Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [96]
We cannot reiterate often enough: this is not a contest, this is not a race, and nobody is the prize. One strategy to cut through any feelings of competitiveness is to play matchmaker for each other, to invest yourself in your partner’s sexual happiness as you do in your own—some polyfolk use the word “compersion” to describe the feeling of joy that comes from seeing your partner sexually happy with someone else. Remember the climax of The Big Chill, in which a woman character sets up her best friend with her husband so that her single friend could have a baby?
Janet recalls meeting a new Internet acquaintance for coffee and hearing her describe a pet sexual fantasy that was startlingly similar to Janet’s then-partner’s. Janet set up a first date for her new acquaintance and her partner for later that week, and the two of them (with Janet joining in later on) went on to have a long and intense relationship.
Dossie was once out on a date with a longtime lover of hers when she noticed an attractive person trying to catch her eye behind her date’s back. She explained the situation to her date, who had a stroke of genius. He strode over to the young man in question and with great dignity announced, “My lady would like you to have her phone number.” The young man looked terrified at the time, but he called the next morning. Dossie has made use of this strategy repeatedly since then and recommends it highly: they always call!
CRUSHES
We have pointed out before that it is impossible for anyone to predict what depth of feeling may potentially exist in any sexual relationship.Many people new to open relationships try to limit outside sexual encounters to a casual, recreational level to avoid the terrifying specter of seeing your partner in love with, or at least crushed out on, another. It is true that sometimes an outside relationship will threaten to become primary and supplant the existing partner. When this happens everyone involved will feel horrible, especially the partner left behind: it really sucks to spend months or years struggling to own your jealousy and working hard on your fears of abandonment, only to be actually abandoned.
But it is not possible to predict when or with whom a crush, or any other deepening of feelings, might happen, and most crushes pass in time and do not need to lead to breaking up. We certainly do not want to draw the boundaries of our agreements so tightly that we exclude everybody we like. There is no rule that will protect us from our own emotions, so we need to look beyond rules for solutions and for a sense of security.
It can help to do a reality check on your fantasies and expectations. New relationships are often exciting because they are new, glowing with sexual arousal, and too untested to have uncovered the inevitable conflicts and disturbances that come with true intimacy over time. Every relationship has a honeymoon phase, and honeymoons do not last forever. Some people get addicted to the honeymoon (which you may hear called “limerence” or “new relationship energy” or NRE) and wind up flying from partner to partner, always imagining that the next partner will be the perfect one. Such unfortunates may never stay with anyone long enough to discover the deeper intimacy and profound security that comes with confronting, struggling with, and conquering the hard parts of intimacy together.
Our friend Carol wisely notes:
Sexual time is connected with intimate time for most of us; we come to depend on our partners for various kinds of emotional support. So we get into this pattern where we share all our hard emotional unsexy needs—all the work of living together, the sickness and health, richer and poorer stuff—with our life partner, and we’re on our best behavior with our other partners.