Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (24 page)

me as a bad person and a bad wife and a bad mother is convenient and facilitates their separating themselves from me. Otherwise, they could be just like me. And that’s simply too scary a proposition to address. The best thing I can do for myself, then, as well as for others who choose to live in open relationships, is to own being open, and to respect it as I would any more traditional arrangement. Normalizing open marriage among its participants is the first step toward gaining acceptance in the community at large.

For me, it’s not so important to meet the standards that other people impose upon me as it is to be able to live in harmony with my neighbors and friends and acquaintances, particularly where Emily is concerned.

The scenario I fear most—which, thank goodness, hasn’t happened and I pray never will—is that people will stop letting their children come over to our house to play with our daughter. One of my very closest friends, Alex, ended up taking issue with my lifestyle at one point in our friendship. She was worried that her children might “see something” when they were playing at our house. She felt unnerved by my own comfort with my open relationship, and because she and her husband and I had experimented a bit together at one point, she lashed out at me, rather than talking through her reasons for feeling upset or regretting her choice, or whatever the issue was for her. I respect my partners’ privacy just as I expect them to honor mine, but other people can be unpredictable, to be sure, and that is

one of the greatest hazards of being in an open relationship. That risk can require significant management, and it cannot always be controlled.

Alex and I ended up having a long talk and working out our problems, though I don’t know that we ever quite got to the root of her discomfort. The problem stemmed from her not being able to wrap her head around what had happened. There was no tidy little box into which she could fit our liaison—or me, for that matter. I had no problem with what had happened with Alex and her husband, and I didn’t want us or our children to lose out on the friendships that were at stake. But without the box, she questioned her own acceptance of me.

It’s sad when we question our own judgment, our own gut instincts, because they don’t mirror what everyone else is saying or doing or believing. Making an open marriage effective means being prepared to work through any rough spots with your friends, surrounding yourself with as many enlightened people as you can, and setting an example for people of just how normal and reasonable an open marriage can be. I feel like I’m finally at a pretty good point with most of my close friends, but there’s always the potential for missteps with them, and then there are the issues that arise when I meet new people or acknowledge my circumstances to current acquaintances, particularly people I know through Emily’s school. It’s a calculated risk. But I can think of few things in life worth doing that aren’t.

Things are different for me now because Jemma is the only person I see outside of my marriage. Without doing a lot of dating and having various relationships, I have less potential for turmoil, to be sure. But it’s still hard to juggle. I want to be with Emily and Jemma and Christopher all the time, yet I can’t because Jemma doesn’t live with us. And that makes me sad sometimes. When I think about it in the simplest of terms, our arrangement feels like a forced, contrived, and unnecessary separation of people who, outside of social conventions, would likely live together. The idea of living with my family and Jemma has certainly occurred to me, but that’s not something any of us want, at least not for now.

This has to do with where I live, my desire to protect my daughter, and the fact that our society cares too much about how people love. And so, despite my comfort and my openness, and despite living alternatively and following my heart in my relationships, I still, in many ways, live under the thumb of others’ expectations and ideals. That will likely continue as long as Emily lives at home, because I want to protect her from other people’s ignorance and potential wrath.

What an awful commentary—that because I enjoy sex, particularly in a way that too many people find abnormal, I’m automatically deemed mentally ill or unstable or dangerous to my own child. In an incredibly unscientific survey, I gave questionnaires to people in open relationships, and asked

them about the hows and whys of their daily lives. One respondent, whom I’ll call Sara, expressed fears that were all too familiar to me. “We do not look like the ideal family, so it would be easy for people to take that next step to the idea that there is something wrong with us as parents.”

the final stage in figuring out how to

be in a successful open marriage is overcoming our own worries and other people’s misunderstandings about how we define our relationships. There’s nothing unusual about people who choose open marriage, except perhaps that we opt to tell the truth to ourselves and to one another. There wouldn’t be any great apocalyptic end to life as we know it if the “accepted” definition of a marriage or a rela- tionship or even a family were to include those of us who don’t look like a family straight out of
Leave It to Beaver.
Open marriage does not and will not disrupt life as we now know it. It already
is
life as we know it, even though some people pretend not to understand that. They seem terrified of open marriages, of any alternative lifestyle, for the same reason that they’re scared of anything unknown: They don’t know what to expect around the corner. This situa- tion is similar, and not surprisingly so, to society’s struggle with interracial marriage and its continued wrangling with same-sex marriage. My hope is that others will come clean about their lifestyles, as I have, as we work toward creat- ing a society where people in heterosexual, monogamous

marriages are not the only ones who are permitted to live free from harsh and unfounded judgment.

I’m not out to change anyone. I’m interested in changing how we look at everyone. Everyone needs support. No one needs jealousy and no one benefits from it. Open marriage is happening all around us. And no walls are going to come tumbling down because of it. Living openly is about living honestly, loving fully, and being able to embrace that choice freely. This is what I want for myself and others, both those who are already living in open marriages and those who are interested in exploring its possibilities.

Chapter 10

our very own

happily ever after

She finally decided that she didn’t need to know what it all meant or where it was all going. What she did know was that everyone is different, so it made sense to her that every marriage might be different. For now, her marriage was working. She had a husband and a girlfriend who loved her, and a daughter who was doing just fine. Why shouldn’t they keep on doing what they were doing, she reasoned, and see if they couldn’t define for themselves their own happily ever after?

after doing lots of research, talking

with nearly everyone I knew, and having all kinds of experiences that I’d longed to have, I came to terms with the

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fact that I was okay with not having it all figured out, and not knowing for sure why living in an open marriage is the best choice for me. And I still don’t know why, no matter how much I want to have it all figured out. What I do know is that people are all different, marriages are different, and my husband, my girlfriend, and I—and Emily—are happy.

