“I’m terribly worried that today is the beginning of the end
of my marriage. There, I’ve written it. It’s out of my head and on a page, now,
so it’s some form of truth.”
I wrote
that in my journal on August 29th, 2015. I’d spent the day at work
pacing around my lab, alternately convincing myself that things were going to
be alright and that I was going to be divorced again by the end of the year.
Where would I go? Could I handle being a bachelor again? What would become of
our children? Could I make this work for their sakes? Am I overreacting? Have I
misinterpreted the signals I’d found? Had she already started, and that was why
she had been spending so much time at work recently? Was this the ridiculous
kind of panic-attack fueled nonsense that I would laugh at myself for later, or
was this the “your subconscious figured something out that your brain doesn’t
want to deal with right now” kind of realization? Whatever the truth, I knew I would have
answers that night.
Because that
night, we were going to talk about Polyamory.
***
My wife and
I were both divorcees when we met, and we both thought we were only looking for
a cool, fun person to know and maybe sleep with. She’ll tell you her story in
her own time, but for my part I really wasn’t taking advantage of my newfound bachelorhood as much as I had originally intended. My wild oat sewing had so far
consisted of three embarrassing failures to ask women out and one semi-serious
relationship that ended when we both realized it was a lot more of a rebound and
a lot less about love than we’d initially told ourselves. So, suffice it to
say, playboy I was not.
My future
wife and I met through a free dating website. I found her profile after I got
sick of their “algorithm” pointing me at women who either A) Never responded to
messages I sent them (probably because they weren’t real people,) B) Didn’t
match any of my interests and/or C) Wanted to message only but had no interest
in actually getting together in person. So rather than get digitally jerked
around any longer, I searched for prospects on my own. This is a good tip for
the bachelor-men out there, by the way. Dating websites lose you as a revenue
stream if you pair up with somebody and no longer need their service, so ask
yourself how committed they really are to finding you “the one.”
I’m
digressing, and this will be long enough as it is. I searched manually for
people with similar interests, and I found Her. She liked video games. She was
into football. She seemed like a cool chick. She also had two kids and smoked,
but what the hell? I had told myself I was just looking for fun, right? This
was a woman who seemed, if nothing else, fun. So I messaged her. I asked about
her World of Warcraft character. I busted her balls for being a Raiders fan. I
absolutely did not say anything stupid like “you’re hot. Wanna fuck?” which I’m
told sadly placed me in rarified air compared to the rest of the guys
who messaged her (another pro-tip, fellas.) And despite all probability to the
contrary, she messaged me back and we eventually planned a date.
I can still see that first moment. One
thing she’d made clear in her profile was that, if I ever saw her in a dress,
it would be at a wedding or a funeral. So, when I came out of an alley next to
the restaurant and saw her in a black dress and heels from across the street, I
was gob smacked. And then she smiled at me, and I was lost. We talked all
through dinner. We walked around the market area and talked more. Then I took
her to her car, awkwardly muttered “I’m gonna do this, now,” and kissed her (smooth.) I
can’t describe the feeling without cliché words like “sparks, floating, or
giddiness,” so I’ll just say that I had it bad from that moment, and leave it
at that.
I
approached our relationship how I had handled all the others, like a serial
monogamist. We didn’t sleep together until a few dates later, at which pint I
spooked her for the first of many times by staying the night when she had
intended for me to leave (after I fell asleep, she was too polite to ask me to
get up and go.) This would become a bit of a theme for us: me moving too fast
and her begrudgingly tolerating it. I used the love word first. I called her my girlfriend
first. I brought up the idea of marriage first (at least, I think so.) I thought
this reluctance on her part was because she had kind of given up on the idea of
a serious, long-term relationship before we got together. Single mothers of two kids come with the sort of baggage that sends your average online-dater running. It
never occurred to me that she was honestly not looking for this kind of
relationship, and never had been.
 |
| We joke today that I was sort of like Mr. Magoo, blindly wandering along and blissfully unaware of how close I was to blowing the whole thing up. |
Luckily for
me, she didn’t dump me. I married my best friend a couple of years later. I got
a job after finishing graduate school and we moved halfway across the country
to start a new life with our family, and a year later we had a baby together.
Our life hasn’t always been perfect, because nobody’s is, but it was still a
pretty damn good facsimile of the good-old American Dream made manifest. So
why, a couple of years later, was I halfway convinced that it was all coming to
an end?
