Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (10 page)

“I don’t know how you can say that, Jenny. I do love you.” “I know you love me, but do you want me?”

“Of course I want you.” He put his hand on my thigh, and I brushed it away.

“It sure doesn’t feel like it.”

We continued to talk well into the night. We talked about whether this meant we would leave each other, but neither of us wanted that. He wanted things to be the same and I wanted things to be different, but we still wanted to be with each other.

“We have to do better than this,” I told him. “This isn’t working. I’m happy with nearly every other aspect of our marriage, but I’m miserable about our sex life.”

He apologized and promised it would be better, that he would be more attentive. I’ve heard this time and time again from women, but, sadly, it’s often too late by the time a couple gets to this point in their marriage. I was willing to give it a shot, but my eyes had been opened, my awakening had been abrupt, and I liked what I saw on the other side. I wanted those possibilities. And yet I struggled because I wasn’t ready to leave Christopher, either.

I had told him before we got engaged that I had been with women before. I had a feeling he might propose, and I wanted him to know everything about me. He seemed pretty blasé about it at the time. “But once we decide it’s just you and me, then it’s just you and me,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Of course,” I replied, and at the time I meant it wholeheartedly. But I still cheated on him, because I felt desperate. I just wanted to stop the flood of feelings I had, feelings of being sexless, like “Mommy” was all I was now. I don’t know that I felt this at the time, but in retrospect, my infidelity may have put my marriage into a state of sink or swim. Something had to give, and cheating was potentially going to save us. It was a sort of last resort, a means to an end. I understand, of course, that that didn’t, and still doesn’t, make it right.

There we were, this clichéd couple with a baby and a house and a life. And here I was, coming out of a relationship that had stirred me, made me feel alive in a way I hadn’t in such a long time. Despite feeling scared and stressed out all the time about being found out, I also couldn’t help but think about how Grace made me feel. Why was I having such intense feelings for her? Should I have been having those feelings for someone else when I was married? Was it possible that I didn’t want my marriage to end, even though I wanted—needed—to be with other people?

I longed to be normal, to be content like the women I saw around me. I wanted a household that looked like

my vision of everyone else’s, with their happy, healthy, successful marriages. But then I realized that lots of people
look
like that from the outside. Hell, we did. And yet I knew that affairs were on the rise, especially among women.

Locating hard statistics on affairs in the United States is difficult at best. Studies don’t often elicit honest answers and are often found flawed and biased in both design and execution. I found statistics stating that anywhere from 12 percent to nearly 70 percent of women cheat. Anecdotally, there’s evidence of these higher numbers in a bevy of successful websites that facilitate cheating, and magazine headlines about women who stray. Some websites and books are devoted to helping people find out if their spouses are cheating, and other resources discuss how to cheat and how to recover from infidelity.

As I mulled all of this over, I kept coming back to the question of monogamy.
Are there really any happy, successful marriages?
I asked myself. I started to wonder how many of the people I passed on the street every day were cheating on their partners. I started wondering if I could stay married to Christopher and still see other people. What would that really look like? At first, I just thought there was no way. I’d be too jealous. Christopher would be too jealous. It would be too complicated. Where would we meet people? How would we know they were safe? Would they only be people from out of town? What if we met someone in town? Would we have threesomes? Foursomes? Would we go to

“parties”? Would I sleep just with other women, or men, too? Would it just be sex, or would I fall in love? The more I thought about it, the more confused I became, and not just because of the ins and outs of how something like this might or might not work out. There was also the question of whether any of it even made sense. I vacillated between three ways of thinking about my marriage: 1) This was “just the way it was,” and I should deal with it; 2) I had married the wrong person; and 3) I had married the right person, but I could stay with him only if I could also have the freedom to be with other people.

as I often do when I find myself in a

philosophical quandary of sorts, I finally decided to talk to my dad about my conflict. Although having a rabbi as a father can be tough at times, it can also be wonderfully convenient. I can and do talk to him about my life and the world at large. That is no less true when it comes to issues of love, sex, and relationships. Over the years, my dad has made it clear that he finds marriage, as well as a number of other societal conventions, deeply flawed at best. So, even though it made me a little uneasy to confide in my own father about this particular issue, I decided I needed his input. And I told him everything.

He took it all in, and then he likened what was going on with me to Christmas, believe it or not. “People imagine marriage is just like Christmas,” he explained. “They have

this image of what it
should
be, and yet that was never the reality and can’t be the reality. Yes, some people have lovely Christmases, complete with carols and relatives. But even those family gatherings aren’t the perfect, Rockwellesque events that people long for. They drag their kids to the mall to sit on a fat, old stranger’s lap so they can tell him their wishes. Christmas is built around fantasy. It doesn’t matter that the kids are miserable, or that the mom is exhausted, or that the father would rather watch the game than eat the meal his wife slaved over all day. But you’re not allowed to say that. You have to play along, or else you ruin it for everyone else.”

We continued to discuss human nature and how we behave when we’re attempting to be part of a cohesive society. My dad entered rabbi mode, as he often does during such conversations: no judgments, just thinking. I commented on the paradox that exists when we try to live in a way that strikes me as antithetical to human nature—that is, how popular monogamous marriage is, despite the fact that our biology does not necessarily seem compatible with that way of life. The question is, why would we prolong our silence and discomfort about something so important that affects so many people?

“For a couple of reasons,” my father told me. “Misery loves company. You can’t go off and do your own thing and be happy. You had better feel guilty, and you had better be prepared to be labeled as the weirdo that you are. Everyone

loves Christmas, and that’s an order. It’s the same way with marriage. This is how it’s done, and it doesn’t matter that not many people are happy, or that the human body and mind aren’t suited to monogamous marriage. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it shall be. And anyone who dares to go off and do their own thing will be shot. Better right than happy.”

