Slutever Page 22
It’s clear that, underneath all the openness of Colette and Dan’s relationship, they have a very strong base level of security—and that’s essential when your partner is regularly spending Saturday evenings inside another human being. It can’t be easy to say, “Have fun at the orgy, honey,” if you suspect your partner might leave you for one of the fluffers. Colette told me, “People are afraid of nonmonogamy because they’re scared that the person they love is going to run away from them. But that fear is based on insecurity. You have to be able to love and accept yourself. Because ultimately I know that if Dan finds someone who he’s more compatible with, I’m going to be fine. It won’t be easy, but I will be okay. So you kind of have to be okay with the idea that your partner might run off—it’s always a possibility, but that’s also true of monogamous relationships.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “My analogy is that if you have a dog in your yard, you can make the choice to put a fence around it, or you can let him run free, and if he keeps coming back to you, that’s how you truly knows he loves you—and yes, I am comparing men to dogs in this analogy.”
I asked Colette if she ever felt the desire (or the pressure) to have kids. “Recently,” she said, “Dan and I were on acid, and we were laughing and having this amazing time, and then suddenly I had this thought, like, ‘Wait, if we had kids, it would ruin everything. Everything we’ve been working for—our freedom—would be destroyed.” She thought for a moment. “We’re on this earth to make things. Some people choose to make babies. Others choose to write books or make films or start a company. We’re not leaving our genes behind, but we’re leaving a different kind of imprint.”
I respect the practicality of that. In recent years, the Sheryl Sandberg brand of lean-in feminism has been promoting the old “you can have it all” narrative again—you can be a “girl boss” at work, and have a romantic and intellectual partnership, and raise precocious little mini-me’s all at the same time. It’s like, okay, sure, but what if you’re not rich enough to have a maid? And what if you don’t want your kid to be raised by a nanny? And what if you love spending your weekday evenings alone, smoking weed and Googling “Jon Hamm penis” for five hours? At some point, something’s gotta give.
I understand that I can’t just shrug off the significance of having a family simply because it feels conventional to me, or because I think it will interfere with my rigorous masturbation schedule. I understand that major life steps like having kids, getting married, and buying a house fulfill basic human necessities: People want to be part of a community; we want to feel appreciated and secure; we don’t want to spend middle age alone, eating canned tuna and being casually racist on Reddit. And the older I get, the more I admittedly feel drawn to these conventional landmarks. Like, if you had asked me two years ago about having a family, I would have been like, “Eww, why would I have kids when I could devote my life to more important things, like blogging and attending mediocre sex parties?” But now I’m like, “I’m too lazy to go out. Maybe I should just start a family.” (I guess biology is real?)
But I try to remind myself there are other, less traditional ways of fulfilling these fundamental human desires. Maybe those of us living outside the lines have to create our own milestones—you make your first movie, you buy an apartment with your girlfriend, you sell a painting, you run a marathon, you redecorate your house, you go traveling, you write a book about being a slut that will make it ten times harder to ever get a boyfriend, et cetera. Maybe you don’t have your own kids, but you adopt a proxy family of drag queens. Maybe you foster dogs. Maybe you start a brothel and the prostitutes act as your surrogate children. Maybe you don’t get married, but you acquire a devoted sex slave who sleeps in a cage in your attic. The point is, love and security take many forms, the unconventional of which are often harder to see, which makes it all the more exciting to discover them.
Sex is so perfect. Why destroy it with a relationship?
When I was a kid, I had an image in my head of what a “good relationship” looked like, based mainly on my favorite sappy rom-coms and what I gleaned from the relationships of my parents and their friends. I remember “inseparable” being a word people often used positively when describing relationships—“they’re inseparable” was another way of saying “they’re very in love.” I imagined a good boyfriend as a guy who would come with me to my friend’s birthday party without complaining. This is pretty standard thinking. Romantic relationships are informed by all kinds of socially sanctioned ideas about what is a normal and good way to express your love for another person. Generally, this translates to: someone who will always be at your side. But isn’t that a depressingly simplistic way to define love and connection? Shouldn’t an ideal relationship be two people who support and understand each other, rather than two people who stand next to each other by default?
