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Authors: Tristan Taormino

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Self Help, #Sociology

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BOOK: Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships
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Who are these daring revolutionaries? When most people think
of those with multiple partners, a few images come to mind. The cheating spouse and his mistress. Crazy swingers, wild orgies, and sex parties.
Polygamous people of a foreign culture in a faraway land. But nonmonogamous people are not a strange or rare breed. They are everywhere, all around you. They belong to hip urban enclaves and they live
on farms in rural America. They have high school diplomas and they
have PhDs. They may have little in common in their everyday lives.
What they share is the honesty and willingness to take a leap and
create relationships that defy everything we've been taught.

My Research

In the past 10 years, I've studied a lot about polyamory and other
forms of nonmonogamy. What always struck me, in reading books and attending workshops, was that how-to information is helpful, but its
just a framework. I can remember attending talks on the subject and
walking away feeling that I didn't know any more than I did before.
Polyamory was portrayed in an idealistic way where everyone was on
the same page, having tons of sex and getting along great. It made me
a little suspicious.

Several years ago, while out of town, I went to dinner with a
friend and a woman I knew from the area. I knew both of them were
polyamorous, and we struck up a conversation about it. My friend
said, "My primary partner and I don't have a sexual relationship. We
have sex with our other partners. But we are 100 percent committed
to one another." I was surprised, because what she was saying contradicted all the models I knew Our companion was a very high-profile
leader in the BDSM community, and she'd been with her primary partner for a long time. "Della and I became poly after she cheated on me.
I was sort of dragged into polyamory nonconsensually, in other words.
When I found out she cheated, I was hurt and angry, but when I cooled
down, I realized I did not want to end our relationship. So, we sat
down and said, What can we do to make this work?"

What I realized that night, listening to their stories, was that I
hadn't heard a lot of people talk about the specifics of their situations.
When someone is willing to share the nitty-gritty details of their life,
we can learn from their experiences. But people have to have the
courage to tell the good, the bad, the ugly, the quirky, the embarrassing, so others know they are not alone.

That is why it was important to include as many different voices and
versions of nonmonogamy as I could in this book. I have my own experiences with open relationships, both successful and unsuccessful. I've
tried many different styles of nonmonogamy I have been in my current
open relationship for seven years. But I think its useful to get as many
different perspectives as possible about such a broad topic. So I turned
to the people I knew who were coloring outside the lines of monogamy

I created a written questionnaire and emailed it to personal contacts
and leaders of local polyamory groups. In addition, I posted information about the questionnaire in online forums and encouraged people
to forward and distribute the posting to others. It's a self-selecting
group of people, or what researchers call a "snowball sample": I send
the interview to people, they send it to partners and friends, and so on,
like a chain letter. I'm not a sociologist-this is not a scientific study,
and the participants are not a random sample-but the information is
valuable nonetheless, especially since there is so little research about
people in open relationships.

In total, I collected information from 126 respondents. I received
written questionnaires from 121 of them. I did follow-up interviews
with 80: 38 of them in person, 20 via email, and 22 by telephone.
(Five of the 38 in-person interviewees did not complete the written
questionnaire in advance; I collected their demographic information
during the course of the interview.)

My study included 66 women, 50 men, and 10 people who
identified as transgender or "other." Thirty-eight percent identified as
bisexual, bi/queer, bi/straight, or bi/pansexual. Thirty-seven percent
identified as straight or straight/bi; 19 percent as gay, lesbian, or
queer; and 6 percent as pansexual or omnisexual. The youngest
person was 21, the oldest was 72, and the average age was 37. The
majority of respondents were white (about 80 percent). People came
from 28 states and were pretty equally divided across the US: 30 percent from the South, 29 percent from the Northeast, 20 percent from
the West, and 19 percent from the Midwest. Two participants were
from Canada. The group included a food-service worker, a cosmetic
sales representative, a Gaming Commission officer, a state tax auditor,
a porn performer, an enlisted member of the Army, and a minister.
The most common occupation was teaching, with six elementary,
middle, and high school teachers and four professors. In some cases,
I interviewed both partners of a couple or all members of a triad; in others, I obtained information from only one member, reflecting just
that person's perspective of the relationship.

