Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [80]
Later in this chapter, we’ll give you some ideas about ways to keep this difficult negotiation as productive as possible. But first we want to talk about a situation that we know some of our readers are confronting.
Cheating
Sometimes the relationship is already open, only one partner doesn’t know it yet. This situation can be very hard to deal with, but it does happen, and often. Discovering that you have been and are currently being cheated on can be utterly awful. Feelings of betrayal, of lost trust, and often of shame are frequent consequences. Many people in this painful position are plagued with questions: “Am I not desirable?” “What did I do wrong?” All these feelings are legitimate, and we don’t believe you did anything wrong beyond accepting the stories you grew up on about what “happily ever after” is commonly supposed to mean.
It can help to remember that a cheating spouse who wants to open up a primary relationship is taking steps toward more honesty, showing respect for the partner and the relationship. They wouldn’t go to all this trouble if they wanted to get rid of you.
Our stereotypes paint the cheating partner as the villain, the greedy prick or bitch who wants to have their cake and eat it too, at your expense. But we know way too many people who have gotten into this position and are trying, often desperately, to find a way to make things right for everyone. The truly callous cad would just keep it all secret.
It can be hard to remember your partner’s goodwill while you are struggling to digest this unwelcome news. Discovering that your partner already has an outside love can be very close to catastrophic, simply because it feels so terribly bad. And although it may be comforting to focus your pain into righteous outrage—and you are justified in doing so—something more needs to happen if you and your relationship are going to survive and thrive.
What do we see when we look at cheating with an open mind and with compassion toward everyone involved? Our culture would like to have it that cheating happens rarely, that it’s an anomaly. Kinsey discovered otherwise more than half a century ago: slightly more than half of theoretically monogamous marriages back then actually were not. So cheating is not unusual and is not perpetrated only by heartless sex addicts.
Conventional therapeutic wisdom is that cheating is a symptom of something wrong in the marriage and that working on the marriage will make the cheating go away. Sometimes this is indeed true. But cheating is not necessarily about some failure in your connection, and it is cruel to tell people that something is wrong with a perfectly good relationship just because sexual desire has a way of squirming out of bounds.
You may feel betrayed, or grief-stricken, or furious. You’ve been launched into these feelings without any warning, and without your choice. It can be particularly hard to learn that your partner has been engaging in far-out sexual activities like kink or cross-dressing—if you’re struggling with this, please look at some of our other books, particularly When Someone You Love Is Kinky.
Working to open a relationship under these conditions is far, far less than optimal—how is the nonconsenting partner supposed to find a way to feel secure and loved when the rug has been pulled out from under? But many couples do eventually find their way through this particularly thorny thicket. If you find yourself so angry that you can’t begin to think about anything else, here’s a way to make it easier to listen to your anger.
We are talking about a life situation in which many people experience particularly fiery anger. This exercise can be a first step in getting to know that anger and understand