In her bestselling book Mating in Captivity (2006), famed psychotherapist Esther Perel describes how maintaining space, independence, and individual goals is essential to sustaining the allure of your partner over time. Perel’s research shows that across cultural, religious, race, and gender lines, people report being most drawn to their partners when they are away—when they are able to long for each other and then reunite—or when their partner is doing something they are passionate about—when they’re onstage, in the studio, in their element, when they are radiant and self-sustaining. When, suddenly, the person we know so well becomes once again mysterious and elusive. Putting it frankly, Perel says, “Fire needs air. Desire needs space.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself thus far in my adult dating life, it’s that I need a lot of space. Like, acres. Sometimes I worry it will never be enough. Like, how am I supposed to share a life with someone when I can’t even bring myself to share a bathroom? (I’m sorry, but I don’t need someone else’s shampoo all up in my shampoo. I have enough anxiety.) Even in my open relationship, where I was given a ton of freedom, I still found myself bending the rules almost compulsively. And now I’m like, Shit…at what point do I have to stop blaming society for all my problems, and actually admit that the problem just might be me? Do I just suck at relationships?
Despite all my commitmentphobia and boundary issues, to my credit, there is one type of relationship that I have mastered: the fuck buddy. I’m really good at fuck buddies. To me, fuck buddies feel like this weird life hack where you get to be close to someone and have sex semiregularly while offering them literally nothing. As it turns out, I’m great at that! When it comes to offering people nothing, I’m extremely passionate and consistent.
It’s telling that the two longest relationships of my life have both been with men who I was never officially dating. The first guy, Ben, was my friend with benefits for eight years. We met when I lived in London, when I was twenty-two and he was seventeen (that’s legal there, I checked). For most of that time we lived on different continents, but inevitably, a couple of times a year, we’d find each other somewhere in the world, have a few days of romance, and then go our separate ways. And while I couldn’t imagine being with Ben “for real”—I mean, he’s a low-key homeless anarchist who once took me on a date to his Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting; there are red flags—I still valued our relationship immensely. I mean, eight years, that’s longer than I predict my first marriage will last. And honestly, Ben knows me better than a lot of my partners ever did.
People are skeptical of fuck buddies. They’re like: How can you have sex with the same person, again and again, without falling in love? Or at least, without getting super jealous and Fatal Attraction–esque? Some assume that one of the “buddies” is always being strung along, secretly hoping that the fucking leads to something more serious. Others dismiss fuck-buddy dynamics as just being compulsive sex that’s devoid of emotion. But I beg to differ. For me, this dynamic has been a way to have a relationship while removing the creepy ownership of another human being. Fuck buddies have felt like the perfect middle ground: a liminal space be
tween so-called eternal love and zombie-fucking a stranger; a place where you can care about someone, have good sex, and yet not want to literally implode at the thought of them sleeping with someone else.
Case in point: The most significant romantic friendship of my life, Malcolm, my aforementioned editor who helped me harness my slut powers. When Malcolm and I met, we bonded over our shared ineptitude at “normal” dating. He would always tell me, “Sex is so perfect. Why destroy it with a relationship?” I’m pretty sure it was meant as a joke, at least partially, but it left a nagging imprint on my dating subconscious.
In the years since we first met, there have been times when Malcolm and I saw each other frequently, and other times when things dropped off for a while, usually because one of us had a partner. And sure, when he would get a girlfriend, I’d be a little bummed out, but it didn’t cause me to spiral into an emotional cyclone the way I would have if I’d been cheated on by a boyfriend. After all, disappointment comes from expectation. Ironically, when my fuck buddies tell me stories about their crazy and hot sex adventures, I can get really turned on. I can’t count the number of times I’ve touched myself while in bed with a fuck buddy, listening to them detail the time they were willingly statutory-raped by one of their friend’s moms. But when my partner talks about people they’ve fucked, all hell breaks loose. Why is that?!
