17
MAKING AGREEMENTS
Most successful relationships, from casual acquaintanceship through lifetime monogamy, are based on assumptions that are really unstated agreements about behavior: you don’t kiss your mailman, you don’t tip your mother. These are the unspoken rules we learn very early in our lives from our parents, our playmates, and our cultures. People who break these unspoken rules are often considered odd, sometimes even crazy, because the values and judgments behind the social agreements about how we relate to one another are so deeply ingrained that we are usually not even aware that we have made any agreement at all.
In many day-to-day relationships, like your relationships with neighbors and coworkers, it’s probably fine to rely on those implicit, built-in agreements. But when you’re trying something as complicated and unprecedented as ethical sluthood, we think it’s very important to take nothing for granted. Talk with the people in your life about your agreements, and negotiate the conditions, environments, and behaviors that will get your own needs met and respect everybody’s boundaries.
You’ll often hear people talking about the rules of their relationships. But “rules” implies a certain rigidity, that there is a right way and a wrong way to run your relationship and that there will be penalties if you do it wrong. We understand that there are many different ways that people may choose to relate to each other, so we prefer to use the word agreements to describe mutually agreed-upon, conscious decisions, flexible enough to accommodate individuality, growth, and change. These agreements are sometimes a little fuzzy, particularly if you’re used to the hard edges of rules. A little fuzziness is okay: your agreement will either get clarified later if it needs to be—or it won’t, in which case it’s probably clear enough.
How do you know when you need an agreement? You can tell by listening to your emotions. If something comes up that leaves you feeling upset or angry or invisible or whatever, that’s an area in which you and your sweetie may need to discuss making an agreement. We suggest that you let go right now of the idea that you can predict every single situation that might come up in your relationships and make a rule to cover it. Many perfectly good agreements get made by twenty-twenty hindsight: a problem comes up, and, instead of arguing over whose fault it was, the people involved simply make an agreement to try to prevent that problem from coming up again or to deal with it when it does.
Our friends Laurie and Chris became extraordinarily flexible agreement makers through practicing a lot:
We met at the Renaissance Faire and connected right away. Although we didn’t feel ready to jump into marriage right off, we did get handfasted [an ancient Celtic rite of romantic commitment] about five months after we met. Our handfasting included an agreement that if we still wanted to be together a year and a day later, we’d get married. And we did.
When we first decided to get handfasted, Chris proposed an agreement in which we’d be free to be sexual with other people during Faire but at no other time. Laurie felt shocked by his desire to do this and insecure about what might happen. So we decided to postpone a decision until the next summer’s Faire, after we’d gotten married.
During the first year of our marriage, the agreement was for Faire only, and then after that we extended it to the weekend preparatory workshops as well as to Faire itself. At one of these, Laurie met a guy with whom she got fairly seriously involved—it was our first ongoing relationship outside the marriage. At that point, things opened up all the way to where Laurie was spending a lot of her time with her other lover, and Chris didn’t like it much; he felt that he wasn’t getting enough time with Laurie.
So we renegotiated. We decided that either of us could sleep over with another partner twice a month. We felt that twice a month was often enough for fun but not so often as to encourage a threateningly strong bond with someone else. That’s been working pretty well for a while, although we’ve compromised on a case-by-case basis a time or two.
We’re still working out the bugs—among other things, we’re hoping to become parents pretty soon, and we’re not sure how a baby will affect our relationship. But our agreements have always been at least tolerable, and at times they’ve offered a relief valve that’s kept us from fleeing the relationship in terror!
In the twenty years since this interview, Laurie and Chris’s children have grown into teenagerhood, and the two of them are still together and still happily slutty.
Consent
So what constitutes a good agreement? In our opinion, the single most important hallmark of agreement is consent , which we define as an active collaboration for the pleasure and well-being of all concerned. In the case of polyamory, this means that we consider the feelings of people not directly involved—other partners, children, and other people whose lives are affected by our agreements—and obtain consent when necessary.
We want to remind you that there is absolutely no way to make a list of agreements that will cover every contingency and are so clear they can never be misunderstood. When difficulties arise, we recommend spending as little time as possible trying to figure out what went wrong. Instead, invest your energy in figuring out what you’re going to do next.
