The Ethical Slut (23 page)

In physics, the triangle is considered one of the most structurally sound and well-balanced structures—but in relationships, the very phrase “love triangle” carries a whiff of tabloid drama. This particular situation is not made any easier by the fact that it’s been happening for as long as there have been relationships. It can help to remember that it is utterly normal to have differences in desire in any relationship—you don’t need to both get excited about the same flavor of ice cream. Making room for everyone’s desires
can
work for all concerned—we know many people who have done so, reaching accommodations that work for all three people involved. Let’s look at the dilemma from all three points of view.

The advantage of being in this position is that you know, more or less, what you want. Perhaps you bought this book for your spouse, hoping
for some freedom down the road and probably hoping that there is some way that you and your spouse can reach agreement without going through a whole lot of agony. However, you and your spouse are both, like all of us, products of our culture, and it takes hard work to step out of the paradigm upon which your entire previous existence was based. Good work, rewarding work, life-changing work, but still hard work.

Guilt is a dreadful emotion, one of the most uncomfortable ones we can feel. Most people feel guilty when something they do causes pain to the people they care about. When you place your desire for an open relationship on the table and your partner has a hard time with it, you will probably feel very guilty. There are no easy ways to allay your guilt by fixing how your partner feels.

You can’t wave a magic wand and change your partner’s mind—that’s the hard work we must each do for ourselves. It will hurt. There may be tears and rage and bitterness, and you will feel guilty. If you already have two partners, then both of them might feel bad, and you will feel doubly guilty.

Don Juan and Doña Juana are portrayed in fiction as carefree explorers—and also heartless and free of care for any pain they may leave in their wake. We don’t believe that you want your freedom at the cost of becoming a callous jerk. If you have invited your partner into this exploration, that means you don’t want to cheat, you want to live your life honestly and honorably. We respect you for that. A lot of other people won’t.

We don’t even know what to call you, which makes it hard to talk to you and may make it hard for you to think about your situation. Your role—a potentially loving, giving individual who’s sexually involved with one member of a committed couple—is so distant from most people’s conceptual framework that a nonloaded word for you does not exist. Homewrecker? Mistress? The other woman? (There isn’t even a phrase for “the other man,” in spite of the fact that many, many such men exist.) More civilized, but often equally problematic, are concepts like “secondary” or “tertiary”: this language does define the situation, but we think the implied hierarchy can be demeaning. Do you only
count when you are number one? Or does everybody have rights in this constellation?

Whether you are the sweetie, the squeeze, the lover, or whatever, your position in the triangle comes with advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, nobody expects you to wash their socks, and most of your time with your lover can be spent having fun. You are not expected to support your lover, nor to give up your career to stay home with the kids. On the downside, who do you call when you need a drive to the emergency room? Who do you call when you are sad? When you need support? Do you have any rights at all to your partner’s time, or is there somebody who sees you as the competition, with whom you may never speak or negotiate? While your position conveys few responsibilities, it often also carries very few rights.

We really hope you didn’t get this book as a Valentine’s Day surprise, but we know that could be the case. It is utterly no fun to be called upon to expand your relationship in ways you never asked for, nor to deal with your beloved’s desires for other lovers after you’d promised to forsake all others. You may be feeling like you’ve had an abyss open up under your feet, with no solid ground anywhere to stand on.

Of course you are distressed, and angry as well—you did not choose this path. Here you are, in a maelstrom of scary feelings you never agreed to undertake. It may take a while for you to get that this is really happening. Eventually, though, this situation must be dealt with: once the subject of opening a relationship is on the table, it cannot be shut away in a drawer again. One way or another, you must find a way to cope with what’s been handed to you and begin considering what may happen next.

It is unfair, of course, that you’re being asked to do hard emotional work that you never chose to do. Is there any reason why you should have to work so hard? Is there anything in it for you?

Well, quite possibly. Perhaps this work will make you stronger. Perhaps you will make an unexpected journey into your own capacities: Maybe you too have the ability to love more than one person. Perhaps it will deepen your relationship with your partner. Perhaps it will improve your sex life. Perhaps you will find a path that allows your
relationship to continue, that allows you to grow and change together. Perhaps you can see a faint gleam of a possible freedom somewhere on the horizon.

We can’t promise that any of these will happen for you. But there’s one thing we
can
promise. If you tackle this difficult situation, and learn whatever you can about yourself and your relationship from it, at the end of it you will have a choice. You may choose to separate, or you and your partner may choose to go back to monogamy, or you may try a more open relationship … but whatever you do, it will be because you’re looking at all your possibilities and
choosing.
Not reacting blindly, not doing what you’ve been told, not choosing the easy way just because it’s easy, but making your own, informed, heartfelt choice. We truly believe that consensual monogamy is a fine choice.

Later in this chapter, we’ll give you some ideas about ways to keep this difficult negotiation as productive as possible. But first we want to talk about a situation that we know some of our readers are confronting.

Sometimes the relationship is already open, only one partner doesn’t know it yet. This situation can be very hard to deal with, but it does happen, and often. Discovering that you have been and are currently being cheated on can be utterly awful. Feelings of betrayal, of lost trust, and often of shame are frequent consequences. Many people in this painful position are plagued with questions: “Am I not desirable?” “What did I do wrong?” All these feelings are legitimate, and we don’t believe you did anything wrong beyond accepting the stories you grew up on about what “happily ever after” is commonly supposed to mean.

