Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [55]
Or the sense of loss you feel might be the loss of an ideal, a picture you have been holding in your head of what a perfect, monogamous relationship might look like. It may be helpful to remember that all relationships change through time: people’s needs and desires shift according to age and circumstance, and the most successful long-term relationships are the ones with enough flexibility to redefine themselves over and over again through the years.
Occasionally, our discomfort means that we are becoming aware on an intuitive level that our partner is moving away from us, and it might be true that we are losing the relationship we cherish. That does happen. The fact that supposedly monogamous people everywhere often leave one partner for what they perceive as greener grass with another is not much consolation when it happens to you.
We watched a friend of ours go through feelings of deep grief and loss when she perceived that her partner’s lover was trying, nearly successfully, to abscond with her partner. In this case, her pain threw a spotlight on some dishonesty and manipulation on the part of the third party and gave her partner the strength to break off from the outside lover and to find other lovers who had greater respect for his primary bond. On the other hand, this scenario might just as easily have ended in a breakup; we’ll talk more about breakups, and dealing with them ethically with care for your own and your partner’s feelings, in chapter 20, “The Ebb and Flow of Relationships.”
Jealousy might also be associated with feelings of competitiveness and wanting to be number one. There’s a reason there is no Olympics of sex: sexual achievement is not measurable. We cannot rank each and every one of us on some hierarchical ladder of who is or is not the most desirable or the better fuck. What a horrid idea! Your authors want to live in a world where each person’s sexuality is valued for its own sake, not for how it measures up to any standard beyond our own pleasure. If you find out about something that you would like to add to your own repertoire, you can certainly learn to do it without wasting time trashing yourself for not already having known how.
Fear of being sexually inadequate can add up to a very deep and secret wound. But allow us to reassure you that eventually, when you succeed in establishing the lifestyle you are dreaming about, you will be so familiar with so many different individuals’ ways of expressing sexuality that you will no longer have to wonder how your sexuality compares to another’s; you’ll know from direct experience. Great lovers are made, not born. You can learn from your lovers, and your lovers’ lovers, and your lovers’ lovers’ lovers, to be the sexual superstar you would like to be.
Unlearning Jealousy
To change the way you experience a feeling takes time, so expect a gradual process, learning as you go, by trial and error. And there will be trials, and you will make errors.
Start by giving yourself permission to learn. Allow yourself to not know what you don’t know, to be ignorant; Buddhists call this beginner’s mind. You must allow yourself to make mistakes; you have no choice. So reassure yourself: there is no graceful way to unlearn jealousy. It’s kind of like learning to skate—you have to fall down and make a fool of yourself a few times before you become as graceful as a swan.
The challenge comes in learning to establish within yourself a strong foundation of internal security that is not dependent on sexual exclusivity or ownership of your partner. This difficult work is part of the larger question of how to grasp your personal power and learn to understand and love yourself without such a desperate need for another person to validate you. You become free to give