Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (17 page)

“I’m too old for this place,” I said aloud to no one in particular.

“You’re not too old,” a voice behind me said. I turned around on my barstool to find a guy who looked like he had been extracted straight from the pages of a J.Crew catalog. He had brown hair and blue eyes, and was six feet tall, with a build that you could tell, even through his clothes, would look damn good without those clothes. I smiled.

“Your mother raised you very well. Thank you,” I said. “Kyle,” he said, offering me his hand.

We exchanged the typical pleasantries about work, and then moved on to discussing the crowd. I mentioned feeling

a bit out of my league, and Kyle told me he was none too impressed by the girls there.

“They all look the same,” he said. “They look like they haven’t eaten for weeks because they don’t serve food at the tanning salon or the makeup counter.” Who knows if he was trying to flatter me, but it was working. He worked in industrial sales. He was twenty-five, intelligent, and very cute. An hour later, when the bar closed, Kyle walked me out.

He invited me to join him and his friends at their next destination, but I declined, offering an early morning ahead of me as my excuse.

“Can I take you out tomorrow night?” he asked. I smiled, thinking there wasn’t a chance in hell this guy would call. But why not? I gave him my last name and told him where I was staying.

When I got back to my room the next afternoon after the conference, there was a message waiting for me. It was from Kyle. I paused for a moment. Did I really want to follow through on this? Could he possibly be as cute or as funny as I remembered? What if it was the alcohol or the dark bar? He had been fun to flirt with, but why mess with it? But even as I was thinking these things, I was lifting the receiver to call him.

He met me in my hotel lobby that same night. He walked me out to his car, a small black Mercedes, and opened the passenger-side door for me. He got into the car and put the

keys in the ignition, but before he started the engine. he turned to me and asked, “Are you married?”

“I am,” I answered.

“Yeah, my friend said he thought you were wearing a wedding ring,” he said calmly.

I took a deep breath and apologized for the amount of information I was about to regale him with. I told him that I was in an open marriage. I explained our circumstances: “We don’t bring people home. We’re not promiscuous. And we have no interest in leaving each other for someone else.” I felt relieved even as I was talking. I felt committed to my promise to be honest to potential partners, to Christopher, and to myself.

He looked a little stunned and I asked him if he wanted me to go. “I would completely understand,” I said. “It’s a lot of information, but I want you to know that I would have told you before anything happened. I mean . . . if it seemed like something might happen.” He smiled and started the car.

Later that night, we continued to talk about my marriage and how it worked. Kyle asked lots of questions. And then he surprised me: “Your husband must be amazing,” he said.

It was not the typical response—which I’m much more aware of now than I could have been then. And I so appreciated Kyle’s understanding. I remember one guy in particular, an aspiring rock star, who told me point blank, “I couldn’t be that guy. Even if your husband’s down with it, it’s not right.” The funny thing was, he had a girlfriend

but he was obviously ready to take me home. So again, this crazy mix of people’s own baggage comes into view as soon as the topic of open marriages arises. Many people are totally okay with the sex but can’t even begin to imagine the honesty part. Other people get hung up on the fact that I’m married, yet they feel perfectly comfortable cheating on their girlfriends or boyfriends. I’ve experienced a million different reactions of every variety and every combination of sticking points. But what all these people have in common is that they have an opinion about my marriage, regardless of whether it impacts them.

My choice to be honest with my partners outside my marriage is as important to me as being honest with Christopher. It’s always fascinating to me that people are more disturbed by the idea of an open marriage than they are by cheating. Christopher and I talk a lot about what’s behind other people’s negative reactions to our relationship, and we work to separate out those reactions from our true feelings about our own marriage—feelings free of societal baggage and based on our instincts about, experience with, and understanding of sexuality and partnerships. Christopher is not a victim. He’s a smart guy who knows that having sex with other people wouldn’t be the thing to break us up. Sex is the easy part. And even if or when we develop feelings of love for someone else, consummating that relationship wouldn’t be our demise, either. That is, sex is not the tipping point. We’d be no more likely to leave

each other over having sex with someone else than over harboring feelings for another person whom we opted not to sleep with.

