10

BOUNDARIES

Many people believe that to be a slut is to be indiscriminate, to not care about who you make love with and thus to not care about yourself. They believe that we live in excessively wide open spaces, with no discrimination, no fences, no boundaries. Nothing could be further from the truth. To be an ethical slut you need to have very good boundaries that are clear, strong, flexible, and, above all, conscious.

One very successful slut we interviewed is outraged by accusations of indiscriminacy, pointing out that sluts get a great deal of opportunity to develop exquisitely sophisticated discrimination: “We actually have more boundaries than most folks because we have more points of contact,” more experience relating in very different ways to very diverse people.

“No one can own another person.”

What Are Boundaries?

It is basic to any relationship, and particularly important in open relationships, that no one can own another person. Some of us who are kinked that way may explore kinds of power exchanges that we call “ ownership,” but regardless of our relationship style, it is essential and incontrovertible that we each own ourselves—lock, stock, and barrel. We each have the responsibility of living our own lives, determining our individual needs, and arranging to get those needs met. We cannot live through a partner, nor can we assume that just because we have a lover, all our needs should automatically be satisfied. Many of us have been taught that if our lover does not meet every need, this must not be true love, our lover must be somehow inadequate, or we must be at fault—too needy or undeserving or some other sin.

If you were brought up to believe that your relationship would provide your other—or (shudder) better—half or that your destiny is to submerge your identity in a relationship, you will probably have to put some attention into learning about your own boundaries. Boundaries are how we understand where I end and you begin, where we meet, and how we are separate individuals. You need to figure out where your limits are, what constitutes comfortable distance or closeness between yourself and others in various situations, and particularly the ways in which you and your lovers are individual and unique.

“When you grasp your emotions, you have something unbelievably valuable to bring to your relationships.”

Owning Your Choices

As we’ve already discussed, each person owns their own emotions, and each person is responsible for dealing with those emotions. Understanding this is the first step to claiming something very precious—your own feelings. And when you grasp your feelings, you have something unbelievably valuable to bring to your relationships.

When you find yourself responding to someone else’s behavior, it can be easy to dwell on what that person has done and how terrible it is and what exactly they should do to fix it. Instead, try looking at your own feelings as a message about your internal state of being, and then decide how you want to deal with whatever’s going on. Do you want to find out more? Do you want to discuss a limit? Do you want a little time to yourself to calm down and get centered? Do you want to be heard about something? When you take responsibility, you get these choices, and more.

What you are not responsible for is your lover’s emotions. You can choose to be supportive—we’re great believers in the healing power of listening—but it is not your job to fix anything. Once you understand that your lover’s emotions are not your job or your fault, you can listen and really hear without falling victim to an overwhelming need to figure out whose fault it is or to make the emotion change or go away.

Some people habitually respond to a lover’s pain and confusion with an intense desire to fix something. Fix-it messages can feel like invalidation to the person who is trying to express an emotion. “Why don’t you just do this…try that…forget about it…relax!” sends the message that the person expressing the emotion has overlooked some obvious and simple solution and is an idiot for feeling bad in the first place.

Being responsible for your emotions doesn’t mean that you have to conquer all your difficult feelings bareknuckled and solo. You can ask for the help you need—reassurance, validation, a shoulder to cry on, an ear to vent in, a brain to brainstorm with—from friends, lovers, and/or a good therapist. And you, in turn, will do your best to make yourself available when your friends and lovers need this kind of help from you…right?

Learning to operate your emotional system consciously may require changing some old habits and can feel very shaky, sort of like learning to ride a bicycle. You’ll probably fall down a few times, but if you pick yourself up and keep going, eventually you’ll get the feel of it. And once you get your balance, you’ll never forget.

Relationship Boundaries

Relationships also have boundaries. The agreements that free-loving singles, couples, and families make with respect for each other’s feelings constitute the boundaries of their relationships. In an open sexual community, it is important to deal with each relationship within its own boundaries. For example, you figure out your limits with your partners before you go to the sex party, you don’t use your lover to diss your spouse, and decisions are made with input from everyone affected by them and not behind anybody’s back.

Communities based on sex and intimacy work best when everybody has respect for everybody’s relationships, which includes not only lovers but also children, families of origin, neighbors, exes, and so on. When everyone is conscious of and caring about boundaries, such communities can evolve into highly connected family systems.

“You can’t learn from your errors if you always have to be right.”

Be willing to learn from your mistakes. Boundaries can get tricky at times, so we hope you give yourself lots of slack to explore. Expect to learn by trial and error, and have compassion for yourself when things inevitably don’t work out the way you hoped they would. Remember, you can’t learn from your errors if you always have to be right!

Dumping

One place where people often get confused is differentiating between the honest sharing of feelings and dumping. Dumping means using others as your garbage pit, spewing your problematic stuff all over them and leaving it there. Dumping usually carries the expectation that the dumpee will do something about the problem, even if it’s simply to take on the burden of worrying so that the dumper can stop. Usually you can avoid dumping by making it totally clear that your need to share your emotional state carries no obligation for your listener: “I don’t like your having a date with Paula tonight,” followed by a heavy and pregnant silence, carries an entirely different weight than, “I’m feeling insecure about your date with Paula tonight, but I want you to go ahead and have it. Are you okay with listening to some of my fears? Can we talk a bit about ways that I might be able to feel a little safer?”

