Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [82]
EXERCISE Hierarchy of Hard, or, How to Get from Here to There in However Many Absolutely Easy Steps
Here’s an exercise about choosing the first step you want to take.
Choose a very concrete goal to focus on, one about which you have some anxiety. Poly issues might include: looking at personal ads together, introducing your lovers, making a date, having a sleep-over, talking about safer sex. Choose an issue to practice with that is relatively easy for you today.
Think about the steps you would have to take to get from here to there—agreements, negotiations, honesties, asking for what you want, scheduling time, finding a babysitter, and so on. Write each of these steps on an index card. If any step looks too enormous, break it down into a few steps. Sort of like teaching three-year-olds to bake cookies, make each step utterly simple before you go on to the next one.
Then lay out the cards and put them in order from the easiest to the hardest, or the safest to the scariest, according to how intense it feels when you think about that step. You may get new information about yourself when you do this.
Then pick up the safest, easiest card, figure out how you could take that step, and march onward! When you’ve accomplished that, and learned whatever you learned from doing it, put the card away and go to work on the next step, which is now the easiest step.
Never take anything but the easiest step.
Kinds of Agreements
We look at the kinds of agreements that sluts make to deal with emotional comfort zones as falling, loosely speaking, into two categories: agreements that avoid scary feelings, and agreements to take a risk of feeling something that might be uncomfortable or scary, but not terrifying. Make a list of all the agreements you might consider entering into, and divide them into avoidant and risky. Avoidant strategies might include don’t ask, don’t tell; don’t rock the boat; don’t let me find out; I will never meet your lover; only on Thursday nights when I’m out with my lover, so I’ll never be home alone. These might be good agreements for the couple who are starting out on this path, in that they are taking the very smallest risks with the tightest possible containers. This is how we form a learning curve.
If you choose only avoidant strategies, however, you can wind up keeping yourself frozen in your present state. If you don’t talk about what you are doing, then how can you think? If you can’t think, how can you negotiate? How can you reassure yourselves without knowing what is happening? People don’t do well in a vacuum, and many people find that the stories they make up in their heads in the absence of information are scarier than the reality.
In a worst-case scenario, you could wind up not knowing something that everyone else in your community knows, and then you might find out about it from a friend who thinks you already know. Most people don’t much like getting blindsided, so basing your safety on keeping yourself blind is not going to work forever. And if you and your partner have to keep your activities secret from each other, then you have, well, a big secret. Secrets will not bring you closer together—they often create more distance. Suppose you have a fight with your outside lover, and your life partner can tell that you’re upset. How do you deal with these realities and not disclose anything about your outside connections?
Many people find it easier not to hear about the specifics of their partner’s lovemaking with others, and we don’t see a lot of problems with that. Eventually, you might find it a turn-on, but there is no need to start there, or even