Input:
Title: Couples and Groups

1. Q: What kind of relationship do the authors of "The Ethical Slut" have?
A: The authors have been lovers, coauthors, and best friends for twenty-five years, and have never lived together. They have both lived with other partners during those years and have both been single together for only a brief time. Their relationship is unique and treasured, and they have no intention of stopping their connection. They agree that to live together would risk spoiling a good thing.
2. Q: How can you approach forming connections without preconceived notions?
A: You can approach forming connections by welcoming each new person into your life just as they are, without trying to force them into the picture that's labeled "relationship" in your brain. This has been true whether the authors have been single, coupled, part of a group family, or engaged in any other way of relating.
3. Q: What are some common assumptions about coupledom that may need to be reconsidered?
A: Some common assumptions about coupledom include the idea that a relationship commitment specifies the right to control many aspects of their partner's lives. However, the authors do not much like this idea of ownership and suggest reconsidering it. They also suggest considering the possibility that you don't have to depend on any one person to fulfill all your desires.
4. Q: How can sluts in love build a life together?
A: Sluts in love can build a life together by being mindful of each other's boundaries, responsibilities, and courtesies. While ownership may not be a part of the equation, sustainability still requires consideration of these factors.
5. Q: What are some special problems that may come up for partnered sluts?
A: Some special problems that may come up for partnered sluts include the potential for competition between partners to be the most popular or to score the most attractive conquests. One strategy to cut through any feelings of competitiveness is to play matchmaker for each other and invest in your partner's sexual happiness as much as you do in your own.
6. Q: What are some considerations for couples who live separately?
A: Considerations for couples who live separately include how to maintain a connection when apart, how to respect each other's space, and how to handle differences in patterns of sexual desire. Skills in scheduling and keeping time commitments are also important.
7. Q: What is a metamour?
A: A metamour is your relationship with your lover's lovers, and theirs with you. Being a metamour brings up points of etiquette that can be tricky to navigate. The authors suggest meeting the metamour if possible and doing your best to fall in like with them.
8. Q: What are some considerations for couples who maintain multiple primary relationships?
A: Some very capable sluts maintain more than one primary relationship. This can result in complex family networks that include exes, children, and grandchildren. It is important to be mindful of these relationships and to consider how they will be impacted by any new partnerships.
9. Q: What are the authors' thoughts on marriage?
A: The authors think it is important that everyone look closely at what's under the crust when considering marriage. They suggest that marriage as a legal concept should be abolished, allowing people to enter into contract relationships as allowed by existing laws. This would allow people to consciously choose their arrangements rather than having them legislated.

Response:
# 20

# COUPLES AND GROUPS

Sluts relate in as many combinations and styles as you can imagine, and more. Is there a typology of relationships that could include every wonderful possibility? Obviously not—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: ours! Your authors have been lovers, coauthors, and best friends for twenty-five years, and we have never lived together. We have both lived with other partners during those 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 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 are developed daily by brilliant sluts who want to explore the rewards and challenges of their own customized lifestyle. In this chapter, we will discuss some of the 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 of our puzzle we were 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 poles? When we include _all_ 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, somebody else will—our relationship will not be less for it. What we share is valuable for what we share. Period.

"Each relationship seeks its own level when we let it."

We like to be easygoing about sex, but what people mean by "casual sex" is perhaps too dismissive. Casual sex sounds like we are supposed to be distant: don't get too close, don't expect too much, avoid any expression of intimacy or vulnerability.

We are now hearing people refer to certain of their lovers as "friends with benefits," an interesting concept. Why shouldn't we share the manifold benefits of sex with our friends, making sex a natural part of the love and honor and loyalty and openheartedness that we already share?

We have learned the most, and had the most fun, and made the most wonderful, rich connections, when we have welcomed each new person into our lives just as they are, without trying to force them into the picture that's labeled "relationship" in our brains. This has been true whether we've been single, coupled, part of a group family, or engaged in any one of the myriad other ways of relating that creative and loving sluts can devise.

Couplings

We hear too often of folks who delight in a joyously slutty lifestyle until they "fall in love." Then, perhaps prodded by cultural messages that love must equal marriage must equal monogamy, they dive into an attempt at a conventional lifestyle, often with disastrous consequences. Both of your authors have proven themselves not immune to this kind of programming. A cautionary word: sex and romance, no matter how spectacular, are not reliable predictors of satisfaction and peace of mind in a long-term relationship.

There is no reason why wedding bells, or the equivalent thereof, need to break up that old gang of yours. Many sluts find it possible to combine the committed stability of a life partnership with the pleasures of sex and intimacy with others.

However, there is no question that being a slut within a committed relationship has some special challenges. Even people who know better often find (sometimes to their surprise) that their expectations of a committed relationship may include the right to control many aspects of their partner's lives.

While we're going to write about couples for the sake of clarity, all the principles apply equally to threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes. Relationships take their own shapes, but the best ones tend to share some basic principles: good boundaries, mindfulness, and a mutual desire for the well-being of everyone involved.

As you can probably guess, we don't much like the idea that a relationship commitment specifies anybody's right to anything beyond mutual respect and caring for each other. Yet once you divorce romantic love from the concept of ownership, what happens? One woman we know, who had never been in an open relationship before, was startled to find that many of her old habits had become irrelevant: "Why should I bother to look for stray hairs on the pillow, trying to sniff out any trace of infidelity, when I know that if they have sex with someone else, they'll simply tell me about it?" Yet there _are_ still issues of boundaries, of responsibility, of courtesy, that complement ownership and promote sustainability, which must be dealt with.

So, how do sluts in love build a life together?

