The Ethical Slut (31 page)

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 very 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 brought 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. We have discussed the problems that come from blaming and projection before.

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: the client is the relationship itself, not either of the people in it. During a breakup it is supremely 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 that they’re somehow at fault because they’re unable to magically make everyone’s pain and trouble disappear. Instead of refusing to own their stuff, one partner takes too much responsibility for the problem at hand. 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 in order 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.

If your relationship problems include anybody being physically violent, or emotionally or verbally abusive, it’s not time to waffle over whose fault it is—it’s time to get professional help in learning to resolve conflict in a nondestructive manner. The Resource Guide in the back of this book will tell you how to get in touch with groups in your area that help both battered and battering partners. Similarly, 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.

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. They may acquire new desires, new dreams. Some breakups in our own lives, as we look back with 20/20 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 entirely unrelated to the openness of your relationship. At any rate, it probably isn’t evidence that you aren’t meant
to be a slut: we suspect 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.

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 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 are at our best.

A typical grief process takes about three months to get past the acute phase. 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 really do it for you. Feelings of grief, loss, abandonment, anger, resentment, and such that are overwhelming or intolerable today will probably seem sad but manageable three months from now as you move through this process. 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.

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 (other than themselves), a villain, a perpetrator, the bad guy, to feel okay about themselves or to clear their consciences.

The Internet has provided us with fabulous new technology for accomplishing 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—on which 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.

As for junior-high-school behavior like making a big drama about unfriending someone on your MySpace 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 badmouth them behind their back is silly and rude, and they’ll probably hear about it from some mutual friend anyway. Look for safer and more constructive ways to vent your feelings.

If you look at advice columns from the early twentieth century, there is considerable judgment about the rudeness of using a typewriter (horrors!) to write a personal letter: new technologies often seem very impersonal at first, and email is no exception. The advantages and disadvantages of email are the same thing: on a computer screen you can’t use your face or body to communicate, and little smiley and frowny faces don’t really help much. Email 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, since your sympathetic smile gets lost somewhere in the ether.

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 couple has some responsibility toward their intimate circle, and the circle has some responsibility toward the erstwhile couple. The members of the couple should refrain from trying to split the community. In other words, you don’t demand that all your friends sever whatever friendships they may have with your ex and you don’t divide your community up into those who are on your side and those who are against you by virtue of who continues to speak to your unspeakable ex.

Privacy is a touchy issue here, 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 with, and who we would rather not have familiarized with our dirty linen. Other times, no agreement is reached, and the chips fall where they may.

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 adds up 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, then 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, and all of 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 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 oaf 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.

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, and to burn no bridges. Janet says:

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: