Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [58]
When you hold still with your jealousy, you will find that it is possible to feel something difficult without doing anything you don’t choose to do. You will have taken your second step at disempowering your jealousy. You’ve told your jealousy that you will not allow it to drive you to do anything that might destroy your loving relationships.
Khalil Gibran wrote something truly profound about the nature of pain: “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
WHITEWATER RAFTING
So here you are, shell cracked, with waves of pain washing over you. What do you do? Get as comfortable as you can, and see how you can learn to ride those waves instead of drowning under them. Gather up the courage to feel what you’re feeling. Explore your feelings, nourish them, treasure them—they are the most essential part of you.
Be good to yourself, and remember that the most important part of love is not loving someone’s beauty and strength and virtue. The real test of love is when someone sees our weaknesses, our stupidities, and our smallnesses and still loves us. This unconditional love is what we want from our lovers, and we should expect no less from ourselves.
Experiencing painful feelings is not a moral issue—it is in no way “wrong” to feel what you feel and to want what you want. Only actions can be crimes. Let us repeat that one: emotions are never wrong; only actions can be wrong. Emotions are an expression of our emotional truth, and truth cannot be wrong. Nor do they need to be justified. They just need to be felt.
Remember, as you look at yourself, to look kindly, and also remember that you are not balancing a checkbook: anything you see that you don’t like, or that you want to change, is not a debit that you subtract from your virtues. When you learn to reflect on your strengths, it becomes easier to look at your weaknesses with acceptance and compassion. Keep your virtues at their full value, and cherish them.
Start by setting yourself the task of getting through a short period of time with your jealousy, like an evening or an afternoon when your partner may be off with another. Make a pact with yourself that you will stay with your feelings, whatever they may be, for this brief time. If a whole evening or night seems like too long, start with five or ten minutes, then arrange to distract yourself with a video or whatever.
IT MIGHT BE EASIER THAN YOU THOUGHT
One of the possible, and indeed common, outcomes will be that your partner will go off on a date with another and you will feel just fine. Surprise! Your anticipation may have been a lot worse than the actual event. Experienced sluts often find that they feel jealous only now and then. When they do experience jealousy, they examine these specific experiences to see what they can learn about themselves, and then brainstorm strategies to make this particular sort of event safer and easier.
One couple we talked to is working to maintain their primary relationship in a difficult situation: One of them is out of town most of the time on business, and thus much of their activity with other partners takes place under circumstances that prevent them from reconnecting physically afterward. One of their agreements is that they talk on the phone every single night, regardless of where they are or how busy they are. Often, their conversations take place after one of them has spent time connecting with an outside partner. One of them notes that during these conversations,
He allows my feelings. I don’t hesitate to say anything I want; in fact, he encourages