FruitTaster: Designer Relationships

Thank you, FruitTaster, for leaving the following comment on my most recent blog post: Monogamish Week! This comment is so insightful and interesting that I wanted to share it with you. And once you've read this comment, make sure you read more of FruitTaster's blog; it makes for excellent reading!

*Note: Emphasis added by me*

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I don't mean to throw the ball back at you, but what you wrote triggered a thought.

It's that I find particularly interesting the view that, in the event of one partner being caught cheating in a monogamous relationship, that the result should automatically be a split.

There is such an importance put on monogamy that we are willing to throw away everything if it is not respected. There are without a doubt times when this is the right course of action. However it happens so often that you have to wonder why people don't just start off with the assumption that it might occur, or at least that the thought or desire of getting involved with others during the course of a very long term relationship will eventually be felt, if not acted on.

The point is, why not be proactive about it and have an intelligent discussion considering ways to deal with it, either when it will happen, or before it happens. A non-monogamous or open relationship is kind of an umbrella term that encompasses really everything other than monogamy. It's too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you're not monogamous, then you're up for grabs and you're just careless and promiscuous. There are a lot of variations possible between the two extremes.

I like to think of it as being a relationship designer. We spend so much time personalizing our clothes and our hair and our homes and everything that surrounds us. Maybe we should consider that we can also design our relationship. Forgeting the monogamy vs non-monogamy terms, which may be too polarized for many people, I think it's accessible to everyone to just ask themselves, if I could design the perfect, bullet-proof relationship for me, what would that be?

The interest I have in Dan publishing the letters he's received, is to demonstrate the breath of arrangements that are possible, and to realize we can apply our imagination and our creativity to the problem of how to make our relationships more successful.

You can have your blog back now. :)

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