Sartre and Beauvoir formalized honesty and primacy rules for their open relationship

Evidence

It was perhaps made easier by the fact that, after the late 1930s, it was no longer a sexual one. (She wrote to her lover Nelson Algren, ‘We dropped it after about eight or ten years rather unsuccessful in this way.’) They also agreed two long-term conditions. One was that they must tell each other everything about their other sexual involvements: there must be honesty. They only partly kept to this. The other was that their own relationship must remain primary: in their language, it would be ‘necessary’ while other relationships could only be ‘contingent’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 383

Categorization

• XREF: The necessary/contingent distinction maps directly onto Sartre’s ontology of freedom and situatedness — the couple applied their existentialist vocabulary to their own private contract. Also resonates with Jade/Luna’s structured polyamory negotiations elsewhere in reading. — connects to: Sartre and Beauvoir deliberately lived their philosophy of freedom in their relationship — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 50; Sartre came to embrace collaborative thinking with a partner — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 973; Beauvoir and Sartre pioneered the contingent-affairs arrangement against bourgeois convention — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 32
• DEFINE: Shows how ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’ — technical terms from Sartre’s ontology — were concretely applied to rank human relationships.