Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (8 page)

One woman there, Leila, had been more than suggestive with me since the very first day of the summer season. She’d come on to me in the most shocking way, whispering in my ear, just moments after we met, that she was going to fuck me by the end of the summer. At the time, I had thought she was drunk. “I wasn’t drunk,” she told me later. “I wanted you—and I get what I want.” I couldn’t argue with her on that point, because three weeks into our stay, I was naked in her bed following a night of sex—with her boyfriend watching. The two of us shattered all of poor Tim’s boyhood ménage à trois dreams, and he expressed his disappointment when he found out that this particular threesome experience was about Leila’s and my finding pleasure with each other, and that it had little to nothing to do with him.

When I walked into their bedroom earlier that night, I found Tim tied to the bed and her straddling him, pouring hot candle wax onto his naked chest.
This girl is nuts,
I thought. But I was also insanely turned on. My sex life with Christopher had been good, yes, but it had already become a bit predictable, even that early on. And now here was this woman: gorgeous body, insatiable drive, and an

attitude about sex that I remembered having had myself, pre-Christopher. She reminded me of the me I was seriously contemplating giving up. She also made me remember how voracious a woman’s sexual appetite can be. Her desiring me made my own longings seem all the more normal—and she was so unapologetic. I wanted her, without question, and I gave in more than willingly.

At that moment, I didn’t care what the consequences might be as far as Christopher was concerned. The next morning, of course, I did. But I reminded myself that Christopher and I had been together only a few months, and that we had never even addressed monogamy or exclusivity. For all I knew, he was sleeping with someone else, too—at least that’s what I told myself. Truth was, I felt like Leila would be the last girl I would ever be with—and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity. Even then, I was thinking Christopher would be the man I’d marry someday. Justification? Perhaps. But it was one amazing night.

In Leila’s room, I could feel myself getting wet at the sound of her voice.

“Take your clothes off,” she commanded. “All of them. Now.” I obeyed, and every inch of my body suddenly remembered how much it liked something more than what Christopher and I had going on. As I undressed, Leila untied Tim and ordered him to stand at the side of the bed. She tied me down, straddled me, and dripped the wax from the candle she’d been using on Tim onto my skin, leaving

thick, waxy trails down the length of my torso and across my breasts.

“It hurts,” I said, pulling against the restraints.

“You don’t think that’s going to make me stop, do you?” she countered.

“No,” I said. And I didn’t want her to stop.

“Good girl,” she said, removing the restraints and kissing me. Tim watched silently while we had sex. He knew better than to join in without Leila’s invitation. She was in charge. When I heard him sigh, I looked up, expecting to see that he’d come. Instead I saw his disappointment, maybe mixed with a bit of fear.

“You girls don’t need me at all, do you?” he said.

“No,” Leila replied bluntly. “Want, maybe, but definitely not need.”

“I’m gonna go,” he said, pulling on his jeans and black Aerosmith T-shirt.

“Suit yourself,” she said, without missing a beat.

I slept with Leila several times that summer. I also slept with Christopher when he came to visit me. She was manipulative and exhausting. He was sweet and smart and loving. By the end of the summer, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Christopher. Leila and I had had fun together, but I was ready to swear off being tied down with velvet ropes, splayed at someone else’s mercy. I was twenty- five years old, and it was time to move on to a serious, committed relationship. It was time to be a grownup and

settle down. All of this experimenting and sleeping around was kid stuff, I told myself. It had nothing to do with who I was. It was a phase. And it was over.

one year after Christopher and I met,

we were engaged, and one year after that, we were married. We lived in a rented condo for the first year, and then bought a cute little brick house in a fashionable part of town. I took to the role of wife quite naturally. I baked bread and kept a garden. I wore Lilly Pulitzer dresses and went to scrapbooking parties. Christopher and I had sex occasionally, far less than when we were dating. And it wasn’t long before I got tired of always being the one to start the fire. Instead of constantly initiating, I got used to “taking care of business” myself— and it was fine.
That’s what happens when you get married,
I told myself. I talked myself out of feeling discontented. Besides, it was just a rough patch.