Over time, Malcolm and I became intensely close—in a sex way, but also in a friend way. It felt like we had entered this secret bubble of transparency—we were emotionally intimate, yet free of the burden of jealousy and ownership. We could spill our guts to each other because we didn’t have anything to lose. I told Malcolm about my previous relationships, my heartbreak, and my likely problematic predilection for porn where the sex looks slightly painful for the woman (not my fault—I didn’t program myself). It seems counterintuitive, but at times it has been easier for me to be more open and honest with friends with benefits than with my actual partners. This paradox always makes me think of that Mad Men episode where Betty seduces Don at their kids’ summer camp, well after they’d both remarried. Afterward, when they’re lying in bed together, Betty says of Don’s new wife, “That poor girl. She doesn’t know that loving you is the worst way to get to you.” Harsh. But sometimes romantic friendships can offer a type of intimacy that committed relationships can’t.
I recently brought all of this up with Malcolm. He told me, “Having a friend with benefits is great because it’s just—it’s just less annoying. It’s more of a low-intensity intimacy. It’s not encumbered by obligations, which just lead to resentment. We are all selfish—we all live in this Ayn Rand–ish self-centered world, whether we like it or not. When you’re in a friends-with-benefits situation, you don’t have to go to the other person’s awful friend’s birthday party. But if you behave like that within a conventional relationship, it causes problems.” In other words, your fuck buddy gets all the good stuff about being in a relationship—the wild sex, the cuddles, the juicy dark secrets—minus all the boring, would-rather-die activities that go hand in hand with commitment, like having to help assemble your boyfriend’s IKEA bed, or having to watch your girlfriend stab at the ingrown hairs on her bikini line while she watches the Kardashians. (That’s me—I’m the girlfriend who does that.)
Honestly, sometimes I ask myself: Why do I feel like I need a long-term live-in partner, anyway? Why is it weird to think that my friends with benefits could satisfy my need for intimacy and connection for the rest of my life, while leaving me all the space I need to fuck strangers for blog anecdotes? It seems kind of chic to be a woman whose life includes an ever-changing rotation of new and diverse lovers. There’s a part in the film The Royal Tenenbaums where a montage shows the many suitors of Etheline Tenenbaum (Anjelica Huston) over her life, ranging from archaeologists to writers to Arctic explorers. Whenever I watch it I think, Wow, that’s so glamorous—maybe that’s what I want! Imagine how much I could grow and learn and how dynamic my life could be if I were constantly being energized by new blood. At the same time, perhaps the reason romantic friendships have always been so attractive to me is that they lack the soul-baring vulnerability and intense emotional investment that are integral to a more committed partnership. And it would be silly of me not to think that I could learn a lot from that dynamic, too.
A Slutty Future
Not long ago, I was emailing back and forth with Christopher Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn, about my never-ending relationship-versus-freedom anxiety. (Really, he’s the best friend to have when you need advice about your slutty problems.) I was explaining to him that, yet again, I had found myself deeply in crush with a guy who didn’t seem very interested in nonmonogamy, and I couldn’t help but think: Wait, why am I back here again? Why am I investing my time in yet another person who doesn’t want what I want? Chris’s response was so perfect. He wrote me:
For what it’s worth, my life changed dramatically when I started offering people only what I had to offer, as opposed to what I knew they wanted. I thought I was entering a romantic/sexual desert, but it ended up closer to a fucking Gauguin painting. I know it’s harder for women (because men can be so narrow-minded), but things got A LOT easier for me once I adopted a “this-is-who-I-am, take-it-or-leave-it” approach to all things romantic. It eliminates all the time wasted in cultivating relationships destined to hit the wall of truth eventually—and the ensuing suffering. Better to filter them out early and invest that time in people who are interested in who we REALLY are. Plus, that has the added benefit of helping us work out who the fuck we are, too.
