States, in Canada, and in an increasing number of countries in Europe and elsewhere, and we utterly approve. Your authors, however, think it is very important that everyone look very closely at what apples we are buying when we reach out for the marriage-rights piece of the American pie. Some of those apples have worms.
Marriage, as it now stands, is the inevitable outcome of government imposing its standards on personal relationships, legislating a one-size-fits-all prescription detailing how people in sexual or domestic relationships ought to run their lives. Here in California, for example, we have community property laws, which means that whatever income or debt either spouse creates during the marriage belongs to both spouses. We know a woman whose soon-to-be-ex-husband deliberately threw them into bankruptcy because she was planning to leave. Other states have laws just as arbitrary: in some places, if you live together for seven years you’re married whether or not you want to be, by what is called, with startling narrow-mindedness, “common law.”
Marriage is, we’re told, a sacrament—a loving ritual where your faith and your community bless your union. Why, then, is our government, the one that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” requiring us to get marriage licenses?
If marriage is sacred, as we think it is, why is legal recognition of a relationship, along with privileges like health insurance and inheritance, restricted to those who are willing to shape their lives to conform to somebody else’s design?
If we ran the world, we would abolish marriage as a legal concept, allowing people to enter into contract relationships as allowed by the perfectly adequate laws that already govern other forms of legal partnership. Sample contracts could be provided by institutions, attorneys, churches, publishers, and support networks. Those who wished to perform marriage as a sacrament could do so under the auspices of whatever religious or social institution felt like a good fit for them. Under such a system, no agreement would be taken for granted; sexual exclusivity, money sharing, inheritance, and all the other issues currently covered by inflexible marriage laws could be consciously chosen. We really like conscious choices.
There is, of course, always a need for laws about the basic responsibilities adults have for children and other dependents. Tax breaks and other support should still be available to those caring for children and dependent elders, who really need them. It’s sort of like supporting public education: we have a hard time imagining a better use for our tax dollars than meeting the needs of the disabled, the aging, and our next generation.
Love is a wonderful thing, and we think it would be even more wonderful if we all acted like responsible adults and entered into thoughtful arrangements about the physical and financial foundations of our lives. If we really took care of business instead of letting a pro forma piece of paper dictate our decisions for us, we would be much freer to love in whatever ways fit for us.
The commonest form of relationship in our culture, and many others, is the couple: two people who have chosen to share intimacy, time, and perhaps space and possessions for now and the foreseeable future. While couplehood has a great deal to be said for it—it’s a lot of work building a life, and many hands make light work—it also offers some special challenges.
The ideas in this section are written for two-person couples for the sake of simplicity, but most of them apply to threesomes and moresomes as well.
One problem that sometimes arises between partners in sluttery is competition to be the most popular, a concern most of us have carried around in the bottom of our psyches since junior high school. Sometimes partners compete with each other to see who can score the most or the most attractive of conquests—an ugly picture.
We cannot reiterate often enough: this is not a contest, this is not a race, and nobody is the prize. One strategy to cut through any feelings of competitiveness is to play matchmaker for each other, to invest yourself in your partner’s sexual happiness as you do in your own—some polyfolk use the word “compersion” to describe the feeling of joy that comes from seeing your partner sexually happy with someone else. Remember the climax of The Big Chill, in which a woman character sets up her best friend with her husband so that her single friend could have a baby?
Janet recalls meeting a new Internet acquaintance for coffee and hearing her describe a pet sexual fantasy that was startlingly similar to Janet’s then-partner’s. Janet set up a first date for her new acquaintance and her partner for later that week, and the two of them (with Janet joining in later on) went on to have a long and intense relationship.
Dossie was once out on a date with a longtime lover of hers when she noticed an attractive person trying to catch her eye behind her date’s back. She explained the situation to her date, who had a stroke of genius. He strode over to the young man in question and with great dignity announced, “My lady would like you to have her phone number.” The young man looked terrified at the time, but he called the next morning. Dossie has made use of this strategy repeatedly since then and recommends it highly: they always call!
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:
Sexual time is connected with intimate time for most of us; we come to depend on our partners for various kinds of emotional support. So we get into this pattern where we share all our hard emotional unsexy needs—all the work of living together, the sickness and health, richer and poorer stuff—with our life partner, and we’re on our best behavior with our other partners. However, while being in a long-term relationship may involve trading away some of the juicy excitement of a brand-new unknown partner, the intimacy you get in return is valuable too, and you can’t have that with a person you met two weeks ago. The trick is to find a way to manifest both possibilities—the intimacy of sharing and the heat of novelty—in your own life.
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,
I was once in a relationship with a man who had a primary partner whom I had not met. I had asked to meet her, and she was considering whether she felt safe enough to do that. Their arrangement was that when Patrick had a date with me, Louisa would make a date with her other lover, and everybody would, hopefully, feel safe and taken care of. Unfortunately, Louisa’s other lover frequently stood her up, and then Patrick would stand me up, which I began to find unacceptable. This was the first time I had asserted any right to consideration of me as the outside lover—we are so used to seeing the outsider as the home wrecker that we rarely think to protect that person’s feelings. With much back and forth, and after the promised meeting, Louisa finally agreed that Patrick could see me whether or not she had a date, and we would make sure that she got plenty of advance notice, that he got home on time, and that she got lots of support from both of us. As we worked through this, Louisa and I got closer and closer—I particularly remember one night when we were worried about Patrick and sat up late talking about him while he slept in the next room. Louisa and I became best friends and went into business together, putting on workshops and theater presentations. We all three traveled together and had a wonderful time. Patrick and I wound up growing apart as lovers, but the friendship between Louisa and me carried on.
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.
Two of our favorite sluts have been together nearly twenty years, loving each other and a lot of other wonderful people. One year, for Tina’s birthday, Trace bought her what we think is the ultimate birthday present: three season tickets to an excellent performance series … one for Tina, one for Trace, and one for whichever of Tina’s lovers she chose to invite to each event. (Dossie got to see Ravi Shankar!)
Some very capable sluts maintain more than one primary relationship. Dossie has known one such couple, Robert and Celia, for almost four decades. They together raised two children from previous relationships, and subsequently some grandchildren. Each has another primary partner, both usually women, and family relationships with all their exes. Robert’s outside partner May was originally lover to Celia’s lover Judy back in 1985, then became lovers with Celia, and finally with Robert from 1988 to the present and, they intend, on into the future. Some years ago Miranda and Celia lived upstairs, and Robert and May lived downstairs. Currently Cheryl, another of Celia’s previous girlfriends, lives upstairs and helps with the grandchildren; Miranda, another of Celia’s exes, visits two days a week since she lives out of town but attends school nearby. Are you dizzy yet? All of these people, plus many other friends and lovers of various degrees of intimacy, both present and historical, and most of their friends and lovers, form a very long-term extended family that has lived, loved, and raised children together for nearly forty years and plans to care for one another in their old age. We are impressed.