Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [106]
I have lived about half my adult life single. Some things are hard to do by yourself. I recently bought my first house. How I yearned for a partner in that scary endeavor! But I managed, somehow. I dealt with my fears, and with realtors and mortgage brokers and roofers and inspectors, and now I have a sweet little home in the woods: like me, mine to share with others, when and how I choose.
Nothing lasts forever. Someone asked me if I feared being alone in my old age. I am now in my sixties, and you bet I’m afraid of that. I saw my mother live to be ninety-three in the house she shared with my father during their thirty-seven-year marriage: only he died of cancer when they were sixty-five.
Nothing lasts forever. I still crave the thrill of falling in love, the dream of a romance so magical it could never fade. And I know better. When I have fallen in love in the past, the long-term outcome has been a crapshoot: sometimes great, sometimes disastrous. After eight such relationships, I must admit I have no idea how to predict the future of any passion: whether we will grow into a solid and sustaining kind of love, or whether we will grow to hate each other.
Now I am a person who prefers burning passion to sweet reason. And I don’t consider myself very good at compromise. But my compromise for my own survival is to learn to live single and to make a very good life of it: a lifelong commitment to myself.
Long ago, I thought of singlehood as being “between old men”: some condition of waiting for the next one-and-only to show up. It was like being on hold, waiting for one-and-only number four to pick up the phone, not like living a real life.
In 1969, when I was first a slut on purpose and a baby feminist, I decided to live single for five years so I could discover who I might be when I’m not trying to be somebody’s wife. But how was I going to make this work? I didn’t want to live and raise my child in a cold world with no affection or intimacy, so I devised a scheme for sharing love with lovers I had no intention of living with.
Back then, there was very little precedent for sharing sex with someone you were not auditioning for a long-term partnership. So I invented ways that I could take the risky steps of sharing affection openly with people I had not “secured,” if I can call it that. I told them what I liked about them. I good-mouthed. I sought out opportunities to be demonstrative. I used the L-word and insisted on calling the feelings I had for each of my lovers by their true name: love. And when I had the courage to be loving, the result was that I got a lot of love back.
It is true that I first learned to love this way as a survival technique for living single. But it has become something far more valuable: an open affection for who and what I love around me has become my foundation and my way of life, whether or not I am living with a partner.
I am confident that this approach can work for everyone, whatever their lifestyle, and even when they are not sharing sex: wouldn’t it make a fine world if we all made it a point to honor and cherish and openly value every person we make a connection with?
I raised my child with this sense of community. Being a mother taught me to respect limits and boundaries and certainly to refuse to welcome in my home or in my heart anyone or anything that threatened the well-being of my child or me. By extension, I learned to better protect my own vulnerabilities, which made me even more capable of expressing my love for others.
I live in the country, and I feel this same kind of heart-opening love when I walk on a beach, or look at the world from the top of a small mountain, or discover, around some bend in a trail, a two-thousand-year-old tree standing in majesty. I feel no desperation, nor any desire to cling. I just feel happy.
Do I sometimes feel lonely? Sure. Do I love my life?