“We define consent as an active collaboration for the pleasure and well-being of all concerned.”
Defining consent can sometimes be tricky. If someone consents under pressure, we don’t think that meets the “active collaboration” criterion. And you can’t consent to something you don’t know about: “Well, you didn’t say I couldn’t fly to Boise for two weeks with this flight attendant I just met” does not constitute consent.
To achieve this kind of active consent, everyone involved must accept responsibility for knowing their own feelings and communicating them—but this isn’t always easy. Sometimes feelings don’t want to be pulled to the surface and examined; you may simply know that you feel bad. Give yourself the time and support you need to get to know that feeling, perhaps using some of the strategies we discuss in chapter 15, “Roadmaps through Jealousy.” If you feel you need help in defining what’s going on for you, it’s okay to ask for that help, possibly by asking a partner or a friend who understands multiple relationships to devote some time to hearing you out. Physical or verbal reassurance often makes a huge difference, and sometimes a wise friend or therapist can ask the right questions to help you untangle a complicated feeling. Once you start listening to your own feelings, you’ll have a much easier time getting your needs and desires out there where everybody can hear them and make agreements to help meet them.
Many of us need some support in asking for what we want. We need to feel sure that the needs we reveal will not be held against us. We may feel pretty vulnerable in and around our emotional limits, so it’s important to recognize that these limits are valid: “I need to feel loved,” “I need to feel that I’m important to you,” “I need to know that you find me attractive,” “I need you to listen and care about me when I feel hurt.”
Blaming, manipulation, bullying, and moral condemnation do not belong in the agreement-making process. The process of making a good agreement must include a commitment from all concerned to listen to one another’s concerns and feelings in an open-minded and unprejudiced way. If you are waiting for your partner to reveal a weakness so that you can exploit it as ammunition to “win” your argument, you are not ready to make a satisfactory agreement.
Legalistic hairsplitting is another enemy of good agreements. We know one couple whose agreement was that either of them would let the other one know within twenty-four hours if they were going to have sex with someone else. One of them called the other one from another city to let her know that he’d had sex the night before. “But you said you’d give me twenty-four hours’ notice!” she cried angrily. “I never said twenty-four hours before ,” he pointed out. This loophole-finding legalistic behavior left neither individual feeling that their agreement had worked for them. The moral: be clear, be specific, and above all, negotiate in good faith; this is not about cheating anymore.
Agreements need to be realistic and clearly defined—if you’re not sure whether you’re keeping an agreement, it may be time to redefine that agreement. It is unrealistic, for example, to ask your partners never to enter into sexual interactions with people that they care about “too much.” There is no way to define “too much,” and few of us conceive of our slutty utopia as a world in which you are only allowed to share sex with people you don’t care about at all. None of us can truthfully agree to feel only this way or that way: our agreements need to have room in them for real emotions, whatever they may be. A more concrete agreement would be to limit outside dates to once a month, which might serve the same purpose.
Agreements do not have to be equal. People are different and unique, and what pushes my buttons might be perfectly okay with you. So one partner may want to hear all the graphic details about what a sweetie does with their other lover—but when the tables are turned, the sweetie wants no more detail about their partner’s outside engagements than absolutely necessary. One person might find it very important that their partner not stay out overnight, whereas said partner might actually enjoy an occasional opportunity to watch the late movie all alone and eat crackers in bed.
One friend of ours says:
Bill and I have very different needs when it comes to relationships. I feel no need to be monogamous; I’m quite comfortable having sex with people I like, but they’re not affairs of the heart—whereas his sexual connections are either very casual, like at parties, or very deep and long term. We’ve formed agreements that meet both our needs—mine for friendly partners, his for long-term secondary relationships.
When thinking about agreements for an open relationship, most people start out by listing what their partner shouldn’t do: don’t kiss her on the mouth, don’t treat him better than you do me. Some “thou shalt nots” are necessary: agreements need to be made, for example, about sexual connections with relatives, neighbors, and coworkers. But many negative agreements are really about protecting your partner from feeling hurt or jealous; we’re not big fans of these, although we recognize that they sometimes have their place as an intermediate step. We think that the best agreements to protect your partner from emotional pain are positive rather than restrictive: let’s have a special date next weekend, I will find time to listen to you when you hurt, I’ll tell you how much I love you again and again.
