tagged w/ Open Relationships
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This is about so-called “non-monogamous relationships,” about some of the benefits of trying out one of the alternatives to the formulaic dating/marriage/divorce model for love. Your response to this article will probably be similar to the one I had a few years ago when I read a discussion of the same subject by David Sandstrom in the Swedish ‘zine Handbook for Revolutionaries: “good idea, but, uh, not relevant to me, of course…” It turned out I was wrong. Had I remembered a lesson I’ve learned over and over, I would have realized that often the ideas that make me the most defensive and uncomfortable at first turn out to be the most important for me in the long run. Not to say that I’m offering a program that you must all immediately adjust yourselves to… but we can’t remind each other enough to be open to new ideas, in case they do prove to be helpful in our lives.
A couple years ago I had a wonderful experience on tour, in which I finally experienced what it felt like for men’s gender roles to be dissolved: over the course of the tour everyone in the band and the people touring with us were all able to open up and become emotionally supportive and loving, and suddenly the experience of being with a lot of other boys was totally f*cking different from anything I’d encountered before. In this safe, encouraging environment, all of us really felt fearless, free, ready to try anything, with no more doubt or need for walls to protect us. On the surface, it was just that we weren’t afraid to touch and hold each other, and that we stopped complaining and being selfish; but the implications beneath this were immense: I realized that there was no need for intimacy and emotional support to be confined to my romantic relationships—I could create and benefit from these things in every relationship.
This got me thinking about my romantic relationships… if there was no reason my friendships couldn’t be more like my love affairs, why couldn’t my love affairs be more like my friendships? When I thought about it, my friendships had a lot going for them that my love affairs never did: my friends were never jealous or possessive, my friendships didn’t tend to adhere to some strict socialized image of what they “should” be, and while my friendships generally continued on in one form or another through my life, once it turned out that a romantic relationship wasn’t storybook-perfect it would end and I wouldn’t see the lover any more.
All my love relationships had proceeded something like this: In the beginning I would meet a beautiful new person, we would broaden each others’ horizons and have wonderful experiences together, and thus fall in love. At first we would feel more free together than either of us ever had, and the world would seem full to overflowing with possibility and wild joy. But slowly, not trusting the rest of the world, or the future in which we might not feel such wonderful things, we would build our relationship into a castle, to keep out the cold and dangerous outside world, and protect our passion by turning it into an institution. Sex, which at the beginning had been something that came more naturally and freely than anything else, became jealously guarded as the seal sanctifying our love relationship, as proof that it was different than all our other relationships. [This seems, in retrospect, like a really strange role for sex to play.] Inevitably, I would wake up one day and realize that the free, feral passion that we’d been united by was gone, replaced by habit, routine, fear of change; the castle we’d built had become a tomb, sealing us inside and away from the outside world, which we’d actually needed all along to bring us each new things to offer the other and sustain ourselves. Inside the coffin, we fought more and more, each demanding that the other prove her love by sacrificing more and more—when love is supposed to enable you to live more, not disable you in return for an assurance of basic companionship, a companionship that often replaces your participation in larger communities anyway. Falling in love had been like finding a secret entrance to the garden of Eden, a gift economy in which we shared everything without keeping score or worrying about “fair trade”; but now we were back in the exchange economy, competing to see who could need more, who could control more. After all my attempts to transcend the stereotyped roles of people in romantic relationships, I suddenly found that I was a “boyfriend” again, with a “girlfriend” (which is not a healthy role for anyone to have to play in this sexist society!), with no idea how it had all happened.
I started thinking about how it is that we all keep falling into these patterns, and how we could avoid them. The issue of limitation kept coming up: the idea that some things had to be off limits for the relationship to work. With my friends, nothing is off limits, and nothing is demanded either: we offer each other whatever we can, whenever we have it to give, and we don’t demand anything that doesn’t come naturally for the other (that’s how my friendships go when they’re healthy, at least, and most of them are at this point). I decided to look into what other models for love relationships there were, and discovered that there is a long tradition of relationships without these limits and expectations: non-monogamous, or “open,” relationships.
I’m not trying to say that monogamous relationships are bad, exactly, but there are a thousand kinds of relationships, and we generally only permit ourselves to try one format, which seems ridiculous. Let’s explore a bit. Every time I hear about another wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend cheating and sneaking around, every time I hear someone speaking proudly about how (in the name of monogamy) he has managed to resist doing something he really wants to, every time I must listen to someone pathetically lamenting the feeling of being “trapped” in a relationship or unable to pursue her desires out of some kind of fear, every f*cking time I have to witness someone leering voyeuristically (“it’s ok to look if you don’t touch”), it makes me so furious about how we’ve trapped ourselves in this one-option relationship system, accepting these symptoms of suffocation as inevitable instead of experimenting with the other possibilities. More than anything else, our commitment to supporting monogamy as the only option (other than “casual sex,” I guess, which is boring as f*ck and bad in other ways too) keeps us from being honest with each other. We’ve got to dare to address all these complexities of life and desire openly, even if it is painful.
We punk rockers always act like we’re such radical people, but when it comes down to acting, in practice, to try out radically different ways of living that might be more in line with our ideas (or just plain challenging, for once, not safe—nothing is more dangerous than playing it safe!), it doesn’t occur to us to question our programmed habits. All too often our revolutionary ideas are just badges, a different ideology for us to vote for, not catalysts for transforming life. This is an issue that affects everyone, where anarchist values can be tried out in the real world, but thus far I’ve seen very little discussion of this subject in our community; if we’re going to question the way the world works, we should take that home to our own personal relationships, and perhaps try out alternatives there first before proposing solutions to the ills of the world. That is—if we really have solutions to the ills of our society, let’s put those into practice to solve the ills of our own relations. Healer, heal thyself.
What an open relationship is:
Read the rest: http://www.filmsforaction.org/blogdetails/?num=330This is about so-called “non-monogamous relationships,” about some of the... more
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The husband of Jenny Block, author of "Open: Love, Sex and Life in An Open Marriage" opens up to his wife's readers.The husband of Jenny Block, author of "Open: Love, Sex and Life in An Open... more
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Search for: Open Relationships, Overcoming Jealousy
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It's supposed to be the ultimate easy relationship - someone you already know, trust, and have fun with...and now you get to make out too?! However, the first ever study done on young adults looking at this new classification of relationships (which by self-definition of participants includes a wide range of situations from occasional hookups between acquaintances to former lovers who relive their old flame when the fancy strikes) shows that friends with benefits share one of the primary concerns of a real relationship, while lacking many of the positives. Friends with benefits have the same worry of one partner becoming more attached than the other. The ambiguous nature of the relationship also decreases openness and often coincides with a lack of passion and commitment. Sounds like "relationships without the good stuff" might be a better name for it.It's supposed to be the ultimate easy relationship - someone you already know,... more
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Tori
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added this
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4 years ago
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This article explores the broad spectrum of denial and how we use denial to form and sustain close relationships.This article explores the broad spectrum of denial and how we use denial to form and... more
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AllyK
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added this
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4 years ago
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The Weekend!
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