Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [107]
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Ebb and Flow of Relationships
WE OBSERVE, with much delight, the number of our old lovers we count among our present friends, and we marvel at how sexual relationships can develop into family memberships. There is a reality limit here: You have only twenty-four hours a day to devote to your love life, and presumably you need some of those hours for work and sleep and so on, so you have a finite amount of time to devote to each of your lovers. You can fit only a certain number of people in your life and expect to do any of them justice.
We find that most people do okay letting their partners come and go as it feels right for each of them. Extended family sexual relationships are more likely to grow apart than to break up. One of the very wonderful things about building sexual friendships is that, while past relationships and smaller affairs may come and go over the years, each pairing has its own characteristic and unique intimacy. You create this intimacy the way you learn to ride a bike—by trial and error, slipping and falling, and ultimately zooming along together. Just like riding a bike, you’ll never forget this particular intimacy or your own role in it. Even after the most bitter of separations, when conflict is cleared and time has healed the wounds, you may find that you can slip that connection right back on, like a comfortable old glove.
On the other hand, sometimes conflict in an intimate relationship goes on so long, or seems so impossible to resolve, that it threatens the very foundation of that relationship. We hope you bring the same high level of ethics and concern to a conflicted relationship that you brought to a happy one.
It is always tempting to respond to a major relationship conflict by assigning blame. In childhood we learn that pain, in the form of punishment from our all-powerful parents, is the consequence of doing something wrong. So when we hurt, we try to make sense of it by finding somebody doing something wrong, preferably somebody else. We have discussed the problems that come from blaming and projection before.
What is important to remember is that most relationships break up because the partners are unhappy with each other, and no one is to blame: not you, not your partner, and not your partner’s lover. Even if someone acted badly, or was dishonest, your primary relationship probably isn’t falling apart for that reason—relationships tend to end due to their own internal stresses. Even your authors have trouble remembering this when we are in the middle of a bitter breakup.
When you find yourself wanting to blame, it may help to remember a truism of relationship counseling: the client is the relationship itself, not either of the people in it. During a breakup it is supremely useless to try to ascertain who is “right” and who is “wrong”: the question is, what needs to happen next? If you start looking at conflicts as problems to be solved instead of trying to decide whose fault they are, you have taken an important first step in solving them.
Some people habitually bear the burden of being responsible for everybody’s emotional well-being and feel that they’re somehow at fault because they’re unable to magically make everyone’s pain and trouble disappear. Instead of refusing to own their stuff, one partner takes too much responsibility for the problem at hand. Such people need to learn to own their own bit and let everybody else own theirs.
It’s also common for one partner to take too little responsibility. People who have a lot of their self-esteem connected to their ability to maintain a relationship may feel the need to make their partner into the villain in order to justify their own desire to leave. This strategy is unfair to both of you: it gives the “villain” all the power in the relationship and disempowers the “victim.” Deciding that you have no choice but to leave because your partner is so horrible is denying the fact that there are always choices. Our experience is that relationship