I know from my experience that following my instincts and acting on what feels right are the keys to living an authentic life. Going against my gut simply wasn’t working for me. And I’ve discovered, from talking to countless people about my own experiences, that I am not alone in my thoughts and ideas, or even my practices. Open marriage is not a radical or singular act, which is what I thought it was when I first started down this path. It’s far more prevalent than people think, and current trends suggest it will likely become only more commonplace. One need only look at people in their twenties and thirties to see how true that is: They are far more accepting—of gender, sexual preferences, you name it—than previous generations, probably because they’ve lived among people who have all sorts of arrangements, and because they question everything and accept themselves for who they are. Every generation wants a chance to prove what they can offer. Young people today certainly seem more poised to accomplish that goal than my generation was, let alone those that came before me. This isn’t across the board, of course—nothing ever is—but so many of them are seeking to find their own truths, rather

than simply following the road map that has been set before them, one that has led so many people down the paths of failed relationships, disillusionment, and dissatisfaction.

My dad used to tell me that when people insist that they know best and ridicule others for their behavior and choices, it’s because they’re insecure about their own behavior and choices. It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood and my marriage, though, that I was able to fully grasp how vital it is to stop listening to other people’s assertions that “you just can’t do that” or “it’s not done that way.” I had to find out for myself, and definitely through trial and error, that when it comes to sex and love and relationships, the closed-off, boxed-up, reined-in way I was trying to live wasn’t going to work.

For better or worse, people change. When two people in their twenties get married with certain ideals and expectations in mind, it is all but inevitable that they are going to find themselves surprised by what they discover once they have a few years of marriage under their belts. Open marriage and polyamory are just two examples of alternative ways of doing relationships that make space for that change. Hell, they don’t just make space for it—they welcome it, breed it. Open marriage, polyamory, and other lifestyles outside of heterosexual, monogamous marriage exist because a lot of people want to reach a different potential where sex and love are concerned, a possibility that traditional marriage bars because of its limiting construct.

Whether or not you personally like these concepts is beside the point. Living openly might not be right for you. It might not even appeal to you. But no matter what your lifestyle preferences are, surely it’s time to accept the fact that these more open styles of living do benefit some people, and that it’s time to stop ignoring what’s going on all around us. More likely than not, if you have kids, they are already spending time in households where the parents are in situations that exist outside of what we have come to call the “norm”—whether they’re gay, swinging, or poly. You may be aware of their choices, or you may not, but shouldn’t you base your feelings about people on whether you trust them with your children, or whether you’d like to invite them to your home for dinner? Are you honestly any safer believing that no one you know lives differently than you? Does sameness equal safety? The usual saying is that ignorance equals bliss. I say ignorance equals intolerance.

Divorce rates continue to be high, and infidelity becomes a more prevalent issue by the day. If you think that no one you know is cheating on their significant other, think again. There might not be a crimson vowel emblazoned on his or her chest, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going on right under your nose. In my research, I came across this headline in the August 9, 1854, edition of
The New York Times:
“Growth of Infidelity in the United States.” The article read, “It is generally admitted that Infidelity, within the last twenty- five years, has increased in the United States. There are not

statistics, so far as we know, on the subject, but the fact itself is too obvious to admit doubt.”
1
Some things never change. What does it say about our society that we refuse to face the reality of just how unsuccessful our most common social construct is? How evolved and intelligent is that? Do you think Bill Gates would continue to employ a manufacturing or programming process with a track record as lousy as marriage’s? Don’t kid yourself.

More and more people are choosing never to get married at all. We’re beginning to drown in the negative effects of pursuing a lifestyle that doesn’t suit the majority of people. That’s not to say that someone can’t choose monogamy, but that’s what it is—a choice—and precisely what it should remain. Furthermore, it should also be one choice among many, and that means that polyamory should be one of the other options. It’s far from new or revolutionary, this idea that we can love more than one person at a time. People are living in intentional communities, in groups of three or four or more, or in separate houses from their spouses while still maintaining happy marriages. Someone who is polyamorous may not be committed to one primary, long- term partner, but may instead see a loose circle of people that rotates and changes. Some people practice polyfidelity, meaning they are involved with and committed to a specific group of people (in any number). But the most common scenario is the triad, or triple, in which three people are committed to one another and may or may not all be

sexually involved with one another. What all three people do share is love and respect.

Polyamory is about how love would look outside of any social constructs. Think about it: If no one ever told you how you were “supposed” to do it, whom would you love? How would you love? How many would you love? What would your sexuality look like if no one had prescribed it for you from the moment you were born? These questions may lead you to consider whom you want to share yourself with, and in what way, without being concerned with an arbitrary framework. The only rule in open marriage and/or polyamory is that everyone involved follows the rules—and the rules are set by those involved. It isn’t simply a matter of doing whatever you want, with whomever you want, whenever you want. Polyamory is about thinking for yourself. Doing what everyone else is doing because everyone else is doing it is easy. It is seeing beyond that requires far more vision.

my own venture into open marriage