It can help to remember that a cheating spouse who wants to open up a primary relationship is taking steps toward
more
honesty, showing respect for the partner and the relationship. They wouldn’t go to all this trouble if they wanted to get rid of you.

Our stereotypes paint the cheating partner as the villain, the greedy prick or bitch who wants to have their cake and eat it too, at your expense. But we know way too many people who have gotten into this position and are trying, often desperately, to find a way to make things right for everyone. The truly callous cad would just keep it all secret.

It can be hard to remember your partner’s goodwill while you are struggling to digest this unwelcome news. Discovering that your partner already has an outside love can be very close to catastrophic, simply because it feels so terribly bad. And although it may be comforting to focus your pain into righteous outrage—and you are justified in doing so—something more needs to happen if you and your relationship are going to survive and thrive.

What do we see when we look at cheating with an open mind and with compassion toward everyone involved? Our culture would like to have it that cheating happens rarely, that it’s an anomaly. Kinsey discovered otherwise more than half a century ago: slightly more than half of theoretically monogamous marriages back then actually were not. So cheating is not unusual and is not perpetrated only by heartless sex addicts.

Conventional therapeutic wisdom is that cheating is a symptom of something wrong in the marriage and that working on the marriage will make the cheating go away. Sometimes this is indeed true. But cheating is not necessarily about some failure in your connection, and it is cruel to tell people that something is wrong with a perfectly good relationship just because sexual desire has a way of squirming out of bounds.

You may feel betrayed, or grief-stricken, or furious. You’ve been launched into these feelings without any warning, and without your choice. It can be particularly hard to learn that your partner has been engaging in far-out sexual activities like kink or cross-dressing—if you’re struggling with this, please look at some of our other books, particularly
When Someone You Love Is Kinky.

Working to open a relationship under these conditions is far, far less than optimal—how is the nonconsenting partner supposed to find a way to feel secure and loved when the rug has been pulled out from under? But many couples do eventually find their way through this particularly thorny thicket. If you find yourself so angry that you can’t begin to think about anything else, here’s a way to make it easier to listen to your anger.

We are talking about a life situation in which many people experience particularly fiery anger. This exercise can be a first step in getting to know that anger and understand it, rather than just avoiding it like the plague and then erupting when you can’t stand it any more.

Intellectually understanding cheating doesn’t make it that much easier to handle when you discover that it’s
your
lover who is doing it … but it might help you figure out where you want to go from here. The challenge of rebuilding trust can be hard to contemplate, and you need to figure out how you can meet your partner halfway. Your spouse can’t make you trust, can’t really even earn your trust as though it were a salary—you have to decide that it’s worth your while to grant it.

Furthermore, there is the problem of your partner’s outside lover waiting, patiently or not, in the wings while you are starting from scratch trying to orient yourself to the situation. This person that you just found out about has feelings too and has perfectly good reasons for not wanting to remain a dirty little secret.

If the situation you’re negotiating is one in which you or your partner has been cheating, you will probably have to spend some time together working through feelings of anger, betrayal, and guilt. But when you have those feelings under some degree of control, you will next have
to look at the future and begin working—preferably together—on some solutions.

It may be that you will wind up separating, or perhaps the two of you will return to monogamy. Your local bookstore offers many excellent books to support you through either of those alternatives. But this book is called
The Ethical Slut,
so let’s assume for now that you are at least considering the possibility of more openness in your relationship.

In order for everyone involved in this situation to get from where you are right now—perhaps angry, perhaps scared, almost certainly confused—to somewhere new, you need to make a commitment to push yourself a little beyond your comfort level. Just a little, but still you need to push yourself. It doesn’t work if your partner has to push for you, and it doesn’t work if you are pushing your partner. You each have to push yourselves so you can discover how much stronger you are than you thought you were. It’s sort of like working out—you have to push and pull those weights in order to strengthen your emotional muscles.

A good way to start would be to sit down with your partner in a peaceful place and compare your visions of a more open future. Perhaps you could each write down a little about what your relationship would look like if it were perfect, and perfectly easy. When you compare notes you may find out that you have very different visions: one partner may want to be the Queen of Sluts at sex parties, the other may be looking for a lover who wants to go backpacking and make out on a mountainside. One of you may be yearning for zipless fucks with no obligations, the other may desire an ongoing relationship with one or two people who stay connected and join the family.

Don’t panic. You don’t have to want the exact same thing, and you can figure out agreements that make it possible for you both to make your dreams come true. Look back at
chapter 15
, “Making Agreements,” to get some ideas of possible ways the two of you might want to structure your poly constellation.

It can be pretty overwhelming to look at the dream with no idea how it can possibly be brought into reality—but, again, don’t panic.
The next part is to figure out how you are going to get from here to there. As with any journey, you don’t have to teleport to your destination in an instant—you will get to where you are going one step at a time. You don’t learn to swim by jumping into the ocean, and you won’t get comfortable with any of this by castigating yourself for not being comfortable already.