“Do you really believe that? Really?” “I do.”

I wasn’t surprised. Over the previous ten years, my father had begun to combine his education in the Jewish tradition with Buddhist teachings. He now believes in living life awake, not living it for others.

“So, you don’t believe in monogamous marriage?” I asked. “People aren’t built for it, and we never lived that way

until very recent history. People love to pound the Bible when they want to defend their righteous ways, but they should have another look at it. People have long lived in communities and groups. Men had lovers or concubines or multiple wives. Kings and queens kept their own apartments. Women of status had lovers, and sometimes even servants, to service them. What do you imagine that was about? Marriage was about money and property, and not about love.” He went on to explain that he believed we act outwardly like we cleave to the current model because it’s what’s been done for as long as people can remember. However, we don’t actually live that way, obviously. People

have mistresses and lovers and simply choose to lie about their behavior, rather than face their own hypocrisy.

“And to change it all?” I asked.

“It’ll take a revolution,” my father said, “because change doesn’t come easy, and people don’t like it.”

So, despite the misery in many marriages, the fact that the marriage exists (and will, theoretically, continue to exist—even if only in all its miserable glory) can apparently be comforting. And even people in the most stifling and static marriages often convince themselves that the relationship is working, and that they have no good reason to rock the boat. Iris Krasnow, in her horrifyingly antifeminist book
Surrendering to Marriage,
actually suggests that women keep paddling away because “perhaps being happy in marriage is not what we should be seeking after all.”
6
What should we expect instead? According to Krasnow, marriage requires women to surrender themselves to their husbands, and to “tortuous work and predictable routine.”
7
And yet women are expected to accept this setup—not because it’s logical, but instead because it’s prevalent. Krasnow’s argument may be insane, but her viewpoint on marriage is not uncommon. Women want to feel validated in their unhappiness so they can ignore their own circumstances and go along with the status quo. And Krasnow gives them just that incentive.

I’ve thought many times since that day about what my father and I talked about. That conversation was what helped me—though it took some time—to finally feel

confident that I was neither crazy nor an anomaly. I was terribly and unsurprisingly normal. But I still decided to give my marriage the old college try. Even with the support and guidance of someone like my father, I am still a product of the society I was born into, whether I like it or not. And I did know people who were happily married, or so both partners claimed. Surely it was possible. Why else would so many people keep attempting such relationships? And what about all of the romantic books and movies out there? There had to be some truth to them, right?

From cradle to grave, we are conditioned to believe that marriage is the be-all and end-all of this thing called life—that it is a sign of our success or failure. And so, when you’re in a functioning marriage, it’s pretty tough to explain to people that somehow, it’s not “working” for you. But there I was, thinking that maybe I wanted to stay in my marriage
and
see other people.

I decided that I did believe in love, and in the union Christopher and I had formed. And, quite honestly, I was feeling too overwhelmed by the social messages I had received to do anything other than hunker down and figure out if we could make our situation work. I had no model for the type of arrangement I was just beginning to piece together in my head, so I chose to shelve it and focus on giving my marriage another go. We had committed to this. We had a kid. What else was there to do?

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Chapter 4

everyone else manages to do it, why can’t i?

She made a pact with herself to try to be what was expected of her. They moved to a planned community, and she baked brownies and volunteered at her daughter’s school. She hosted happy hours and wore sundresses. But she couldn’t keep it up. Her marriage couldn’t last the way it was. She thought maybe she had married the wrong guy, or that maybe she was a lesbian. She thought perhaps she just needed to have lovers outside of her marriage. Talking to her husband about what she needed was the only way to figure it out. It was the hardest thing she’d ever have to do, but she had to try.

after I had decided to recommit to

my marriage, Christopher and I moved to a planned communi- ty called The Estates. We built our dream house, handpicking

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the paint, the doorknobs, and every possible household fix- ture and appliance. We carefully planned where the electrical outlets and towel bars would go. I threw myself into that house and the move with a passion unlike anything I’d ever experienced for something so wholly material. Not until later did I realize how much that energy was about my commit- ment to turning myself into a “good wife.” I was sure that I was the problem, after all. I had only myself to blame. I had been lazy. I hadn’t fully invested myself in my husband and my family. I could do a better job—all I had to do was work harder, and building the perfect house in the perfect neigh- borhood seemed like a great place to start.

I was quite happy for a while when we first moved to The Estates. The house was indeed everything I had always wanted, the neighborhood was beautiful, and everything was within arm’s reach. The built-in community seemed to provide a solution for what I was lacking. I had a toddler at home and only a few friends left from my graduate school days. I wanted married friends with children, friends whose lives paralleled—or at least seemed to parallel—my own. These women, my new neighbors, all seemed to be doing the wife thing so well. I figured if I could just blend in and be like them, all my problems would be solved.

I went to all of the playgroups, moms’-nights-out events, neighborhood happy hours, gourmet club dinners, and candle parties. I took up scrapbooking. And I enjoyed myself. It felt like summer camp, which, barring that

summer when Brian had stomped on my heart, I’d always loved. I made a handful of close friends and lots more acquaintances. It actually seemed as if I had found my place. But, as generally happens when you’re trying hard to be the person you’re not, the whole façade started to unravel little by little. I was pretending to be happy, and no amount of willing myself to be different was going to change the fact that I wasn’t.

Inevitably, the novelty wore off. Too many of the women talked about nothing other than their window treatments and their children when they weren’t complaining about their lives and their husbands. A number of these women had had high-powered jobs before they’d had children and moved to The Estates. Now they were nursemaids and ladies who lunched.