ClueChick: real clues from a real chick

I have a bit of a backlog of questions from readers, which I'll try to work through in the next couple of weeks.

I read something on your blog that leads me to believe that you don’t like cheating, yet apparently you have main squeeze and you sleep around. Do you consider that cheating or do you have another definition? This is all new to me since I was married and monogamous forever, but I am not interested in going back to that. Soooo how do you have a main squeeze, and still fool around without someone getting hurt?

You're right; I don't like cheating. In general, I find it foreign and questionable. I understand that there are lots of situations where cheating is the lesser of the available evils, but I have a hard time understanding how people end up in situations where that's the case. Honesty is important to me (though I'm not fanatical about it), and I prefer to involve myself with people who are living basically up-front lives. Furthermore, I am continually baffled at cheating people's openness with strangers about their status while being deceptive with the person who is, in theory, the person they've chosen to spend their lives with. But, hey, I'm also baffled at people's fascination with American Idol, so, big deal.

What do I do? I do have a regular lover and I do sleep around. My lover knows I sleep around, and if we were more serious, I would tell him about all of my hookups. As it is, I just tell him about the extra fun or interesting ones. And if he asked, I'd tell him about the less spectacular ones, too; it's just not normally important to bring up. What is important is that he knows that I have hookups and that a) I'll talk about them sometimes and b) he can ask whatever he wants or needs to know. Meanwhile, he has other lovers, too, and people he's dating more seriously than he's dating me. I know about them and they know about me. In fact, I met him through his longest-term partner, with whom I'm very good friends.

Is your head spinning? Then you've probably never heard the term "polyamory", though that's not a term I particularly care for. Still, if you do a web search on it, you'll find more web pages full of people spouting on about how to do it right or wrong or best or worst than you'll know what to do with. Some of these might be useful. I haven't done such a search recently, so I have no idea what the state of information is at the moment.

Personally, I prefer the term nonmonogamy, and I describe my variant of it as consensual nonmonogamy. I keep people informed, and I expect they'll do the same. Those might be additionally useful search terms for you to consider. I bet they'll lead you to a variety of useful and useless places, but with any luck, you'll find something good.

I'm not going to go into more detail about this stuff, because I find it largely boring to talk about, but before I sign off, I do want to say one thing, and that is that I don't think it's possible to have relationships without someone getting hurt from time to time. More important than pussyfooting or tiptoeing around hoping never to cause pain is being clear and honest and communicating effectively with the people you're involved with. And when pain results, then it's your big chance to be thoughtful and considerate in dealing with it. This is true in any kind of ongoing relationship, whether sexual/romantic, familial or friendly. We can't avoid hurting people close to us, though I hope we avoid doing so on purpose; what we can avoid is being an asshole after we've caused pain. Ignoring or avoiding addressing the unintentional hurts we cause strikes me as vastly more problematic and flawed than causing them in the first place.