Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [97]
Remember, please, that fantasy is not reality, and enjoy your fantasies while you maintain your commitments. When your expectation is that a crush is a brief, if wonderful, experience, you and your partner can live through one with relative equanimity and without destroying your long-term stability and love with each other.
The Two-House Couple
Not all couples live together. In recent years it has become more common that couple-style partnerships, with all the closeness and longevity of couplehood, may nonetheless span two or more households. Dossie has extensive experience living this way. Sometimes this situation comes about by happenstance: school or career commitments, for example, may create geographical distance. Other couples have made a conscious choice, like one duo of our acquaintance who have maintained a ten-year bond by deciding about three years ago that they should live in separate dwellings. According to them, this saved their relationship.
This life choice, we think, may well become even more common in the future. In times of financial security, sharing a house is no longer an economic necessity. Individuals in these couples may well be sharing a home with housemates, not necessarily wasting resources living alone. While some of them are polyamorous, others may be more or less monogamous. Arguments about who sleeps where become unnecessary when everybody has their own beds, but that’s not the main reason these couples cite for living separately: most of them simply feel that their relationships work better that way. Your authors, for instance, have been coauthors and lovers for sixteen years and have never chosen to cohabit: we understand our relationship to be a magical gift that daily living might well destroy (if Dossie’s inexplicable need for clean dishes didn’t do the trick, Janet’s devil-may-care attitude toward past-due bills certainly would).
We should not assume that such relationships represent a failure of intimacy or commitment. Rather than look for what is wrong, we might want to examine what is uniquely adaptive about these partnerings and what special skills or wisdom have developed from these new, assumption-challenging partnerships.
Often such partners create rituals that maintain their connection when apart—agreements about phone calls, ways of reaffirming love at comings-together and leave-takings, keeping caught up with the news in each other’s lives, marking one space or time as “theirs” and another space or time as belonging to one or the other of them.
Making this arrangement work requires some skills in scheduling and keeping time commitments, so differences between individuals in how they handle time and punctuality must be worked out. Differences in patterns of sexual desire can become problematic when opportunities don’t happen every night.
How do you respect your partner’s space in this arrangement and feel secure in your own? Do you have to go home when you want a little distance, or can you figure out a way to maintain your own space in a house that belongs to one of you? How much stuff do you get to keep there?
People often have differences about how much staying-in-touch they are comfortable with when they are apart—some people chat on the phone or text or instant message two or three times a day, while others would find that too distracting.
All of the differences that all couples need to manage still need to be managed when they live apart: differences in gregariousness, tidiness, work patterns, focus on careers, how money gets handled, how often you have your mother over for dinner—no two people have identical patterns in any, much less all, of these items. And, sorry, living apart is not automatic