Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [84]
Use good communication tools, and set the timer. When the twenty minutes are up, take a few deep breaths and let go, let go, let go of wherever you are in the argument. It is a terrifically useful skill to know how to stop. It is much safer to start talking about a controversy when you have agreed not to yell at each other till you are exhausted and go to bed in a huff. You may find that after you stop talking you will be thinking about what you said, and what your partner said, and in a day or two you may very well get some new ideas about how you feel and what might work. By the time you come together next week for Twenty-Minute Fight round two, you may surprise yourselves by how much closer to understanding or accepting each other’s positions you have come.
We have deliberately suggested some extremely easy places to start with—like looking at ads, or talking about all the cuties dancing at the club. These are very safe places to take a tiny risk, and pay attention to what feelings come up, and talk about them. Remember that feelings like to flow—don’t look for answers, just watch them move on through. Please don’t assume that how you feel today is how you will always feel: the whole purpose of this endeavor is to open up your options about your feelings.
You may be surprised by what’s difficult, or by what’s easy. Give yourself a gold star for what’s easy—that’s a strength you already have. Give yourself another gold star for even thinking about something that’s hard—this is the work you are setting out to do.
Keeping It Hot
Regardless of what decisions you make about other people in your life, it’s a good idea to start from a relationship that feels fulfilling and exciting. If you are delighted with your sex life with your partner, perhaps you don’t need this section. But if your sexuality as a couple has become infrequent, perfunctory, unsatisfying, or nonexistent, please know that this is utterly normal (although not inevitable) in mature relationships. Most of us, when we get settled into a comfortable relationship, find wonderful ease and safety, but as our days get filled with careers and kids and softball and mortgages and building the studio in the garage, there is less energy for sex, and passion may lose both its ease and its urgency.
Before you read on, think for a minute: is the sex in my partnership okay the way it is? Maybe having somewhat less sex these days than you did on your honeymoon is fine for you. It’s a myth that your relationship is a disaster if you’re not getting it on three times a week or for three hours at a time. There are perfectly marvelous partnerships that last for decades and are very satisfying to all concerned, with little or no sex, or with comfortable, routine sex. Don’t feel like you have to change something that feels okay the way it is: when it’s not broken you don’t need to fix it.
If, however, there are changes you would like to make, the first thing you need to do is find some time to talk with your partner, maybe read this section together, and negotiate your learning curve. If this opens up some hard feelings—and it may—go back to chapter 14, “Embracing Conflict,” and consider how you can listen to each other’s feelings without making anyone into a villain. Both of you got you here, and it’s going to take both of you to get somewhere better. So start with what you need to do to get on the same side. We’ll start with discussing a few common problems and some solutions to try.
Where you start depends somewhat on the nature of the problem. Some couples fall out of sexual synch because of a physical difficulty with sex that has eaten away at their sense of intimacy. For others, it can have more to do with the distance caused by the pressures of day-to-day life, or about small resentments that have built up over time and that can make it difficult to find the passion and romance that once inspired you. For many, it is some of each.
Let’s start by talking