Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (20 page)

I think many women, whether they are willing to admit to it or not, have greater intimacy with their best friends than they do with their husbands. It’s culturally accepted, and that makes it okay. And thank God for that! But wouldn’t it seem more logical for men to be more threatened by their wives’ best friends than by men who hit on their wives?

Those guys don’t pose nearly the same threat of providing the kind of closeness that so many women crave, and that they are likely getting already from their female friends. The reason men aren’t threatened, generally, is that they don’t fear not being the person who’s closest to their wife’s mind. Instead, they fear losing ownership of her body, which doesn’t belong to them in the first place.

Sex doesn’t make the intimacy. The intimacy is there, and sex enhances it. Intimacy is expressed differently in various relationships. I adored Jemma before I slept with her, and I adore her still. We have both said, many times, that the happiest thing for both of us is that we feel confident that we will still love each other and be there for each other if and when sex stops being part of our equation. Open marriage, for me, is about having enough love to go around; it’s about finding all of the love and closeness and sex I desire in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone involved.

I know that for me, being with Christopher and resenting every minute of it because I’d rather be somewhere else, with someone else, would be far more hurtful—to both of us. Being with your spouse while you’re telling someone else that you wish you could be with them can tear a relationship apart. The sex is not the problem; the unresolved feelings are. I’ll be honest: I don’t believe in soul mates, or that there is one person out there who’s meant for each of us. Instead, I believe that we are capable of loving and being loved as much as we allow ourselves to.

Sex is just sex. Can you feel closer to someone by having it? Certainly. But not necessarily. Strangely, sexual love is often elevated over platonic love, and yet the opposite should be true. It’s easy to be “in love” with someone you’re having sex with. Sex is the best drug, bar none. But feeling love across a Scrabble board, feeling a connection for no specific reason at no specific time—isn’t that the love that should seem more unusual? More valued? Look, if it’s up to me, I say give all love the same value and stop trying to privilege any one love over another. And allow sex to be what it is: a joyous physical activity that can express levels of intimacy from zero to sixty.

Once again, language is a major barrier here. The Greeks had a number of words for love.
Eros. Philos. Agape. Storge.
We have one. One lousy word to describe a plethora of feelings and relationships. That fact goes hand in hand with Americans’ limited thinking that the only relationship that really “counts” is monogamous, heterosexual marriage. The irony is that there is no
one
love, and there is no
one
kind of relationship.

My partnership with Jemma no longer feels surprising; it’s no longer a contradiction in my journey. It is another spot on the spectrum of relationships that coincides harmoniously with my marriage. We need different things at different times. The problem with modern marriage is that it simply does not allow for the fact that relationships aren’t static. People aren’t static. Sexuality isn’t static. So why should marriage be?

Chapter 8

it’s not necessarily what you think

It became increasingly clear that open marriage is not what most people think. People thought she was promiscuous, or that she hosted orgies, or that her daughter saw her with other people. Some people thought she and her husband were immoral, and that the only way to live was in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Some people thought she was selfish and a bad mother. But she and her husband knew that their marriage looked like most people’s marriages—except that they were honest with each other, and they were happier than they’d ever been.

too many people have preconceived

notions about open marriage. Open marriage is, by defini- tion, open, which means it can and does take any number

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of forms: It can be a triad of two women and one man, or vice versa. It can be a quad of any mix. It can include couples with children and without, people who live alone, and people for whom sex is the only thing they share with someone other than their spouse. For others, it’s about love. But most important, it’s not limited to a certain type of picture or a certain type of couple. We are not all porn stars or career sex writers. We are not people whom you’d automatically peg as being interested in wildly alternative scenarios. Rather, open marriages often look startlingly similar to the majority of traditional marriages you en- counter every day—one man and one woman with one or two kids, living in the suburbs with no strange cars parked out front and no drama spilling out back.

Open marriage doesn’t imply anything beyond the fact that my husband and I have partners outside of each other, one of whom we shared (and that was the only time). It’s embarrassingly simple, really. People think it’s a lot more exciting, edgy, or controversial than it is. Plenty of more unusual, complicated, and taboo things are brewing in other people’s bedrooms. Married, single, divorced—it doesn’t preclude people from doing kinky things. And open marriages may or may not be kinky. They’re more reflective of each person’s, and thereby each couple’s, identity. Ours is generally incredibly tame, although at other times, I’ve acted on fantasies that have been extremely exciting.

Our situation has worked like this: I go out of town and I’m open to the possibility of a sexual encounter. Christopher is allowed the same freedom, although he says he’s too shy to partake. Knowing him as I do, I would guess it’s more about his not “needing” such an opportunity. But he’s told me that if I brought someone home and we had a mutual interest in her, he wouldn’t turn her away. This prospect applies only to women, as Christopher has expressed time and again that he is not interested in being in a threesome with another man. Christopher talks openly about homosexuality. He knows I’m interested in women, after all, and that I identify as bisexual. Yet the idea of my bringing another man home is not an option in our relationship. And that’s perfectly fine with me.

