Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (19 page)

I figured I couldn’t possibly be the first person in this type of situation. So, as I often do when I am feeling perplexed

about something in life, I decided to see if there might be any books to help me figure it out. Lo and behold, I found a book whose title suggested that I might have found exactly what I was looking for:
The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping with Chicks,
by Jen Sincero. Although I’d been with women before and was as opposed to being labeled “straight” as I was to being deemed “bi,” I was pretty sure the references would apply. The very fact that the book existed spoke to the fact that I wasn’t alone on the planet. There were other “straight girls” who wanted to figure out how to meet other “chicks”—and, yes, sleep with them. It helped, too, that Sincero approached the subject with a heavy dose of humor and chutzpah.

Knowing that these women were out there, coupled with my new resolve to find them, resulted in one false start—a very nice girl who came back to my hotel room and then became uneasy when she realized what she’d gotten into—and several very fun nights that busted the myth that women aren’t interested in sex for the sake of sex—with other women. One of those women was someone I met at yet another writers’ conference in 2004. I started up a conversation with my waiter, Thomas, who asked me if I wanted to go out for a drink with him when he got off his shift. I had no idea what his intentions were, but he was funny and friendly, and it seemed like we could have a good time together, even though I wasn’t seeking his affections. And so I asked him, “Actually, do you know anything about the gay and lesbian scene around here?”

“Oh,” he said.

“Yeah,” I smiled.

“Well, you’re in luck, because it just so happens that I do.” Turned out Thomas was a struggling actor and had a ton of gay friends. “I know just the place,” he said. After making him promise me that he had no illusions of a threesome (only partially in jest), I jumped into a cab with him. The taxi stopped in front of a small, dark club. Plush and hip. Thomas introduced me to his friends, and then walked right up to the bartender and told him what I was looking for. I was mortified—until the bartender introduced me to Justine. She was lean and about five inches taller than I was, with attentive eyes and a great smile. Her long arms were covered in tattoos of angels, and her blond hair was cut in a perfect pixie. I was smitten.

We talked and flirted, and after a few hours, the talking turned to kissing and I began wondering if I would ever have the nerve to ask her to go back to my room with me. I can be the tiniest bit impulsive, especially when I get nervous and have had a few martinis. So I somehow found myself blurting, “Is now when I ask if you want to come back to my hotel?” She smiled and giggled.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said. I laughed in relief and asked the bartender to call us a cab.

On the way back to my room, we had a chance to talk more, and Justine told me that she hadn’t been with a woman in a long time. I was completely surprised to find out that

she had three kids and had been dating men exclusively for quite some time. Because of where we’d met, the fact that the bartender had “referred” her to me, and her look, I’d automatically assumed she was gay. Shame on me. The social brainwashing rages on.

We had fun that night. Justine was so alternative looking compared to me, and I loved it. Her nipples were pierced, and parts of her body that had been covered by clothes in the bar turned out to be covered in more tattoos. We laughed and talked and kissed and played, and then, at 5:00 a.m., she headed out to relieve her babysitter and be sure she was home before her girls woke up. We made plans to talk again, which we did once after I got back home. But it was definitely just one of those things. Christopher ate up the story when I told him about it; he asked for more and more details, which was generally how it went. When I was with a man, he wanted to know that it had happened, but nothing more; when I was with a woman, he wanted the whole megillah—and it always turned him on.

With Christopher’s interest fueling my own, our relationship felt more lively and exciting than ever, perhaps even more so than it had when we were first dating. I dated another married woman in the winter of 2005, who told me that her experiences with me had the same effect on her and her husband. “I couldn’t wait for my husband to come home,” she told me after we had been together. “I felt so sexy. I just wanted to attack him.” Another married

couple I was with both told me some time afterward that their encounter with me had revved up their sex life and their desire for each other. These scenarios seem to remind couples that their partners are desirable to other people. It intrigues me that so many people fear that the exact opposite will transpire. Not so, in my experience.

eventually, even dating only women,

I started to believe that maintaining a series of multiple partners wasn’t what I envisioned for myself ultimately. That was when the second leg of my journey began, when I started to explore not just the sexual-freedom side of open marriage, but the polyamorous side as well. I got a girlfriend.

I met Jemma when I was working on a review of an art show opening at a local gallery. She was the gallery’s curator, and she gave me a tour of the exhibit. She invited me to a lecture by the artist that night, and afterward we went out for drinks with some of her friends. I liked her. She was smart and funny, pretty and stylish. Not my usual type. Too young. And too sweet. I had a penchant for women with tattoos, women whose personas were anything but sweet. Jemma was twenty-six, and as innocent and straitlaced as they come. Think cheerleader and class valedictorian. Think Reese Witherspoon, not Salma Hayek.

But we had such a great time together, and we had so much in common. Jemma started inviting me out more

regularly, sometimes with her friends in tow, sometimes alone. We were friends at first, and I didn’t even consider that we might be more than that. The fact that she lived in town meant that dating her would break one of the rules Christopher and I had set. And she was straight. “Very straight,” she told me one night, after I asked her if she’d ever consider dating women.

Not too far into our friendship, I decided it was time for me to explain my situation to Jemma and a few of her friends whom I’d been out with a couple of times before. We were headed to a bar, and I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea if she saw me flirting with anyone. I figured she would likely misconstrue it as either cheating or pursuing cheating.

“Look, I hope this isn’t TMI,” I said over dinner, “but Christopher and I are allowed to sleep with other people. We’re in an open marriage. And I’m also bi.”

They seemed surprised but not shocked. They were fine with it—for me—but they all concurred that it wasn’t for them.

