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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. 

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. 

I cannot tell you how very much I hate the word “compersion.” Not the idea, just the word. The idea of compersion is the joy you feel for someone else’s joy, particularly in the context of ENM.

I remember the first time I felt compersion in an identifiable l way. My ex-husband was being seriously pursued by a woman and he was lighting up at their conversations. I remember feeling almost out of my body, watching myself be happy for him instead of jealous, and having a lightbulb moment that 1) so THIS is compersion, and 2) okay, maybe I really am suited for ENM. 

I had more of that recently, watching my current husband grin to himself while talking with a beautiful, intelligent woman who I genuinely want to befriend (and more…), and with whom I feel absolutely zero competition. That he takes joy in talking with her takes nothing from me. We both have something to offer him, much of which overlaps, much of which doesn’t, and his time with her is time I can and do spend doing other things. It takes nothing from me or from us. 

There’s an odd comfort in that. I remember the first time worrying that it meant I didn’t love my ex enough. Isn’t that the opposite of what we’re taught that love looks like? Isn’t love shown to us as desperate possession of the person’s entire attention? That they’re so consumed with us that they have no eyes, no time, no room for someone else? That’s what Hollywood told me. But as I worked through that – which literally took days if not weeks – I realized that I actually think that portrait of love is pretty unhealthy.

Is it fair to ask one person to supply all of our emotional/physical/spiritual/mental needs? Maybe. Personally, I think probably not. That’s why we have friends. That’s why we have jobs (well… that and capitalism). Those things stimulate us in ways different to what we get at home. Even if our partner does fill all of those needs completely, and is able, willing, and happy to do so, is there not still a gulf between that and possessiveness? Is there not a danger in love so consuming that you aren’t supposed to ever derive joy anywhere else?

To be quite clear, I’m not saying that monogamous relationships are toxic or that wanting to be in one makes you possessive and dangerous. At all. 

What I am saying is that I think, like so many other things in life, there is a spectrum. Some of us are happy for our partners to derive joy from hobbies, friends, man caves and girls’ weekends. Some of us like seeing our partners excel at competitive sports, support their efforts at a talent or a craft, or go with them to classes just to learn together. Most of us are okay seeing our partner get their happiness from other people in group settings, or even one on one, already. The difference is that I’m also happy for my partner if that comes with implicit or explicit sexual overtones. So while at first glance the gulf might seem quite wide, I think in fact it’s a line which most of us toe right up to without ever seeing it. Some of us are okay stepping over. Other’s aren’t. And that’s okay. 

If I seem to experience it relatively easy, why do I hate the word “compersion” so much? Because it’s weaponized. If you stick around, you’re going to see that a lot of my word choice comes from the weaponization of words within the poly community of which I was a part. In that community, if you experienced anything other than 100% pure bliss at your partner experiencing sexual or other pleasure at another person’s hands, you were a bad person. 

And I want to be clear about something: as easily as I feel happy when my husband is enjoying time with another woman, that does not mean that EVERYTHING I feel is happy. There are complex emotions. There are days I don’t feel good about myself, so when a smoke show is making my husband grin, that can prickle sometimes. Every now and again, even though I cognitively don’t feel competitive with most women, jealousy rears up its ugly head and says “Okay, but what if he falls in love with her?” There is no perfect compersion, I think. It is okay to have moments of less than perfectly joyful feelings when thinking about your partner being intimate with other people. However, in my experience, a lot of poly communities suggest that anything less than perfect compersion means you’re not ready for the lifestyle. You’re a bad person for occasionally having doubts. So the word becomes a tool by which people judge others outwardly, even if they experience the same things inwardly. 

