Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [108]
If your relationship problems include anybody being physically violent, or emotionally or verbally abusive, it’s not time to waffle over whose fault it is—it’s time to get professional help in learning to resolve conflict in a nondestructive manner. The Resource Guide in the back of this book will tell you how to get in touch with groups in your area that help both battered and battering partners. Similarly, professional support is often a good idea to deal with substance abuse—no partner, no matter how wonderful, can resolve something like alcoholism with love alone. If a child is being abused in any way, safety becomes the first priority, and you need to leave right now. You can work on resolving these issues from a safe distance.
Breaking Up
It happens. Good relationship skills and high ethics don’t mean you get to be with the same partner or partners forever and ever. It is our experience that relationships change, people grow out of them, people change. They may acquire new desires, new dreams. Some breakups in our own lives, as we look back with 20/20 hindsight, were actually constructive moves toward personal growth and a healthier life for each of us. At the time, however, we just felt awful.
It helps to remember that in the contemporary world, a breakup doesn’t have to mean that you and your ex did something dreadful. Most of us can count on going through a breakup at some time in our lives, possibly quite a few times. Rather than hide in denial, or torture ourselves with wondering what we did wrong, what would happen if we thought, in advance, about how we would like breaking up to be in our lives?
When a traditional marriage breaks up, nobody takes that as evidence that monogamy doesn’t work—so why do people feel compelled to take a slut’s breakup as evidence that free love is impossible? Your breakup may be for reasons entirely unrelated to the openness of your relationship. At any rate, it probably isn’t evidence that you aren’t meant to be a slut: we suspect you wouldn’t have done all the hard work it takes to live this way if you hadn’t had a strong desire for sluthood in the first place.
When a relationship shifts dramatically, it’s great if everybody feels calm enough to separate with affection and equanimity. But all too often, partnerships break up in a harsh way, with painful, angry, hurt, and bitter feelings. Grief at losing a relationship that we had counted on cuts deep, and while we are going through the hurtful process of an unwelcome separation, none of us are at our best.
A typical grief process takes about three months to get past the acute phase. It helps to look at grieving as productive work. Loss has left a hole in your life, and you need to pore over what you valued as you figure out how you want to fill the empty space and knit the wound together. You probably will need to do this work on your own—your ex can’t really do it for you. Feelings of grief, loss, abandonment, anger, resentment, and such that are overwhelming or intolerable today will probably seem sad but manageable three months from now as you move through this process. As the most intense feelings die down, you can find a good time to get back into communication with your ex—have some coffee or go to a movie or some such. It would be a shame not to come out of this breakup with at least a friendship, after all you’ve shared.
BREAKUP ETIQUETTE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Sadly, many people approach the ending of a relationship as if they have been given a license for drama, and furthermore, some people just can’t leave in a good way. They need someone to blame (other than themselves), a villain, a perpetrator, the bad guy, to feel okay about themselves or to clear their consciences.
The Internet has provided us with fabulous new technology for accomplishing drama—friending and unfriending, publishing your wise and wicked judgments about your recently beloved, spreading your indignation like