“Well, wait till you’re married for a while,” I told the group of twentysomethings seated around me. “And wait until you meet a woman who makes you forget that you don’t like women. Then decide how monogamous and straight you are.” They just laughed. But I wasn’t joking. There I was, at a table filled with attractive, self-confident, accomplished women, most of them more than ten years

younger than I, all of them subscribing to the same beliefs I’d had at their age. It was amazing. I had to think about that same point in my own life, when I felt as if everything would unfold in a certain way. I wondered if perhaps the fact that my life had turned out so differently from the Disneyfied version I’d anticipated helped me relate better to these girls. Or maybe no amount of explaining could allow them to identify with what was more likely to be their own experience down the road than they would have liked to admit. It’s a funny place to be in—almost like being able to see the future.

I felt compelled to share my situation with them because I never want anyone to think,
Poor Christopher,
or to think badly of me. I understand that they might think badly of me regardless, but at least I’d be living as honestly and openly as I know how to. And I’d rather have someone disagree with my choices than make assumptions about me without even being aware of those choices.

Jemma and her friends asked a few questions about how it all started, how it worked, and how I realized I was bi. No judgment, just curiosity. By and large, this has been my experience when I confide in younger women. I think that (in general, anyway) each generation is more open-minded than the next. Young woman today seem particularly interested in discovering the world for themselves, rather than having it force-fed to them. They are looking for new recipes for finding happiness, and they are not afraid to

think for themselves and to experiment, accepting their own experiences and their peers’ experiences as truth. They seem far less willing to embrace “That’s just the way it is” as an explanation for the way the world works. They want to
see
it work.

It wasn’t long before Jemma and I were spending a lot of time together. We had a lot in common, and she was willing to be my “plus-one” for the many events I had to attend that Christopher would sooner have pulled all his teeth out than sign on for. We also became each other’s confidant. There wasn’t anything we didn’t talk about, and she was one of the few people I shared “Portrait of an Open Marriage” with, the piece I wrote about my marriage for
Tango
magazine. That article sparked a lot of conversations between us about sexuality and couples and romance. The more she told me, the closer I felt to her—and she to me.

Although Jemma’s story wasn’t my own, it was familiar—maybe simply because we are both women and have therefore both struggled with the same issues, no matter how different our experiences might have been. She didn’t lose her virginity until she was twenty-two, has had very few sexual partners, and had never even considered being with a woman, let alone actually gone through with it. But many women I know, regardless of their specific sexual and romantic backgrounds, are so baffled by mixed messages, signals, and expectations that they find themselves in relationships and marriages that leave them confused and

dissatisfied. All of that conflicting information I spoke about earlier in this book makes it very difficult for young women to sort out who they are and what they want, especially when it comes to matters of the heart and desires of the body. As different as Jemma and I are, we are very similar in certain ways. We both wanted (and want) what I think all women do: happy, healthy, satisfying, fulfilling, supportive, loving relationships with great sex.

“What about love?” she asked one day when we were discussing how my open marriage in particular worked. I told her the truth.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t know what would happen if I had other love relationships outside of my marriage.” Up until that point, I had considered only the possibility of falling in love, and somehow I didn’t expect it to actually happen. But it did, of course—I fell in love with Jemma. We went out of town one weekend a few months after we met, and she confessed, shyly, that she was interested in me. She asked me to kiss her and I did.

Jemma and I have been together for a year and a half as of this writing. I understand that she is that “something else” I was looking for to supplement my marriage. She’s now the only person I see outside of my marriage. She is the only one I want to see, and she says she wouldn’t be comfortable—not at this point in our relationship, anyway—with my seeing anyone else. She’s not interested in dating anyone else, either. It seems altogether strange and amazingly simple.

And it works. Could I be happy with Jemma exclusively? I suppose that’s possible. But I have no interest in leaving my husband. I think I will probably always desire more than what one person can possibly be for any other person.

I think it’s likely that if Jemma and I attempted exclusivity, things would change for us; there would be a shift once we had the sense that I “had” her, once we had a mortgage to share and dishes to wash. I think the nature of our relationship would alter significantly. And I—we— don’t want that. As it is now, it’s relatively uncomplicated. I’m not sure I want to be in some sort of communal living situation, or if I could handle a stable full of people and all the permutations in which those people got together. But my having a husband and a girlfriend works for all of us. Right now, each of us has what we want and need. Will that change? I’m sure. But that’s the benefit of being open: We follow love, desire, instinct, and honesty, rather than convention. And we remain open to exploring how the future unfolds.

before I fell in love with Jemma, I

had long argued that being open worked because it was strictly about sex. But then I found love. I still sometimes struggle to explain it to myself, let alone to other people. If open marriage works because it involves “just sex,” then how can I reconcile my relationship with Jemma? How do I justify giving up sleeping with anyone else besides her outside of

my marriage? How do I rationalize loving her, being in love with her? After questioning and requestioning myself, I’ve realized that falling in love with Jemma didn’t contradict everything I’d always professed was true of open marriage. The thing I have with Jemma would be there whether or not we were sleeping together. Our emotional connection runs far deeper than the physical. The sex, albeit great, is still just sex. The feelings I have for her would be the same without it, and they wouldn’t be any different if I chose not to acknowledge them to Christopher. In which case, it might look like a crush to Christopher. In fact, that might be exactly what it looks like to others who don’t know about our situation. Regardless of what people know, Jemma’s and my relationship may appear different to them, perhaps as something deeper or stronger than an average friendship. In most cases, women don’t hang out with their female friends and call it cheating. But isn’t it, in a way? Couldn’t it be if you looked at it differently, if you considered the fact that you’d rather hang out with your girlfriend than your husband? Or that your girlfriend is your travel companion, your plus-one, your confidant in matters of the heart?