Webinar hosted by Taylor Sparks of ORGANICLOVEN

Your Journey into Ethical Non-Monogamy In the realm of committed relationships, whether ethically monogamous or ethically non-monogamous, jealousy can rear its head. But fear not! Our transformative discussion is here to guide you on the path to emotional liberation.

Ethical Means Designed on Purpose

Ethical non-monogamy is designed intentionally, and it is never an excuse for cheating. As Sparks put it, "cheating is unethical. It is deceitful... it's lying," and that remains true regardless of relationship structure. An open relationship does not make dishonesty acceptable, and a monogamous label does not make honesty optional.

Partners decide together what their structure looks like and where their emotional boundaries sit. Nobody outside the relationship gets to draw those lines, and nobody inside it gets to redraw them unilaterally.

Swinging and Its Many Styles

Swinging, sometimes simply called the lifestyle, was defined as typically physically non-monogamous but emotionally monogamous. Participants are not looking for a girlfriend or boyfriend and are not seeking ongoing romantic involvement with the people they have sex with.

Within that, there are recognized styles. Soft swap includes flirting, kissing, and oral sex, essentially everything except penetrative sex, which stays within the couple. Full swap includes all sexual activity including penetration, though some full swap players will not kiss others because they consider kissing too intimate. And then there is the arrangement where one partner plays, meaning only one member of the couple participates.

Sparks pushed back hard on lifestyle peer pressure, particularly the idea that soft swap is a stepping stone to something else. "I know couples who've been soft swap for 20 years. They don't have penetrative sex with anybody. You get to decide." Nobody should be told they will inevitably transition to full swap at some point.

When Only One Partner Plays

Taylor shared real examples of one-partner-plays arrangements. One wife has sex with women only while her husband abstains entirely by choice. Another straight wife has plenty of sex with other men on swinger cruises and large events, the Hedonism and Naughty in N'awlins type gatherings, a few times a year, while her husband does not play at all. His summary was straightforward: "she has a great time... she's happy, and I'm happy." The reverse arrangement exists too, where only the husband plays.

The common denominator is not the shape of the arrangement. It is agreement and alignment reached through conversation. She also spoke about single men in the lifestyle, having interviewed men with 10 to 15 years or more in the scene while researching her book, including at a 2,500-person New Orleans weekend event.

Polyamory, Polygamy, and the Shapes Love Takes

Polygamy, whether polygyny or polyandry, requires being legally married to at least one partner. Calling three partners husbands or wives without legal marriage is polyamory, not polygamy.

Polyamory itself is a form of consensual non-monogamy involving multiple romantic and/or sexual partners where all parties know and consent. Common structures include triads, Vs and open Vs, quads that are often two couples, and larger networks called polycules. There is also the half-joking, wholly real term polysaturated, for the point at which a person simply cannot keep up.

That leads to one of the most quoted lines of the session: "Love is infinite, but time is not." A person can only date as many people as they have time for, given work, pets, vacations, family, and businesses to run.

Parallel, Kitchen Table, and Polyfidelity

Parallel polyamory, from lived experience: she had her boyfriend's wife's number and met her for coffee once in two years, but they weren't part of each other's lives. Everyone signed off on travel and overnights.

Kitchen table polyamory is more intimate. Everyone sits down together and decides about money and the future. In her parallel relationship, she didn't know her metamour's income or that the house was for sale. In her kitchen table relationship, the group planned to buy property together. (A metamour is "the lover of my lover.")

Polyfidelity is a closed group that's sexually and romantically exclusive, often paired with fluid bonding: everyone tests, results come back clean, and barriers come off because no one is having outside sex. If communication matters in monogamy, it matters exponentially more here.

You Cannot Move Faster Than the Slowest Person

One story landed with particular force: a partner asked to get a room with Sparks, then pitched the idea to his wife as though it had come from Sparks, saying "she's so dominant, you can't say no to her." She sent him straight back to have an authentic conversation, insisting he say "I want to spend the night with you" rather than offloading his desire onto her, and warning him that he was jeopardizing the good relationship between the two women.

The wife said she was not ready. The answer was simply, "then we won't do it." That illustrates the rule: no one gets to move faster than the slowest person in the relationship, and this matters most during transitions, whether from monogamy to non-monogamy or from open to swinging.

