One of my personal beefs about the contemporary family and relationship models for adults is that they leave everyone who isn’t a straight monogamous heterosexual up a tree on what kind of structures or families are possible for them.
When I was young, it never even occurred to me I could find true love and kink in one relationship because my impression of kink was so negative. Like most people, I believed what I read about the shadiness and mental instability of kinky people. It disturbed and embarrassed me that all my fantasies involved bondage and fetishes. It led me to split myself in two, dating non-kinky men but always secretly hungering to find someone who really “got me” sexually, meanwhile having furtive affairs with kinky men I couldn’t bring home to meet my parents.
The turning point came when I realized that I could have it all – a loving, romantic partner who shared my values and world-views and also loved hot kinky sex. It transformed not just my life, but my perspective on life. It made me realize that I too was entitled to the happiness others seemed to find in vanilla, traditional relationships. Everyone was wrong about kink! It wasn’t the end of love: for me, it was the beginning.
Now, nearly 30 years later, I know that no one sexual identity or family structure has ever proven globally to be better or worse than another. The worst one may say about sexual non-conformists and non-traditional families is that by resisting the officially sanctioned models of how adults should live, they face persecution and loss of civil and human rights. The only way to turn around the injustice is to deal with sex as it is, not as people believe it to be. As a therapist, I let facts and evidence guide me.
Helping people function better sexually usually means helping them to function more authentically. If you can find what it is that really truly floats their particular boat, and understand what environment they need to feel safe enough to really let go, that’s your best assurance of guiding them to optimum sexual performance. That’s why all such advice has to be relevant to individuals and not – as some non-helping professionals operate – out of a book on “what to do when X happens.” It would have been in insult, for example had I urged Tan and Mai to spice up their lives with threesomes and swinging. I worked within their moral framework to find solutions that integrated with their larger, conservative Christian identity. Similarly, I didn’t force Caressa or John to accept labels they couldn’t live with, or demand they pick one role and stick to it. Nor did I insist that either of them must be in a defined permanent partnership to be “normal.”
Traditionally, relationships, marriages and romantic partnerships have taken a multitude of forms, not one single standard of conformity. So I think that all models of romantically bonded relationships between loving adults are normal and positive. I believe in monogamy for monogamists and polyamory for polyamorists and everything in between. In a rational world, we would accept the simple fact that so-called non-traditional relationships are, in fact, an ancient human tradition, well-documented in every major historical text in Western history, and most notably in the Bible.