So good, right? It reminds me of what Colette said about Dan: “I’m so happy to finally be with someone who radically accepts me for me: a weird, polyamorous sex worker.” And I guess that is ultimately what I want. I want to be with someone who accepts me for who I am, who isn’t threatened by the fact that I’m an insatiably curious sex writer whose urine is arguably more valuable than her ideas. I don’t want someone to like me despite that—I want someone to like me because of that. And I want to be able to curb my jealousy and accept someone for all their weird and vaguely annoying tendencies, too. (It’s only fair.) I want someone who respects my ideas about sluthood, but who also is going to push me out of my blindly defiant default setting and inspire me to be emotionally vulnerable. I want someone who challenges me, but who also makes me feel deeply understood.
I think that, particularly in my generation, we’ve been brought up to believe that independence and individuality should be primary goals. We’re told that if we want to be a modern, hashtag liberated Lean In feminist, we should avoid shifting from being an “I” to a “we,” and that we should resist changing ourselves for our partners—whether that means putting off monogamy, or prioritizing your career equally with your relationship, or not taking your husband’s last name, or insisting that your boyfriend tolerate your taste for pink velvet furniture, or whatever. And, of course, independence is hugely important. But I think that sometimes, in the heat of this pursuit, we can forget the importance of love and partnership, and all the things you gain from being a team. At least, I know I can. Because truly, isn’t the ideal that someone changes you for the better? That someone makes you feel happier, more supported, more known, and just generally like less of a manic bitch? I probably sound sappy, but I’m saying this because I want to make it clear that my goal in life is not simply to be an uncompromising slut maniac, or to assert that any person who won’t accept me as is, sans negotiation, just isn’t good enough or “enlightened” enough to be with me. Not at all. Truly, I want to be with someone who inspires me to be myself, but better. I want to take Christopher Ryan’s advice and say, “This is who I am,” while also being self-aware enough to know that there’s obviously room for a touch-up once in a while.
Beyond that, I guess I don’t really know what I want. I’m never going to be the type of person with a five-year plan. Honestly, if you told me that in five years I would be living uptown, married to a Wall St
reet dude, and blogging about being pregnant, I would believe you. On the other hand, I could also believe that in five years I’ll be living in Mexico, in a poly relationship with a nongendered entity, running a hipster brothel. I just really don’t know. Maybe life is like a craft fair embroidery wall ornament and we truly never know what we want until it’s right in front of us. Or maybe we never know ever, and life is literally just an endless, mostly embarrassing journey of figuring ourselves out (especially if you’re a narcissistic Millennial).
But one thing I know for certain, no matter whether I end up a Wall Street wife or a madam (or somewhere in between), is that I never want to get to a point where I look back on my sluttiness as being a “phase” that I’ve matured out of. That narrative is all too common. Often, we associate promiscuity with youth and bad decisions, and are expected to calm down (or slut down?) with age. Some people even begin to regret their promiscuous pasts. I’m often asked how I “deal” with the thought of getting older, and my potential future kids being able to find videos online of me shaving my vagina (for “art,” but still), alongside old blog posts about the drug-fueled orgies of my early twenties. But I’m kind of insulted by the idea that just because I grow up, I should automatically reject my past and the things that were once important to me, as if the former and fluctuating incarnations of ourselves are not all valid parts of who we are. It’s kind of like how if someone has a same-sex partner but then ultimately ends up in a heterosexual relationship, their bisexuality is often relegated to having been “just a phase.” But why would that be true? Why would a new relationship, or new desires, discredit our former experiences, loves, and orgasms? Surely the entirety of my sexuality does not hinge on the person who’s inside me at this very moment. (Yes, I write with someone inside me—I told you that sluts are great at multitasking.) My sexuality is an ever-changing, oppressively complex labyrinth of beauty, nightmares, and transcendence, and it is mine and mine alone.