Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [78]
The relationship that you want to open may or may not be a life partnership; you may or may not be living together. You might have been practicing serial monogamy, with the usual occasional overlap. Or you may be dating and keeping all your lovers compartmentalized and want to move toward something more like a family or tribe. You may be looking for adventures outside of a triad or a group marriage. The work of opening is still work, no matter the nature of your relationship.
For the sake of simplicity, we are going to talk about opening a relationship between an existing two-person couple—but the principles and skills we discuss here can apply to lovers in any configuration.
Turning Two into Three
If you and your lover are beginning this work with equal agreement that you both want to create this expansiveness in your lives, then congratulations, and welcome to the path. You will probably encounter some unexpected disagreements about the way this new life will look—so you still don’t get to skip this chapter.
In our experience, though, it’s much more common that one person wants to open the door to outside connections and the other hasn’t ever even considered it and is appalled by the idea. This situation is definitely more difficult, especially when the third member of the triangle, the outside partner—potential or actual, open or secret—is waiting in the wings and probably cares a lot about the outcome of this process. A lot of people don’t really think about monogamy until they make a connection with someone who feels important to them and they don’t want to give up their beloved life partner, or get a divorce, or split up the kids. You could be in any of these roles in the triangle: the one with the lust for adventure, the new love who is not a partner, and the sometimes stunned partner to the would-be adventurer.
In physics, the triangle is considered one of the most structurally sound and well-balanced structures—but in relationships, the very phrase “love triangle” carries a whiff of tabloid drama. This particular situation is not made any easier by the fact that it’s been happening for as long as there have been relationships. It can help to remember that it is utterly normal to have differences in desire in any relationship—you don’t need to both get excited about the same flavor of ice cream. Making room for everyone’s desires can work for all concerned—we know many people who have done so, reaching accommodations that work for all three people involved. Let’s look at the dilemma from all three points of view.
THE ADVENTUROUS PARTNER
The advantage of being in this position is that you know, more or less, what you want. Perhaps you bought this book for your spouse, hoping for some freedom down the road and probably hoping that there is some way that you and your spouse can reach agreement without going through a whole lot of agony. However, you and your spouse are both, like all of us, products of our culture, and it takes hard work to step out of the paradigm upon which your entire previous existence was based. Good work, rewarding work, life-changing work, but still hard work.
Guilt is a dreadful emotion, one of the most uncomfortable ones we can feel. Most people feel guilty when something they do causes pain to the people they care about. When you place your desire for an open relationship on the table and your partner has a hard time with it, you will probably feel very guilty. There are no easy ways to allay your guilt by fixing how your partner feels.
You can’t wave a magic wand and change your partner’s mind—that’s the hard work we must each do for ourselves. It will hurt.