“Fairness means we care about how each person feels and make agreements to help all of us feel as good as possible.”
Everyone needs a sense of emotional safety to succeed at feeling secure in open relationships, but thinking up agreements that will help both partners feel emotionally safe can be confusing. In the process of unlearning jealousy we will all at some time be asking our partners to take some risk, to agree to feel some painful feelings, to fall down a few times to learn how to ride the emotional bicycle of truly free love.
EXERCISE: EIGHT STEPS TO WIN-WIN CONFLICT RESOLUTION
1.
 Take time out to ventilate anger.
2.
 Select one issue to work on.
3.
 Make an appointment to talk.
4.
 Take three minutes each to state how you feel while your partner listens. Hint: Use I-statements, avoid you-messages, and consider allowing some time and a change of activities between each person’s statement, so you can refocus away from whatever responses to your partner you’ve thought up and talk about your own issues. Try as hard as you can to describe your emotions about the issue.
5.
 Brainstorm. Write a list of all possible solutions, even silly ones.
6.
 Edit the list. Cross out any suggestions that either person feels they could not live with.
7.
 Choose a solution to try for a specific period of time—perhaps two to four weeks.
8.
 Reevaluate when that time is up.
One way you can make agreements to respect emotional limits is to ask for whatever might make you feel a little bit safer— reassurance, compliments, affection, a special ritual for homecoming after a date—and then when that works and you feel a little safer, take another step toward even more safety, and soon you will feel safe enough to expand your explorations further and further. Each tiny step in the direction of freedom will eventually get you there. One of the things that works about reassurance is that once we understand that our partner or partners, or maybe even their partners, are willing to help us with our feelings, we feel more secure and need less protection as we go along.
The single most important thing to remember is that the purpose of an agreement is to find a way in which everybody can win.
Making Space for Difference
You and your sweetie might have different visions about what your relationship will be. For one person, it could be a lot of recreational sex, one-night stands, or party play; another might yearn for one primary and one special secondary relationship. Some people enjoy many relationships that make extended families out of their lovers and their lovers’ lovers; others look for a three- or four-person group marriage.
Negotiating difference, however, can be done and is being done successfully every day. So what if one person wants BDSM or tantra or wild orgies, and the other wants walks on the beach at sunset? Once you’ve opened your relationship to other people who may be more accepting of those desires, anything is possible. Agreements may be asymmetrical to account for different desires and different feelings, and each individual may need a different kind of reassurance: the relationship-lover may feel shy and unhip, the party animal may feel judged or threatened by long-term partners, and each needs to have their own feelings validated and cared for.
Some Agreements
We’ve done some asking around among our friends and colleagues to find out what kinds of relationship agreements have worked for others. Here is a partial list of agreements we’ve heard from some very successful sluts.
Notice as you read it how many different kinds of agreements it contains—some are sexual, some are relationship-oriented; some are thou-shalts and some thou-shalt-nots; some are logistical and some sentimental. Just so you know that we’re not recommending any of these, you should also note that some are mutually exclusive. We’re presenting this list as a discussion opener, not as how it ought to be. However, everybody has to make some agreements about sexual health and safer sex.
• We always spend the night together except when one of us is traveling.
• We’ll take turns watching everyone’s kids on the weekend.
• Neither/none of us will [specific sexual act] with other partners.
• We always provide advance notice of potential other partners.
• Don’t tell me/us about other partners.
• Tell me/us everything you did with other partners.
• Other partners must be [specific gender].
• New partners meet everyone involved.
• Sex beyond our couple/group will only be: group sex/party sex/anonymous sex/committed sex….
• We will check in to confirm safety after a get-together with a new partner.
• Everybody chips in for the babysitter.
• Be sure to save some hot sexual energy for me/us.
• No sex with other partners in our bed/house.
• We set limits on phone calls, Internet time, and so on, with other partners.
• We establish quality time with one another.
• We don’t take off the rings that symbolize our relationship.
• We must reach agreements about who is too close to have sex with: neighbors, coworkers, close friends, former lovers, your doctor, your partner’s therapist?…
• We’ll spend an hour cuddling and reconnecting afterward.