These
things always start slowly, and often through something stupid. We started to
speak less and less about things beyond day-to-day life. I had more in-depth
conversations with friends I had known for only a few years than with Her. We
had less intimacy. This is easy to understand after having a baby, but as time
went on and it didn’t come back this began to be more of a concern. There were
weeks it felt more like we were a pair of roommates than a married couple.
Then, one
day, I was on Amazon looking for school supplies for the kids. I noticed the telltale
indicator that something had been left in the digital shopping cart, and I
clicked it without realizing I was logged onto her account instead of mine. Saved
under her searches was Veaux and Rickert’s “More Than Two.” A book about
polyamory? Surprisingly, I somehow decided in the moment that it was maybe a
topic of academic interest to her, and left it alone without further
investigation (Magoo strikes again!). This, of course, left the nagging seed of
doubt behind, and eventually I cracked. More snooping on my part (not a proud
moment) found that she had actually purchased Tristan Taormino’s “Opening Up.”
And then, well, I didn’t know what to do with this information. I still avoided
asking her about it because I felt guilty for violating her privacy, and I
tried to tell myself that I didn’t know the whole story, and there was probably
a simple, stupid explanation for all of this. But I couldn’t help but remember
it, and I couldn’t help but think about that gap that had opened steadily between
us as a couple, and the Green-Eyed Monster of jealousy started to play those
doubts in my head like a poorly-tuned, dissonant violin. Something was wrong
and I knew it. There were a number of nights when she would stay up late into
the very early hours of the morning, writing and leaving me to go to bed on my
own, something that I remembered happening during the last days of my first
marriage. So finally, I asked her if we were alright when she came home from
work one evening. “Yes, we’re alright. I just need to work some things out,”
was a paraphrase of her response. We hugged, and I went up to bed alone, again.
In that moment, I think we both understood why the 12th Doctor says
he doesn’t trust hugs.
 |
| Because it lets you hide your face. |
The next
morning I saw that she had sent me a Facebook message. This is often how we
communicate about heavy matters when we want to get our point across clearly
and precisely, without verbalization getting in the way. She said things felt
off between us because she’d been doing a lot of soul searching and writing to
figure out some things about herself, not about our relationship. I shouldn’t
worry, she said, because she still loved me and wanted to be my wife and mother
to our children. We would need to have a talk sometime soon that might not be
very comfortable, but she still wanted those things more than anything else.
And, just like that, all my suspicions were confirmed. Without saying or even
hinting at it, I somehow just knew she wanted to be polyamorous in one form or
another. Suddenly Magoo could see that he was standing on a steel girder 40
stories up, and there was no going back to wandering along blindly.
I googled Mono-Poly relationships
(leading to some amusing auto-complete results that inspired the name for this
blog) and it was, in a word, horrifying. I found a thread on Reddit about the
pain of Mono partners sitting at home, trying to be supportive while their significant other went out with metamours (the amount of new vocabulary I was
picking up was pretty staggering,) leaving them at home alone. There were a lot of examples of pretty selfish assholes who were basically backing their partner into a corner, blackmailing them with nonmonogamy to the tune of "This is something I want to do, so you can either get on board or lose me," and I imagined She and I having the same conversation soon. I pictured myself in the place of those, lets just go ahead and call them victims, since that's what they are, and it
felt like hell. The fact that I was doing the equivalent of googling "headache" and getting back the WebMD page for "brain tumor" didn't cross my mind. I thought about other people touching and being intimate with my wife and my guts
twisted up into knots filled with every ugly, black, jealous emotion I had ever felt. I wanted to rip my hair out. I wanted to scream. If you've ever had a panic attack you know how it feels, and if you haven't then you probably think I sound nuts. Which is appropriate, because I literally drove myself crazy, long story short. It says something that it never even occurred to me that the same freedom from opening
up could be extended to me as well. Again, I tried to deal with it, but when I
spent my second day in a row not accomplishing anything at work because my mind
was busy pacing circles around this topic, I knew I had to do something. “You
know that talk you mentioned we were going to have? Yeah, I think we need to
have that soon. Like, tonight.” She must have seen the only-just restrained
emotion in my eyes, because she put her hand on mine. “Ok,” she said, “It’s not
anything bad, you know?” I smiled and nodded, wishing I could believe that to
be true.
When she
came home from work that night I was a couple glasses of wine ahead of her. She
sat down on the patio with me, her own worry showing up in her expression, and
I laid out my side of the story starting with finding her books. That, of
course, led to a deep breath, her fetching her own wine glass and lighting up
one of the cigarettes we’d both been pretending we didn’t know she had, and her
starting her own side of the story.
