Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (11 page)

I was basically a stay-at-home mom myself. Although I was teaching full-time at night, I was mommying all day long. Many of the women in The Estates had given up nearly everything that had previously defined them—their jobs, their non-mommy friends, their hobbies—in exchange for a big house in the burbs and annual trips to Tahiti. But all the status in the world couldn’t hide the fact that these women were prisoners in their own lives: Some even had to ask permission to go out at night, and when their husbands were with the kids, both spouses referred to it as “baby-sitting.”

Some of the husbands traveled more than half the year, and when they were home, they were often mowing

the lawn or golfing. Meanwhile, their wives dutifully kept the home fires burning. Many of my new friends were lonely and sad, and others had that sleepwalking thing going on, smiles plastered in place. Wasn’t this the life they’d fought so hard for? Yet they had to smile to hold it all together—and some of us had to wonder how we’d ended up here.

“The housewife is more an invention of privileged people in ranked societies than a natural role of human animal,” writes Helen Fisher in
Anatomy of Love
.
1
It certainly felt like an undesirable, false role to me at the time. And while I’d like to believe that the modern-day housewife role is somehow based on good intentions, it’s just not working out for most women.
Now what?
they too often wonder. Nothing staves off reality like a damn good brownie.

What about me?
was the question I was asking myself. The trade-off was supposed to be some divine sense of fulfillment that only wifedom and motherhood could bring me, but, despite my high hopes, I was coming up short.

I know some women can manage this lifestyle, and I understand that some parts of it can be very rewarding. But at what cost? Certainly, it varies from woman to woman, and for some, it’s not even a question. But, looking at the preponderance of women in my new community, I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d ended up in Stepford, surrounded by so many unhappy women who shopped and gossiped to fill their tiresome days. From my vantage point, there

seemed to be two types of women in The Estates: those who had forgotten who they were and what they wanted, and were resigned to that fact (even content about it), and those who were unhappy but saw no alternative. When they complained about their situations, they often followed by saying, “But it is what it is.”

“I signed up for this, I guess,” they’d tell me. They’d lament the fact that their husbands didn’t want to have sex with them anymore, or that their husbands wanted to have sex too often. Some talked about their spouses’ wanting to do “weird” stuff. When I listened to what some of those requests were—things like spanking—I actually found them fairly benign. One woman confessed that she was mortified that her husband had asked her to try some new positions.

“Why don’t you want to try it?” I asked. “What do you mean, ‘why?’”

“I mean, how do you know you won’t like it?” “It’s what sluts do,” she pronounced solemnly.

“Really?” I replied. I must have sounded a bit too in- credulous, because she raised her eyebrows and gave me an expectant look.

“I like to have sweet, romantic sex, too,” I told her, “but I also like to talk dirty and play rough sometimes.” I wasn’t totally alone among my new friends, I soon found out, as sex turned out to be one of our most frequent topics of conversation once we opened that door.

i did become very close with three or

four women in the neighborhood, particularly with one named Samantha. She had a great sex life with her husband, Clayton. She talked about the wild places they’d done it, and how they took vacations just to have sex without fear of being interrupted by one of their three kids. She would become one of the few friends with whom I felt connected enough to discuss my ideas about open marriage. She admitted she was attracted to other people, and her husband had told her on more than one occasion that he’d love to have a threesome.

“I’d be too jealous if I saw him with another woman, though,” she told me. “I’m not into women. I’ve thought about it, but I just don’t think I could go through with it.” She knew I’d been with women, and I’d even suggested flirtatiously a few times, just to test the waters, that we get together. She always laughed off my advances; she was never uncomfortable, but never interested, either. It was a relief to have a friend whom I could be completely honest with, and who didn’t think I was a freak. Nothing I could tell her would bother her, because Samantha and Clayton had an interesting sex life of their own, which they worked constantly to keep new and exciting. They bought a massage table for their bedroom, had a chest full of sex toys, and had sex with a frequency I envied.