Predictability
Our experience is that most people we know need some kind of predictability to deal with the stresses of open relationships: it’s easier to handle a nervous-making situation if you know when it is going to happen and when it is going to be over. You can plan to do something supportive with a friend, go to a movie, visit Mom, whatever—and tell yourself that you only have to handle things for this chunk of time, and then your sweetie will come back and maybe you can plan a celebratory reunion.
Most people have a hard time dealing with surprises, which can feel like land mines exploding. Very few of us would be comfortable living with the possibility that our partner might go home with someone else at any time, from any party we go to, from the restaurant where we thought we were just going for a cup of coffee—no place, no time we could count on. One partner of our acquaintance was working across the country from his spouse during a time when he was first struggling to deal with his jealousy. He made an agreement to know when his partner was playing with someone else because, as he put it, “If I know when they are out with someone else, I also know when they aren’t, and then I can relax most of the time.”
If you feel that planning takes too much of the spontaneity out of your life, then think about declaring one night or one weekend a month to be open season—then you can make a decision whether to join your partners in cruising or sit this one out in a quieter milieu. An agreement to be unpredictable at some specified time is, after all, predictable.
What Is the Emotional Cost?
One way to think about possible agreements is to consider the potential emotional cost to each person involved. We’ve already talked about some of the emotions you may encounter as you and your partners begin to explore; your cost is what you risk feeling that might be difficult or painful. A conversation about each person’s “emotional cost” can clear a lot of foggy air and clarify what’s getting in the way of making an agreement that feels stuck. One agreement might be simply to have this conversation when certain issues are in play: many emotions can be satisfied simply by listening to them.
If you imagine little to no emotional cost in whatever agreement you’re contemplating, maybe it’s time to try challenging yourself a bit more. (Or maybe you’re just a brilliantly talented slut who never has emotional difficulty with any of your partners having any kind of connection with anyone else, in which case we’re looking forward to reading your book.) On the other hand, if the emotional cost seems so great that you can’t imagine managing it at the same time as you run the rest of your life, you may have overestimated your ability this time: consider negotiating an agreement that feels a little bit easier.
On Veto Power
In making the decision to open up to new partners, one of the steps many people in closed relationships take is to try “ veto power”—where an existing partner has the right to “veto” their partner’s outside sexual or romantic connections.
Basic slut ethics should not allow you to abuse veto 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. And sometimes, when you do, it might be easier than you thought it would be, and what you might learn is that you are stronger and more sure of yourself and your love than you thought you were.
Nevertheless, we recognize that veto power can be reassuring when you’re making your first steps into a more open relationship structure. But we encourage you to think about what that reassurance actually means.
Veto power says, “If you propose a partner I don’t feel comfortable with, I can tell you so, and you’ll abandon your relationship with that person.” But what happens if the proposing partner decides nevertheless to pursue their relationship with the vetoed person? Well, we guess the vetoer has two choices: they can either suck it up and keep going (usually after some very painful conflict) or walk away from the relationship.
Which—surprise!—is exactly the same choice everyone faces when an outside partner comes into a relationship, whether or not it’s by mutual agreement. For that matter, this is the fundamental choice at stake when any kind of relationship conflict arises: the decision of whether to do the hard work of sticking around or the equally hard (although different) work of leaving. So what is your veto power actually giving you that you don’t already have?
If agreeing to veto power increases your sense of security during the early days of opening your relationships, that’s fine. But we suspect that if you decide to drop the formal veto power and move toward a more fluid process of accepting outside partners, you’ll notice very little difference in the way your relationship actually works—unless, of course, it actually works better.
When There Is No Agreement
There are probably a lot of issues in your life about which you feel no need to reach agreement. Everyone deals with differences in relationships all the time, as any night person married to a morning person can tell you. However, lack of agreement can feel less comfortable in the close-to-the-bone field of sexual relationships. When feelings run high, particularly about sexual issues, it’s easy to want to believe that your way is right and that all other ways are wrong.
One way to avoid the trap of turning a difference into a moral argument is to look carefully at ownership: who owns what in this disagreement anyway? What is A’s investment in this particular choice, how is B feeling different about it, and what are we afraid might happen if we can’t agree? Try to get really clear on how each person feels before you even think about what you want to do.