Projection

Another trick to watch out for is projection: using another person as a screen to run your movie on. You see your fantasy and miss the real person. You imagine you know this person’s thoughts, when in fact you are thinking about your fears. Maybe you imagine that they will respond the same way your parents did: “I know you’ll reject me if I don’t make a lot of money,” “You’ll never respect me if I show you my sadness.” Or you might be projecting your expectations, projections that your lovers—who are not mind readers—can never live up to: “You’re supposed to take care of me!” and “Whaddaya mean, you’re not horny? I’m horny!”

When you make a commitment to own your own emotions, you can stop projecting them onto people you care about. Then you can be free to see the people you love clearly, in all their glory. When you find yourself thinking blameful thoughts about your partner, you might ask yourself: “What do I own here?” What you see inside might be something like, “Wow, I sound just like my father when he was angry” or “I feel the way I did when I was eight and used to hide in the closet when I was upset.” Then you might go to your lover and share how whatever was going on woke up some old tapes of yours, and you can brainstorm what you want to do about that. When each of you work together to own your stuff, then your partner can support you in exploring your emotions and, more important, learn to stop projecting onto you as well. Then you need never again feel like a puppet in somebody else’s show.

Role Boundaries

You may find yourself playing out different roles, indeed, feeling like a somewhat different person with different partners. With one partner you might feel young and vulnerable and protected; with another, you are earth mother. With one lover you might feel careful and solid and safe; with another you might be dashing and reckless. These boundaries may seem unfamiliar or confusing when we don’t have much experience with living in multiple relationships.

Janet once got a wonderful feeling of acceptance for all her parts at a party:

I enjoy games in which I role-play the part of a little girl, but my then-partner wasn’t comfortable with them. After a bit of searching, though, I found within my circle of acquaintances a man who enjoyed being a “daddy” as much as I enjoyed having one. My partner was delighted I’d found a safe place to play that role, and we both felt I’d made a good choice in selecting someone to whom I could entrust such vulnerable parts of me. “Daddy” and I got together once or twice a month for finger painting, watching Disney movies, eating peanut butter sandwiches, and other somewhat more adult pleasures.

At one point I attended a party where both my life partner and my “daddy” were in attendance. From across the room, I saw the two of them chatting, and I headed over to say hi. As I drew closer, my partner held his arm out invitingly and called, “Hey, hon, come over and hang out with your dad and your boyfriend for a while.” The feeling of acceptance, and the warmth of knowing the two men accepted and honored each other’s role in my life, was amazing.

One of the things people get out of multiple relationships is the chance to be all of their various selves. When two people meet, they relate where they intersect, where they have complementary roles in similar scripts. So by being different things with different lovers, we might find ourselves having different boundaries, limits, and relationship styles in different circumstances.

Your own internal variety might manifest in many ways. For instance, you might be calm and centered when Lover A is angry, but Lover B’s irritability is distressing to you—it “pushes your buttons,” perhaps reminding you of a past lover or a punitive parent. Here is an opportunity to take charge of your buttons. When your buttons are your own, it becomes much easier to figure out what your limits need to be with Lover B and to understand that they may be altogether different from your limits with Lover A.

Forget about fairness. Ethical sluttery does not mean that all things come out equal. Different relationships have different boundaries, different limits, and different potentials. So if your lover has found someone that they can share a certain activity with, and you would like your lover to share that with you too, the question is not, “Why don’t you do that with me?” but “That sounds interesting; how do you suppose we could make that work for us?”

This is how one woman we interviewed put it:

My open sexual lifestyle gives me personal freedom, independence, and responsibility in a way that being an exclusive couple doesn’t. Because I’m responsible, every day, for my needs being met (or not), and for creating and maintaining the relationships in my life, I can take nothing for granted. Every person I meet has the potential for whatever it is that’s right between me and that person, regardless of how my relationships are with anybody else. And so this lifestyle gives me a very concrete feeling of individuality that I re-create every day. I feel more like a grown-up, adult, responsible person when I know that my life, all of it—who I fuck, who I relate to, how I relate to them—is all my choice. I promised my partner that I would share my life with him, and that implies to me that I have a life to share—a complete life. And it’s clear to me that he’s here because he wants to be here, wherever “here” is. We are with each other, every day, because we really want to be.

On Asexuality

The Asexual Visibility and Education Network defines an asexual as “someone who does not experience sexual attraction.” A parallel identity is the “aromantic,” who may or may not also be asexual but does not relate to people romantically. There are many gradations of both asexuality and aromanticism: people speak of “graysexuals,” who are somewhere between asexual and sexual; “demisexuals,” who feel sexual only toward people they love; and many others (with parallel categories available to the aromantic). We can’t possibly list all the categories of asexuality and aromanticism here, but we encourage you to seek out more information about these orientations if they’re unfamiliar to you—many people are startled to find in themselves some kinship with at least some asexual/aromantic identities.

Like all sexual orientations, asexuality and aromanticism may be fluid, evolving as any given individual grows and changes. Or they may stay stable from earliest self-awareness onward.

Many asexuals and aromantics find sluthood a good fit, as they can connect with partners in the ways that work for them, while the partners can seek ways of connecting with others that the asexual and/or aromantic partner is not interested in sharing.

Janet has attended some asexuality panels and workshops and has been amazed by how many talking points they had in common with ethical sluthood, including the idea that connection can be made in all sorts of ways, genital and nongenital, and that having genital sex does not make a relationship somehow more “real.”