Despite all of that—a seemingly ideal scenario that I wished Christopher and I could have—Clayton struck me

as someone who might still be interested in having other partners. He loved and was satisfied with Samantha, and I cannot imagine he ever would have cheated on her. But I couldn’t help but wonder if he might be open to experimenting with other people if Samantha herself were open to it. They certainly didn’t hide the fact that they found other people attractive. His desire didn’t seem to bother her. She found it quite natural, and would often say that as long as he didn’t act on it, it didn’t present a problem in their relationship.

I have admired Samantha and Clayton’s partnership since we first met. They are the reason why I continue to believe that monogamy, although I see it as a choice, can work for the right couple.

That’s not to say that the idea of “venturing out” hasn’t crossed either of their minds at one point or another. One night, a group of couples from our neighborhood were out to dinner. We had to wait for our table, so we all settled in at the bar—women at one end, men at the other. My husband, usually in an effort to combat his shyness, has a tendency to pose clever questions in group settings. “If you could have any superpower,” he asked the men, “what would it be?” Not surprisingly, most of the guys wanted to be able to read people’s minds or see into the future. But not Clayton. Laughing drunkenly, he actually told the three other men standing there that he wished for the ability to sleep with other women without his wife finding out.

When Christopher told me about Clayton’s remark that night, I wasn’t shocked. I was kind of surprised that he had said it out loud, in front of his wife’s friends’ husbands, but I was also glad about that, because it implied that he wouldn’t care if Samantha knew. It made me think that he would’ve made the same comment in front of Samantha, and that felt like awfully good couple honesty to me. More than anything, though, I was relieved that I wasn’t alone. It was too easy to think I wanted something more just because I was dissatisfied, or just because I wanted more, period. I felt an unspoken camaraderie with Clayton, but I never let either him or Samantha know that Christopher had shared Clayton’s superpower wish with me.

Six months went by, and Samantha and I began spending more time together. One day, she was dropping me off at my house after one of our bimonthly girls’ nights out at the local bar. As I said goodbye, just as I was pushing the car door open, she turned to me and said, “Clayton wants you for his birthday.” She was a little drunk. I could tell she was teasing, but I knew there was an element of truth there, and that she was curious about how I would respond.

“Excuse me?” I said, letting the door close again and settling back into my seat.

“He’s turning forty next month, you know? And when I asked him what he wanted for his birthday, he said he wanted another woman to join us in bed, and that he’d like that other woman to be you.”

“Wow,” I said. That was all I had. We sat in silence. It wasn’t awkward, exactly, but I think I was as interested to hear her reaction as she was to hear mine. “So . . . ” I prompted, after I couldn’t take the silence any longer.

“So, I don’t know,” she said. “Would you?”

“You know I’ve wanted to sleep with you since the minute I met you,” I said. She’d heard it a million times by that point, and she still wasn’t interested. I had noticed that sometimes, after she’d had a drink or two, she’d start to get flirty, but I still didn’t think sealing the deal was part of her plan.

“Shut up,” she said lightheartedly. “I know. But what about Clayton?”

“I’d be willing to take my medicine to get my sugar.” This came out before I even knew what I’d said. I was flirting with her because I wanted to see where it would go, but I wasn’t sure that I would have gone through with it, either. It was too close to home. I wasn’t interested in Clayton, and I wouldn’t have wanted to risk a friendship that continues, even today, to be a huge part of my life.

“Well, you never know,” she said, which is what she always said when I’d feigned a proposition. I got out of the car and made my way up to my front door. When I turned around, she was still sitting there, and we waved goodbye again. I felt conflicted, not because I believed anything would ever happen between Samantha and me, or Samantha and Clayton and me, but because she was opening a window on an option I felt like I wanted to have

with Christopher. Here was this sexually satisfied couple who entertained the thought of opening their relationship, even if only for a one-time thing. Amid all of these other couples who seemed so out of step with each other, Samantha and Clayton were completely attuned, and yet no amount of sexual satisfaction seemed to cancel out their natural desire for other partners.