A year later, we decided it was time to have a baby. I got pregnant on my first try that summer. Christopher seemed shocked, maybe even disappointed, that I had gotten pregnant so quickly.

“You know those tests aren’t always accurate,” he said when I handed him the pink stick with the two blue lines.

“They’re plenty accurate,” I replied. “This is the same kind they use at my doctor’s office.”

“Well, this is going to change everything,” he said as he disappeared up the stairs.

No kidding,
I thought.

I gave him a few minutes alone, and then went upstairs to find him.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. Oh yeah, of course,” he said. I could tell he was reading the look of worry on my face. “I’m just, well, surprised. I thought it would take a few tries.”

“It can. But it just didn’t with us, I guess.”

“Must mean it’s meant to be, huh?” He reached out to hug me.

“I’d like to think so.” He told me he loved me and admitted that he was scared. I told him I was scared, too. We agreed that we’d tackle it together. It was what we wanted. I knew it was what I wanted, and I had no reason to doubt him when he echoed my desire to start a family. I felt good. I felt ready. And, honestly, I felt happy.

i had a difficult pregnancy. I fluctuated

between hunger and nausea, without a break from either. Eating became my only pastime. That and watching bad daytime TV. Christopher and I had sex only once during my entire pregnancy. He finally admitted that it freaked him out to do it while I was pregnant.

“It’s too weird,” he said.

“You mean I’m too fat,” I responded angrily. At that point, it didn’t matter what the reason was, really. I was pissed, and our sexualities seemed more incompatible than

ever. I felt hurt and confused. I was doing this wonderful thing that we both wanted so much, and yet it made me unattractive to him. It was hard for me to articulate my feelings, though, because my moods were so dramatic and changing constantly. On good days, I accepted that Christopher just felt weird about it. It felt weird to me, too; It was hard to feel sexy when I was feeling so awkward. On bad days, I wondered what I was thinking by having a baby with someone whom I felt completely sexually incompatible with.

After our daughter was born, I was uncomfortably heavy, weighing more than I ever had in my life. I couldn’t fit into anything, and often wore the scrubs Christopher had been given at the hospital when I had my emergency C-section.

I struggled with my weight for the next year, and Christopher and I never had sex. I didn’t feel the least bit desirable, and without my prodding him, what little interest Christopher did have in sex disappeared completely.

I finally joined Weight Watchers to get back on track, but even after I lost weight, Christopher continued to struggle with the idea of our having sex. It was as if he simply couldn’t look at me the way he had before I had the baby, and he seemed to have no libido at all.

“You just . . . you still look pregnant to me,” he said one night. His comment sent me into a tailspin. I was angry at him, angry at myself. I was incredibly unhappy with the way I looked, too, and I felt awful, as if I were dragging my

body along with me wherever I went. I kept hoping it would just pop back into shape, or that I would simply wake up one day and feel perfectly fine with the sagging belly and weighty thighs that no amount of diet and exercise seemed to be able to reduce. But nothing changed.

Christopher’s comment was horrible and hurtful, but it was also true. Should he have wanted me anyway? Maybe. But he didn’t. And I had trouble blaming him entirely, because my attitude certainly wasn’t helping the matter. Maybe if I had felt and acted desirable, I would have been attractive to him regardless. Through it all, I felt silly and upset with myself. What difference did it make what my body looked like? I was conscious enough of media messaging to know that social expectations were also partly at fault, that I was being blasted by images that made me want to look thin and stay young and unmarred by pregnancy. I had a healthy baby girl and a loving husband. What I needed, I decided, was to get over myself.

But knowing the source of my vanity didn’t make my desire to look better any less powerful. It’s a crummy paradox: We’re not supposed to care about appearance, but we live in a world that values the way a person looks over nearly everything else. In her book
Full Frontal Feminism,
Jessica Valenti explains, “We’re expected to be hot—but if we are, we’re vain and stupid. And if we’re not hot, we’re useless. Kind of hard to get around.”
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So true, and I wasn’t having any luck avoiding this dilemma. So I decided to

accept the paradox for what it was, despite its unfortunate source, and do what felt right for me.