Our friends Ruth and Edward remember:

> We had a monogamous relationship for about sixteen years, then opened it up and started interacting with other people. Now we're trying to figure out what we're comfortable doing with other people and what we want to reserve for our own relationship. Sometimes, the only way to locate the boundary of our comfort zone is to cross it and feel the discomfort. We try to take small steps so that the pain is minimal. We're definitely committed to each other and are each willing to stop doing things that the other finds threatening.

Here are some special problems that may come up for partnered sluts.

When each relationship seeks its own level, then some relationships end up as life partnerships, which may include sharing living space, possessions, and sometimes parenting. Others may take other forms: occasional dates, friendships, ongoing romantic commitments, and so on. Yet many folks find that they've gotten into a habit of letting their relationships slide inexorably into life partnership without much thought or intent on their part. (Some clever person coined the term **relationship escalator** for this pattern, because once you step on, you can't get off until you reach the end.) Well-meaning friends and acquaintances may aid in this process by assuming that you and your friend are a couple before you've ever decided to become one. In addition, many people get coupled by accident, by virtue of an unplanned pregnancy, an eviction romance where one partner loses a housing situation and moves in with the other, or simple convenience. Janet remembers:

> In my freshman year of college, I met a guy I liked a lot—quiet and shy, but when he said anything, I really liked what he had to say. Finn and I wound up going out together a couple of times and having sex a few times. When school ended, we wrote to each other over the summer. Then fall came and I began looking around for a place to live outside the dorms. The only room I could find was a double-sized room that I could afford only if I shared it with someone. So I called Finn and proposed that we share it, putting up a partition across the middle and sleeping on separate mattresses, and he agreed.
>
> The first night there, Finn had already gotten himself a mattress, and I hadn't yet—so I shared his. Somehow, we never did get around to getting another mattress. We wound up living together for a couple of years, then getting married. That missing mattress led to a fifteen-year marriage and a couple of kids.

While we're all for coupledom for people who choose it, we like to see folks make their choices a bit more thoughtfully. We suggest that before you let yourself slide into something that you don't really want, you do some serious thinking and talking, alone and together, about what is the best form for this particular relationship. Talk to each other about what love means to you and how you fit into each other's lives.

You may discover that while you enjoy one another's company and have fabulous sex, your habits regarding housing, money, possessions, and so on are wildly incompatible. In such a situation, you could do what generations of people have done—move in together and spend years trying to change one another, getting frustrated and resentful in the process. Or you could reconsider some of your implicit assumptions. Do you have to live together? Why? Why not instead enjoy your friend for the things you like about them and find someone else with whom to share the other things? Sluthood means, among other things, that you don't have to depend on any one person to fulfill all your desires.

If you know you're a person who tends to slide into coupledom, we suggest spending some time trying to figure out why you've fallen into this pattern and what you hope to get out of being part of a couple. It's a very good idea for everyone to learn to live single—to figure out how to get your needs met without being partnered so you don't find yourself seeking a partner to fill needs that you could equally well fill yourself. You might also consider experimenting with some relationships unlike those you've tried in the past—instead of looking for your perfect soulmate, try dating some people you like and trust but don't necessarily love, or maybe love in a quieter way than chills running up your spine.

The key is to build your own sense of internal security. If you like yourself, love yourself, and take care of yourself, your other relationships can arrange themselves around you as perfectly as crystals. We hope that if and when you get coupled, you do it on purpose.

Special Challenges for Couples

The commonest form of relationship in our culture, and many others, is the couple: two people who have chosen to share intimacy, time, and perhaps space and possessions, for now and the foreseeable future. While couplehood has a great deal to be said for it—it's a lot of work building a life, and many hands make light work—it also offers some special challenges.

The ideas in this section are written for two-person couples for the sake of simplicity, but most of them apply to threesomes and moresomes as well.

COMPETITION

One problem that sometimes arises between partners in sluttery is competition to be the most popular, a concern most of us have carried around in the bottom of our psyches since junior high. Sometimes partners compete with each other to see who can score the most or the most attractive of conquests—an ugly picture.

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 much 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.

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.

CRUSHES

We have pointed out before that it is impossible for anyone to predict what depth of feeling may potentially exist in any 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 _NRE_ , which stands for **New Relationship Energy** ) 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 can 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. However, while being in a long-term relationship may involve trading away some of the juicy excitement of a brand-new unknown partner, the intimacy you get in return is valuable too, and you can't have that with a person you met two weeks ago. The trick is to find a way to manifest both possibilities—the intimacy of sharing and the heat of novelty—in your own life.

Remember, please, that fantasy is not reality, and enjoy your fantasies while also maintaining your commitments. When you expect a crush to be 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 for each other.

The Multihouse Couple or Group

Not all couples or groups live together. In recent years, it has become more common that partnerships, with all the closeness and longevity of couplehood, may nonetheless span two or more households, sometimes even in different cities. Sometimes this situation comes about by happenstance: school or career commitments, for example, may create geographical distance. Others 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 arrangements 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 folks 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 a quarter century 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 arrangements and what special skills or wisdom have developed from these assumption-challenging partnerships.

Often such partners create rituals that maintain their connection when apart—agreements about phone calls, ways of reaffirming love at coming-togethers 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.

The differences that all partnerships need to manage don't go away when partners live apart: differences in gregariousness, tidiness, sleep schedules, 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 protection against bed death. Nor does it make every time together automatically an occasion for sex.

We suspect that couples living separately will not be that different in their sexual lifestyles from those who live together. It can, however, make being together much more of a special occasion, so people tend to respect these times and be willing to invest a little effort into making them special.

