18

OPENING AN EXISTING RELATIONSHIP

Many people come to a time when they want to open their relationship to more sexual partners. But when your relationship was established under conventional monogamous agreements, you can’t expect to proclaim “Open Sesame!” and have everything fall magically into place. Like everything else about ethical sluthood, opening an existing relationship requires care, thought, practice, and work.

The relationship that you want to open may or may not be a life partnership; you may or may not be living together. You might have been practicing serial monogamy, with the usual occasional overlap. Or you may be keeping all your lovers compartmentalized, and want to move toward something more like a family or tribe. You may be looking for adventures outside of a triad or a group marriage. The work of opening is still work, no matter the nature of your relationship.

Turning Some into More

If you and your lovers are beginning this work with equal agreement that you all want to create this expansiveness in your lives, then congratulations and welcome to the path. You will probably encounter some unexpected disagreements about the way this new life will look—so you still don’t get to skip this chapter.

In our experience, though, it’s much more common that one person wants to open the door to outside connections and another hasn’t ever even considered it and is appalled by the idea. This situation is definitely more difficult, especially when an outside partner—potential or actual, open or secret—is waiting in the wings and probably cares a lot about the outcome of this process. A lot of people don’t really think about monogamy until they make a connection with someone who feels important to them and they don’t want to give up their beloved or get a divorce or split up the kids. You could be in any of these roles: the one with the lust for adventure, the new love who is not a partner, and the sometimes stunned partner to the would-be adventurer.

In physics, the triangle is considered one of the most structurally sound and well-balanced structures—but in relationships, the very phrase “love triangle” carries a whiff of tabloid drama. This particular situation is not made any easier by the fact that it’s been happening for as long as there have been relationships. It can help to remember that it is utterly normal to have differences in desire in any relationship—you don’t need to both get excited about the same flavor of ice cream. Making room for everyone’s desires can work for all concerned—we know many people who have done so, reaching accommodations that work for everyone involved. Let’s look at the dilemma from three different points of view.

The Adventurous Lover

The advantage of being in this position is that you know, more or less, what you want. Perhaps you bought this book for a partner, hoping for some freedom down the road and wishing fervently for some way to reach agreement without going through a whole lot of agony. However, you and your beloved are, like all of us, products of our culture, and it takes hard work to step out of the paradigm upon which your entire previous existence was based—good work, rewarding work, life-changing work, but still hard work.

Guilt is one of the most uncomfortable emotions we can feel. Most people feel guilty when something they do causes pain to the people they care about. When you place your desire for an open relationship on the table and someone you love has a hard time with it, you will probably feel very guilty.

You can’t wave a magic wand and change another person’s mind—that’s the hard work we must each do for ourselves. It will hurt. There may be tears and rage and bitterness, and you will feel guilty.

Libertines are portrayed in fiction as carefree explorers—and also heartless and free of care for any pain they may leave in their wake. We don’t believe that you want your freedom at the cost of becoming a callous jerk. If you have invited people you care about into this exploration, that means you don’t want to cheat but to live your life honestly and honorably. We respect you for that. A lot of other people won’t.

The Outside Lover

We don’t even know what to call you, which makes it hard to talk to you and may make it hard for you to think about your situation. Your role—a potentially loving, giving individual who’s sexually involved with one or more members of a committed relationship—is so distant from most people’s conceptual framework that a nonloaded word for you does not exist: “homewrecker,” “mistress,” “the other woman”? (There isn’t even a phrase for “the other man,” in spite of the fact that many such men exist.) More civilized, but often equally problematic, are concepts like “secondary” or “tertiary”: this language does define the situation, but we think the implied hierarchy can be demeaning. Do you only count when you are number one? Or does everybody have rights in this constellation?

Whether you are the sweetie, the squeeze, the lover, or whatever, your position in the constellation comes with advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, most of your time with your lover can be spent having fun. You are not expected to support your lover, nor to give up your career to stay home with the kids. On the downside, who do you call when you need a ride to the emergency room? Who do you call when you are sad or when you need support? Do you have any rights at all to your beloved’s time, or is there somebody who sees you as the competition, with whom you may never speak or negotiate? While your position conveys few responsibilities, it often also carries very few rights.

The One Who Chose None of This

We really hope you didn’t get this book as a Valentine’s Day surprise, but we know that could be the case. It is no fun to be called upon to expand your relationship in ways you never asked for, nor to deal with your beloved’s desires for other lovers after they’d promised to forsake all others. You may be feeling like you’ve had an abyss open up under your feet, with no solid ground anywhere to stand on.

Of course you are distressed, and angry as well—you did not choose this path. Yet here you are, in a maelstrom of scary feelings you never agreed to experience. It may take a while for you to get that this is really happening. Eventually, though, this situation must be dealt with: once the subject of opening a relationship is on the table, it cannot be shut away in a drawer again. One way or another, you must find a way to cope with what’s been handed to you and begin considering what may happen next.