The very next day after Christopher told me I still looked pregnant to him, I called the amazing plastic surgeon who had worked on my nose when I was in college. I had been unhappy with the large, crooked version my family’s genes had provided me with, and was thrilled with the one that Dr. Williams put in its place. So, when I decided to have liposuction and a tummy tuck, I dialed his number without hesitation. Vanity had taken over, but I was unhappy with my body not looking and feeling the way I was used to it looking and feeling. And the surgery had the desired results. I felt normal again. Our sex life improved, but only because I was feeling good enough to be the one to initiate sex again. We went right back to the vanilla sex that we had had before we got married, but with less frequency. I thought I could deal with it. I rationalized that sex wasn’t that big a part of marriage.

Ultimately, though, it was big to me. I missed it, and not having it made me sad. I was also angry—at Christopher for not craving me sexually, and at myself for not being attractive enough to inspire such craving. And since I was now feeling good about my body again, I found myself blaming him more readily and less compelled to blame myself. I even thought about leaving. But everything else was fine. He was lovely to me and wonderful with the baby. Sex was really the only issue we were on opposing planets about, barring all the

usual stuff couples and parents argue about, like whose turn it is to do the dishes, change the baby, walk the dog, or figure out what’s for dinner. It was impossible for me to fathom that a marriage could end over sex.

As I began to examine the history of our sex life, I thought about what I had given up to be with Christopher. Getting engaged to him meant that my lifestyle of safe but relatively casual, open sexuality had come to an abrupt halt. And that way of life hadn’t just been handed to me—I’d had to work at it. I’d made a conscious decision that that was the way I wanted to express my sexuality, and my experiences had validated me. But when he proposed and I said yes, I was buying into the idea of monogamy. In my marriage, I was making a pact with my husband, and with society, that he would be the only man—rather, the only person—I would ever sleep with again. And I went along with it, just like everyone does. I’d hung in for three years by that point. The early stages of love will do that for you.

And now we’d conceived a baby, and I was a new mother. I’d heard that new mothers often don’t want to have sex, but I can’t say that I had heard the same thing said about dads. Still, we were both overworked and sleep deprived, and so I continued to assess and reassess my needs, reminding myself all the while,
This happens to everyone; this is normal; this too will pass.
I could hear all of the conventional wisdom echoing in my ears. I convinced myself that everything I had learned about sex and about myself applied only to my

single self, and that my married self was someone entirely different—and that this was right.

But I was dissatisfied, and I began to accept that I had been for quite some time. I was hungry not just for more in terms of the
amount
of sex I was having, but also for more in terms of the
kind
of sex I was having. I missed sex with women, rough sex, and role playing—all of the things that I simply was not going to get via sex with Christopher. I didn’t feel like a married version of myself. I felt like someone else entirely, a person who was supposed to be molded by a marriage and by social expectations that didn’t suit her at all.

and then I met Grace. And, like a flood

I couldn’t control, the real me came rushing back. It happened one weekend when I was away at an artists’ retreat. It was the winter after my daughter turned two. I was profoundly aware of and amazed by the conflict I was living with. I was happily married, other than the fact that I was not okay with our sex life. Being a wife and a mom made that point even harder to reconcile, because I felt like I wasn’t supposed to want or be focused on sex anymore. I had had my slutty years, and now I was supposed to be over them.

The irony of the fact that we’re not supposed to have sex until we get married, and that once we get married we’re not supposed to be sexual, was eating away at me. And the fact that this is a well-recognized social phenomenon didn’t make me feel any better. In her book
The Meaning of Wife,
Anne

Kingston explains, “But here is the catch-22: While marriage sanctioned female sexuality, women were seen to undergo a sexual muting when they became wives.”
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And there you have it—the ugly and impossible contradictions, which we are taught as girls, that follow us through life. But despite the societal “normalcy” of what I was experiencing, there was no question that that “something missing” was starting to feel like an overwhelming need I simply had to fill. After all, with my sexuality being as important as it was to my self- definition, I felt like I was beginning to shrivel without it.