One question people often ask about such arrangements is, "Then how do you know you're a partnership?" They know by how they feel about each other and, by extension, how much of their lives they are sharing. We'd like to see a world where all our relationships are honored and valued and where it is understood that a partnership's love and their journey together is in no way less important just because it occurs in two or more houses rather than one.

Metamour Relationships

The word _metamour_ is a recent coinage to describe your relationship with your lover's lovers, and theirs with you. Being a metamour brings up points of etiquette that Emily Post never dreamed of.

Dossie notes:

> I was once in a relationship with a man who had a primary partner whom I had not met. I had asked to meet her, and she was considering whether she felt safe enough to do that. Their arrangement was that when Patrick had a date with me, Louisa would make a date with her other lover, and everybody would, hopefully, feel safe and taken care of. Unfortunately, Louisa's other lover frequently stood her up, and then Patrick would stand me up, which I began to find unacceptable. After much back and forth, Louisa finally agreed to meet with me—our first meeting wasn't exactly warm and fuzzy, more like a somewhat distant effort to survive the occasion. However, she did agree that Patrick could see me whether or not she had a date, and we would make sure that she got plenty of advance notice, that he got home on time, and that she got lots of support from both of us. As we worked through this, Louisa and I got closer and closer— I particularly remember one night when we were worried about Patrick and sat up late talking about him while he slept in the next room. Louisa and I became best friends and went into business together, putting on workshops and theater presentations. Patrick and I wound up growing apart as lovers, but the friendship between Louisa and me carried on.

Should you meet the metamour? We vote yes: if you don't, you'll almost certainly wind up imagining someone sexier, more predatory, and more threatening than anyone could be outside a Hollywood erotic thriller. Besides, who knows?—you might wind up liking them.

For your first meeting, choose an easy, nonstressful environment: lunch or coffee, a walk in nature, a movie (then you can talk about the movie even if you're having trouble finding your words).

Do your best to fall in like. If you take a dislike to one of your partner's lovers, things can get very messy, and happy balances can be hard to find. We sometimes regard lovers whom we do not instantly adore as we do in-laws: we may not exactly love our brother's wife or our mother's new husband, but we recognize that this person has joined our family and has rights and feelings just like everybody else, so we find ways to be cordial at the various gatherings that we all attend.

Some of our best friends are people we met because someone we were fucking was fucking them, too. You may find yourself considering forming a liaison with this person yourself—we talked to one woman whose first experience with open relationships took place when her girlfriend was sleeping with another woman and our friend wound up falling in love with the other woman. "My girlfriend got kind of cranky," she remembers wryly. "We're all tight family now, but it took a decade to get here." We suggest a bit of soul-searching to make sure your motivation is loving or lustful rather than vengeful or competitive—then, if you "test clean," go for it. It's really not too surprising that you like the same people your partner likes, and mutual attractions like these can form the nucleus of a long-lasting and very rewarding little tribe.

On the other hand, we sometimes see sluts who feel that they _have_ to be sexual with their lover's lovers. In some cases, both parties in a partnership have an agreement to play with a third party only together. Such agreements require that both partners are comfortable with potential thirds—being sexual with someone you find unattractive or unpleasant is a very bad idea for you and for them.

You may simply feel that because your partner likes and lusts after this person so much, you should too—to assuage your partner's guilt or to satisfy some obscure sense of fairness. Please don't. If you simply don't feel hot for your squeeze's squeeze, don't let yourself be driven into a position where you feel you have to fuck out of politeness: there are many other excellent ways for people to relate to one another. Cook a nice dinner, go to the movies together, play cards together, or find some other way to help this person feel accepted into your life.

Which brings up an important question: how much responsibility do you have for helping your lover's lovers feel secure and welcome? We've both spent many long telephone conversations reassuring our metamours that, yes, it's _really_ okay, and have a great time, honey. We think your own needs should be of primary importance to you; if you really just can't be welcoming and supportive, then simple civility can suffice. On the other hand, we also think it's gracious to be as friendly as you can without having to grit your teeth and force a smile. At minimum, we suggest that you try to provide some reassurance that this is not a competition, that you are not being harmed by anything that's going on, and that you are able to take care of your own emotions—in other words, a promise to own your own stuff and not blame the third party. After all, such people come into your life because you share something very important: the belief that your partner is the hottest thing on legs. They presumably have better things to do with their time and energy than sitting around plotting how to destroy your happiness.

Some couples take meeting and interviewing prospective partners very seriously, and we suggest this strategy when your model of polyamory requires that you include any new partner in your family. People with children, for instance, care a lot about who comes to the house and could wind up as an uncle or an auntie to their kids. Some poly people will not have sex with a lover until all these issues have been dealt with, and those are fine decisions to make if they fit your lifestyle: long engagements can be a very good idea.

After the crush is over, some people will find a long-term place in your life, often unexpected, like the lover who has become your kid's favorite uncle or your partner's business partner. Others may leave, and when they leave with warm feelings, they may come back again in the future, when once again there is a place for them in your life or for you in theirs. Thus infinitely connected polyamorous sluts build their webs of extended families and tribes.

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 slut 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!)

Side by Side by Side by…

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 because 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 old age. We are impressed.

On Marriage

One of the questions facing coupled sluts is the issue of whether to enter into the special legal partnership called "marriage." In an increasing number of countries, even being in a same-sex relationship no longer exempts you from having to address this question: same-sex marriage has been legally sanctioned in the United States, in Canada, and in many countries in Europe and elsewhere, and we approve. However, we also think it very important that everyone look very closely at what's under the crust when we reach out for the marriage-rights piece of the American pie.

Marriage today is the outcome of government imposing its standards on personal relationships, legislating a one-size-fits-all mandate for how people in sexual or domestic relationships ought to run their lives; it is built to support a very specific style of marriage in which partners marry young, have children, and one spouse works while the other stays home. Many marriages do not fit this pattern and thus are not supported by current laws. In many states we have community property laws, which means that whatever income or debt either spouse creates during the marriage belongs to both spouses: we know a woman whose soon-to-be-ex-husband deliberately threw them into bankruptcy because she was planning to leave.

Marriage is, we're told, a sacrament—a loving ritual where your faith and your community bless your union. Why, then, is our government, the one that says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," insisting that we get licenses? If marriage is sacred, as we think it is, why is legal recognition of a relationship, along with privileges like inheritance and parental rights, restricted to those who are willing to shape their lives to conform to somebody else's design? And why is it assumed to be only for romantic partnerships? Why shouldn't you marry your best friend, if they're the person you want to spend your life with? Dossie's longest-term nesting partner, who raised her daughter with her, was a gay man.

If we ran the world, we would abolish marriage as a legal concept, allowing people to enter into contract relationships as allowed by the perfectly adequate laws that already govern other forms of legal partnership. Sample contracts could be provided by institutions, attorneys, churches, publishers, and support networks. Those who wished to perform marriage as a sacrament could do so under the auspices of whatever religious or social institution felt like a good fit for them. Under such a system, no agreement would be taken for granted; sexual exclusivity, money sharing, inheritance, and all the other issues currently covered by inflexible marriage laws could be consciously chosen rather than legislated.

There is, of course, always a need for laws about the basic responsibilities adults have for children and other dependents. Tax breaks and other support should still be available to those caring for children and dependent elders, who really need them.

Love is a wonderful thing, and we think it would be even more wonderful if we all acted like responsible adults and entered into thoughtful arrangements about the physical and financial foundations of our lives.


Input:
Title: The Single Slut

1. Q: What is the cultural perspective on singlehood?
A: In most cultures, singlehood is considered unusual. People often view their time as single as temporary and something to be ended as quickly as possible. The idea of intentionally choosing to live single for a period of time is not common.
2. Q: What would it take to live single by choice?
A: To live single by choice, you would need to build a social support network of friends, lovers, family, mentors, and other personal resources to get your needs met and feel loved and secure. This can be a challenge, as you would be responsible for making connections and staying connected.
3. Q: What are the benefits of being single?
A: Being single offers unique opportunities for self-discovery and personal growth. You have the freedom to explore different relationships and develop intimacy with people who may not be life partners. You also have more freedom to do your own thing, without having to consider the needs and desires of a partner.
4. Q: What are the challenges of being single?
A: Being single can be difficult in a culture that values coupledom. There may be limited resources and social status available to single people. It can also be a challenge to deepen intimacy in relationships that are not life partnerships.
5. Q: What are the ethics of being a single slut?
A: As a single slut, you have the right to be treated with respect, have your feelings heard and responded to, ask for what you want, have dates honored, receive emergency support, negotiate family holidays, set limits, not be blamed for problems in other people's relationships, and be valued and welcomed as a unique human being. You also have the responsibility to develop and maintain good boundaries, make clear agreements, be straightforward about your intentions, and promote intimacy in all your relationships.
6. Q: What are some common patterns of relationship for single people?
A: Single people may find themselves interacting with a wide range of other people in a variety of patterns. These can include dating other singles, being a partner to someone who has a long-term, life-sharing partner, having role-constrained relationships based on shared interests or activities, and being a lover to a couple or group. Each of these patterns presents its own unique challenges and opportunities.

Note: This prompt assumes that the reader is familiar with the concept of sluthood and the idea that it is possible to have multiple romantic and sexual relationships in an ethical and consensual way. If this is not the case, additional context may be needed to fully understand the prompt.

Response:
# 21

# THE SINGLE SLUT

To live single is unusual in most cultures. Most people look on their times 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.

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 regarded as an escalator to couplehood. How, then, to stay single?

What would your social support network look like? 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, stay connected. It's up to you to build yourself a family and to take care of yourself gently with an open heart.

Your relationship with yourself is a lifelong commitment. When you are single, you have unique opportunities to deepen 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.

Being single over being partnered 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 limited 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 childrearing. 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 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.

"Being single offers the opportunity to spend time being purely who you are."

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 leaves you 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 want to explore how to develop sexual connections with people you like but do not love, or to learn to love without possessiveness, or to explore any of the innumerable relationships that are 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.

The Ethics of the Single Slut

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.

THE RIGHTS OF THE SINGLE SLUT

• 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, respected, and responded to.

• You have the right to ask for anything you want—the person you ask may not 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 a relationship with. How this works may look different depending on the values of the family you're connecting to, but you have the right to ask for more than just being somebody's dirty little secret.

• You have the right to have and 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, welcomed, and respected as the wonderful human being that you are.

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE SINGLE SLUT

• You are responsible for developing and maintaining good solid boundaries. Boundaries are how you can tell where you end and the next person 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.

• 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 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 little bits of essential rubber.

• You are responsible for owning your feelings. Learn to handle your own crises and get support 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 are responsible for valuing and welcoming all your lovers as the wonderful, brilliant, unique human beings that they surely are.

Rainbow of Connections

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.

SINGLES WITH SINGLES

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 any individual, you might be dating frequently, regularly, irregularly, or rarely. Quantity doesn't always equal quality. When everyone is single and no one is auditioning for partners, then each relationship is free to seek its own level, and there may be fewer obstacles to flowing into exactly the relationship that fits for the two of you.

Just because you are single and not planning on changing that right now, please don't take your lovers for granted. Let them know how precious and valuable they are to you. Convention says we should be more reserved: we say let's change that convention. We love hot dates, and we also love warmth.