It can help to remember that you have been living with differences and disagreements with everyone in your life ever since you met them. When you discover a sexual difference with one person, it has probably been there all along. Remember that you’ve been getting along fine without this particular agreement—if you’ve made it this far, you can live with the lack of agreement a little longer. Let time be your friend. When difference is difficult, allow yourselves the time to thoroughly explore the feelings that are driving the disagreement and arrange to lead a rewarding life while you explore. You really can agree to disagree. Between the “yes” of full agreement and the “no” of full disagreement is a whole big gray area of “no-agreement-yet,” “tolerable-disagreement,” or even “who-cares?” Sometimes you will eventually find it possible to make an agreement, and other times you won’t.
Occasionally, however, you will hit an area in which agreement is both necessary and impossible. For many people, the whole issue of nonmonogamy may be one of these; childbearing is another frequent point of contention. We suggest flexibility and compromise seeking, possibly with the help of a qualified therapist.
But if agreement simply cannot be reached, we think the skills you learned in trying to reach agreement can come in very handy as you practice not blaming, not judging, and not manipulating, as you work to change or even end a relationship that cannot reconcile its differences.
Some people agree to end a relationship and then discover that later on, when the stress of parting has eased, they can agree on a new kind of relationship with the same person. Others cannot. But either way, forthright and openhearted discussion of disagreements and agreements will lead to a cleaner and less stressful outcome.
Reaching Agreement
So how do you find an agreement that will work for everyone? A good place to start is by defining your goals. A goal is not the same as an agreement: your goal is what you’re trying to accomplish, and your agreement is the means you’re using to try to get there. For example, if your goal is to prevent anyone from feeling taken advantage of, your agreement might be to ensure that nobody’s personal time, space, or belongings are being infringed on. So start with getting clear on what feels like infringement to each person involved and use that for your guidelines.
Often you will discover a goal by tripping over a problem: “Last night, when you and Sam were in our bedroom together, my feet were freezing and I couldn’t get in there to get my bedroom slippers.” The goal is to prevent this problem from coming up again—what kinds of agreements might help achieve that goal? Answering these questions will require an honest (and often difficult) look at what the real problem is: is it that your feet are cold or that you resent being kicked out of your own bedroom or that you’re feeling left out?
Once you’ve defined your problem and your goal, it’s time to start figuring out a good agreement. It might be appropriate to do a trial agreement, to put a time limitation (a weekend, a week, a month, a year) on your newborn agreement to see how it feels to everybody concerned. After the time is up, you can sit down again to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and whether to continue your agreement or revise it or scrap it.
In our experience, it’s rare for an agreement to last a lifetime without change: human beings change, and so do agreements. The way you can tell that your agreement needs to change is when someone doesn’t agree to it anymore. Janet and one of her partners, for example, began their relationship with an agreement that they could be sexual with other people, but that they couldn’t fall in love with anyone else. Then one of them did. (In hindsight, Janet admits, this seems like a fairly silly agreement—as though you could simply decide not to fall in love!) She remembers:
There was a period in which we were having “check-ins” one or two times a day. This was a situation neither of us had ever planned on. We found it was very important to stay in the moment and to stay with tangible things—yes, it feels okay if she sleeps over while I’m out of town; no, it doesn’t feel right for you to bring the two of us to the same party. We found, during that experience as well as similar ones that came later, that the words “in love with” made us both feel kind of panicky—that agreements that dwelt on measurable factors such as time, behavior, and space worked better for us.
Expect to try out some agreements and find out that they don’t work, and expect to need to change them. You will get better at this process with practice, and in time you may know your own and your partner’s needs so well that negotiating agreements will be easy. But in the beginning, while you are learning, tidiness won’t count anywhere near as much as tolerance.
When you first set out, some of these discussions may get quite heated: remember, anger is an emotion that tells you what is important to you. What is constructive about these difficult times is what you learn about your partners and about yourself.
Remember that there are many good ways to structure your sluttery. Structure is not what makes you safe from hard feelings—your ability to take care of yourself is what counts. So whatever structure you choose, hold it fairly loosely. Your agreements are not taking care of you; you are.
Don’t get discouraged—all the successful sluts you see who seem so carefree have fought over their agreements. You too can work your way through this tangled web of assumptions and emotions and learn to love with openness and freedom.
“Your agreements are not taking care of you; you are.”