One of the things that became clear to me as I’ve journeyed from that shameful pew to now is that overcoming those entrenched lessons is not accidental. It takes deliberate, head-on work to unlearn decades of society telling us sex is bad, our bodies are shameful, and our natural desires are unnatural and unclean.
So how do we do that? Fuck if I know.
I suspect it’s a pretty individualized process. For me, when my ex and I were first exploring the idea of poly, and I would think something like “OMG we can’t do that,” I would charge myself with thinking through why not. Sometimes I’d do it in my head, sometimes in a journal, and sometimes with my ex. Why can’t two or three or four or 12 consenting adults do anything they want with their bodies?
I know there are laws in place regarding things like helmets, drugs, seatbelts, etc. That’s not the point of this post.
The thing is, for me, that took repetition. Takes repetition. Because as much processing and unlearning as I’ve done, we’re talking about very deeply seated lessons. Core lessons that helped shape us as we grew. And unlearning those is a lifetime’s effort for a lot of us. I still struggle with scheduling sex or sex-adjacent activities. It’s weird to me after a lifetime of having sex intimately linked to romance and “chemistry,” and having society say that sex should arise organically from good connections and attraction etc. Good connections and attraction are obviously somewhat essential to sex for most of us. But the fact of the matter is that for two couples to get together to engage in sex together, that’s not going to happen organically the vast, vast majority of the time. Being okay with scheduling it is essential. And it’s weird for me. So I still have to do that work with some regularity.
One of the things that inevitably happens as I work through this is realizing stuff that should probably be more mainstream even for non-ENM folks. Lack of physical intimacy is regularly identified as a leading cause of divorce. I would normally provide a citation for that here, but it’s so ubiquitously cited that I don’t actually feel like I need to. It’s easy to find. Perhaps if more couples took the time to schedule sex, rather than waiting for it to organically come up in their lives full of work, chores, children, and these unprecedented times, that particular cause of divorce might trend down. Is it going to save all failing marriages? Of course not. Is showing our partner desire—that we want to be physically intimate with them enough that we prioritize it the same way we do things like the gym—important? Yes, of course.
We make time for the things that are important to us. It’s just reality. No one has enough time for work, healthy food, exercise, friends, relaxing, good sleep, and physical intimacy. People make time for their priorities and sacrifice other things instead.
And it doesn’t even always have to be that big of a sacrifice. Even sending our partner a text in the two minutes we have a handful of times a day just to appreciate them – physically, emotionally, otherwise – can go a long way to making the connection last. Again, that’s something that I learned at least partially in exploring this lifestyle. When someone I’m interested in reaches out, even just sporadically, to say they’re thinking about me, that makes the interest go up. It just does. Most of us will respond to interest with interest.
In fact, some of the lessons we’ve learned have been when we ignored the subtle messages of disinterest. The guy that only ever texts innuendo or outright sexts probably isn’t that interested in working my brain. The couple with the wife who very rarely participates in the group chat probably just isn’t that into us. The handful of times we’ve proceeded in these scenarios have turned out to be some of our “Well that wasn’t great” nights. It’s ongoing learning and unlearning, even a decade in.
And not everyone is going to learn—or unlearn—these things the way I did. Some folks are going to be better able to go “Hey, I don’t have to feel weird about this” and just release it. Some of us are going to have to do a lot more deliberate work over a much longer period. Some folks might need a sex-positive therapist or some good educational materials on sex-positivity and/or ethical non-monogamy to help them work through this stuff. All of that is okay. Undoing what society has subtly and overtly put into our brains is going to be different for everyone. We have to unlearn what society continues to subtly and overtly tell us every day, too. These messages don’t stop just because we’re doing the work.
I think it’s work we should all be doing, though, regardless of involvement or interest in ethical non-monogamy. Men who “can’t imagine sharing [their] partner with another man” should consider unpacking that. Why? What’s the threat to you? What has society taught you that makes you feel like you are somehow threatened by that? If she sleeps with another man and still chooses to make a life with you, might that not say more about her devotion to you than strictly adhering to an agreement she made 20 years ago before life got so hard and exhausting? Women who can’t fathom being so open about sex and sexuality, why not? What other ways has society taught you that you are inherently bad for the things you do/think/are/want? Would we as individuals and we as a society not be better off if we addressed some of these things?
I think we would. Everyone might have differing opinions on that. And again, I’m not saying that monogamy is bad or that people who don’t want to share their partners are bad or uninformed or unenlightened or anything. I’m merely suggesting that we would all do well to unpack those initial, visceral reactions we have to things like sex positivity so that whatever decision we make is a deliberate one, rather than one society made for us long before we realized what was happening.