PARTNER TO A PARTNER

You may be dating someone who has a long-term, life-sharing partner—married or living together. When you are dating that person, someone else's feelings must be taken into account.

Perhaps you find yourself in the position of sleeping with someone who's cheating. Whatever you think about the ethics involved—different sluts make different choices on this one—it is certain that difficulties can arise when your lover's partner doesn't know about your connection. Contortions may be required to keep the partner from finding out—and even with all the cleverness and forethought in the world, there is no sure way to keep such a big secret forever. This kind of secrecy can impose severe limits: if the relationship consists of weekly trysts at the no-tell motel, how much connection can really take place? If the relationship goes well, someone may very well wind up wanting more. It's the "outside" lover in a secret affair who will most likely get abandoned if anybody gets caught.

Perhaps your sweetie is in a "don't ask, don't tell" agreement; many couples new to nonmonogamy try this one in an attempt to feel safer. In our experience, this sometimes creates problems for all concerned. First, many people find their lovers in their social networks, so keeping them all separate can be difficult or impossible. Or lies must be told to protect the agreement—and then it's back to the cheating paradigm we just discussed. Maintaining untruths, even when you're asked to do so, may create distance in any relationship and can be particularly damaging to live-in partnerships, where secrets are a lot harder to keep.

On the other hand, things are often simpler when everybody is informed about your involvement. Even if it starts out uneasily, being out of the closet offers the possibility of working toward learning to be more comfortable. If your lover is part of an experienced poly couple or family, everyone involved will know their boundaries and be able to let you know what their limits are, which can make for a lot more clarity. If they're new to this kind of relating, good faith and a willingness to talk through problems can get you through most difficulties.

Your authors have found that we are happiest when everybody knows and acknowledges everybody. Common courtesy is essential, as is scrupulous avoidance of anything that smacks of competition or one-upmanship. Catfights are only fun in porn.

Both of us much prefer to meet our partners' partners and make friends with them when at all possible. Sometimes they are not entirely sure that they want to be friends with us, and occasionally they're pretty sure they'd rather not, but with patience and goodwill, most of them come around. After all, we have at least one thing in common: we both love the same person.

There is no reason why our interests need be opposed to our lover's partners' interests. We all want to collaborate on creating a happy outcome where everybody gets respected and everybody gets their needs met and their desires fulfilled. In the long run, we are all on the same side.

The experienced slut can take some initiative in reaching out to frightened partners in a gentle and openhearted way. The vulnerability of feeling jealous or nervous about each other is its own form of intimacy, and friendly feelings may be the most useful response.

"We are all on the same side."

Taking care of a partner's partner by sharing sex with them is optional for both of you. It's rarely a good idea to get intimate with someone just because they might feel left out. Occasionally, you will discover a sweet fit and become lover to a couple, as we will discuss soon. But avoid committing yourself to an interaction that you don't like very much or don't want at all. Agreeing to sex you don't want to assuage jealousy almost never makes the jealousy go away. You can respect your own limits while offering support, warmth, and welcome to your lover's lover.

A special case: you may find yourself in a relationship with someone whose life partnership is no longer very sexual, whether from the normal cooling of passion as relationships mature or through illness or disability. When you are dating such a person, do remember to approach their partner with an added measure of care and respect. Such people may be happy that you are keeping their partner happy but still somewhat sorrowful at not being able to fulfill that role themselves. It helps to recognize and honor the valuable contributions that person _does_ make.

ROLE-CONSTRAINED RELATIONSHIPS

Sometimes your relationship may be defined by the roles you play together, roles that a person's other partners may not want or enjoy. Your connection could be as simple as a love of watching football on TV or, perhaps more complicated, being the same-sex partner to someone in an opposite-sex marriage. Your shared roles might be about BDSM, erotic role-playing, exploration of gender, spiritual journeying, or any other sharing that the partnership doesn't provide. Your shared role makes you part of a family's ecology, part of what makes it run smoothly, and is both a joy and a responsibility not to be taken lightly.

LOVER TO A COUPLE

Sometimes sexual connection comes together quite beautifully between multiple people—a threesome, a quad, or whatever. If you are fortunate enough to have this experience, you can expect to honor the relationship that you are privileged to share in and to be honored as a very special member of that relationship. The sex can be very luxurious—think of what can be done with those extra pairs of hands!—and feature various configurations of two on one or two on two or three on one or….How delicious to have multiple people spoiling you, how fascinating to share the active lovemaking with others, a virtuoso symphony when you get practiced at it.

There may be times when someone has little to do and could feel left out. When that happens to you, think about how an extra pair of hands might be useful in whatever the others are doing and gently join in. One time, in such a moment, Dossie was temporarily left out while the couple who were her lovers were having intercourse with each other. She felt a little shy, thought about joining in, and then noticed that these two people, who had been together for quite a few years, were amazingly graceful in their deep connection with each other, so Dossie settled in to watch for a while and was quite content just to witness such beauty. When they were through, they welcomed Dossie into their embrace, and further delights occurred that were well worth waiting for.

You can, if you choose, get to be all about fun and leave the heavy stuff to the partners who will go home with one another afterward. Or maybe you'd rather be there to help out when the kids all come down with chickenpox. Do remember that there is privilege in being an outside partner: as one friend of ours puts it, "I get to be dessert!"

GROUPS

When your lover has a whole bunch of partners, making agreements can look like major treaty negotiations. Perhaps the other members want to meet and approve—that's an easy one. Some will want outside partners to clearly understand the group's limits and boundaries, especially about safer sex, which is great. We are very happy to see that some poly groups are very thoughtful about how they make connection to a new person and are willing to take the time to get things right.

