If you haven’t read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, I highly recommend. In roughly 100 pages, I learned transformative new rules for my inner world that make life so much brighter, easier, more loving, and more aligned with the Divine. Recently, I’ve noticed how this book has also impacted my relationships. My soulmate, my friends, potential sexual partners and even strangers I meet benefit from me having read the book, and I think all of the rules also apply to swinging relationships. This is my attempt to show how.
The Prelude: Justice
Although not an agreement, the book begins with perhaps most important concept, phrased as a question: “What is justice?” Ask yourself this, momentarily.
Don Miguel responds: “Justice is paying for a mistake only once.” I think this is the best definition of justice I have ever heard. How many times do you typically pay for a mistake? How many times do you make your partner, or your family, or your friends pay? Maybe it’s a betrayal, a lie, an honest misstep. But so often, it’s not enough that we beat ourselves up for it, we allow others to beat us up for it too. Endlessly on our minds, we remember and replay our mistakes, punishing ourselves relentlessly (and sometimes, for eternity). That is not justice.
After reading that section, I vowed to never make myself or my husband pay for a mistake more than once. But what does that mean? In a situation where I’ve made a mistake, a poor judgment call, or done something I wish I could redo, it means I recognize the error, decide how I would act differently in the future, and let it go. For my husband, it means never punishing or criticizing him for anything. Just like I know when I’ve messed up, I can assume the same for him: he has already paid for the mistake in his mind. That is justice. I can forgive him. Holding on to the memory of the mistake would be an injustice. This doesn’t mean we skip over repair and remedy (when applicable), but it does mean I try not to pout, hold a grudge, or remind him about it ever again. It doesn’t come into the future with us.
Applied to swinging, you are going to make mistakes. Every experienced couple we have ever met has impressed on us, passionately, that you are going to make mistakes, especially in the first five years. FIVE YEARS! If we know we are going to make mistakes, and we know we are going to punish ourselves endlessly in our minds for each one, how could we possibly expect ourselves to endure those first five years? Internally, our hearts and minds are going to beg us, “Just don’t do it. It’s too risky. It’s too scary.” If you know you or your partner will not be able to let a mistake go, then you are not free to make mistakes, and swinging will be rife with fear and pain. The spiral of shame, guilt, and self-judgment will be a high price to pay for momentary pleasure, causing constant polarization (aka war) inside.
What if you could acknowledge a mistake and move on, as if it doesn’t mean anything about you or your future? What if you could trust that you are smart enough to internalize the lesson the first time? What if you could forgive yourself even if you didn’t? It can be so hard in the moment, fear creeps in, saying, “I need you to remember so you don’t do this again.” But actually, we attract what we fear. So that’s a losing strategy.
No justice. No peace. Opt for peace and let it go. When you or your partner makes a mistake, remember, that “ouch” feeling inside is payment enough. You’ve paid once, that is justice. Anymore ouches, and we are treating ourselves (or our beloved) unfairly.
Okay. Now on to the Agreements.
The First Agreement: Use your words impeccably
This Agreement means never use your words to betray yourself. Honor the power of your word to create your reality. It means you must tell your truth, and never use your words to judge or put yourself down. Try this even in your mind.
This is hard for me. I am the queen of beating myself up, and honesty can be scary. I can remember losing many friendships over being honest; women especially are taught to people please, and we do so primarily with our words. And I can be dishonest in other ways. I get enthusiastic and exaggerate. Or I make small accommodating statements like, “Sure, that’s okay,” or–and this is a big one–I bite my tongue. I heard someone say about the Yoni that every time we penetrate her before she is ready, she gets a chip on her shoulder, grows distrustful, until finally she shuts off to us completely. The same is true for our souls. When we allow ourselves to be touched or talked to in ways that we do not like, when we squirm through even a short moment during which our body or heart is saying “no,” we betray our body-soul and damage our connection to ourselves. So not only must we use our words in alignment with our truth, we must also speak up.