ALL THIS TO SAY: ethical non-monogamy is almost inherently going to raise complex emotions. What feels safe and okay one day might, the next day, put your hackles up a bit. That is allowed. That is normal. If Tuesday the grin on your spouse’s face when someone else’s text arrives doesn’t feel as good as it did on Monday, that doesn’t mean you have to scrap the entire idea of ENM. It just means you’re human. It just means that sometimes emotions are fucky. As long as you talk with your partner(s) about it, as indicated, you’re gonna be fine. What we’re not gonna do is let perfect get in the way of really, really good. 

So far I’ve referenced ethical non-monogamy (ENM), polyamory, and swinging in this blog, and we’re only three posts deep including this one. So let’s refine some terminology as it will be used here. I’m not trying to make rules for everyone – these are for context as you read my works only. 

Polyamory: multiple romantic relationships, which I will almost exclusively use to mean non-hierarchical multiple relationships for reasons I’ll get into in another post. 

Swinging: having sex with different people, often in a low or no-repeat situation, but largely an activity done with the primary partner and often in the same room. 

Ethical non-monogamy: umbrella term covering electing, proactively, with your partner(s) to engage in sexual or romantic relationships with other people, with full, non-coercive consent from them.

And I haven’t used it yet, but included in the umbrella is Open relationship: having sex with other people that may or may not involve emotional attachment, largely undertaken separately from the primary relationship. 

I wrote on my Twitter account recently that I wish we had a scale for ENM like we do for the Kinsey scale. Like ENM 1 is swinging only, no repeats – bed notching. ENM 10 is non-hierarchical kitchen table polyamory – everyone is an equal member in all the relationships, even if the particular person-to-person dynamic is non-sexual. Someone who I’ve come to think of as a friend, despite the fact that we’ve never met in real life, mentioned that they use the term “relationship anarchy,” because it encompasses all of that. 

And they’re right. But, in my opinion, that’s not any more of a clarification on the particular type of ethical non-monogamy – or relationship anarchy – than the original ENM umbrella term. Language is used to mean things. Sometimes labels are sloppy and they don’t fit just right, but they help us understand the world around us. I am bisexual. For me, what that means is that I am gender agnostic, if you will. I don’t much care about the gender presentation or sex organs a person has as distinguishing features – I can be turned on by the right person in any body with any presentation. For other people it might encompass different presentations. But for all of us – universally – bisexual conveys that we are interested in people of the same gender and of other genders. Language means things. 

So here, when I’m talking about swinging, I’m largely talking about one-night-stands or infrequent repeats, primarily physical in nature, undertaken with the primary partner as a participant. When I’m talking about polyamory, I’m largely talking about non-hierarchical kitchen table polyamory. And when I’m talking about ENM, it’s because that’s how my husband and I view what we’re doing and what we want.

The most in my own I’ve ever felt sexually has been at a swing club, at least until I found NSFW/ENM Twitter. Good clubs set out a few ground rules that make it feel very safe to be overtly sexual there as a woman. That’s the baseline. But a general ethos in swinging is that the women are in charge. That’s not in a power dynamics way, although that’s often okay, too. Rather it’s a “what she says goes. Period.” No means no and “discussion” to the contrary is generally not received well. Women are able to walk around fully owning their sexuality, often dressed in ways that make them feel beautiful and sexy and desirable, knowing that, at least for these few hours, they are safe in that. 

Yes, there are always the exceptions. Those will be addressed, I’m sure, in another post. That’s not what this one is about, though. 

How did I get from sitting in the pew worrying about going to hell for thinking Johnny was a hunk to being comfortable in a sex club? It was a journey that was not without its trials, that’s for sure. 

I married young. Too young. We were fresh out of undergraduate school, I was the first real girlfriend he’d ever had, and he was only the second penetrative sex partner I’d had. We truly did not know what we were doing, and we had no business getting married at such a pivotal point in our lives. Maybe that works for some folks, but it didn’t for us. We grew up in the aforementioned small town, and we went to a small, conservative undergraduate school – there was no room for experimentation. 

