The Ethical Slut (29 page)

Two of our favorite sluts have been together nearly twenty years, loving each other and a lot of other wonderful people. One year, for Tina’s birthday, Trace bought her what we think is the ultimate birthday present:
three
season tickets to an excellent performance series … one for Tina, one for Trace, and one for whichever of Tina’s lovers she chose to invite to each event. (Dossie got to see Ravi Shankar!)

Some very capable sluts maintain more than one primary relationship. Dossie has known one such couple, Robert and Celia, for almost four decades. They together raised two children from previous relationships, and subsequently some grandchildren. Each has another primary partner, both usually women, and family relationships with all their exes. Robert’s outside partner May was originally lover to Celia’s lover Judy back in 1985, then became lovers with Celia, and finally with Robert from 1988 to the present and, they intend, on into the future. Some years ago Miranda and Celia lived upstairs, and Robert and May lived downstairs. Currently Cheryl, another of Celia’s previous girlfriends, lives upstairs and helps with the grandchildren; Miranda, another of Celia’s exes, visits two days a week since she lives out of town but attends school nearby. Are you dizzy yet? All of these people, plus many other friends and lovers of various degrees of intimacy, both present and historical, and most of
their
friends and lovers, form a very long-term extended family that has lived, loved, and raised children together for nearly forty years and plans to care for one another in their old age. We are impressed.

TO LIVE SINGLE is unusual in most cultures. Most people look on their periods of singlehood as temporary, often accidental, and to be ended as quickly as possible. You are recovering from your last relationship, mourning a breakup, or too busy working on a career to handle hunting for romance. Perhaps there aren’t any good candidates around right now. Something better will surely come along soon … so you wait, not even thinking of making a lifestyle out of how you are living today. Your authors hasten to assure you that there there are more positive approaches to the lifestyle of the single slut.

What would it be like to be
intentionally
single, to choose for some period of time to live by yourself? Potential partners can pop up when you least expect them—and in a culture that is built in twos, any relationship that has any life in it is generally regarded as an express train to couplehood. How, then, to stay single?

What would your social support network look like? Would everybody regard you as an outlaw? Might it be possible to get your needs met and feel loved and secure through a community of friends, lovers, family, mentors—your personal human resources?

Building your network by yourself can be hard at first—no one but you to make the phone calls, schedule dates for lunch or the movies,
make sure to stay connected. It’s up to you to build yourself a family, and it’s up to you to take care of yourself gently and with an open heart.

Your relationship with yourself is a lifelong commitment. When you are single, you have unique opportunities to live out that relationship with yourself, to find out who you are, and to celebrate your journey in whatever relationships you may move through as you travel through your life. To live single and in love with many is a voyage of self-discovery, an opportunity to get to know yourself intimately and to work on any changes you want to make in your life. Dossie was single when she first struggled with her jealousy, and having it all to herself made it easier to see inside herself rather than blame someone else, and to make conscious decisions about how she wanted to deal with her feelings.

We are not here to advocate being single over being partnered—this is not an either/or choice. But our culture tends to discount singlehood as a lifestyle, and thus very few people choose to remain single, which means there are relatively few resources and little social status available to the single person. Perhaps if being single were an acceptable, even valued, lifestyle, partnerships might develop more out of choice and less out of a sense of necessity or a desperate grab for salvation.

Partnered people get to share the basics of their lives—working together on shared goals, pooling finances, splitting the hard work of child rearing. Partners also get to share with each other when things are less than pretty—and we all need somebody to let us know that we are still lovable when we are not at our shiniest. The challenge for the single slut is to find ways to deepen the intimacy in relationships that may not be life partnerships.

Being single, on the other hand, offers the opportunity to spend time being purely who you are. Singles enjoy more freedom to explore, fewer obligations, and the ability to lounge around the house in a holey T-shirt playing video games with nobody the wiser. Perhaps you are single for negative, and valid, reasons. The last relationship was a disaster, and you are terrified to try again. You only feel safe controlling your own finances, or your own kitchen, or your own life. The only way you know how to be in a relationship is to try to be the perfect wife, or husband, or lover, or provider, and you’re exhausted from trying to be someone you are not. You are recovering from a breakup, you want
to avoid rebound romance, you need time to grieve. You just haven’t found anyone that you really want to live with.

Perhaps you are actively choosing to live single at this time in your life. Living alone, you’re free to explore any kind of relationship that crosses your path. You can love someone who wouldn’t make a good partner. You can love someone who already has a partner and who doesn’t need you to help with the mortgage or taking the kids to the orthodontist. You might choose singlehood because you love the joy of the hunt, the magic of flirtation, all the mystery and excitement of newness. Or you might be choosing to develop sexual connections with your friends, or without possessiveness, or any other relationship that is possible without coupling. Each utterly unique person you meet offers a new mirror in which you can see a new view of yourself: each new lover increases your knowledge of the world and your self-knowledge as well.

As our relationships blossom all over the rainbow of possibility, each one may inspire different feelings of love. When we learn to recognize and welcome love as we find it in our hearts in all of its many and marvelous manifestations—sexual love, familial love, friendly love, passionate love, gentle love, overwhelming love, caretaking love, and millions of others—we discover a river of rich and nourishing love that can flow through our lives in a constantly replenishing stream.