Their marriage was a revelation to me. Most people do want something new and different, but the question is whether they can be honest about it, instead of repressing their urges or cheating. When I thought about Clayton and Samantha’s relationship, it hit me all over again: It’s not about sex; it’s about honesty. And what could be healthier than that? They were living proof that even the happiest and most sexually satisfied couples aren’t immune to outside desires.

These ideas were stirring in my head, but I still wasn’t prepared to suggest anything to Christopher just yet. After all, talking about those impulses and acting on them were two very different things. My desire existed—that was clear. The honesty part seemed like a great idea, and I was all for it. But could we really sleep with other people and still be okay?

Samantha and Clayton were certainly more the exception than the rule, after all, and not just in my neighborhood, but also in my experience at large. A couple that better exemplified the kind of relationships I tended to encounter

was Elizabeth and her husband, Brian. Their marriage was problematic on many different levels, entrenched as it had been, for as long as I’d known them, in a modern tragedy of the virgin/whore variety. That dichotomy, in which the male half of a partnership wants a kitten in the kitchen and a tiger in the bedroom, is incredibly emotionally draining and confusing for women, whether they’re married or not. It leaves them with the near-impossible task of negotiating the untenable space of being a good girl with a nasty streak, the kind of girl you can take home to Mama
and
who is sexual— but not too sexual. Too often, it happens that men find that nasty girl and then expect her to suppress her behavior a bit after she’s married. And once kids are in the picture, she’s gotta tone it
waaaay
down.

I think this is a predicament many couples struggle

with—the question of how “slutty” a woman is “allowed” to be, and how much of a nasty girl a husband wants in his wife. Even simply laying out the idea exemplifies how much of a double standard it is to begin with. A man experiences no similar pressure. He can pretty much set the tone for the relationship, and even if his wife complains that he’s sexually deviant—looking at porn, frequenting strip clubs, cheating—she’s still the one who’s trying to figure out how to satisfy him, how to make the marriage happy. For me, the sexual issues surrounding being someone’s wife led me to consider the idea of open marriage, but for other couples, like Elizabeth and Brian, this sexual disconnect I’ve just

described only continued to fester until it became a palpable problem that infested every other part of their lives.

One night early on in Christopher’s and my friendship with Elizabeth and Brian, we were at a neighborhood dinner party. Some twenty other people were milling about, but only a half a dozen or so were within earshot. Brian approached me and, apropos of nothing, said, “You would never have been in Elizabeth’s sorority.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“You would have been in the sorority of the girls guys slept with. Elizabeth was in the sorority of the girls guys married.”

Brian’s comment had no context; he wasn’t even drunk. He had simply decided it would be okay, in that moment, to launch into a diatribe about his perception of my sexuality versus his wife’s. And he didn’t stop there. He went on to tell me how Elizabeth had been a virgin when they got married, and had purportedly lost all interest in sex not too far into their marriage. Surprise, surprise. Brian had a reputation for spewing distasteful comments about his wife. I remembered one occasion when he had told a group of neighbors, “I can’t get my wife to fuck me, no matter what I buy her.”

I always felt like asking him, “And what did you expect when you married her?” He wanted to marry a virgin, and he got one. And as far as she was concerned, she’d done the right thing: She’d followed the rules and gotten the guy, and then—partly because he wanted her to be someone

else, and partly because he had always been someone other than who he professed to be—she couldn’t stand him, and he couldn’t stand her. She molded herself into the woman society said (and Brian agreed) she was supposed to be, only to get the backhanded message that her uptight ways were boring and priggish.

It was sad and painful to watch Elizabeth. She worked her tail off to run the perfect household. Her home was always spotless, her children always looked adorable, and I never saw her looking unkempt in the slightest. Eventually, she caved in to her husband’s demands. She started wearing low-slung jeans and low-cut shirts, instead of the more conservative clothing she preferred. But their issues never really stemmed from something as simple as wardrobe disagreements—they were always about intent. Elizabeth’s intent was to be the perfect wife and mother, as defined by Hallmark, Disney, and Lifetime Television. Brian’s intent was to marry that girl and, I guess, hope that a martian invasion would occur and Pamela Anderson’s body and attitude would replace Elizabeth’s. It was an unfair setup from the start.