Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [92]
It took several rounds of correspondence before we each began to figure out who the other one was, and then all our mutual friends started getting phone calls from each of us asking about the other one. E was in a relationship with one of Dossie’s roommates for several years—that’s how close the connection actually was, once we figured it out.
We’d already fallen half in love just through email correspondence. Our first date was for Thai food and a long walk around one of Oakland’s nicest neighborhoods. We had some negotiating to do around the whole issue of poly—some of his previous partners had been pretty good at the slut part but not so good at the ethical part—but he was willing to at least try.
He moved in a year or so later, and we got married a few months after that. As of this writing, we’re approaching our third wedding anniversary and our fifth anniversary as a couple.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Couples
SLUTS RELATE in as many combinations and styles as you can possibly imagine, and more. Is there a typology of relationships that could possibly include every wonderful possibility? Obviously not. We believe that every relationship is unique unto itself, and thus even an attempt to think in types and forms is not going to express the essential truths of what happens when we love people.
Here is one particular and fairly unusual relationship we cherish:
Your authors have been lovers, coauthors, and best friends for sixteen years, and we have never lived together. We have both lived with other partners during those sixteen years and have both been single together for only a brief time. Our relationship is a treasure, and no other partner gets to object—we’ve been doing this for a long time and we do not intend to stop. Of course, if we wanted to live together we probably would have by now, so we are also no threat to any life partner. (As long as you don’t get threatened by reading in extensive detail about your partner’s sexual adventures with her coauthor—this is a problem only a few of you will ever face.) It is nothing short of a miracle to us that our partnering has been so fruitful and so serene and so intimate and so explorative over all this time. We both agree that to live together would run a terrible risk of spoiling a good thing.
Everybody ought to have a coauthor. But even if you don’t write, you might find yourself making connections that remind you of some of the possibilities we will discuss here.
While all connections can be guided by the basic principles we’ve discussed in earlier chapters, new skills and concepts may get developed by brilliant sluts who want to explore the rewards and challenges of any particular lifestyle. In this chapter, we will discuss some of the many ways of exploring open sexual lifestyles and making your connections sustainable. Even if it doesn’t seem like what you want has much in common with any of these ways of partnering, we suggest reading the whole chapter—there are ideas for all of us in the experiences of any one of us, and sometimes a voice from somewhere else can give us just the piece our puzzle was looking for.
We all grew up in a world in which there was assumed to be nothing between emotionless sport fucking and committed long-term marriage-type relationships, leaving the vast territory in between open to discovery by relationship pioneers of all stripes, including ourselves. What interesting ways of relating to people might we, and you, find between these two poles? When we include all of our connections in our picture of relationship, we expand the definition of what a relationship can be.
Each relationship seeks its own level when we let it. Operating on this principle, we can welcome each of our partners for precisely who they are: we don’t need them to be anybody else or to bring us any particular resources or skills. If you don’t want to play tennis with me, I’ll ask somebody else, and if you don’t want to play bondage games with me,