The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

[Update: This book has certainly done more to spark conversation with friends and acquaintences than almost any other this year. Based on those conversations, this book should be considered a very high 3, a book that many people need to read, but it still remains a three because it does not demand re-reading.]

Monogamy is practically convenient but not morally required.

This book is a primer on consensual non-monogamous relationships. "Consensual" is notable because this differs from cheating, sex as trophy-hunting, promiscuity combined with self-loathing, or claiming to have an open relationship as an excuse to sleep around while keeping your partner from doing so. The Ethical Slut proposes that you consider seriously whether lifelong monogamous pair-bonding is the best way to meet your sexual, emotional, and practical needs in life. If not, the authors have recommendations for finding out what arrangement might best suit you.

At some point, the modern human being must confront the fact that our environment differs dramatically from the one in which our species evolved. It is unlikely that our neurochemistry is conducive to 50-year long monogamous relationships just because the average lifespan was not 50 years as recently as a century ago. Throughout human history we married early and at least one partner was likely to die young. "Til death do us part" means a lot more with modern medicine and hygiene.

Even accepting lifelong monogamy as an ideal, we frequently fail to live up to it. What percent of marriages will have no divorce or adultery in them? Many people are in non-monogamous relationships, only their partners have not told them yet. People who abhor promiscuity seem pretty accepting of serial monogamy, where you have at least as many partners but officially only one at a time.

The traditional family too is not terribly traditional. The modern nuclear family is rather unusual from a global or historical perspective. Two married adults and their offspring living alone? Beyond the frequent death of a parent, now replaced with divorce, families had broader kinship networks or closer ties to their communities. It is rather demanding on a marriage when that one other person has to be the perfect lover, provider, nurturer, conversationalist, parent, spouse, friend, and whatever else gets stacked on that one relationship.

The Ethical Slut is not just about sex. That is simply the biggest and hardest way that it suggests thinking beyond the pair-bond. If you can get past the assumption that one person must be everything to you in the bedroom, it seems more trivial to think about how you can expand your web of emotional support.

That assumption of monogamy is what much of the book argues against. It is something we are born into and generally accept uncritically. The frequent failures to succeed in a happy, monogamous life are taken as failures of the individual, not a question of whether it is the right model for everyone. If you have not considered the possibility of other ways of arranging your life, you have not really chosen your current way of life. It is unlikely that you will read this book and immediately set out to start swinging, but monogamy should be something you consciously accept or reject, not a default that you never need to think about. This is too important a part of your life to avoid thinking or talking about because it could be unseemly.

If your spouse comes home with this book, it is not a reason to panic. This is a good general relationship book, stressing the importance of communication, caring, respect, empathy, and working to build connections that improve the lives of everyone involved. They just don't assume that only two people are involved.

Non-monogamy demands more and more explicit communication because it transgresses the normal boundaries. You do not have those defaults to rely on. The book does not stress that this is just as important in monogamous relationships. Too often we assume that everyone else has the same assumptions that we do. Your spouse may not realize that you resent how little housework s/he does, or may not realize how much you do, or maybe you do not realize how much s/he does. One of the first points in the book is to stop assuming that anyone else is a mind reader or should just know that you are unhappy and what needs to be done to make you happy.

Talk. Communicate. Be honest and open. Respect each other. Figure out how you can get your needs met. And the authors venture to suggest that sleeping with other people might be a part of that. Or not.

Amazon link

Dan Savage's book has a section on people who swing to improve their marriages.