Reading Opening Up

This book is a window into the world of possibilities beyond
monogamy It's a study and a road map, a guidebook and a manifesto.
Just by picking it up, you show some interest in the topic. Maybe you
are curious about or considering an open relationship. Perhaps you
have been polyamorous for most of your life and you're looking for
advice about how to actively support your open relationship. You
might be the loved one of a person in an open relationship who wants
to better understand nonmonogamy, or a member of a helping profession (a doctor, therapist, or social worker) who needs to better
understand it. I hope there is something useful here for all of you.

I had an important epiphany while putting this book together:
there is no formula for an open relationship. Everyone does nonmonogamy differently. Each story and each relationship is unique.
There are similarities and patterns, but no one does it exactly the same
as anyone else. Consider the observations and advice in this book a
guide for creating open relationships and making them work. Learn
from the people I interviewed, who share their clarity and confusion,
their heartbreak and joy, their struggles and success stories. Take it all
in as you design your relationships, and remember: life is in the details.

The first section of the book is an introduction to open relationships. In Chapter 1, 1 cover a brief history of different forms of
nonmonogamy since the 1950s and define important terms that are
used throughout the book. Chapter 2 exposes and corrects myths
about nonmonogamy. Why people choose open relationships is the
subject of Chapter 3, and some of the principles that make them work
are outlined in Chapter 4. The second section, Chapters 5 through 10,
describes various styles of open relationships, including partnered nonmonogamy, swinging, polyamory, solo polyamory, polyfidelity, and
mono/poly combinations. Beginning with Chapter 5 and continuing
through Chapter 17, there is a more detailed look at one (or several)
of the subjects I interviewed at the end of each chapter.

The third section of the book is your road map to creating and
sustaining open relationships. Chapter 11 offers guidelines and exercises to help you design your ideal relationship. In Chapter 12, 1 dig
into jealousy and its many companions, including envy, insecurity,
possessiveness, and resentment. Chapter 13 delves into the concept of
compersion, which has been called the opposite of jealousy Some of the
common challenges and conflicts people in open relationships must
deal with-what happens when a partner gets into a new relationship,
time management, miscommunication, and agreement violations-are
explored in Chapter 14. Coping with change is the focus of Chapter
15. In Chapter 16, 1 examine the ways people in nonmonogamous
relationships interact with the world: coming out (or not), finding
community, and creating support networks. Chapter 17 is concerned
with the unique issues people in open relationships face when raising
children. Information about safer sex and sexual health is discussed in
Chapter 18, and Chapter 19 deals with legal and practical issues.

In Chapter 20, 1 look toward the future of relationships and share
words of advice from my interviewees. At the end of the book are some
useful appendixes, including the endnotes, detailed information and
statistics about my research subjects, and a Resource Guide. The
Resource Guide includes recommended books as well as one of the
most comprehensive compilations of national and local organizations,
publications, events, websites, and online communities.

I chose the title Opening Up because I like all that it implies about
people in open relationships. They're open to suggestion. Open to
interpretation. Open to possibilities. Their desires aren't guarded, but
out in the open. These people make room in their beds, lives, and hearts for other people. To those who explore the possibilities beyond
monogamy, opening up is about expanding and evolving. Everyone I
interviewed opened up to me. Some of them were content and settled,
while others were at a crossroads in their relationship, with uncertainty
ahead of them. They all shared their worries, their fears, their hopes,
and their dreams. Their stories touched my life in innumerable ways,
and I hope they touch yours on your journey toward opening up.

Tristan Taormino

 
Chapter 1
Pilots, Parties, and
Polyamory: A Brief History

THE PRACTICE OF conducting consensual multiple sex and love
relationships simultaneously is not new As long as people have been
in relationships, there have been open relationships. From swinging
and open marriage to gay and lesbian sex spaces and communes, a
look at models from recent history provides a context for today's open
relationships.

