Date

The Ethical Slut says that you might find it helpful to keep a notebook in which you just write FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK when your open relationship is doing your head in and that's ok. Maybe I'm not a totally fuck-up. I'd quite like to have a room to go to where I can scream it as loudly as possible and beat my hands against a soft wall. Oh hang on, such rooms do exist and I'd rather not.

I went on a date with someone yesterday. I didn't mention it earlier because I hadn't posted for days and there were so many other things to write about.

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No sex please, I'm apprehensive and navel gazing (and the view is bleugh)

In fact, if you're one of those people who believe that if you can't say something nice say nothing at all, close this window now. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I know that I want people to read my blog and be my online followers. I want them to comment on my posts and link to me so that this feels like real blogging. I want to read their - your! - opinions and (heh!) praise for my pithy commentary and honesty.

So I submitted The Ethical Slut post to e-Lust, an online compendium of sex blogs.  And now I'm wondering which would be worse: to be called a naive, selfish, mithering, self-pitying lay-about (which would be fair comment, believe me) or (what is more likely) to hear nothing at all. And writing it, I know with some certainty that it would be the latter.

Do all bad tempered people dislike themselves? There's a mean voice in my head that says every bit of ill humour, cowardice, pride, jealousy and selfish behaviour gets repaid in kind, resulting in a barren, joyless life. I don't mean like karma; it's much more mundane than that. Here's an example, Kate is a friend who I no longer talk to and although I might say it's because she lives on the other side of the city the truth is simply that I am jealous of her. We were at college together and now her career is going well and mine is faltering. I think that Kate was offered the job she got because, unlike me, she is pleasant, easygoing and inoffensive. I am not always offensive: I can be kind, witty, fun, thoughtful and generous but I also behave badly enough to have a rep. My wit can be cutting; I have very hard edges. People are often a bit wary of me.

Kate has a wide circle of friends and is in close contact with people she was friends with from her school days. If I'm honest, this was another point of tension in our friendship. I am often wary of very sociable people: the friends I choose tend to be slightly lonely, like me. I'm not threatened by them and don't have to be jealous if their social life is better than mine. For a minute it puzzles me that I have never experienced sexual jealousy in relationships before... and then I remember that I have always chosen people who I found unthreatening and who loved me more than I loved them. Ah.

Virgil and I are trying to mend things. I apologised the other day. I said, "I have realised that I have been using my anger and hurt feelings as a weapon against you, which was not right and I am sorry." I felt scared. I had remembered, in time I hope, that love is not unconditional. Virgil has been good and patient with my work woes, some of which are certainly self-inflicted, but my moping and inertia would try anyone's patience. The open relationship issue just gave me another excuse to wallow and mope and essentially to rub his nose in my bad mood.

In my 20s I had a depressed, under-employed boyfriend and he drove me crazy. While I worked for my finals, Patrick slouched despondently around our flat. He sat in a miasma of dope smoke and apathy, running up enormous telephone bills (in my name) on dial-up internet and dodgy premium rate phonecalls. When you live together you get the unedited versions of each other and you can fall out of love with someone for being like that. It would be justified. Virgil and I have not been living together very long but that's another story.

I am resolved to turn over a new leaf and get out of this horrible rut before I really fuck things up. Fortunately I now have a brand new pdf of The Ethical Slut to teach me how.
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Research

One thing I've done quite a lot of this last week is to ask friends, and just about anyone I think will talk to me, about their experience of open relationships. Me and Virgil are talking it over still and probably will be for some time. We keep taking breaks because it gets too loaded and sad. I start to talk about bottom lines and breaking up. He brings us back from the brink of saying too much. Meanwhile, I am canvassing opinion.

The first person I ask is Dee. There's been a little distance between us recently. I think it's because I put a veto on Virgil's sexual interest in her as a solo project but I might have been being a little paranoid there. We meet for coffee one sunny morning to talk about a joint project we're working on. She asks how I am and I say I'm shit actually. Then she says that she's been having a hard time too, and it turns out that (among other things of course, like jobs) we have both been having issues about our open relationships.

So we have a fascinating and thought-provoking conversation. It turns out that Dee finds her open relationship really hard and is going along with it more for the sake of Kevin than herself. Kevin lives in New York, and Dee's biggest beef seems to be that she can't be more involved. She wants to meet the other girls and vet them for sanity, poly accountability and so on. She even wrote to a hot mutual friend asking her to have Kevin over for dinner and boy rape. The idea was that as she made her move she would say: "And this is a present from Dee!" But the friend was having a complicated time and not available for this kind of favour. She also said that she prefers to know in advance when Kevin is off on a date so that she can prepare herself for it.

I wish I were as evolved. My own base instinct is that I wouldn't want to know the women Virgil chooses for lovers, unless it was so that I could say to myself: "Hah, well she's not all that and I don't feel threatened at all..." And as for preparing myself, wouldn't it just be best not to know? (I imagine a scene in which Virgil irons his best shirt and I scowl and skulk around in the background, hating him and waiting for him to leave so that I can throw myself on the bed, howl, call a friend for sympathy, blog my vitriol and pain.) Couldn't it just be done comfortably behind my back so that I wouldn't be wondering what he was up to on any given minute that he is with someone else? Somehow I doubt the ethical sluts would advocate this peevish and basically monogamist approach.

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The Ethical Slut

Oh where the fuck is my copy of The Ethical Slut?

The only reason I'm blogging right now is because I can't find it anywhere and I want to read it. Indeed, starting this blog and reading The Ethical Slut were my plans for this evening, while I have the flat to myself.

I have vague memories of lending it to someone, I can't remember who. Probably no one. I always think I've lent things to people who have then not returned them: books, clothes, equipment, anything that can conceivably be lent in a moment of generosity (or opportunism on the part of the recipient), when I want to share my good book/outfit/Leki walking poles/strap-on harness/spare bike light, whatever it is that I am now hunting furiously for. The book's probably in storage. I've searched his bookshelves but Virgil's probably got his copy out already (or it's at the bottom of a pile of mess). Since the date bombshell and all the fallout that's ensued, we agreed we probably both need to read it again. Or was it only me?

I was introduced to The Ethical Slut about years ago by Erin, a dreamy Nova Scotian psychiatric nurse my then-boyfriend Isaac introduced me to when I lived with him for some months in British Columbia one winter. Before I showed up, Erin had been a lover of Isaac's and harboured a massive crush, even though she was seriously trying out the idea of girls (mostly by living in a lesbian houseshare, joining a women's street hockey team and having crushes on her teammates).

Soon after I arrived Erin took me for a walk up a mossy, waterlogged lump of rock called the Chief's Face or something. Halfway to the top we smoked some British Columbian weed and as I tottered, almost hallucinating and gasping for breath, up the last ascent, Erin told me about The Ethical Slut. This almost legendary book, written by two amazing, inspirational, Californian, polyamorous, kinky, hippy, motherly goddess types, is one that simply everyone with any pretensions or aspirations to a sexually liberated lifestyle should read, she told me. And then she started talking about threesomes.

Actually that's my precis of it. I read The Ethical Slut from cover to cover and really drank the Kool Aid, in theory at least. Isaac, Erin and I had our threesome. Then Isaac and Erin had an illicit fuck behind my back which wasn't really in the spirit of things, and I was annoyed mostly because it was a sneaky drunken fuck, but Isaac and I were breaking up by then. Isaac and I had make-up sex; Erin and I made up. I went back to London. Years passed.

When I've read it again I'll tell you about it.

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