Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [77]
Reaching Agreement
So how do you find an agreement that will work for everyone? A good place to start is by defining your goals. A goal is not the same as an agreement; your goal is what you’re trying to accomplish, and your agreement is the means you’re using to try to get there. For example, if your goal is to prevent anyone from feeling taken advantage of, your agreement might be to ensure that nobody’s personal time, space, or belongings are being infringed on. So start with getting clear on what feels like infringement to each person involved, and use that for your guidelines.
Often you will discover a goal by tripping over a problem: “Last night, when you and Sam were in our bedroom together, my feet were freezing and I couldn’t get in there to get my bedroom slippers.” The goal is to prevent this problem from coming up again—what kinds of agreements might help achieve that goal? Answering these questions will require an honest (and often difficult) look at what the real problem is: is it that your feet are cold, or that you resent being kicked out of your own bedroom, or that you’re feeling threatened and left out?
Once you’ve defined your problem and your goal, it’s time to start figuring out a good agreement. It might be appropriate to do a trial agreement, to put a time limitation (a weekend, a week, a month, a year) on your newborn agreement to see how it feels to everybody concerned. After the time is up, you can sit down again to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and whether to continue your agreement or revise it or scrap it.
In our experience, it’s rare for an agreement to last a lifetime without change: human beings change, and so do agreements. The way you can tell that your agreement needs to change is when someone doesn’t agree to it anymore. Janet and one of her partners, for example, began their relationship with an agreement that they could be sexual with other people, but that they couldn’t fall in love with anyone else. Then one of them did. (In hindsight, this seems like a fairly silly agreement—as though you could simply decide not to fall in love!) She remembers,
There was a period in which we were having “check-ins” one or two times a day. This was a situation neither of us had ever planned on. We found it was very important to stay in the moment and to stay with tangible things—yes, it feels okay if she sleeps over while I’m out of town; no, it doesn’t feel right for you to bring the two of us to the same party. We found, during that experience as well as similar ones that came later, that the words “in love with” made us both feel kind of panicky—that agreements that dwelt on measurable factors such as time, behavior, and space worked better for us.
Expect to try out some agreements and find out that they don’t work, and expect to need to change them. You will get better at this process with practice, and in time you may know your own and your partner’s needs so well that negotiating agreements will be easy. But in the beginning, while you are learning, tidiness won’t count anywhere near as much as tolerance.
When you first set out, some of these discussions may get quite heated: remember, anger is an emotion that tells you what is important to you. What is constructive about these difficult times is what you learn about your partners and about yourself.
Remember that there are many good ways to structure your sluttery. Structure is not what makes you safe from hard feelings—your ability to take care of yourself is what counts. So whatever structure you choose, hold it fairly loosely. Your agreements are not taking care of you; you are.
Don’t get discouraged—all the successful sluts you see who seem so carefree have fought over their agreements. You too can work your way through this tangled web of assumptions and emotions and learn to love with openness and freedom.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Opening an Existing Relationship
MANY PEOPLE