On Intimacy

This post is responsive to a prompt from Twitter, which reads: I’d be curious as to your take on sexual/emotional intimacy with other people & how that affects your partnership in ENM. Navigating what kind of intimacy is acceptable between you and your partner when it comes to other people is complex. Your thoughts would be appreciated. 

As with so many things, I think this is a matter of scale. That’s probably going to end up a pretty common theme here. 

I think it is widely accepted that we can have non-sexual friendships where we care deeply for our friends – dare I say even love them – and it isn’t a threat to our marriages. A lot of psychology has shown that we need those external friendships and support systems to be fully healthy adults, and the pandemic has demonstrated that pretty thoroughly through the lack. We can, should, and many do have friendships where we want those friends to succeed, even at expense to our time together. If they’re ill, wounded, or in need of help, we’ll show up. We’ll offer them food and shelter, emotional support, and more, because we care deeply about – love – them. 

It strikes me as odd, then, that in ethical non-monogamy there is a common current of “I’d like my spouse to only sleep with other people they care less about than people they don’t sleep with.” It’s just an odd perspective, in my opinion. And I think it’s grounded in the puritanical ideals upon which so much of our society still rests. Sex is still widely seen as the pinnacle of intimacy. I think we could all do ourselves a favor to reconsider that, but that’s a bit of a tangent. 

What it really boils down to, to me, is that there is a difference between loving our friends and loving our primary romantic partner. At least I think that’s the case on the swinging end of the ENM spectrum, maybe even up to just shy of non-hierarchical poly. That’s inherently going to be a little bit of an “I’ll know it when I see it” situation. For me, I can love and support my friends, want them to succeed and wish I could remove their hurts, and not want to build a life with them. They’re not who I want to run to with great news or heartbreak. When I’m just completely toasted after a tough day or week, and I want to shut myself inside to recover, I want that with my partner, who I know will take care of me in particular ways that are recuperative for me. 

I also think that the reality is that saying we can’t fall in love with someone else is not going to prevent it, regardless of the physical intimacy involved. People fall in love with others without ever having sex with them all the time. If we’re trying to prevent our partners from falling in love with someone else, saying they can’t sleep with them or they have to maintain an emotional distance isn’t actually going to be effective. What might be more effective is having good communication skills, especially making it safe to say to our primary partners “Hey, I’m starting to get feelings for [other person],” and agreeing to work through that constructively. I don’t know anyone in the lifestyle who hopes for that situation to arise. What will prevent it isn’t going to come from prohibitions, though. It’s going to come from having a partnership that is simply untouchable. Do the work at home, and you don’t need to have prescriptive prohibitions beyond. 

I acknowledge that those are lofty goals and are often more easily said than achieved. Still, I genuinely believe effort goes a very long way. Seeing that my partner is trying, even if they’re not good at it yet, gives me a reason to stay and keep striving.

So what about us? I talked in On Language about the ENM spectrum. I think ENM 1 would be zero emotional attachment. One and done. We can fuck because I don’t find you repulsive. ENM 10 is building a life together with multiple partners. Where we’d probably come in is somewhere in the middle, around say ENM 4. Maybe the spectrum is too big, now that I’m trying to use it. Anyway, what we’d like is basically a couple we are very good friends with, who we care deeply about, who we want to see succeed and maybe even help with that, but who is their own unit, and who respects that we are our own unit. That would be new for us to navigate, honestly. We’ve had people we considered friends who we threw down with, but we were never going to be really good friends. We were very casual friends who could share a meal, but we weren’t out going to events together. There wasn’t enough in common. So it would be novel for us to test the emotional boundaries of very good friends we were also sleeping with. 

I think that’s what we genuinely want, though. Having sex with people we were lukewarm about intellectually and emotionally wasn’t super fulfilling for either one of us. We like to be turned on in our brains as well as our southern governors. The simple reality is that, for us, physical intimacy is heightened by intellectual and emotional stimulation. We want to do the work to make that viable for us and for another couple, hopefully with whom we can get a really good multi-direction connection with. The reality is that something like that inherently comes with risks. We’ve put in a LOT of effort to get things on the table so that we can navigate it in a healthy way. Hopefully, what we have is simply untouchable.

So how do we know whether it’s truly untouchable? The reality is that we don’t. It is, admittedly, something of a gamble. Nothing for it. One of our favorite shows was The Newsroom. In the first episode, Will (Jeff Daniels) is talking to Charlie (Sam Waterston) about making good news, and Charlie says “In the old days of about 10 minutes ago, we did the news well. You know how? We just decided to.” Those last four words really resonated with us, and we have adopted them widely in our lives, mostly relevantly with respect to being in, staying in, and actively doing love. We elect loving each other every day. And there are days that it’s harder. There are days where it’s made harder by ENM. But we still just decide to, day in and day out. Every day, tiny choices that are doing love. Hopefully, over time and with repetition, that is what will make us untouchable. The reality is that we cannot prevent an incursion. But, for us, that doesn’t change with ENM – we can’t prevent an incursion from colleagues or anyone else from the common sources of affairs, either. So, for us, the fact that we’re ENM is a separate issue from whether we are vulnerable to being split apart. Not everyone will see it that way; that’s okay.