It is unfair, of course, that you’re being asked to do hard emotional work that you never chose to do. Is there any reason why you should have to work so hard? Is there anything in it for you?

Well, quite possibly there is. Perhaps this work will make you stronger. Perhaps you will make an unexpected journey into your own capacities: maybe you too have the ability to love more than one person. Perhaps it will improve your communication skills and deepen your relationship. Perhaps learning that your beloved will still come home to you after an adventure will end up making you feel more secure. Perhaps it will free you from traditional views of relationship as ownership, opening new horizons for connecting. Perhaps it will give you much-needed personal time. Perhaps it will improve your sex life. Perhaps you can see a faint gleam of a possible freedom somewhere on the horizon.

We can’t promise that any of these will happen for you. But there’s one thing we can promise. If you tackle this difficult situation, and learn whatever you can about yourself and your relationship from it, at the end of it, you will have a choice. You may choose to separate, or you and your partner may choose to go back to monogamy, or you may try a more open relationship…but whatever you do, it will be because you’re looking at all your possibilities and choosing —not reacting blindly, not doing what you’ve been told, not choosing the easy way just because it’s easy, but making your own, informed, heartfelt choice.

Later in this chapter, we’ll give you some ideas about ways to keep this difficult negotiation as productive as possible. But first we want to talk about a situation that we know some of our readers are confronting.

Cheating

Sometimes the relationship is already open, kind of, only someone doesn’t know it yet. This situation can be very hard to deal with, but it does happen, and often.

Discovering that you have been and are currently being cheated on can be awful. Feelings of shame, betrayal, and lost trust are frequent consequences. Many people in this position are plagued with questions: “Am I not desirable?” “What did I do wrong?” All these feelings are legitimate, and we don’t believe you did anything wrong beyond accepting the stories you grew up on about what “happily ever after” is supposed to mean.

It can help to remember that a cheating spouse who wants to open up a primary relationship is taking steps toward more honesty, showing respect for you and your relationship. They wouldn’t go to all this trouble if they wanted to get rid of you.

It can be hard to remember your partner’s goodwill, though, while you are struggling to digest this unwelcome news. Although it may be comforting to focus your pain into righteous outrage—and you are justified in doing so—something more needs to happen if you and your relationship are going to survive and thrive.

What do we see when we look at cheating with an open mind and with compassion toward everyone involved? Our culture would like to have it that cheating happens rarely, that it’s an anomaly. Kinsey discovered otherwise more than a half century ago: slightly more than half of theoretically monogamous marriages back then actually were not. So cheating is not unusual and is not perpetrated only by heartless sex addicts.

Conventional therapeutic wisdom is that cheating is a symptom of something wrong in the relationship and that working on the relationship will make the cheating go away. Sometimes this is indeed true. But cheating is not necessarily about some failure in your connection, and it is cruel to tell people that something is wrong with a perfectly good relationship just because desire has a way of squirming out of bounds.

You may feel betrayed or grief-stricken or furious. You’ve been launched into these feelings without any warning and not by your choice. It can be particularly hard to learn that your partner has been engaging in far-out sexual activities like kink or cross-dressing (if you’re struggling with this issue, please look at our book When Someone You Love Is Kinky ).

Working to open a relationship under these conditions is far less than optimal—how is a nonconsenting partner supposed to find a way to feel secure and loved when the rug has been pulled out from under them? But many relationships do eventually find their way through this thorny thicket.

We are talking about a life situation in which many people experience particularly fiery anger. This exercise can be a first step in getting to know that anger and understand it, rather than just avoiding it like the plague and then erupting when you can’t stand it anymore.

EXERCISE: WHAT IS ANGER GOOD FOR?

For this exercise, start out thinking like an ecologist. Remember in school how they taught you that everything in nature has its job, its contribution (the maggots eat the dead mouse and turn it into rich soil, and then the rose can bloom)?

So why do we experience anger? What does anger contribute to our emotional ecologies and to our intimate relationships? How does your anger help you? How does it protect you? Write a list. Examples might include helping you discover your limits, energizing you to action, letting you release tension.

You might put this list on the refrigerator and add items over a week or two as you experience them.

Then, the next time you feel angry, you can ask yourself: “How is my anger trying to take care of me?”

Intellectually understanding cheating doesn’t make it that much easier to handle when you discover that it’s your lover who is doing it…but it might help you figure out where you want to go from here. The challenge of rebuilding trust can be hard to contemplate, and you need to figure out how you can meet it halfway. Your beloved can’t make you trust, can’t really even earn your trust as though it were a salary—you have to decide that it’s worth your while to grant it.

