Sarah Mirk - Sex from Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules (Good Life)

Sex From Scratch

Making Your Own Relationship Rules

Second Edition, 3000 copies, November 14, 2021

All text is Sarah Mirk, 2014, 2017, 2021

This edition is by Microcosm Publishing, 2014, 2017, 2021

In the Real World series

eBook ISBN 9781648410444

This is Microcosm #155

Edited by Elly Blue

Designed by Joe Biel

Cover illustrations by Sarah Mirk

Portraits and street scenes illustrated by Natalie Nourigat. Quotes illustrated by Molly Schaeffer.

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Portland, OR 97227

https://microcosm.pub/SexFromScratch

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Microcosm Publishing is Portlands most diversified publishing house and distributor with a focus on the colorful, authentic, and empowering. Our books and zines have put your power in your hands since 1996, equipping readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and bookettes about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice. What was once a distro and record label was started by Joe Biel in his bedroom and has become among the oldest independent publishing houses in Portland, OR. We are a politically moderate, centrist publisher in a world that has inched to the right for the past 80 years.

I choose to lovethis timefor once

with all my intelligence

Adrienne Rich

For my parents, Marquita and John.

Thank you for not screwing me up.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Introduction to the second edition

1. Loving Being Single

Michelle Tea: Dont Date People Who Bring You Down

Tracy Clark-Flory: Dont Fake Orgasms

2. Building Feminist

Relationships

EvYan Whitney: Ditch the Beliefs that Dont Fit

Aya de Leon:

Take Up as Much Space as You Want

Andi Zeisler: Choose to Make Each Other Family

3. Navigating Open

Relationships

Tristan Taormino: Practice Saying No

Erika Moen: Love is Not Enough

Bauer

4. Gender is Messy

Stu Rasmussen:

This is My Life and Im Going to Run It

Margaret Jacobsen:

Show Up As You Are, and Thats Enough

5. Staying Childless

by Choice

Wendy-O Matik: Love Who You Want, How You Want, As Many as You Want

6. On Never Getting Married

Betty Dodson: Sex is More Than Bumping Genitals

7. Knowing When to Split

Tomas Moniz: Relax, Listen, Ask Questions

Reading List

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Look, I dont know what Im doing.

Most advice books are written by people who say theyre experts and sell you on the notion that there are secrets inside that will transform your life. I have to tell you some bad news: Im no expert. There are no secrets here. Only you can change your life. Sorry.

What is in this book are a bunch of good insights, practical advice, and admissions of honest mistakes from people who are not selling anything except the idea that everyone should feel empowered to have a healthy and happy relationships. Its a do-it-yourself approach to dating and its a hard road, thats for sure.

When I hit my mid-twenties and was in a long-term relationship that didnt feel quite right, I didnt know where to turn. My boyfriend, Carl, was great. Hes funny, hes generous, hes the smartest person I know. But I wasnt certain whether I wanted to keep dating him, whether I wanted to get married and have kids with him and have sex with only him forever. It felt like the world was closing down a bit when I thought about that, but I wasnt sure why. I was raised by open-minded parents in the feel-good early nineties and was taught to have a clear vision of who I am, encouraged to just be myself by every TV special since 1986. Were told over and over to be proud of our differences and embrace all of our own quirks. But when it comes to relationships with other people, our role models dont encourage quite so much originality. Instead, our vision of dating is very straightforward: No matter what kind of weirdo you are, you aspire to someday get married, you aspire to have kids, you actively work to have sex with one person for most of your life, and whoevers relationship lasts the longest wins.

As I started to evaluate whether my relationship was healthy for me, I started to realize that though I knew a lot about myself, I didnt know a lot about how I wanted to be in relationships with other people. I started recognizing that a lot of what I grew up learning about relationships is based on religions that I dont believe in and on old-school ways of thinking that come from generations long before mine. Part of why I felt so lost was because I had no value set for relationships that felt honest and relevant to me.

Its not just me. In the United States, fewer people than ever identify with any specific religions. People are getting married later than ever, or not at all. More and more people feel comfortable identifying as queer and genderqueer. The rigid traditional benchmarks of successmarriage, monogamy, and kidsarent useful for everyone. When people try to squeeze their relationships and identities into that vision, they often find that its an awkward, unhealthy, and destructive fit. We need a better understanding of what a successful relationship looks like.

I worked as a newspaper reporter for years, and I know that in reporting, you rarely rely on just one persons perspective. Instead, the most honest stories come from analyzing a diversity of experiences. When trying to make decisions about my own relationships, I was anxious that basing my romantic choices on only my limited experience and narrow perspective would inevitably mean making terrible mistakes and breaking the hearts of people I love, over and over. Or, maybe worse, Id wind up trapped in a relationship that slowly drove me crazy over time. One winter, on a Friday, after I got off work writing at the newspaper, I visited the relationship section of a bookstore, looking for some kind of guidance. The dating section of the bookstore during Friday happy hour is a weird scene. But I avoided eye contact and focused on the books. I didnt find much. Almost all the best-selling books about relationships are divided along gender binary lines (the skinny bitchs guide to dating or pick-up-artist rules for men, for example). The ones geared toward women are specifically focused on trying to snag a man and get married to him. I dont think that an emotionally manipulative, goal-oriented approach to relationships sounds like a good idea. Im just not that into competitive sports. A couple other bookslike The Ethical Slut , Opening Up , and others mentioned in the endnotes of this bookoffered refreshing alternative visions of relationships. But they were all pretty focused on one specific type of relationship, and I wasnt sure what kind of relationship was good for me. I wasnt certain what I wanted at all. I wanted to find a book on the relationship shelf that would gather the collective wisdom of what people older and braver than me had learned. I wanted to read about people who have learned the hard way. That book didnt exist, so I decided to write it.