Some groups might want you to join in one way or another—having sex with the group, moving in with the group, becoming part of a group marriage—that may or may not fit for you. You, of course, get to look at what's being asked and decide whether that is what you want, and to define your own desires and limits.

Many initial disagreements can eventually be negotiated if all the parties involved are open-minded and operating in good faith. And if they aren't, you might be better off learning that right at the start. One friend of ours connected with a person who had two primary partners and wanted our friend as a secondary. But when our friend asked what would happen if they were to acquire a primary partner, the new friends said, "Oh, no, that wouldn't be acceptable." So our friend opted out.

Most group marriages and circles we have encountered are much more lightly held and flow easily with new partners who may someday join the group at large, over time, and one step at a time. Dossie belonged to one such family when her daughter was a baby. There were no formal membership requirements, and everyone fit together and grew together as they went along, with partnerships forming and separating and reforming on their own timetables, and everyone responsible for the whole gang of children. This adaptive arrangement worked very well for quite a few years—not forever, but for a good, happy, memorable long time.

Single Soliloquy

Dossie writes:

> Someone at a workshop once asked me: "Don't you get lonely, living alone?" It took me a second to understand that he wasn't trying to make me feel bad. What an ache he innocently opened in me. I had to say: "Yes, of course I get lonely." And yet…
>
> I have lived about half my adult life single. Some things are hard to do by yourself. I bought my first house a few years ago. How I yearned for a partner! But I managed, somehow. I dealt with my fears, as well as with realtors and mortgage brokers and roofers and inspectors, and now I have a sweet little home in the woods: like me, it is mine to share with others when and how I choose.
>
> Someone asked me if I feared being alone in my old age. I am now in my seventies, and you bet I'm afraid of that. I do have a role model—my mother outlived my father by almost thirty years.
>
> Nothing lasts forever. I still crave the thrill of falling in love, the dream of a romance so magical it could never fade. And I know better. But I am a person who prefers burning passion to sweet reason, and I don't consider myself very good at compromise. My compromise for my own survival is to learn to live single and to make a very good life of it: a lifelong commitment to myself.
>
> In 1969, when I was first a slut on purpose and a baby feminist, I decided to live single for five years so I could discover who I might be when I'm not trying to be somebody's wife. But how was I going to make that work? I didn't want to live and raise my child in a cold world with no affection or intimacy, so I devised a scheme for sharing love with lovers I had no intention of living with.
>
> I invented ways that I could take the risky steps of sharing affection openly with people I had not "secured," if I can call it that. I told them what I liked about them. I good-mouthed. I sought out opportunities to be demonstrative. I insisted on calling the feelings I had for each of my lovers by their true name: love. And when I had the courage to be loving, the result was that I got a lot of love back. Sharing an open affection for who and what I love around me has become the foundation of my way of life, whether or not I am living with a partner.
>
> I am confident that this approach can work for everyone, whatever their lifestyle: wouldn't it be a fine world if we all made it a point to honor and cherish and openly value every person we make a connection with?
>
> I live in the country, and I feel this same kind of heart-opening love when I walk on a beach or look at the world from the top of a small mountain or discover, around some bend in a trail, a two-thousand-year-old tree standing in majesty. I feel no desperation, nor any desire to cling. I just feel happy.
>
> Do I sometimes feel lonely? Sure. Do I love my life? Immensely. Sometimes I think I am the luckiest person in the world.


Input:
Title: The Ebb and Flow of Relationships: Navigating Breakups as an Ethical Slut

1. Q: How do relationships evolve over time?
A: Relationships, including sexual ones, often change and evolve over time. This can lead to the development of close friendships or even family-like bonds.
2. Q: How can you handle conflict in a relationship?
A: It is common to want to assign blame during conflicts in relationships. However, it is more productive to look at conflicts as problems to be solved rather than trying to determine who is at fault.
3. Q: What are some common challenges during breakups?
A: Breakups can be difficult, especially when they are accompanied by strong emotions such as grief, abandonment, anger, and resentment. It is important to allow yourself time to process these emotions and to work on rebuilding your life after the breakup.
4. Q: What is appropriate behavior during a breakup?
A: It is important to avoid assigning blame and to refrain from making a big drama out of the breakup. It is also important to respect the privacy of your ex and to avoid trying to split your community over the breakup.
5. Q: How can you maintain a positive relationship with your ex?
A: It is possible to maintain a positive relationship with your ex after a breakup. This may involve setting boundaries, being respectful of each other's privacy, and avoiding gossip or negative talk about your ex to your community.
6. Q: What are the benefits of remaining on good terms with your ex?
A: Remaining on good terms with your ex can provide a sense of security and a foundation for a truly intimate and important relationship that can continue to change, grow, and provide support for many years to come.

Note: This prompt assumes that the reader is familiar with the concept of being an "ethical slut," which refers to engaging in multiple sexual relationships in an ethical and consensual manner. If this is not the case, additional context may be needed to fully understand the prompt.

Response:
# 22

# THE EBB AND FLOW OF RELATIONSHIPS

We observe, with much delight, the number of our old lovers we count among our present friends, and we marvel at how sexual relationships can develop into family memberships. There is a reality limit here: you have only twenty-four hours a day to devote to your love life, and presumably you need some of those hours for work and sleep and so on, so you have a finite amount of time to devote to each of your lovers. You can fit only a certain number of people in your life and expect to do any of them justice.

We find that most people do okay letting their partners come and go as it feels right for each of them. Extended family sexual relationships are more likely to grow apart than to break up. One of the wonderful things about building sexual friendships is that, while past relationships and smaller affairs may come and go over the years, each pairing has its own characteristic and unique intimacy. You create this intimacy the way you learn to ride a bike—by trial and error, slipping and falling, and ultimately zooming along together. Just like riding a bike, you'll never forget this particular intimacy or your own role in it. Even after the most bitter of separations, when conflict is cleared and time has healed the wounds, you may find that you can slip that connection right back on like a comfortable old glove.

