Sex is NOT Fun: Nor is This Super-Long Post

Kidder Kaper and Krew (this K thing is fun) found my last post and have responded!  12 comments on one post may actually be a record for us here at Sex or Television!  I was all set - a week ago - to write a scathing post detailing all the weird relationship stuff Kidder has put out there, but the most recent episode of Sex Is Fun has made me rethink this, because despite the fundamental problem that it's yet another  show entirely about Kidder and his life, actual self-awareness was demonstrated in the episode, as was genuine, heartfelt sadness that makes it very hard to continue in this vein of snark.

Fact is, my own personal issues with how Kidder runs his podcast and responds to people on the Internet aside, opening up your relationship is a fraught, terrifying thing to do.  If you have some time, and you're a personal relationship drama voyeur like me, I'd recommend listening to episodes #276 and #278 of Sex Is Fun. You'll be missing a lot of backstory, of course, some of which I'm still missing too, but it should give you a decent idea of the stuff I want to talk about.  And since I'm not going to get into the details of rehashing the history of their relationship troubles here, you'll have to listen to see how what I'm saying applies to their situation.

As I've written before, I don't subscribe to the theory, popular amongst Polaymory activists, that open relationships have to be 100% "fair" to be "good."  I am all for individuals and couples setting their boundaries and then communicating them to each other and renegotiating them.  I think that "irrational" or "unfair" boundaries are fine, provided the other partner is totally OK with abiding by them.  Where you run into a problem is when an irrational/unfair boundary conflicts with what the other partner wants.

Kidder, by his own admission, is really insecure, and has a need to "feel special."  I think right there that is a personality trait that is going to make moving forward with a seriously open relationship pretty tricky.  People with those needs, right or wrong, are often going to feel neglected even in a relatively happy long-term monogamous relationship, just because without "NRE" (poly-speak for "new relationship energy" which is a ridiculous term that normal people call "infatuation") it is human nature to fall into ruts, take your partner for granted, and so forth and so on.  When you open up your relationship to the possibility of your partner experiencing NRE with another person, that's like murder on someone who is already insecure and has a need to always feel like they are the most important person in their partner's life.

That said, I am not a huge fan of the idea that all beliefs and feelings are automatically "valid" just because someone feels them.  Having been in a relationship with someone who was seriously mentally ill and thus held completely ridiculous and inaccurate cognition as a result of his mental illness, I think it's ludicrous to say we have to honor everyone's feelings at all times.  Crazy feelings are crazy, and while we can feel sympathy to the person having the crazy feelings, it doesn't mean we have to validate the false cognition said crazy feeling is based on.

I honestly feel that in order to do any serious amount of openness seriously, both partners need to feel absolutely secure in how "special" they are to their partner without necessarily needing a huge amount of reassurance about it.  Because opening up is challenging even for the most secure people, really.  To this end, I'm not convinced that Kidder and Jade are really good candidates for having a more open relationship (apart from what they've been doing all these years that didn't challenge their relationship as much).  And it sucks for them, because they both obviously want a higher degree of openness but are unable to agree with each other's boundaries on how to handle that.  They both want an emotional and sexual relationship with other people that threatens the other person.

It's almost like the SiF people are at one end of the spectrum and the PolyWeekly folks are at the other.  The latter discusses jealousy in open relationships by refusing to deal with it or making pat remarks about how bubble baths and "taking care of yourself" is the cure to jealousy.  The SiF point of view seems to be that twinges of jealousy are to be responded with by demands on your partner and endless "processing" as opposed to any sort of introspection or willingness to try to work on and move past the insecurities that are causing said jealousy.  I will say, as someone in a committed relationship, that I am overall more sympathetic to the SiF approach because at least it is more likely to ensure the survival of the primary relationship, whereas the PolyWeekly folks are incensed by the very idea of a primary relationship, because it's not egalitarian enough.

I think there's a line in-between that isn't particularly popular and doesn't have some sort of cute catchphrase, but involves both respecting your partner's boundaries but a willingness to advocate for your wants; communicating when you're feeling insecure or upset with your partners actions but also being willing to endure feeling shitty at times and owning your own shit.