To play out this scenario a bit further, say we were simply interested in someone outside of our marriage. Say we longed for that person but chose not to act on that urge. The longing for that person would be likely to turn into a stronger desire if we didn’t act on it, because we’d be feeding the mystery, the allure, of something we couldn’t have. We can’t stop each other from having the feelings we have, feelings that everyone has—married or not. Loving someone else is not going to change the love I have for my husband. This is hard for a lot of people to swallow. But why?

Sadly, I think it has to do with the fact that people are insecure in their relationships, which, in turn, is mostly because they are not self-confident. Low self-esteem pushes people to look to their partners to define them. If they then lose that partner, or if they can’t confirm that they’re their partner’s one and only, then they lose their self-definition. But as long as they continue to live with the illusion that they are all their partner could ever want or need, they feel good about themselves. If your partner really is all you want and need, great. But I haven’t found too many people for whom that’s true. Regardless of the feelings my husband may have for other people, they don’t change who I am or how we interact. I don’t need Christopher to define me, and I definitely only love him more for being open to exploring

this way of living with me—because it honors who I am and what I need, and he’s not any worse off, either.

kyle and I went to a sushi restaurant

for dinner that night, and it was one of the best dates of my life. We were that couple whom everyone in the restaurant envies, laughing and flirting and generally reveling in each other’s company. Because I didn’t know him, I could simply enjoy him. Mitchell speaks to this experience when he writes, “What makes someone desirable is idealization, an act of imagination that highlights the qualities that make that person unique, special, out of the ordinary.”
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So yes, we desire those whom we don’t and can’t truly know. And yet at its core, the idealized version of a life partner is someone whom you get to know completely. How strange and unfortunate that we are primed to expect to get something from marriage that’s so opposed to the laws of attraction and desire.

After dinner, we went back to my hotel room and talked and made out. It was amazingly comfortable. We knew the boundaries. It was new and different, and when I looked into Kyle’s eyes, I saw a version of myself that made me feel sexy and amazing, which I didn’t always feel when I was with Christopher. Not that it was his fault or mine or our marriage’s—it just happens. I don’t know that familiarity breeds contempt, but it certainly breeds familiarity. And that doesn’t exactly lend itself to a woman’s being seen as

some sort of brilliant, gorgeous sex goddess. I’m human. I want to be seen. It’s in my genes. I don’t want to live without something I’m wired to want. Being with Kyle fed that part of me that gets the short end of the stick within a well-oiled marriage, the part of me that wants and likes to be idealized and adored, the part that likes sex for the sake of sex. I had no history with Kyle, and that felt good. Damn good, in fact.

He went off to a meeting the next morning, and we saw each other again later that day. I was going home that night, and he asked if he could see me again. It was hard for me to imagine that happening. We had different home cities, different schedules, our respective “real lives” waiting for us. Just the same, I was excited at the prospect of seeing him again. We kissed goodbye and I watched him drive away.

“How long have you two been together?” I turned around to face a woman who was standing nearby. She was in her twenties, pretty and bright eyed.

“I’m sorry. I just couldn’t help but notice. You and your boyfriend look so cute together. You’re so lucky. You can see from a mile away how much he adores you. I hope I find that one day.” I didn’t tell her the truth. I wanted to, but it would have been too much for a stranger to digest. I found it impossible not to listen to the part of me that whispered in my ear menacingly about how reckless it would be to espouse my ideas so willfully to impressionable minds. Besides, what would I say:
Are you kidding? That’s not

my boyfriend. That’s my newest lover. We met two days ago. I’m married to a wonderful man. I live a gleefully uninhibited life that allows me the joys and security of a longtime commitment without barring me from experiencing the pleasures of new partners.

Instead I said, “Thank you. It’s been a year. He’s sweet.”

It was a white lie to a woman I’d never see again, but one part of me felt my commitment to being honest coming unhinged. Luckily, I’ve squashed that voice since then, but back in the beginning, it always won out. Perhaps I still held out some hope that maybe I
was
a little crazy, that I just had to get something out of my system, and that monogamous marriage ultimately did hold all the keys to the kingdom. But now, I feel 100 percent sure that those ideas simply aren’t true.