I came across a tidbit in the book
The Sexual Spectrum,
by Dr. Olive Johnson, that made me laugh when I read it, in part because it made me think about just how uncomfortable with homosexuality many men truly are. In 1996, psychologist Henry Adams and some of his colleagues from the University of Georgia investigated erotic arousal in a group of straight men who admitted that they had negative feelings toward homosexuals. The researchers compared these homophobic men to nonhomophobic ones—that is, men who said they had no negative feelings toward homosexuals. Both groups were shown sexually explicit videos of heterosexuals, lesbians, and gay men, while their penile arousal was measured by a plethysmograph. The results? Both groups

of men were sexually aroused by videos of both straight and lesbian women, but
only
the homophobic men became aroused by male homosexual videos.
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For Christopher, it seems that the freedom to be with other people interests him more than actually acting on it. It’s that “I could if I wanted to” mentality. As it turns out right now, because of my steady relationship with Jemma, Christopher and I are also in a very steady and stable, albeit open, marriage. I see Jemma when I can, and Christopher remains “single,” as it were, outside of our relationship. I choose not to be open to a sexual encounter beyond Jemma and Christopher because that is what both Jemma and I want. The complexity of being in an open relationship is that you have to continually negotiate the terms with each partner. Christopher and I had already established that I could date whomever I wanted within the boundaries of our agreement, and he was happy to lift the out-of-town- only rule because he knew and liked and felt comfortable with Jemma. She and I, however, have chosen together to be mutually exclusive (other than my being with Christopher, of course), and so that, for the moment, is the primary ground rule of our relationship.

Jemma often hangs out at our house, and I presume the neighbors think she’s my best friend (if they think anything of it at all). And they wouldn’t be wrong. I just happen to sleep with her as well. I love and trust Jemma. And what makes our dynamic even stronger is the fact that if we were

to break up, the only thing that would be lost would be the sexual component of our relationship. Sadly, I think the same could have been true of my relationship with Grace, except for the fact that her husband didn’t “allow” us to maintain a friendship, and she obliged.

The very best thing about open marriage is that it’s exactly the opposite of what most people think it is. It is not subver- sive. It is not alternative. It is not countercultural or deviant. So go ahead and breathe. If you were worried that the only way you could be open to open marriage would be by putting a sex swing in your living room and going to swingers’ retreats, fear not. Maybe you simply find yourself wanting something more or something other than your spouse when it comes to sex. Maybe you have come to accept that our hearts expand when we have more people to love. Maybe you’re ready to let biology and reality, as opposed to religious dogma and social expectations, guide your way of life. It’s okay—because open marriage looks however you want it to look.

one common misconception about

open marriage is that it automatically implies loose morals. But it’s quite the opposite, actually: It involves a heightened sense of ethics because it’s all about honesty and openness. Sex and morality, much like sex and marriage, have gotten dangerously jumbled. Just for the fun of it, let’s take a look at what “morality” means.
The Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy
defines it like this:

The term “morality” can be used either:

1. descriptively to refer to a code of conduct put forward by a society or,
   

   1. some other group, such as a religion, or
      

   2. accepted by an individual for her own behavior or
      

2. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.
   2
   

Let’s begin with the first definition. What society, group, religion, or individual gets to set the moral standard? And if we have no common morality, which we surely don’t, then why should open marriage imply a lack thereof? If you’re thinking this is merely an argument of the slippery-slope variety, then you might look at it this way instead: If open marriage suggests compromised morals, then what about sex toys, anal sex, S&M, fetishes, and so on? Where is the line? Who decides? It seems to me that open marriage gets short shrift because people don’t know anything about it, so it’s an easy target for them to project their assumptions on to.

Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt take on this issue in
The Ethical Slut.
They begin their exploration by “taking back” the word “slut.” They suggest using it not as a means

of judgment, but instead as an indication of freedom and ownership of one’s own sexuality. They write, “We are proud to reclaim the word ‘slut’ as a term of approval, even endearment.”
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Hereby, the two suggest that we, as a society, determine what our morals and ethics should be and how they ought to drive us. Our morals are not absolutes. They have everything to do with perceptions, and the words and definitions we choose for ourselves.

Albert Einstein once said, “A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
4
So many people act based only on their fear of retribution, and yet here’s Einstein, someone whose genius I think nearly everyone could agree on, making the brilliant point that we don’t need religion enforcing behavioral guidelines for us; we do, however, need to learn to be more civil. If we acted more as Einstein suggests we do, we would be open to the fact that there are many ways to experience life and love. We would embrace lifestyles and relationships that fall outside of the traditional and the standard. We would evolve.

Another travesty that is too often ignored when it comes to this morality debate is how women inevitably end up on the losing side. “If you ask about a man’s morals,” write Easton and Liszt, “you will probably hear about his honesty, loyalty, integrity, and high principles. If you ask about a

woman’s morals, you are more likely to hear about who she fucks and under what conditions.”
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This double standard is yet another weapon of misogyny’s great warriors. Want to keep women obedient to men? Tell them that they’re worthless if they listen to their own moral compass when it comes to their sexuality. It’s certainly worked so far.

Open marriage isn’t about loose morals. I’m not sure it’s about morals at all. Morality is a social construct, while the principles behind open marriage are biologically based. We are not all wired for one lifestyle, which is why I’m suggesting that open marriage should be no less of an option than serial monogamy, homosexuality, lifetime abstinence, staying single, or having kids on one’s own. Excuse me for calling in the big guns, but isn’t this what our founding fathers had in mind in the first place—freedom of choice? If you can pick your religion, why would it make any less sense to choose your lifestyle in terms of whom you live with, love with, and sleep with?

because I have a daughter, it’s impor-

tant to me to address the issue of parenting, and mother- hood more specifically. Whenever the subject of my open marriage comes up, people always ask me, “But what about your daughter?” The implication seems to be that being in an open marriage automatically equals bad parenting. But my daughter knows nothing about my sex life. What my husband and I choose to do with our sex lives outside of