We’re waiting to post them both at
the same time, so if you want to hear her side of things click over to herpost. I’ll wait, and honestly I’m worried that mine paints her in a pretty
unfair light. If you can’t be bothered (which, if that’s the case, why are you
here?) the short version is that her soul searching was as much about finally
acknowledging to herself that she was a bisexual woman and, even though our
marriage was great and she couldn’t ask for a better partner, a part of her
wanted to be able to explore that side of herself. Before we had gotten serious
and exclusive she had maintained several casual relationships with men she had
no real emotional attachment to, and that had been the part of her life when
she’d felt the most sexually satisfied. Her ex-husband had once told her that
he didn’t think she could be married to just one person, and she had to admit
that he may not have been entirely wrong. She loved me. She loved being married
to me. She loved our family and our sex life (though we both admitted it had
gone pretty fallow of late,) but she didn’t want to deny herself or put limits
on this part of herself either. And, with our relative starting points finally
laid out and communicated to each other honestly, so began what I think of as
“The Three Bottle Night.”
We talked for hours, both learning
things about each other we had never even considered. It was a relief to both
of us to have the secrets and suspicions laid out for examination, if only so
we didn’t have to keep lugging them around on our backs alone anymore. She’d
been running herself mentally ragged for the last month, trying to come up with
the right way to talk to me about this. And I was very much the benefactor from
the great pains she underwent to make this as easy and painless a process as
possible. If there were awards for being a considerate and understanding
partner under these circumstances, she would win it in a landslide. The main
points she got across to me were:
-“I want to be free to experience more of what the world has
to offer without the restriction of traditional monogamous relationships, and I
want you to have that as well.”
-“There is nothing wrong with you or our marriage.”
-“I don’t have any immediate plans or anybody I’m wanting to
hook up with. I wouldn’t do that before I had spoken to you and we had time to
work through this together.”
-“You are a fine husband and it feels like I’m married to my
best friend.”
-“Yes, our sex is great.”
-“Regardless of what happens, our family will always come
first. It is the most important thing to me.”
Etc. etc. etc. Pretty great, right?
I really can’t say enough times that she did this as well as it could possibly
have been done, and would have broken it to me a lot more gradually if I hadn’t
found the book and forced the issue. I think she was prepared at this point for
me to flatly refuse, or at best offer to think about it without ever giving it
any serious consideration. So she was surprised (and, I guess I was, too) when I
seriously offered to give it real thought and, especially if we were able to
stick together for group stuff in the beginning, I may actually be interested
in exploring as well. The wine probably had a lot to do with it at the time,
and her assurance that everything would go at my speed and nothing would happen
until I was ready certainly helped, but I slowly started to lose that feeling
that the sky was falling. She even encouraged me to go out and sew some of
those “wild oats” the way I hadn’t really done when I was single, and said she was
excited to see what kind of partner she would get back if I had a chance to be
with some new people (a thought so foreign to me that it may as well have been
spoken in Latin, but it was encouraging nonetheless.) So, maybe this wasn’t the
beginning of the end. Maybe this could be the beginning of something amazing. I kissed
her, this time without awkwardly declaring my intentions first, and we made
love right there on the back porch beneath the stars and the three empty
bottles of wine resting on the table above us.
I wish that was the end of the
worry for me, but thirty-plus years of monogamy indoctrination doesn’t go away
after one night, amazing though it may have been. I’ll save some of the
struggles for future posts, but suffice it to say I spent the next couple of weeks
swinging back and forth between thinking I’d made a huge mistake and
fantasizing about the possibilities the future might hold. The swing of this
particular pendulum has slowed recently, but I’m under no illusion that it may
start flying back and forth at some point in the future. "Everybody fucks up in the beginning" is a mantra in the nonmonogamy community. The insecurity and the jealousy are still
close to hand, and I know they will never go away completely. And, frankly,
that’s ok too. For now, I’m onboard with…whatever we are going to become. If I
were to guess, I’d go with Taormino’s definition of “partnered nonmonogamy” as
most likely for our final relationship state, though we’ve both assured ourselves
that if we try this and either one decides its not to our liking, we’re free to put it on hold and reevaluate to find what really works for us. For right now we’re good, we’re together, and we’re looking to the
future that starts this week, with our first nonmonogamous “dates.” Wish us
luck, and stick around to hear how things turn out!
 |
| Oh Magoo, you've done it again! |
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