Ethics of Free Love

When practicing free love and sexuality, we follow these ethical guidelines in our daily lives as an essential part of establishing a field of trust.

• Love is the greatest cultural treasure of humanity. Healing love means freeing love from fear. This also includes sexual love. Love is free by its very nature. If you have a choice between love and something else, follow love.
• The healing of love is a political imperative. It’s not only personal failure that leads to broken relationships and sexual violence, but a societal system based on fear and separation. That’s why we work on new social structures in which we can follow the inherent logic and truth of love and Eros. Our main question isn’t “What do I get?” but, “How can I contribute to a future society in which violence or abuse can no longer occur?”
• Sexuality is a sacred life force. A free sexual encounter between two people that desire each other belongs to the beauty of erotic life. You don’t have to create a personal love relationship if you want to follow your sexual truth. Sometimes sex leads to a relationship, but when we mistake sexual passion for love, we create entanglement with another person, which doesn’t actually serve love.
• Sexual pleasure arises from mutual consent. Sexual encounters need a clear genuine “yes” from both partners – they must never take place against the will of either partner. Interfere when witnessing abuse!
• Establish “contact” with the person you desire. Contact means perceiving and meeting the other with an open heart.
• Give thanks for any beautiful experience with another and don’t demand more contact. The opening is yours and doesn’t belong to the other. More contact will come on its own if it’s meant to.
• Truth in love is the basis for every lasting partnership. Transparency in the community is the key that allows us to show our truth in front of each other. This is how trust develops. You don’t cheat when you desire another person, but only if you hide your truth from your partner.
• Partnership and free sexuality are complementary not contradictory. Lovers long for faithfulness, which belongs to the nature of love. Yet it’s also true that you can only be truly faithful if you are allowed to love others too. Partnership develops from mutual compassion and support, not from mutual possession.
• There are no legal claims in love and sexuality. You can’t solve relationship problems with judicial demands towards your partner, but only with the help of a supportive community. If a partner suffers from jealousy, don’t identify him or her with it, but rather help heal its causes.
• Take full responsibility for contraception. Before entering into a sexual encounter, check with each other what you both need to be safe. Ask before you act.
• Take your time to observe and study the logic of free love. Free love isn’t about immediate fulfillment, but about the deepest system change we can imagine – freeing love and sexuality from historical fear. Remember that every authentic act of love is a service to the world.