On the other hand, sometimes conflict in an intimate relationship goes on so long, or seems so impossible to resolve, that it threatens the very foundation of that relationship. We hope you bring the same high level of ethics and concern to a conflicted relationship that you bring to a happy one.

It is always tempting to respond to a major relationship conflict by assigning blame. In childhood we learn that pain, in the form of punishment from our all-powerful parents, is the consequence of doing something wrong. So when we hurt, we try to make sense of it by finding somebody doing something wrong, preferably somebody else.

What is important to remember is that most relationships break up because the partners are unhappy with each other, and no one is to blame: not you, not your partner, and not your partner's lover. Even if someone acted badly or was dishonest, your primary relationship probably isn't falling apart for that reason—relationships tend to end due to their own internal stresses. Even your authors have trouble remembering this when we are in the middle of a bitter breakup.

When you find yourself wanting to blame, it may help to remember a truism of relationship counseling: any problem belongs to the relationship itself, not either of the people in it. It is useless to try to ascertain who is "right" and who is "wrong": the question is, what needs to happen next? If you start looking at conflicts as problems to be solved instead of trying to decide whose fault they are, you have taken an important first step in solving them.

Some people habitually bear the burden of being responsible for everybody's emotional well-being and feel they're somehow at fault because they're unable to magically make everyone's pain and trouble disappear. Such people need to learn to own their own bit and let everybody else own theirs.

It's also common for one partner to take too little responsibility. People who have a lot of their self-esteem connected to their ability to maintain a relationship may feel the need to make their partner into the villain to justify their own desire to leave. This strategy is unfair to both of you: it gives the "villain" all the power in the relationship and disempowers the "victim." Deciding that you have no choice but to leave because your partner is so horrible is denying the fact that there are always choices. Our experience is that relationship troubles are almost always two-sided: if you can acknowledge your own contribution to the problem, you can work toward solving it.

One huge exception: if your relationship problems include anybody being physically or sexually violent, or emotionally or verbally abusive, it's time to get professional help in learning to resolve conflict in a nondestructive manner. A few minutes on your favorite search engine will tell you how to get in touch with groups in your area that help both battered and battering partners. Only you can decide how much danger you are in. If you feel you are in danger, you really need to leave, now. Professional support is often a good idea to deal with substance abuse—no partner, no matter how wonderful, can resolve something like alcoholism with love alone. If a child is being abused in any way, safety becomes the first priority, and you need to leave _right now—_ you can work on resolving these issues from a safe distance.

Breaking Up

It happens. Good relationship skills and high ethics don't mean you get to be with the same partner or partners forever and ever. It is our experience that relationships change, people grow out of them, people change. Some breakups in our own lives, as we look back with twenty-twenty hindsight, were actually constructive moves toward personal growth and a healthier life for each of us. At the time, however, we just felt awful.

It helps to remember that in the contemporary world, a breakup doesn't have to mean that you and your ex did something dreadful. Most of us can count on going through a breakup at some time in our lives, possibly quite a few times. Rather than hide in denial or torture ourselves with wondering what we did wrong, what would happen if we thought, in advance, about how we would like breaking up to be in our lives?

When a traditional marriage breaks up, nobody takes that as evidence that monogamy doesn't work—so why do people feel compelled to take a slut's breakup as evidence that free love is impossible? Your breakup may be for reasons unrelated to the openness of your relationship. At any rate, it probably isn't evidence that you aren't meant to be a slut: you wouldn't have done all the hard work it takes to live this way if you hadn't had a strong desire for sluthood in the first place.

"Why do people feel compelled to take a slut's breakup as evidence that free love is impossible?"

When a relationship shifts dramatically, it's great if everybody feels calm enough to separate with affection and equanimity. But all too often, partnerships break up in a harsh way, with painful, angry, hurt, and/or bitter feelings. Grief at losing a relationship that we had counted on cuts deep, and while we are going through the hurtful process of an unwelcome separation, none of us is at our best. A whole constellation of friends and lovers can be affected by the breakup of any two partners within, and you may be called upon to support a lover grieving someone who is not you.

It helps to look at grieving as productive work. Loss has left a hole in your life, and you need to pore over what you valued as you figure out how you want to fill the empty space and knit the wound together. You probably will need to do this work on your own—your ex can't do it for you. Feelings of grief, abandonment, anger, and resentment that are overwhelming today will probably seem sad but manageable a few months from now. As the most intense feelings die down, you can find a good time to get back into communication with your ex—have some coffee or go to a movie or some such. It would be a shame not to come out of this breakup with at least a friendship, after all you've shared.

Breakup Etiquette in the Twenty-First Century

Sadly, many people approach the ending of a relationship as if they have been given a license for drama, and furthermore, some people just can't leave in a good way. They need someone to blame—a villain, a perpetrator, a bad person—to feel okay about themselves or to clear their consciences.

The Internet has provided us with fabulous new technology for accomplishing interpersonal drama—friending and unfriending, publishing your wise and wicked judgments about your recently beloved, spreading your indignation like lava over everything.

So while surfing the Web has brought new opportunities, tons of information, and a great many joys into the lives of contemporary sluts, it also offers unprecedented opportunities for acting out, especially during the sensitive period surrounding a breakup.

All the rules that tell us who it's safe to confide in go triple when electronic communication is involved. If you're in the habit of using your blog or social-networking page as your personal journal, please consider keeping a separate page—if it's online, lock it so you're the only one who can see it, but we actually prefer paper for this. You can pour out anger, blaming, grief, and all the other emotions that are important to feel but inappropriate to share with your entire online community. Then you can burn it.