For example, I had known, once, that I was bisexual, but I locked that part of me tightly away in a closet when I was so involved in the Catholic Church. By the time I left the Church and was addressing some of those cobwebbed corners, I had been married a couple years. He had also missed out on experimentation, so we began talking about how to fix that. 

There’s a break here for a story I’m still not entirely ready to tell. Let me leave you with the understanding that lines were crossed and we had to have some difficult discussions. They didn’t always go well. But what came out of it was that we were interested in something about having relationships and/or sex with other people. We didn’t really have the words or tools to talk about it, though, so we started digging. I’m not always convinced that the Internet was a good idea, but through it we were able to find those notable texts “Sex at Dawn” and “The Ethical Slut.”

We also joined Meetup, where we found our local poly community. We began going together to meetups in our area, or close to it, where we started meeting like minded people. We both went on a handful of dates with others, sometimes together, usually separately. Then I decided life was far too simple, so I’d go to law school. 

As law school will tend to do, it chewed up my marriage and spit it out. We never got to fully embrace polyamory together as a couple because we divorced about a year, year and a half after we began exploring. 

But during law school I met a handsome man who, at first glance, was the beacon of appropriate behavior. As I began to know him, though, I realized that he had a very naughty side – one that would ultimately lead me to an upper bunk in a swing club, making eye contact with another man while he fucked a beautiful woman five feet below me and my own fiancé worked his magic on me. 

I was reflecting last night on the work I have had to do to deconstruct my own notions of healthy sexuality as a woman in 21st century United States of America. My husband and I were talking about how, despite being active members of a community that engages in ethical non-monogamy, we still see a lot of women who are simply uncomfortable embracing their sexuality in an overt way. And it got me thinking about my own journey with starting to learn how to do that. 

My mother was raised in the 60s and 70s in the Bay Area. I was raised in the 80s and 90s in a very small town in the middle of the country. Despite my mom’s best intentions—and I really do believe they were her best intentions—I ended up internalizing a lot of shame about sex and male/female relationships in particular. For example, even though my mother always said she wanted me to come to her when I was ready to have sex so she could help me do it safely, and even though she did follow through and make good on that when it happened, she also had to take a few minutes to calm herself down because her initial reaction was one of a sort of panic. 

But it’s ingrained, isn’t it? That sense of young ladies shouldn’t be engaging in sex. And even when we try to do the intellectual work of overcoming that, the message is insidious and utterly pervasive. Even beyond the confines of religions which indoctrinate a purity culture, as a society the message is that for boys and young men sex and experimentation is fun and exciting and makes them more desirable, and for young women it’s dangerous, potentially lethal even, and makes them tarnished. 

I know I’m not saying anything novel here. I do. But the fact that it isn’t novel is kind of the point – it doesn’t really matter what intentions we set for our immediate families or ourselves to overcome these dated ideas, because the message sneaks in. It always finds a way. 

I remember being about 15, sitting in a pew in the local Catholic Church, of which I was a very active member, thinking impure thoughts about a fellow congregant. With a startle I thought something along the lines of “Oh shit, doing that in church, I’m going to hell for sure.” And then more logical thoughts crept in. Weren’t we hand made by God in His image? Didn’t He give us free will? Didn’t He send His only begotten Son to absolve us proactively of our sins? Why would the new and everlasting God of the New Testament make me inherently sinful? Even if there was a test—which… what kind of abusive ass Father tests His children that way so much—that we were supposed to pass during waking hours, what about my very naughty 15 year old dreams? Why would God hand make me to be inherently sinful in a way I could not even control? 

And thus a thread to pull at presented itself. Why indeed was I made to understand sex as so sinful? Why is something so natural and so utterly critical to the continuation of the species considered bad? What, if you’ll pardon the language, the FUCK (as it were)? 

So that’s what we’re gonna break down here. How did that 15 year old, over the next ~20 years, turn into an adult that schedules sex dates with her husband and other couples? How did I overcome those ingrained thoughts, or, rather, did I even do that? Spoiler: I think it’s a lifetime’s work.