Furthermore, there is the problem of the outside lover waiting, patiently or not, in the wings, while you are starting from scratch trying to orient yourself to the situation. This person has feelings too, and has good reasons for not wanting to remain a dirty little secret.

You and your partner will probably have to spend some time together working through feelings of anger, betrayal, and guilt. But when you have those feelings under some degree of control, you will next have to look at the future and begin working—preferably together—on some solutions.

It may be that you will wind up separating, or perhaps the two of you will return to monogamy. Your local bookstore offers many excellent books to support you through either of those alternatives. But this book is called The Ethical Slut , so let’s assume for now that you are at least considering the possibility of more openness in your relationship.

First Openings

For everyone involved in this situation to get from where you are right now—perhaps angry, perhaps scared, almost certainly confused—to somewhere new, you need to make a commitment to push yourself a little beyond your comfort level. Just a little—but still, you need to push yourself. It doesn’t work if someone else has to push for you, and it doesn’t work if you are pushing someone else. You each have to push yourselves so you can discover how much stronger you are than you thought you were.

A good way to start would be to sit down together in a peaceful place and compare your visions of a more open future. Perhaps you could each write a little about what your relationship would look like if it were perfect, and perfectly easy. When you compare notes, you may find out that you have very different visions: one person may want to be the Queen of Sluts at sex parties; another may be looking for a lover who wants to go backpacking and make out on a mountainside. One of you may be yearning for anonymous sex with no obligations; another may desire an ongoing relationship with one or two people who stay connected and join the family.

Don’t panic. You don’t have to want the exact same thing, and you can figure out agreements that make it possible for you both to make your dreams come true.

It can be overwhelming to look at the dream with no idea how it can possibly be brought into reality—take a moment to let go of panic. The next part is to figure out how you are going to get from here to there. You don’t have to teleport to your destination in an instant—you will get where you are going one step at a time. You don’t learn to swim by jumping into the ocean, and you won’t get comfortable with any of this by castigating yourself for not being comfortable already.

EXERCISE: HIERARCHY OF HARD, OR HOW TO GET FROM HERE TO THERE IN HOWEVER MANY ABSOLUTELY EASY STEPS

Here’s an exercise about choosing the first step you want to take.

Choose a very concrete goal to focus on, one about which you have some anxiety. Poly issues might include looking at personal ads together, introducing your lovers, making a date, having a sleepover, talking about safer sex. Choose an issue to practice with that is relatively easy for you today.

Think about the steps you would have to take to get from here to there—agreements, negotiations, asking for what you want, scheduling time, finding a babysitter, and so on. Write each of these steps on an index card. If any step looks too enormous, break it down into a few steps. Sort of like teaching three-year-olds to bake cookies, make each step very simple before you go on to the next one.

Then lay out the cards and put them in order from the easiest to the hardest, or from the safest to the scariest, according to how intense it feels when you think about that step. You may get new information about yourself when you do this.

Then pick up the safest, easiest card; figure out how you could take that step and march onward! When you’ve accomplished that, and learned whatever you learned from doing it, put the card away and go to work on the next step, which is now the easiest step.

Never take anything but the easiest step.

Designing Your Learning Curve

The kinds of agreements that sluts make to deal with emotional comfort zones fall, loosely speaking, into two categories: agreements that avoid scary feelings and agreements that take a risk of feeling something that might be uncomfortable or scary, but not terrifying. Make a list of all the agreements you might consider entering into and divide them into “avoidant” and “risky.” Avoidant strategies might include don’t ask, don’t tell; don’t rock the boat; don’t let me find out; I will never meet your lover; only on Thursday nights when I’m out with my lover, so I’ll never be home alone. These might be good agreements for people who are starting out on this path in that they are taking the very smallest risks with the tightest possible containers. This is how we form a learning curve.

If you choose only avoidant strategies, however, you can wind up keeping yourself frozen in your present state; avoidant strategies are how you feel safe, but risky strategies are how you grow.

If you are required to keep your activities secret from each other, then you have, well, a big secret. Secrets will not bring you closer together—they often create more distance. Suppose you have a fight with an outside lover, and your life partner can tell you’re upset. How do you deal with these realities and not disclose anything about your outside connections? Or you could wind up not knowing something that everyone else in your community knows, and then you might find out about it from a friend who thinks you already know. Many people find that the stories they make up in their heads in the absence of information are scarier than the reality. How can you reassure yourself without knowing what’s happening?

Many people find it easier not to hear about the specifics of their sweetie’s lovemaking with others, and we don’t see a lot of problems with that. Eventually, you might find it a turn-on, but there is no need to start there, or even get there, unless such sharing is important to one of you. Full disclosure is a lovely ideal but often an acutely uncomfortable reality.