I only saw Kyle once again, although we talked on the phone once in a while and tried to meet up on several other occasions. We lived about five hours away from each other, and our schedules allowed only one other meeting before phone numbers were lost or lives changed or desires cooled. But the two times Kyle and I did sleep together, every second felt like a surprise. He told me again and again how much he loved my body, how beautiful I was. Do I think that? On good days, sure. Does my husband tell me that? Of course, sometimes. Is it still fantastic to hear, especially from a hot twenty-five-year-old? Uh,
yeah.
I have generally good self-esteem, and Christopher is relatively generous with compliments, but the context was completely different

when Kyle said the very same words. It seems almost too simplistic, but there it is: We can become someone new again when we are with someone new. It’s not a matter of wanting to do away with who we are; rather, it’s about a desire to supplement who we are and what we have.

I can’t help but wonder how much of this societal discussion about what types of sex and relationships are deemed “acceptable” (who the judge and jury are on that, I have no idea) has to do with simple distraction. It works splendidly as a means of keeping the real issues at bay. Examples of this avoidance are played out everywhere. Consider the fact that women are significantly more likely to suffer harm at the hands of a man they know, or are even in a relationship with, than a stranger’s. Yet we are bombarded with images and messaging about fearing for our safety in the streets. What does it say about us as a society that we are obsessed with sensationalism? A lot of people think of open marriage as nothing more than some sort of freak show, a fringe lifestyle. However, people’s lack of understanding, their often blatant unwillingness to comprehend it, is the very thing that keeps it so marginalized.

Keep people focused on “successful” marriages and stress the deviance, the downright vulgarity, of untraditional sexuality, and people have an insta-cause to get all up in arms about. Never mind rallying for better health insurance, demanding equality for the LGBTQ community, or fighting for better schools; expending countless resources and

energy on bashing, dismissing, or pontificating about what people do behind closed doors is clearly a better way to spend our time. In her book
What Is Marriage For?
E. J. Graff argues, “What other arguments can you resort to when your ideology is outdated—except apocalyptic predictions of misery, disease, and God’s wrath?”
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The opponents of marriages like mine throw out theories like, “It will bring the end of marriage as we know it,” because no rational argument against open marriage exists. Interesting how a means of saving or bettering, or even simply properly naming, a failing institution that, in many ways, is seen as the foundation of our society could be blamed for ultimately leading to the demise of the entire world as we know it.

You don’t have to believe in some sort of far-out conspiracy theory to see that many people’s current stand regarding family values and forbidding gays and lesbians to marry is very much about keeping powerful people in power. Graff concurs: “Marriage’s boundaries are blurry. And exactly what counts as marriage changes according to whose interests are at stake.”
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In other words, as long as those authorities get to define my lifestyle choices as “slutty,” and get to insist that I’m doomed, they’re ensuring that other people worry more about avoiding these supposed “consequences” and protecting their “reputations,” and less about their happiness or the state of our society at large. Distraction is a powerful weapon against that which we loathe or fear.

Christopher and I have determined, despite what others might say about the supposed selfishness, indulgence, or “having our cake and eating it, too” element of our situation, that it’s not about them. It’s not for others to worry about. Our sexual desire deserves our attention, and this is how we’ve chosen to manage it. For us, open marriage works. It would be nice if more people actually considered it a viable option, but we’re not there yet. And so there are people like us, people like me, who’ve decided to live openly and speak honestly in an effort to both bust the myths and provide some visibility for a misunderstood and underrespected lifestyle. When I do tire of discussing my situation with yet another shocked and confused party, I try to remind myself of that. And when I react as I did to that woman who asked me if Kyle was my boyfriend—stifling the truth just because I didn’t know her—I think,
Why would I?
I’m happy and unashamed. I am open with myself and others. My husband and I remain happily united—no betrayal, dishonesty, or false sense of self divides us. And so we continue on our journey of figuring it all out—not for the world, but for ourselves.