Alina | Part Five: Weaponised Communication

All good relationships are built on communication. Sure — I buy that. Who doesn’t?

So have you fucked anyone since we last saw one another? 

She always asked me this when we hadn't seen each other for more than two weeks. So as I lay there mute, at least I wasn’t surprised. Feeling a little like a criminal being interrogated by the police for a crime he didn’t commit, I thought to myself: I wasn’t guilty of this particular crime, sure, but another one, probably.

Nope I replied, struggling to find the right tone for someone who hadn’t done anything wrong.

Cool Alina replied as she pulled a recently discarded t-shirt back over her head, an ever so subtle sigh of relief betraying her attempt to be nonchalant about our strange arrangement.

She always asked me this after we had had sex, I thought as I lay there, never before.

At first this seemed odd to me, after all: if it was important to her, why not ask before? But after my second or third two-week hiatus, when she again felt compelled to ask me about my sexual goings on, she also explained the timing to me —without prompting— saying simply that she didn’t want my answer to ruin the sex for her.

On a level that made sense to me and, if I was being generous to myself, it also signalled her complicity in keeping our situationship transactional. It also left me wondering if that implied that she would still have sex with me even if I told her an answer she didn’t want to hear. It was a theory I wasn’t eager to test. In fact one time, after a similar hiatus, when my answer would’ve been the one she didn’t want to hear, she simply didn’t ask. Unsure if it was a karmic nod of approval or rather a cosmic test of my honesty with her, I opted to say nothing.

Situationships are complicated. In fact, the smashing together of any two words generally lends itself to something complicated and opaque.

In the early days of our situationship I resolved to not be a douchebag. I resolved to be open, honest and communicative with her about my non-monogamy. Trying to embody what it meant to be an ‘Ethical Slut’ — a term I learnt from a book I read at a friend’s house, who himself was in a seemingly endlessly painful open relationship with his partner. 

In a way, being honest and communicative alleviated the guilt because I could tell myself that I had always told her the truth and that she had agreed to allow it to go on. At the same time, it provided the appropriately blurred ethical lens with which to do whatever I wanted with other people and still have the moral high ground. 

All good relationships are built on communication… Sure — I buy that. Who doesn’t?

But just like any tool, communication can be weaponised. A hammer can build a house or it can break one down. In the same way, being honest can prolong a relationship as much as it can end one.

If you talk through your non-monogamous infidelities with someone, if they know what you were going to do them before you did them, and they said they are ok with it, even when they’re clearly not, then have you done anything wrong? An ethical conundrum like that could be heard in the Supreme Court.

Short of nine justices and a Supreme Court, Alina and I had walked through this moral conundrum ourselves a few months ago – with almost entirely predictable outcomes. After a while of leaving our situationship appropriately undefined she asked me one fateful evening if I had been sleeping with anyone else. I told her the honest truth: that I hadn’t and that I wasn’t planning to.

She proceeded with an impressive mental gymnastics routine worthy of a Commonwealth, if not Olympic, gold, that concluded with: So we’re exclusive then?

Trying to be honest and communicative with her again, I explained that I hadn’t slept with anyone else, and I hadn’t been planning to, but that didn’t mean that if I did want to, that I didn’t want to be able to. My own mental gymnastics level: not even a podium finish at a small town regional event for paraplegics.

This may sound callous, but I was just being open and communicative. Remember all good relationships are built on communication right? With this in mind, I continued to communicate to her that functionally it may seem like we were exclusive, in a sense, but in actuality that’s not what I considered our situationship to be. 

We spent the next forty-five minutes talking around in circles about what we wanted, what we expected, and why this wasn’t going to work. All that good communication-BS. Until eventually, and amicably, we parted ways and agreed not to keep seeing one another because —and these obviously being my words not hers— Our short-to-mid term relationship goals were misaligned.

Two weeks passed until we bumped into each other again at a yoga class. And by ‘bumped into’ I of course mean we both knew that we would be in that same class, because the gym booking app told us which of our ‘friends’ would be attending our same classes, and neither of us did anything to avoid it. After the class we ended up back at her apartment where words were said and agreements were made to return to the heydays of our situationship with its ethical non-monogamy and opaqueness.

Later that night as we lay in her bed, Alina rolled over to me and looked me in the eyes and asked for the first time, but certainly not the last, So have you fucked anyone since we last saw one another?