Here's an example.  The Boy and I started our path to what is now a pretty open relationship by having threesomes with other men.  None of them went terribly well, and I was frustrated after the last one and tired of the effort and the awkward sex.  I told the Boy that I'd actually be OK with him, in the future, having sex with men without me present, although we'd have to discuss the terms in more detail at another time. I also told him that I wouldn't be comfortable with him having sex with the guy we'd just finished having sex with, though.  (Hey!  Semi-irrational boundary!) 

The next day I checked the joint e-mail account the Boy and I had set up for arranging said threesomes, and saw that the Boy had e-mailed the guy we'd just had sex with about hooking up one-on-one.  I was shocked and furious.  I called him from work and demanded to know why he'd do that when I'd just brought up the possibility of him seeing other guys without me and specifically said I didn't want either one of us to have anything to do with that guy.  What did the Boy do?  He lied.  He claimed he hadn't sent that e-mail.  When he realized I had proof, he copped to it.  I was livid, sick to my stomach, threatened to break up with him, told him he'd just ruined any chance he'd had of being able to have sex outside our relationship if our relationship even survived.  At the time I felt righteously furious, now I realize I was being a little melodramatic.

This mirrors a lot of the kind of things that led to Kidder's current troubles.  He caught his wife chatting with her paramour and didn't disclose it when he asked.  My partner lied to my face about making a sex date with another person.  How did we get through this huge betrayal of trust?

We talked about it.  Not for days or weeks, but for like, a couple hours.  I realized the Boy and I had a miscommunication - he thought I'd essentially given him permission to fuck other guys, full stop, and was really excited by this new freedom. When I called him to confront him, he realized that he'd triggered all my fears and insecurities about having a cheating bisexual partner (as my ex cheated on me repeatedly with men) and panicked.  And because he didn't want to appear to be just like my ex, he lied.

Like Kidder, I wasn't mad that my partner wanted to have sex with someone else - I was upset that I'd been lied to.  And I felt like I'd granted him this gift, something that wasn't easy for me and in the very first instance he could, he fucked it up and proved himself untrustworthy.  Actually so far, I'd say based on the podcasts, that what I was feeling and what Kidder was feeling intially - why did you lie to me after I'd just granted you something awesome? - were very similar.  So dudebro, I feel ya there.

But instead of making a podcast where I got my friends to passive-aggressively rehash the wrongs my partner had done to me, I talked with the Boy and sat with my feelings, and was able to realize that his intention was not to betray me or hurt me.  And that my reaction - overreaction - to the Boy's e-mail put him in a place where he was terrified to admit to it because of my insecurities and past. It didn't take "three years" to work past, it took about a week or two before I was cool with him going off and fucking someone else.  And he did.  Crazy!

Of course, moving is easy to do when you have faith in your partner.  Despite the fact that he'd just lied blatantly to me, I still believed that on the whole the Boy was truthful with me.  What strikes me about these podcasts, particularly the latter one, is that Kidder does not believe Jade will be truthful with him.  Which is apparently borne out by the events that follow.  The question is, then, is Jade just a terrible lying liar who lies, or does Kidder's reactions - perhaps, dare I say, overreactions - to Jade's initial "disclosure glitches" help create an environment that almost guarantees she won't fully disclose to him?  That I can't say, because I am not Lorax, their relationship counselor. (Btw, guys, that's kinda fucked up, just sayin'.)

The latest podcast certainly makes it sound like Jade is a terrible lying liar.  But it's also clear that the amount of disclosure needed - full access to all chats, texts, Facebook pages, etc - is a bar that makes having an open relationship kinda tricky.  Kidder is defensive of his need to have full disclosure to be OK with the openness, but the full disclosure also gives him the ability to monitor everything obsessively and stew over real and periceved slights in a way that doesn't come across as totally healthy. I have, in theory, a "right" to know all of the Boy's activities online.  I have almost never taken advantage of that right because I don't feel a need to.  I trust him.  When I have, what I've seen has validated my trust.  I guess it's a different can of worms when what you see does the opposite.  If Jade is as untrustworthy as Kidder describes, then I don't see how they can even consider having any serious degree of openness in their relationship.  But in that case I also don't get why they even have a relationship.  Trust is important for a lot of reasons, not just because you're involving other people in your sex life.