Think very hard about any agreements that add up to “Don’t have too much fun.” Agreements about safer sex, of course, are required. But in the long run, it’s not going to make you feel very safe if your lover agrees not to, for instance, kiss someone, or not do any of a long list of activities. All you will get for that is a lot of wondering whether this agreement will be kept and a lot of uproar if you suspect it is not.

You have the right to expect your beloved to be open with prospective partners about your existence. Your partner may be surprised to learn that this will make them more attractive to some people than a single person would be—an outsider can play with them and not have to worry about whether they are going to show up with a U-Haul. When you and your sweeties are honest about the relationship you are looking for, you will attract people who are ready and willing to deal with the realities of your life.

There are distinct advantages to connecting with experienced sluts—their knowledge can be very helpful. But if a prospective outside sweetie is new to polyamory, you will need to negotiate another set of agreements and establish a learning curve for this relationship.

Taking Some Tiny Risks

Entry-level risk-taking strategies might include things like checking out personal ads on the Internet together. What photos in the ads does each of you respond to? How do you feel about that? What does your partner think about the people you find attractive? Or you might go out to a club together and talk about what it would be like to flirt with any of the hotties you might see there.

You can take the risk of arousing one of your scary emotions almost as an experiment, to see how it feels, learn about yourself, and explore how you can take care of yourself and reassure one another when jealous feelings are being felt in the present. Try writing about how it feels. Maybe you could invent a fantasy that feels like that and invent yourself as the competent character who figures out a happy solution.

One risk that we advise you to take involves making the time in your busy lives to talk about how you are feeling about all this. There are a lot of exercises in this book about communication: try them. On the next page you’ll find another script for talking about difficult feelings.

We have said before that nothing creates intimacy like shared vulnerabilities—so we advise you to savor all the closeness that you open up with each other when you start taking risks.

You can also use the “Yes, No, Maybe” exercise in chapter 23, “Sex and Pleasure” (this page ), only this time list all the things associated with starting and maintaining a poly life: coffee dates, answering an ad, exchanging phone numbers at a party, flirting, all the way up to actual dates, sleepovers, and various kinds of erotic activity. The items that wind up on your “yes” lists are the ones to start with, and then you can negotiate what it would take to make it safe enough to try something on your “maybe” list. The “no” list states your absolute limits at this time and maybe forever. Compare this to the “Hierarchy of Hard” cards we talked about in the exercise earlier in this chapter (this page ). You will use these two exercises over and over again, because each time you get good at any part of what you are attempting, the scariness level of all the items will change. Every time you learn something new, you become stronger and more confident.

EXERCISE: THE TWENTY-MINUTE FIGHT

Make an appointment with your partner to discuss something you don’t agree on for twenty minutes. Find a good time when you can focus and when you won’t have to do anything stressful right after—perhaps plan to watch a movie.

Try this first with a small disagreement, something not terribly heated, just for practice. How do you manage to stop after twenty minutes when the discussion isn’t finished? Our most difficult disagreements are not going to be resolved in hours of talking, arguing, or yelling—maybe not even in weeks or months. Difficult issues take time to work on. So one important skill is to open up the controversy and then figure out a way to stop and close it back down until the next time.

Use good communication tools and set the timer. When the twenty minutes are up, take a few deep breaths and let go, let go, let go of wherever you are in the argument. It is a terrifically useful skill to know how to stop. It is much safer to start talking about a controversy when you have agreed not to yell at each other until you are exhausted and go to bed in a huff. You may find that after you stop talking, you will be thinking about what you said and what your partner said, and in a day or two you may very well get some new ideas about how you feel and what might work. By the time you come together next week for Twenty-Minute Fight round two, you may surprise yourselves by how much closer to understanding or accepting each other’s positions you have come.

We have deliberately suggested some extremely easy adventures to start with—like looking at ads or talking about all the cuties dancing at the club. These are very safe ways to take a tiny risk. Pay attention to what feelings come up and talk about them. Remember that feelings like to flow. Please don’t assume that how you feel today is how you will always feel: the whole purpose of this endeavor is to open up your options about your feelings.

You may be surprised by what’s difficult or by what’s easy. Give yourself a gold star for what’s easy—that’s a strength you already have. Give yourself another gold star for even thinking about something that’s hard—this is the work you are setting out to do.

We’ll make more suggestions about how to launch your partnership into happy sluthood in chapter 20, “Couples and Groups,” and chapter 23, “Sex and Pleasure.” We have also listed some good books in Further Reading, and your computer’s search engine is your nonjudgmental best friend.

All these suggestions will take time and energy. Please don’t forget, however, to set aside some time and energy to share pleasurable experiences with the partner you already have: go dancing, go to the beach, watch a favorite movie together, play a game you both enjoy, visit a favorite restaurant for a lovely meal. Shared pleasure is the solid foundation that will make all these wonderful explorations possible—catch up with your email later.