At last, Kathy Labriola has given us the book we have needed for a very long time.
When I was a teenager, in the 1950s, divorce was a disaster that people whispered about. At that time, marriage was expected of everyone, and if your marriage had problems, you must be doing something very wrong.
The traditional concept of marriage in Western culture is based on the importance of family in agrarian society. Long-term commitments are needed to keep a farm going and ensure that nobody starves in the winter. Marriage meant stability, and stability was absolutely necessary for survival. This one-size-fits-all notion still shows up as our gold standard today, but the truth is that our financial security no longer depends on the stability of our relationships.
As we evolve into a new age of intimate partnerships, space opens up for each of us to enter into many different kinds of relationships, with many different kinds of people. Physical connections can be about many different kinds of sex, can include different genders, feature fantasies, or be about outercourse. Romance can be equally varied—from courtly to passionate, from “falling in love” to “I couldn’t help it.”
People live together for financial security, for companionship, as co-parents, retirement buddies, or nesting partners. Sex and romance may or may not be included in any one of these connections. We can achieve emotional security in any relationship by mutual support, transparency, and good communication. We can even enter into intimate connections out of curiosity, attracted by the appeal of something outside of our own culture and experience. For me, this was a revelation that allowed me to see outside the limits of my own family’s values.
Let’s not forget the magnetic attraction of opportunities to struggle with unfinished business from childhood. Many of us yearn to fix our parents, or to learn a better way to deal with bullies. Some relationships, even if brief, can provide a form of healing that helps us move through deeply rooted pain.
In any connection, there can be freedom of choice in how casual, deep, intimate, or autonomous you choose to be. It may not be your path to seek out abundance, but most people can expect to have at least several important relationships in a lifetime. Some of these relationships may be similar and a pattern may be revealed. Others may have wildly different relationship experiences.
Many of our relationships work best if they’re allowed to run their natural course. For some, they can be considered as serving a purpose, and then when we have learned what we needed to, it’s time to accept an end. Such connections might last weeks, months, or years, but duration is not the measure of their value.
With diversity in our love lives comes a lot more breakups than in traditional relationship models, but this too is valuable experience. Consider what might change if we were to embrace the freedom of exploring sexual connections and relationships that may never become “the one.” What would our lives be like if we valued each relationship for what is important in the connection, not for how close it comes to being the permanent pairing of our fantasies?
The old rules tell us that when a relationship doesn’t work any more, someone must have done something wrong, that it must be someone’s fault, that maybe we made a big mistake. The rules also insist that ending an intimate relationship must be drastically painful, terrifying, and enraging, that breakups always feature every scary emotion we can experience, at full volume.
We are told that the way to avoid feeling pain is to never set eyes on the person we were intimate with again, that it would be catastrophic and we couldn’t bear it. So we make sure our friends don’t invite the person we used to love to parties and social events. Only one of us may continue in that community, whether its a school, a job, or a neighborhood. There can be no more mutual friends.
But this reaction isn’t necessary. Back in the 1970s, I spent about a year terribly depressed recovering from the breakup of a very special partnering. My ex, Robin, wanted to resume exploring our extra-special sexual connection, but I felt I couldn’t. After my depression finally passed, we resumed our connection as intimate friends complete with our sexual dynamite and continued playing together for nine more years. It was definitely what we did best.
More recently, in 2015, my friends and family gathered around me while I underwent spinal surgery and a lengthy hospitalization. Joi, an ex of mine, took turns with my adult daughter sleeping in my hospital room for the first two weeks and offered endless support for months afterwards. I put out word that when I got out of the hospital, I could use a month in a guest room in San Francisco with no stairs and no need to drive. I was immediately offered healing sanctuary in the home of a dear friend with whom I broke up in 1979. Could it be that an army of exes cannot fail?
I’m terrifically grateful that my early years of refusing monogamy involved membership in a huge extended family of sluts, many of us with children, houses, careers, and all the other grown-up commitments. If I had a date with someone in that family, we’d start by hanging out at the home of whomever was hosting the children’s pajama party so that the rest of us could go out dancing. When it was my turn to be with the kids, I got to co-parent 13 children and become auntie to quite a few more. The kids got abundant adult support and the experience of having siblings in a huge family plus the privilege of going home to a smaller family.
When a relationship within that family ended, we couldn’t very well yank our children out of the family and tell them to shun their siblings, so we had to work things out in a way that didn’t threaten the survival of our extended family. We wound up figuring out a lot of conflicts that I previously would have run away from and I learned a lot. One lesson was that the ending of an old relationship could be the beginning of a new one—often with the same person.
There’s probably not much worse that you can experience with someone than breaking up with them. So, once you’ve recovered from the trauma of the breakup, old intimacy can fit as comfortably as an old glove. Perhaps sex is still a part, perhaps it isn’t. Many of us have a fear that when someone gets to know us really, really deeply, they’ll see a broken part of us that we are painfully ashamed of and work hard to hide. After a breakup, there’s nothing hidden any more, and there’s freedom in this.
So what could breaking up look like in this brave new world? Perhaps we could do a better job of it with a new set of skills. We were never taught to practise the art of breaking up and living to tell the tale, but maybe becoming skillful at breaking up might also serve you well in other conflicts in your life.
If you want to know what that might look like, you have the right book in your hands. Kathy Labriola uses her awe-inspiring repertoire of skills, wisdom, and experience to teach us that there isn’t one, gold-standard way to do a “proper” breakup. She generously offers us choices to fit our various forms of relationships. She shows us how to find our way through uncharted briar patches, tells us where we might get lost and how we might find ourselves again, and teaches us how to stay conscious during the journey.
So step right up! By rethinking how you approach breakups, you can start building your personal support group of transcendentally comfortable old gloves today.
Dossie Easton
Marriage and Family Therapist
Co-author with Janet W. Hardy of The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love.