There is a reciprocal responsibility, though. The slower partner does not get to hold their cards to their chest for a year or two, repeating "I'm not ready" indefinitely. Everyone is responsible for their own emotions, their own happiness, and, as she put it, "our own bullshit, because we all bring bullshit to the table."

Timing and Structure for Hard Conversations

Have hard conversations in the morning. Not after a long, stressful workday, and absolutely not at midnight at a weekend lifestyle event after drinking since 11:35 a.m., baking in the sun, dancing, barely eating, having not had two glasses of water all day and having had fourteen shots of tequila.

Just because a person has an emotion does not mean they have to act on it right then and there. When tired or triggered, the recommendation is a nap, a cookie, an orgasm, or a night of sleep. Most things are not urgent, even though the nervous system insists they are, which is exactly why self-soothing techniques and clear boundaries are worth learning, a topic she covers in depth in her jealousy seminar.

Jealousy Is a Check Engine Light

Jealousy, in this framework, is information rather than evidence. It is a check engine light, not proof that someone did something wrong. "That thing happened, and you got jealous... No one is making you jealous." The prescribed response is a gut check, some self-soothing, and getting out of your own head instead of blaming the external person.

She invoked Brené Brown's "the story I'm telling myself" framing, acting out a comedic internal monologue about the giggly other woman to demonstrate how people argue elaborately with themselves instead of having an actual conversation with a real human being.

Before reacting to a broken boundary, she also urges people to ask whether every player actually knew the boundary existed. In one story, a married couple agreed on no kissing at a party, and the husband ended up in a slow-dance kiss. His defense: "I looked at her and she just laid one on me... what did you want me to do?" The other woman never knew the rule. The anger was misdirected, and the moment became an opportunity to renegotiate.

Boundaries Are Built to Protect, Until They Are Not Needed

Sparks and her husband entered the lifestyle with roughly 27 boundaries. No sex with anyone in the entire state of North Carolina. No family, no co-workers, no hotel staff, because nobody wanted to get anyone fired. Condoms always. No spending the night. No falling in love. And a memorably bizarre 60-minute time limit on sex, about which she says, "Don't ask me how we came up with 60 minutes... if you can't get it done in 60 minutes, you probably don't need to be doing it."

Roughly 16 years in, there were only three rules left. The realization behind that shift is that boundaries get built to protect the relationship, and then one day a couple discovers the relationship does not need protecting. "Nobody's going anywhere. And if they decide to go, wish them well... You want to be with somebody who wants to be with you."

Reframing "Why Am I Not Enough?"

For the question that haunts so many opening conversations, Sparks offers language a partner can actually use: "You are enough. I want more and/or different sexual experiences, and me wanting those does not take anything away from who you are and what you offer to me."

She also draws a crucial distinction between unable and unwilling. A partner who does not want something is usually not refusing out of bad will. Their natural baseline is simply different. In a libido mismatch, the higher-libido partner chases while the lower-libido partner may temporarily raise their energy to match, and the higher-libido partner may ask for less, but neither can sustain that indefinitely because each has a natural base point. Opening the relationship can relieve the pressure of asking one person to give more than they are able and the other to want less than they truly want.

Her favorite non-sexual analogy: her husband refused to salsa dance, so she took classes on her own for 25 years. The lesson is that nobody has to give up something they love, or throw the baby out with the bathwater, simply because a partner is not interested. It does not have to be all or nothing.

Deprogramming from Monogamy

Most people don't fail at non-monogamy. They fail to deprogram from monogamy first. Parents, aunties, the church, and U.S. policy are all built for it, so people carry a monogamous mindset into a non-monogamous structure, hit a wall, and decide the thing doesn't work. It works fine. It just takes disentangling.

That takes time, especially since most of us arrive well into adulthood with three or four monogamous relationships already shaping what we assume about love and ownership.

So do the work: read, take a webinar ("you don't have to be African-American to read the book"), look at how you were raised, and question the assumptions hiding underneath. That's what turns a curious first conversation into an honest, joyful ride.

Original webinar was live-streamed on SDC.com on November 6th, 2024