Shower Thoughts
It occurred to me in the shower this morning that one reason for hesitancy or trepidation about entering some form of open relationship is that in my life (reflecting our society) one of the pillars of definition of a relationship is ‘the person with whom I am exclusively having sex.’ Pitching that out the window, then, begs the question, ‘what else do I use to define a relationship?’ This is a fairly obvious statement, but these things usually don’t occur to me until I encounter them in my own life.
So, as food for my own thought, how do I delimit the lines of a relationship aside from sex? Clearly there are many others, but it’s interesting how much emphasis we put on the monogamy piece.
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I’ll admit it: I’m a pretty monogamous person by nature. Not so much out of ideological commitment as laziness — if I have someone fulfilling such needs at home, and I know he’s good at it, why go out looking for other, probably terrible, sexual partners? But I do like the idea of “sharing” with other tops and their subs in some fashion. It’s confusing! Anyway, my real point is that if you throw out the idea of monogamous sexuality, I think you’re left with the real foundation of longterm relationships. It’s about having someone who is your home, the person you can rely on through anything, the person you love. I know you like spiritual things a lot more than me, but I think there is something to the sort of religious notion of a marriage as a spiritual union not between two bodies but between two souls. A committed relationship is about fidelity in its purest form — loyalty and faithfulness to each other as people, not to sexual codes of conduct that conform neither to human nature nor to modern life.
6 July 2011 at 1:29 am