How FWB sexual encounters and the swing dance world began a lifetime of unlearning monogamy
Editor’s note : As part of her series My Year as a Finstagram Model,the author details how she came into identifying sexually as ethically non-monogamous (ENM) and is sharing how she’s used her social media to better screen, select, and maintain healthy romantic non-monogamous partnerships. The author describes her partners as trees for both anonymity and symbolism. So far we’ve learned about Birch, Sequoia, and Oak. The series additionally includes adult content available via subscription.
The drive home after being with Oak in his parents’ house began to feel naughty the more often it happened, both in a good and bad way. Obviously I liked it as a teenage young woman with hormones running wild, but I was Catholic, after all. I wasn't supposed to be doing this with anyone, least of all someone I didn’t intend to marry. And I knew damn well that what we were doing was only going to lead to marriage if I got pregnant. To further add to my parochial school guilt, I’d already decided that pregnancy was not going to happen for me, regardless of how the pope or my parents felt.
Oak and I went on like we did — as friends with benefits (FWB), for lack of a better term — for four years before the natural changes in our young lives separated us. Shortly after Oak left my life, I met Elm. And if I’m honest, there were so many Elms during this period of my life.
The Elms
The Elms in my young life were all men who loved me but encouraged me to be free, to be comfortable in my own skin, and to not depend on a man when I was perfectly capable. The Elms I gravitated to were philosophers and scientists, explorers and scouts, computer nerds and athletes. All different, they all taught me so much about their weird little worlds without sucking me in whole. And for that I was grateful because it let me become me.
Throughout these years as I was growing wiser and more dynamically built from the male company I kept, all the while I watched monogamous women around me morphing into mere mirrors of the men they married, swallowed up entirely by their fear of abandonment, cultural peer pressure, and, of course, the fucking patriarchy. As the women around me chained themselves emotionally and financially to men, I continued to spread my wings and land where I chose.
I didn’t always make the right choices when I tangled myself in the branches of the trees, but I tried to choose ones not for what they could give me, but whom excited me and gave me good reason to flutter my wings. Those who came to me with a spirit of adventure, excitement, and joy stayed around the longest. They helped build the version of me I am today: independent, original, sophisticated, graceful, and really fucking funny. And while none of the guys I dated ever encouraged me to be jealous, hateful, or spiteful, of course I was at times— because love is messy, even when it’s supposed to be free.
We all deserve love that feels free, but we don’t get it all the often, do we? The emotion of loving someone should feel like your favorite song being blasted through an amp as you dance in your underwear around a bonfire. And for me, the thing that makes me feel just like that is when I’m fulfilled in multiple relationships that, together, make me feel whole but still unattached free. For me, the act of building my ENM relationships is kind of like conducting a symphony. I know what I’m looking for. I know what’s missing. I know what works together and what doesn’t fit. While it gets complicated and it’s never quite perfect, damn do I enjoy the pursuit.
Love Should Feel Like Music
While all love should uplift you in the same way an upbeat musical composition does, we can learn even more from the dancing world about how partnership should feel. Dancing is the most independent thing we do as a couple. Couplehood has to have fluidity to work. A good dancer cannot become a great dancer until he’s mastered the feel of many partners and learned to adjust to them.
Such is sex. Such is romance. Such is love.
But it’s more than that.
As an instructor of a partnered swing dance called the Lindy Hop in the early 2000s, I taught etiquette and movement theory. We practiced activities like how to ask someone to dance with you kindly (consent), how to pick up on your partner’s needs through both verbal and non-verbal cues (communication), and how to manage the brief but important expectations of a short-term relationship that encompassed the dance like responding to your partner’s cues and suggestions that are communicated in the lead-follow connection (respect). And when these rules of etiquette are followed, music and dancing and skirt twirling all come together in the blissfully delightful way that they should.
But that’s where it ends. You don’t have to go get a beer together with someone after the dance (but you can) and you don’t even have to ever dance with them again if you didn’t enjoy it. But when you respect and fully engage with your partner for the duration of a 3–5 minute song, you experience that bliss. When the song is over, each partner has a choice to either dance again, leave the floor, or choose a new partner.
It’s how we’re meant to swing — both in dance and in life.