Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [81]
EXERCISE What Is Anger Good For?
For this exercise, you start out thinking like an ecologist. Remember in school how they taught you that everything in Nature has its job, its contribution: the maggots eat the dead mouse and turn it into rich soil and then the rose can bloom, right?
So why do we all experience anger? What is its contribution to our individual ecologies and to our relationships? How does your anger help you? How does it protect you? Write a list. Examples might include: helping you discover your limits; energizing you to action; letting you release tension.
You might put this list on the refrigerator and add items over a week or two as you experience them.
Then, the next time you feel angry, you can ask yourself: “How is my anger trying to take care of me?”
Intellectually understanding cheating doesn’t make it that much easier to handle when you discover that it’s your lover who is doing it … but it might help you figure out where you want to go from here. The challenge of rebuilding trust can be hard to contemplate, and you need to figure out how you can meet your partner halfway. Your spouse can’t make you trust, can’t really even earn your trust as though it were a salary—you have to decide that it’s worth your while to grant it.
Furthermore, there is the problem of your partner’s outside lover waiting, patiently or not, in the wings while you are starting from scratch trying to orient yourself to the situation. This person that you just found out about has feelings too and has perfectly good reasons for not wanting to remain a dirty little secret.
If the situation you’re negotiating is one in which you or your partner has been cheating, you will probably have to spend some time together working through feelings of anger, betrayal, and guilt. But when you have those feelings under some degree of control, you will next have to look at the future and begin working—preferably together—on some solutions.
It may be that you will wind up separating, or perhaps the two of you will return to monogamy. Your local bookstore offers many excellent books to support you through either of those alternatives. But this book is called The Ethical Slut, so let’s assume for now that you are at least considering the possibility of more openness in your relationship.
First Openings
In order for everyone involved in this situation to get from where you are right now—perhaps angry, perhaps scared, almost certainly confused—to somewhere new, you need to make a commitment to push yourself a little beyond your comfort level. Just a little, but still you need to push yourself. It doesn’t work if your partner has to push for you, and it doesn’t work if you are pushing your partner. You each have to push yourselves so you can discover how much stronger you are than you thought you were. It’s sort of like working out—you have to push and pull those weights in order to strengthen your emotional muscles.
A good way to start would be to sit down with your partner in a peaceful place and compare your visions of a more open future. Perhaps you could each write down a little about what your relationship would look like if it were perfect, and perfectly easy. When you compare notes you may find out that you have very different visions: one partner may want to be the Queen of Sluts at sex parties, the other may be looking for a lover who wants to go backpacking and make out on a mountainside. One of you may be yearning for zipless fucks with no obligations, the other may desire an ongoing relationship with one or two people who stay connected and join the family.
Don’t panic. You don’t have to want the exact same thing, and you can figure out agreements that make it possible for you both to make your dreams come true. Look back at chapter 15, “Making Agreements,” to get some ideas of possible ways the two of you might want to structure your poly constellation.
It can be pretty overwhelming to look at the dream with no idea