As for junior high school behavior like making a big drama about unfriending someone on your page—well, just don't. If it's no longer appropriate for an individual to have access to your personal information, consider posting less personal information for a while…or, if you absolutely must, simply remove that person from your friends list without comment to them or to anyone else. Unfriending someone so you can bad-mouth them behind their back is silly and rude, and they'll probably hear about it from some mutual friend anyway.

If you look at advice columns from the early twentieth century, there is considerable judgment about the rudeness of using a typewriter to write a personal letter: new technologies often seem very impersonal at first, and email is no exception. The disadvantage of email and social media is that on a computer screen, you can't use your face or body to communicate, and emoticons don't help much. These technologies can be very helpful in clarifying a point that feels too emotional or dangerous to communicate with your voice, but it can also come off sounding a lot harsher than you meant it, because your sympathetic smile gets lost somewhere in the ether.

Who Gets the Friends?

One of the joyous consequences of open sexual lifestyles is that everybody tends to get interconnected in an extended family, sexual circle, or tribe. When a couple breaks up with lots of pain, then the whole circle is affected. For the people in pain, it can feel like there is no privacy. Your friends and other lovers may be full of their own ideas about who's in the wrong. It hurts them when they feel your pain, so the entire circle may start looking for someone to blame.

Ethically speaking, the separating pair has some responsibility toward their intimate circle, and the circle has some responsibility toward the erstwhile pair. The breakers-up should refrain from trying to split the community. In other words, don't demand that all your friends sever whatever friendships they may have with your ex, and don't divide your community up into those who are on your side and those who are against you.

"The separating pair has some responsibility toward their intimate circle, and the circle has some responsibility toward the erstwhile pair."

Privacy is a touchy issue because no one likes the consequences of gossip run amok—but we all need a confidant to tell our troubles to, especially in hard times. Sometimes separating couples can make agreements about who it's okay to talk about private matters and who we would rather not have familiarized with our dirty linen.

If you feel that you and your ex should not be at the same parties for a while, you need to work that out with each other and not wind up screaming at your host for having invited both of you to the same event. It is particularly unethical to call up the host of a certain party and demand that your ex be disinvited or to threaten not to come if your ex is invited. This amounts to foisting your work off on your friends. It is your task to set your boundaries, to make agreements with your ex—and, if you find yourself feeling bad in any place where your ex is also socializing, it is your decision whether to stay or leave. If you wind up deciding that you want to attend this event so much that you will just have to deal with your ex's presence, good for you: you will get some practice at sharing social space with your ex, which you are going to need to do eventually unless one of you moves to Timbuktu. Eventually, with practice, you _will_ get good at dealing with your feelings about your ex, all this will hurt less, and you will be closer to achieving resolution and even possibly friendship after a bitter breakup.

Your circle of friends and family is responsible for not getting split, for listening without judging, and for understanding that all of us think harsh thoughts while we are breaking up. Validate how bad your friend feels and take any condemnations with a grain of salt. The exception to this rule occurs when a breakup is based on the revelation of serious issues, like rape, domestic violence, or destructive substance abuse: there are no easy answers here, because a circle of sexual partners really does need to make judgments about these things. But most of the time, the accusations are about what a thoughtless, selfish, insensitive, needy, bitchy, dishonest, manipulative, passive-aggressive, rude, and stupid asshole that ex-partner is; we have all been all of these at some time or another, so we should be able to understand and forgive.

Happy Endings Are Possible

While breakups are very hard for all concerned, and while we understand that you may feel very angry, sad, abandoned, or ill treated for a while, we implore you to remember that your soon-to-be-ex-partner is still the same terrific person you used to love; burn no bridges. Janet says:

> After our divorce, Finn was very angry with me and pretty depressed, and I felt very guilty. Still, for the sake of the kids of whom we had joint custody, we made a point of staying on civil terms. Now, thirty years later, I count him among my best friends and wound up being one of his support people during his serious illness a couple of years back. If we'd been awful to one another back when things were raw and difficult, I don't think we'd be able to be on such good terms today, and we'd both have missed out on a very important and rewarding friendship.

Smart sluts know, even if they sometimes forget in the heat of conflict, that a breakup need not mean the end of a relationship—it may be, instead, a shift to a different kind of relationship, possibly a relationship between courteous acquaintances or friends or maybe even lovers.

Dossie relates:

> I dated Bill for two years, during which our connection on all levels was wonderful to me, especially an intense sexual connection: we explored a whole lot of firsts together. So we moved in together, and that lasted for all of six months before we blew up in a massive fight and separated. We really did have very different life goals. It was about a year before we could be around each other much, but then we started dating again, and the sex was even hotter and more profound than before. We wound up getting together once a month or so for the following nine years, as good friends and lovers, continuing the lovely steamy sex that had brought us together in the first place.

EXERCISE: A HEALTHY BREAKUP

Make up three brief, different stories about a healthy constructive breakup. Include details about how each person could work through difficult feelings. Invent agreements for right after the breakup, for six weeks later, and for six months later.

One of the nice things about being an ethical slut is that your relationships don't have to be either/or: you may have as many ways of relating to your friends and lovers as you have friends and lovers. Once you have survived a breakup, not a lot worse can go down. A relationship with an ex is real security, a friendship with someone who has seen you at your worst. When we know someone as deeply we do our exes, with their complete complement of flaws and failings, we have the foundation of a truly intimate and important relationship that can continue to change, grow, and provide support for many years to come. As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote:

> After all, my erstwhile dear,
>
> My no longer cherished,
>
> Need we say it wasn't love
>
> Just because it perished?