“Promiscuous” implies that I’m not choosy. In fact I’m very choosy. I just happen to have had a lot of choices.
-Jacki Weaver
How Do You Know If a Slut Loves You? #
It is the giddy catch of breath. Their quick smile.
The way they look at you. Beyond pensive. They aren’t looking at you. They’re looking into you and drinking up every detail.
They touch you like they’d just as soon absorb you. Coax you into them. Because while they enjoy adventuring, they have a way of taking you with them everywhere they go.
And they are a new form of themselves around you. A different one than everyone else sees.
They’re softer with you somehow.
And the biggest tell of all that a slut loves you? Is when they come back to you. Over and over again. Richer from their adventures. The same person as always. And yet different.
Sex Is Nice, Pleasure Is Good for You #
Of all the definitions I’ve encountered for slut, the one in Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy’s Ethical Slut is my favorite:
To us, a slut is a person of any gender who celebrates sexuality according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you. Sluts may choose to have solo sex or to get cozy with the Fifth Fleet. They may be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, radical activists or peaceful suburbanites.
When I was new to consensual nonmonogamy, I struggled a lot with viewing sex and love as zero sum — believing that each person only has so much love, and when they’re splitting that pie among multiple people, everyone gets a thinner slice.
So I feared that partners who were extraordinarily busy weren’t likely to give you anything of value. Because they didn’t have anything left.
It made me wonder: Could a busy slut really love you? Or would they necessarily be shortchanging you and treating each partner as interchangeable?
Sluts Give Because They Have and Have Because They Give #
And as fate would have it, even with my zero sum leanings, I became the busiest person in my polyamorous web. I was a person who had suspected I wasn’t slutty enough to be polyamorous, and here I was with 5 partners.
And curiously I cared deeply for all of them. I was still me, deeply sensitive, a hopeless romantic. Non-monogamy hadn’t changed that. If anything, having multiple partners _amplified _it.
I had been wrong. I thought I wouldn’t be a good slut because I cared too much about other people. Because I was sensitive and loving. Because I got attached.
I was yet to realize that those qualities are _strengths _when you’re a slut. I had a lot to give, and therefore I was good at giving.
As Easton and Hardy write:
Sluts share their sexuality the way that philanthropists share their money: because they have a lot of it to share, because it makes them happy to share it, because sharing makes the world a better place. Sluts often find that the more love and sex they give away, the more they have: a loaves-and-fishes miracle in which greed and generosity go hand in hand to provide more for everybody.
Every Time a Slut Loves You, It Will Be Different #
Every time a slut loves you, it will be different. And every slut you love? Will be a new experience.
But you’ll know it — when you see it. As long as your eyes are wide open and you’re looking for it.
As Easton and Hardy write:
Each relationship seeks its own level, or will if you let it. Like water, you and whatever person has caught your fancy can flow together as long as you let it happen in the way that is fitting to you both.
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