The way to feel solid enough to swim in that ever-changing river is to learn to love yourself. Some people believe that to love yourself is selfish, in a negative way, and that to spend some part of your life focusing on yourself is not only selfish but also narcissistic. How do you draw a line between healthy self-esteem and pathological narcissism? How much self are you allowed to have?

Practice self-nurturing, not only to get you through hard times but to guide you into a loving relationship with yourself. When you follow through with a simple act like comforting yourself with homemade soup, bringing home a fragrant flower for your night table, or taking a sweet solitary walk in a beautiful place, then you get an experience of being kind to yourself that can answer all those questions about “what do they mean, love myself?” This question is more easily answered by doing than by thinking.

If you have a hard time feeling valuable when no one is around to tell you that you are, why not do something that is valuable to others? Many unhappy sluts with no date this weekend have gone off to serve dinner to the homeless at a local church and come back filled to the brim with good feeling about all the pleasure they were able to give to others.

Once you have a handle on loving yourself, you can practice sharing that love with others. You’ve probably been taught to reserve the language of love for when you’re feeling overwhelmingly tender and passionate, and only for those who have made huge commitments to you. We recommend instead learning to recognize and acknowledge all the sweet feelings that make life worthwhile even when they don’t knock you over—and, moreover, learning to communicate those feelings to the people who inspire them.

What are the rights and responsibilities of the single sexual partner? Start with rights; you have them, and you will need to assert them. Too often our culture sees the single partner as “secondary,” “outside,” “an affair,” a “home wrecker,” and your place in the ecology of any life or relationship or community is dismissed as inconsequential at best. What does a single person have to do to get taken seriously, in this community or any other? If you’re in this position, a good place to start thinking about rights and responsibilities would be with some respect, honor, and consideration for each person’s feelings—including your own.

• You have the right to be treated with respect—you are not half a person just because you are single.
  
• You have the right to have your feelings heard and respected and responded to.
  
• You have the right to ask for anything you want—the person you ask may not have to give it to you, but you are definitely allowed to ask.
  
• You have the right to have dates and plans honored, not changed by a third party simply because that person has seniority.
  
• You have the right to chicken soup when you are sick, and whatever other emergency support you may need—rides to the emergency room, help when your car breaks down. Your lovers are your friends, and friends help each other when things go wrong.
  
• You have the right to negotiate family holidays like Thanksgiving and weekends involving your own and your lovers’ children: you are a member of any family you are in relationship with. How this works may look different depending on the values of the family you’re connecting to, but you definitely have the right to ask for more than just being somebody’s dirty little secret.
  
• You have the right to have limits and to set limits: what you will and will not do, what is and is not negotiable for your emotional well-being and personal ecology.
  
• You have the right to not be blamed for problems in other people’s relationships.
  
• You have the right to refuse to be a dumping ground for someone’s marital woes—you may not want to listen to how much your lover wants a divorce, and you shouldn’t have to.
  
• You have the right to count. Everybody counts, including you.
  
• You have the right to be valued and welcomed and respected as the wonderful human being that you are.
  

You are responsible for developing and maintaining good solid boundaries. Boundaries, are, quite simply, how you can tell where you end and the next guy begins. Good boundaries are strong, clear, and flexible; bad boundaries are weak, foggy, and brittle.

You are responsible for making clear agreements. Make and keep agreements about time, about public and private behavior, and about courtesies in shared spaces. Always do what you say you are going to do.

You are responsible for being clear when what you want to say is “no.” Don’t waffle, and don’t make promises you can’t or won’t keep.

You are responsible for carefully choosing who you confide in about your relationships. Gossip can be a destructive force, and yet most of us need to be able to talk out our stuff with someone. Be clear about who those people are.

You are responsible for respecting the other relationships of your lovers, especially their life partners, and for treating these people with respect, empathy, and openheartedness.

You are responsible for safer sex: opening discussion with potential partners, making your own decisions about your level of acceptable risk, respecting other people’s decisions, and learning to be adept with barriers and little bits of essential rubber.

You are responsible for owning your feelings, as is everyone else. Learn to handle your own crises and get support when you need it from others who are free to be there for you at that particular time.

• You are responsible for being straightforward about your intentions. When you practice being openly affectionate with your lovers, they may expect more from you than you are offering, and you must be willing to speak out and make yourself and your desires clear to all concerned.
  
• You are responsible for finding ways to say what another person might not want to hear. Single sluts may need to state uncomfortable truths in relationships that might not have the customary intimacy for such vulnerable discussions.
  
• You are responsible for promoting intimacy in all your relationships. If being single means that you are committed to being coolly invulnerable in all situations, you’ll be living in a cold and distant world.
  
• You must value and welcome all of your lovers as the wonderful, brilliant, unique human beings that they surely are.
  

If you’re single and slutty, you may find yourself interacting with a lot of different people in a lot of different patterns. Here are a few that we’ve encountered and that you may too.

Isn’t it funny how we call single people “available?” Available for what? When you are single, your lovers might be other singles, but that doesn’t mean that each of those relationships is anything like any other. With one person you may love to go dancing, with another it’s hiking.