relationships

Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships

by Domina Doll on 06/20/2024

in book, books, polyamory, polygamy, relationships, Tristan Taormino, tristantaormino

openingup Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships

“Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships” by Tristan Taormino is an enlightening and thought-provoking book that explores the diverse aspects of nonmonogamous relationships from solo polyamory, to partnered nonmonogamy, to triangles and groups.  The book features a wealth of information from stats to brief histories of polyamory in the U.S., as well as Taormino’s own research on the subject where she interviewed over 100 people living in open relationships over the past ten years.

The Guide begins by relating the history of polyamory, as well as breaking the myths of monogamy and traditional relationships, why you might want to choose a nonmonogamous lifestyle and what makes nonmonogamy work.  Section 2 looks at the many styles or models of nonmonogamous relationships and Section 3 talks about creating and sustaining relationships.  There is also a resource guide at the end which lists books, organizations and websites for further information.

Throughout the book Taormino uses checklists and practical advice for the reader which she says can be used like a roadmap to navigate your own way through the different styles and create your own model based on you and your partner(s) needs, desires, and unique situation(s).  Like any emotional or sexual relationship, polyamorous relationships have unique problems, potential issues and conflicts that arise that are common to open relationships.  Taormino deals with each of these giving practical advice and coping strategies including: jealousy, fear of abandonment, time management, negotiating boundaries, violating agreements, new desire, coping with change, safer sex as well as legal issues.

The highlight of the book is the real life experiences Taormino uses with quotes, stories and advice from a diverse group of people who share their desires, fears, challenges, solutions, successes and failures with the reader to provide meaningful context.  This book is really a thoughtful and comprehensive guide on open relationships of all kinds, leaving no stone unturned.  Enlightening, inspirational, and practical, this book is for anyone interested in or already living in responsible nonmonogamous relationships.

You can purchase “Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships” by Tristan Taormino at Babeland.


Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships

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When Blogs Cry: How To Breakup Online (Melissa Gira; The Frisky)

by Viviane on 10/07/2025

in bloggers, Blogging, relationships, social media

Cancel, unsubscribe, unfollow. Sort out how you want to react to the breakup only after you’ve canceled the relationship, unsubscribed from her Tumblr, or blocked him from Twitter. To undo a relationship that made it online in any form—whether you’ve got photos together all over MySpace or earned your own tag on Gawker—requires investing as much shared exposure as you put in. Make a cold calculation: in my case, that meant reframing a year-and-a-half long affair, across half a dozen online networks, and doing it in just a few days. This condenses everything: how much it hurts, how fast you have to react. You had weeks or months to attach to one another’s blogs, profiles, and endearingly staged snapshots. Now you have to delete or address it all, all at once.

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Sexual Legacies from the Men in my Life (Suzanne Portnoy)

by Viviane on 08/19/2025

in relationships, sex

My friend and fellow blogger Mimi’s most recent post ‘Legacies from the Men in my Life’ got me thinking, not in a general sense but in a sexual one. Funny that. In truth, the men in my life have probably taught me more about sex than about anything else. I’ve always been a self-contained, opinionated woman with a wide variety of interests so it’s hard to separate what I actually learned by myself from what I was taught by the men in my life. Actually, that’s not totally true. My ex-husband taught me a hell of a lot about music. And the one after that, the alcoholic, taught me I’m a very bad drinker. Whereas the one after that taught me how to make a very nice martini using apple and orange juice. He also taught me that when a man tells you ‘I’m a one woman man,’ he very rarely means it. The same man told me that I’d look much better with short, curly hair and he was right.

Then there’s the Sexual Legacies. In no particular order:

Ex-husband – I was young. I was relatively inexperienced (but thought I knew it all) So was he. When we got divorced, I was none the wiser.

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legacies from the men in my life (sexagenarian and the city)

by Viviane on 08/19/2025

in relationships

And I don’t mean money. I mean culture, understood in the widest sense.

Whatever about the men, intimacy with them put me in touch with a wide variety of microcultures.

I wonder what legacies, if any, they have from me.

* * *

from my first husband

Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Mozart opera; some sense of how a genius thinks (he was — still is, I suppose — a genius); an understanding of what it was like to grow up Catholic in the U.S. in the 1950s; some sense of what ‘Canadian’ means; a visionary notion of political activism

(he was passionate about Native American education; against the then corrupt miltary regime in Chile; against capital punishment, etc.)

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Feminism And Romance Go Hand In Hand (Science Daily)

by Viviane on 10/16/2025

in feminism, relationships, research

Science Daily — Contrary to popular opinion, feminism and romance are not incompatible and feminism may actually improvethe quality of heterosexual relationships, according to Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan, from Rutgers University in the US. Their study* also shows that unflattering feminist stereotypes, that tend to stigmatize feminists as unattractive and sexually unappealing, are unsupported.

It is generally perceived that feminism and romance are in direct conflict. Rudman and Phelan’s work challenges this perception. They carried out both a laboratory survey of 242 American undergraduates and an online survey including 289 older adults, more likely to have had longer relationships and greater life experience. They looked at men’s and women’s perception of their own feminism and its link to relationship health, measured by a combination of overall relationship quality, agreement about gender equality, relationship stability and sexual satisfaction.

(more . . .)

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