I should note, for the sake of fairness, that I have violated the Boy's boundaries too.  I had (oral) sex with a guy without his permission, told him immediately a fterward, and to be totally fair, his reaction to it was so much more sensible than my response to his indiscretion.  This is the thing that is missing in the discussion of opening up on SiF - WHEN NEGOTIATING OPEN RELATIONSHIPS, PEOPLE WILL FUCK UP.  This needs to be shouted from the rooftops. There is absolutely no way to move forward with open relationships without a certain amount of fucking up, miscommunications, "disclosure glitches" and the like.  It's just the way this goes.  After gazillions of years lurking in Poly and Swinging boards, it seems that people run into the most trouble when they don't expect people to fuck up, and then are blindsided and really upset when it does happen, and then freak the fuck out.

What people don't seem to realize about open relationships, even if they claim to, is that it really does take a lot of internal work.  I don't mean endless discussions with your partner, but internal discussions.  I feel like someone in an open relationship should constantly be thinking about how they're creating their own cognitions, and whether those cognitions are based in reality or their own insecurities.  While it's apparent that Jade fucked up, big time, it also seems like Kidder created a self-fufilling prophecy, based in his own insecurity and fears that he isn't "special" where he was going to, from the get-go, interpet any behavior on Jade's part as proof of what he already believed.  Jade played her role perfectly, as the Boy said when we were discussing it this morning, almost as if she was pushing the buttons that would make him freak out the most.  It's the sad dance of bullshit that I think most of us in long-term relationships will somewhat identify with.  But to do openness successfully, you have to radically alter these sorts of programmed responses.  Sometimes it's more important to shut up and sit with your feelings as opposed to making demands.  Otherwise you're just going to end up in a war for control, which appears to be exactly what happened.

I mean, if either of us had demanded a partner cancel a date because we weren't feeling 100% secure and OK with it at that moment, I don't think we would have ever really opened up our relationship at all.  It takes your partner doing something that perhaps you're scared about, having it happen, and then realizing in the end that your survived and it wasn't that bad to feel cool about it next time.  Or at least, that's how it worked for us.  Our approach may not work for everyone, but we have a remarkably open relationship with few restrictions or need to monitor each other, and we both used to see ourselves as highly monogamous, insecure people.  And I've found that once you realize you can live through something you're terrified of and feel OK about it later, more and more boundaries you used to see as inviolable start to feel unnecessary.  I went from the point where I knew I'd never be OK with the Boy having sex with another woman.  Now I think it's something I could handle, although I know it would still intially cause me some distress and anxiety.

Let me make a terrible analogy: anal sex.  Although a lot of people like to claim that "if you do it right" anal sex won't hurt at all, the reality is that even with tons of foreplay, using small plugs and a ton of lube, and so forth, for most people, intially having anal sex with a penis-sized object will have some discomfort, if not "pain" exactly..  It'll feel uncomfortable and perhaps provoke some anxiety.  If you can slowly work past that, you might end up really digging it.  Or you might be able to do it, but not find it enjoyable and worth the discomfort and effort.  But if you stop at the first sign of discomfort, you're never gonna get that dildo up your butt, period.  Of course, you also have to have trust that your partner isn't going to shove that thing up there before you're ready. 

Or to sum up all this tl;dr: open relationships are not for control freaks and although it's trite, trust is paramount, but so is the willingness to forgive, a genuine desire to move forward, and actively try to give your partner the space to be trustworthy. It's a real leap of faith. The Boy has his own, somewhat different take on this (one that's a lot harsher on Jade, actually), so I'll try to get him to weigh in.  I still have a butt-load of opinions about how Kidder handled this stuff, particularly on his public Facebook, but I wanted to use this post as a way to maybe take some lessons from this volcano of drama that people could use to think about what kind of philosophical and practical approach they take to openness, not to tear Kidder a new one.  But I still might!  Anything can happen at Sex or Television!  I hope some of the people who came here via Kidder's Facebook page will stick around, because we talk a lot about open relationships and non-traditional sexuality in general here.  And I write posts that are way, way, way too long.