Applying this directly to swinging: With new and old friends alike it can be so hard in the moment to speak, to be direct and say, “Actually, can we try _________.” But every time I do, I show myself and my body that I am on its team. That I am on its side, not somebody else’s. When we speak up truthfully, we show ourselves that loving ourself comes first, and our body and soul reward us with more trust, more vigor and more enthusiasm about life. The future looks bright when you know you will stand up for yourself, protect yourself and not betray yourself.
So don’t compromise for new play partners, or even your own partner. Be as direct as possible and stand firm on your solid ground. Only you know what is happening inside of you, and directness is the easiest way to avoid an inner betrayal. Try your best not to betray yourself for other people. In the long run, it will erode your ability to trust yourself, and you won’t be able to swing (happily) long.
The Second Agreement: Don’t take things personally
Currently, one of the most liked posts on SDC is by a Black guy who met a White guy at a swing event and the White guy made an off-color racial comment. As the poster said: “I could have felt some type of way about it, but I decided to get to know the man instead.” The post resolves with the Black man saying, “And I’m so glad I did! This man is not racist. We had such a great time hanging and playing together. Never judge a joe by a single comment.”
You can get ahead of 90% of life’s difficulties by not taking anything personally. Just like dating, it is easy to take actions taken by others personally in swinging. Say a couple you thought you hit it off with earlier doesn’t acknowledge you later. Or someone makes an off-color remark. Or a couple you played with yesterday doesn’t want to play today. It is so difficult but so critical to remember: what other people say and do is about other people (and, what you say and do is about you).
Your opinion is just your point of view. It is not necessarily true….Even the opinions you have about yourself are not necessarily true; therefore, you don’t need to take whatever you hear in your own mind personally…. You have the right to believe or not believe these voices.
Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements
You have the opportunity, at every turn, to choose how to interpret other people’s actions. Assuming them not to be about you (which is most likely the case!) will certainly cause the least pain, worry and frustration. The couple that didn’t acknowledge you, maybe they are in a rush or not feeling well or sincerely didn’t see you. The couple that didn’t want to play could have all sorts of reasons, from desiring new experiences to still needing time to process or recover. I think I hurt a bunch of feelings for being weird about play when I didn’t know how to navigate telling people I was menstruating in swing settings. You never know what people are going through. Give them the benefit of the doubt, and don’t make it about you.
Remind yourself: What other people do is about them, not me.
The Third Agreement: Do not make assumptions
This is basically a nuanced #2. This is about the stories we make up to explain to ourselves why someone does what they do. If you are skilled at #2, this will come naturally to you.
We have the tendency to make assumptions about everything. The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are truth. We could swear they are real. We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking — we take it personally — then we blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our words. That is why whenever we make assumptions, we are asking for problems. We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole world of drama for nothing.
Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements
Let me give you an example. I was at an orgy and a guy was having trouble staying hard while another woman blew him. She burst into tears.
What happened? Well, not only was she taking personally how much blood was flowing to his cock, she made a major assumption about why he was having trouble keeping it up. He was having performance anxiety, it had nothing to do with her. But boy did she enhance that anxiety by assuming that him not staying hard meant something about her. Not only that, but my guess is she made up a very specific story about why — an old story. A memory file, projected on to this poor man. Maybe she assumed she was not sexy enough, not wanted, not wantable. Now we have a fiasco.
When we make assumptions, we are in the past. We are trying to identify patterns, which can only be done based on previous experiences. But previous experiences actually have no bearing on the current ones. They are not the same. Bless the brain, bless its good heart, but we don’t need to do that. If we don’t make assumptions, we can respectfully stay in our own lane, and most importantly, stay present. When that woman was crying, she was not crying about the present circumstance, she was back in the past, feeling past pain. When we are present, calm, and confident that nothing about someone else is about us, we can stay loving, fun, and curious. “The best way to avoid making assumptions is to ask questions,” (Don Miguel Ruiz). If, instead of crying, the woman had asked a question, or even just kept going (making no meaning out of a soft cock), what a different time everyone would have had.
We have millions of questions that need answers because there are so many things that the reasoning mind cannot explain. It is not important if the answer is correct; just the answer itself makes us feel safe. This is why we make assumptions.
Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements
Making assumptions makes trauma. Literally! Trauma can be defined as “the meaning we make when something bad happens to us,” (Gabor Mate). So, make no meanings, experience no trauma! Truly, nothing means anything.
The Fourth Agreement: Always do your best (and remember that you are always doing your best)
This frustrated me as a rule. Initially, I saw it as a cop-out. But it’s a good one. Why? Because I fail all the time. I fail at not beating myself up. I fail at not punishing my husband. I fail at being direct and 100% honest in the moment. I even take things personally and make assumptions. But when I remember I am always doing my best, I can forgive myself, let it go, and try again.
This rule does require that you try your best all the times — definitely do that if you aren’t. But my guess is you probably are. Sometimes it’s hard to know what “my best” is. If I could have done more to clean my house, did I do my best? If I was cranky or cruel, was I really trying my best? I’ve resolved this by reading a lot on free will, which at least left me conflicted enough to agree that it is possible I have no control over myself at all. If I have no control over myself, how could I ever be to blame?
The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab extended his work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a “clock” composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made. More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.
Sam Harris, Free Will
These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next–a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please–your brain has already determined what you will do…. You would, of course, continue to feel free in every present moment, but the fact that someone else could report what you were about to think and do would expose this feeling for what it is: an illusion.
If you are intent on claiming rueful responsibility anyway, which, I understand, there are other ways up the mountain. The easiest one is gratitude. Well, gratitude plus the Butterfly Effect. If you are grateful for even one thing about where you are now, no matter how frustrated or ashamed you are of an action your past-self took, you can’t want to take it away, because if you did, you may not have what you have now. So even if parts of you really wish you could take it back, you can be grateful that you did what you did. You can be grateful for that past-self getting you to where you are now, whether despite or because of its flaws.
If that approach is not hitting, try this: For any situation where you are being hard on yourself, or asking, “did I really do my best?” go back to the moment and ask yourself, sincerely, “Could I have acted differently, or was I doing the best I could?” If the former, make amends. Say sorry. Ask for forgiveness. I like to decide what I would do differently and rewrite the memory reel in my mind, playing it out as if I did in fact do that (wiser) thing. Then, I’m absolved (justice!), and I have more confidence I will take the route I prefer in the future. If the latter, which is most often the case, then there isn’t anything to hate or forgive. Most of the time, I look back and even though some part of me thinks I could have done different, when I get radically in tune with the specifics of the moment, I see that I sincerely did the best that I could: I could not have done different or better in that moment. I either lacked the skills, the awareness, or the emotional wherewithal. Not only does this reduce self-blame and condemnation, it builds self-trust.
Alan Watts said, “The art of Zen is to act perfectly spontaneously,” never looking back. This is much easier to do when we can trust that we have always done and will always do our best. What more can we ask?
Applied broadly, when you make a mistake, when you fail at one of these principles, when you are beating yourself up, remember you are doing your best. You can even be grateful for the error as it showed you something about yourself. Love yourself for being a human being, a person who fucks up sometimes, just like everybody else. Defend yourself against attacks of the mind, attacks that say you did wrong or are bad or inadequate by saying, “I was doing my best. And I am doing my best right now.” It’s possible we have no control over our mental states, so even when you are stuck in a bad place, make no meanings, that’s okay too.
When it comes to swinging, I know, I know, “Don’t make assumptions,” but, if you do make only one, assume your partner and other play partners are also doing their best. This may look like a positive presumption, or compassion, rather than frustration in the moment. For me, it is an invitation not to problematize, not to fume, not to spiral, but to do whatever I need to do mentally to grok that — just like me — whatever this person is doing is their best, and I see and love them for the fallibility we share. And when I am not happy with something I did, I remember I was doing my best, and let it go, going on to play another day.
TLDR: Use your words impeccably, don’t take things personally, don’t make assumptions, and always do your best. Oh, and read the Four Agreements, its gifts go far beyond what I’ve shared here.
😘😘 Honey