Swinging

In the United States, swinging was the first organized form of modern
nonmonogamy for heterosexual and bisexual people. Swinging began
as a hidden subculture, so its history is hard to track, but there is speculation about its beginnings. Organized parties where people had sex
with one another date from the 1930s and 1940s in Hollywood. One
theory is that swinging began among Air Force fighter pilots and their
wives during World War II. Pilots moved their wives close to base,
where a tight-knit community of pilots and wives formed. Because so
many pilots died in combat, it was understood that surviving pilots
would care for widows as they would their own wives. This practice supposedly continued through the Korean War. A slightly different
theory is that swinging began on military bases in California in the
1950s. Neither theory has been well documented or verified. We do
know that in the late 1950s the media reported on a new phenomenon
in the suburbs called "wife swapping." There is also much folklore
about "key parties" in the sixties and seventies-where the husbands
placed their keys in a bowl and each wife picked a set and had sex with
whomever they belonged to. Another theory is that swinging began
among hippies and nudists, and some people point to the Sexual
Freedom League, a liberal activist group founded in 1960s Berkeley
which held orgy parties.'

By the mid- to late sixties, swinger groups formed and swing parties moved out of the underground, becoming popular among mainly
white, affluent heterosexual couples who lived in the suburbs, and the
parties were no longer so secretive that they couldn't be found. For
their 1964 book Swap Clubs,' William and Jerrye Breedlove talked to
800 people who belonged to swinger groups in more than 25 cities in
nearly every region of the United States. The Breedloves' study was
part of a surge of sociological research on swingers in the late sixties
and seventies. Academics' fascination with swinging resulted in
dozens of journal articles and books such as Open Marriage, by Nena
and George O'Neill, Group Marriage, by Larry and Joan Constantine,
Beyond Monogamy, edited by James R. Smith and Lynn G. Smith, and
Ronald Mazur's The New Intimacy: Open-Ended Marriage and Alternative
Lifestyles. Swingers themselves chimed in, writing several self-helpstyle handbooks, including Together Sex and The Civilized Couple's
Guide to Extramarital Adventure.

In 1969, Robert and Geri McGinley founded a weekly social
group for swingers that eventually became the Lifestyles Organization,
one of the oldest and largest swinger organizations in the country The
organization produced the first Lifestyles Convention in 1973, and by
the 1980s Lifestyles Conventions were attracting over 1,000 couples. In the late 1970s, Robert McGinley created the North American Swing
Club Association (NASCA), a trade organization for swing clubs; today
hundreds of swinger-related businesses belong to NASCA, which has
become an international organization.'

Since the 1960s, various researchers have estimated the number
of people who swing at between 1 and 8 million. In the late 1990s,
McGinley estimated that there were about 3 million swingers in the US
based on the number of clubs, roster of club memberships, attendance
at parties, and samples of private parties in selected cities.4 Today,
swingers are a large, organized subculture with their own magazines,
websites, clubs, parties, and conventions. They routinely "take over"
entire hotels and resorts for their events.

Utopian Swingers

Among academics who wrote about swingers in the late sixties and
seventies, sociologist Carolyn Symonds was the first to classify swingers
as either "recreational" or "utopian." She described recreational swingers
as "persons who use swinging as a form of recreation... It might fill
needs for socializing, exercise, or perhaps sexual variety or conquest."
She identified utopian swingers as a much smaller group of "philosophical utopians who dream of forming a community and living all
aspects of their lives in that environment. They want to share not only
sex with their fellow communitarians but also provision for food and
shelter, childrearing, education, and other areas of living."' Other
researchers of that period went on to adopt, critique, and reject the
terms. What is most useful about Symonds's classification is that she
identified a small subset of people who differed from the majority, one
that was more politicized and not threatened by the development of
additional love relationships. The utopian swinger sounds very much
like an early prototype of the polyamorous person.

BOOK: Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships
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