Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [72]
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Making Agreements
MOST SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIPS, from casual acquaintanceship through lifetime monogamy, are based on assumptions that are really unstated agreements about behavior: you don’t kiss your mailman, you don’t tip your mother. These are the unspoken rules we learn very early in our lives, from our parents, our playmates, and our cultures. People who break these unspoken rules are often considered odd, sometimes even crazy, because the values and judgments behind the social agreements about how we relate to one another are so deeply ingrained that we are usually not even aware that we have made any agreement at all.
In many day-to-day relationships, like your relationships with neighbors and coworkers, it’s probably fine to rely on those implicit, built-in agreements. But when you’re trying something as complicated and unprecedented as ethical sluthood, we think it’s very important to take nothing for granted. Talk with the people in your life about your agreements, and negotiate the conditions, environments, and behaviors that will get your own needs met and respect everybody’s boundaries.
You’ll often hear people talking about the rules of their relationships. But “rules” implies a certain rigidity, that there is a right way and a wrong way to run your relationship and that there will be penalties if you do it wrong. We understand that there are many different ways that people may choose to relate to each other, so we prefer to use the word “agreements” to describe mutually agreed-upon, conscious decisions, designed to be flexible enough to accommodate individuality, growth, and change. These agreements are sometimes a little fuzzy, particularly if you’re used to the hard edges of rules. A little fuzziness is okay; your agreement will either get clarified later if it needs to be—or it won’t, in which case it’s probably clear enough.
How do you know when you need an agreement? You can tell by listening to your emotions. If something comes up that leaves you feeling upset or angry or unheard or whatever, that’s an area in which you and your sweetie may need to discuss making an agreement. We suggest that you let go right now of the idea that you can predict every single situation that might come up in your relationship and make a rule to cover it—just forget it. Many perfectly good agreements get made by twenty-twenty hindsight: a problem comes up, and instead of arguing over whose fault it was, the people simply make an agreement to try to prevent that problem from coming up again or to deal with it when it does.
Our friends Laurie and Chris have become extraordinarily flexible agreement makers through practicing a lot:
We met at the Renaissance Faire and made a pretty deep connection right away. Although we didn’t feel ready to jump into marriage right off, we did get handfasted [an ancient Celtic rite of romantic commitment] about five months after we met. Our handfasting included an agreement that if we still wanted to be together a year and a day later, we’d get married. And we did.
When we first decided to get handfasted, Chris proposed an agreement in which we’d be free to be sexual with other people during Faire, but at no other time. Laurie felt shocked by his desire to do this, and insecure about what might happen. So we decided to postpone a decision until the next summer’s Faire, after we’d gotten married.
During the first year of our marriage, the agreement was for Faire only, and then after that we extended it to the weekend preparatory workshops as well as to Faire itself. At one of these, Laurie met a guy with whom she got fairly seriously involved—it was our first ongoing relationship outside the marriage. At that point, things opened up all the way to where Laurie was spending a lot of her time with her other lover, and Chris didn’t like it much; he felt that he wasn’t getting enough time with Laurie.
So we renegotiated.