Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (21 page)

our commitment to each other is not something we’re shar- ing with Emily, who, at the time of this writing, is eight years old. The only people who have ever slept over at our house are Lisbeth and Jemma, and they slept over be- fore any sexual relationship developed. They were friends first. We have never had strangers sleep over at our house. We have never had orgies or wild parties, in part because we’re not interested in that, but more important because we would not subject our daughter to behavior that would be inappropriate because of her age, and because we’re her parents. Most couples who are in open relationships and have children exist along the same spectrum of couples who are not in open relationships and have children. Some parents put their children first; others make poor choices and selfish decisions.

Christopher and I established early on how we would approach this issue with our daughter, and we decided that we would just be ourselves, and would continue to parent as we always had—by putting Emily first. In a wonderful essay for Babble.com, writer Miriam Axel Lute, who is a mother and is also in an open marriage, speaks to this point. “Still, in my world and in the worlds of the other polyamorous parents I know, all these challenges generally just mean more time is focused on family and parenting. So it always brings me up a little short to see people trotting out the ‘clearly bad for children’ argument about my family.”
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And there you have it. Because we have what is considered an

“alternative” scenario, we think
more
about how everything— everything—affects our daughter.

What’s normal to kids is whatever’s presented as normal. We want Emily to think it’s perfectly normal for friends to stay over. We want her to think it’s perfectly normal that lots of people love her and love us—in a purely platonic way, of course—and for people to hug and cuddle and be together. And so she does, because that is what she sees.

And that is all she sees. She’s never seen me kiss Jemma in a romantic way. When I stay at Jemma’s house, I tell Emily the truth she needs to hear—that Jemma lives downtown and it’s a matter of convenience. It’s easier for me, and I don’t miss out on being with my daughter any more than I would otherwise, since she would be asleep if I were to come home late. Lute explains, “The kids I know whose parents just have open marriages don’t even really register it, and why should they? There’s no reason it has to be any different to them if Mom gets an evening out to see her lover or to play cribbage.”
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And it isn’t. I am away from Christopher more often than I might be, perhaps, but being in an open marriage does create some needed distance—space and time away included. And I can assure you he doesn’t mind having the bed all to himself from time to time.

I stay with Jemma because I want to be with her and spend the night with her. I tell Emily that I spend time with Jemma because she is my best friend, and that it’s just like Emily’s wanting to be with her best friend. Would you call

that lying by way of omission? Perhaps. But lying through omission is just one of the many components of good parenting. Your kids don’t need to know if you had way too much to drink at that party last night, kissed someone you were interested in at work, or even had sex last night with your spouse.

For those who argue (and many people have) that I’m keeping Emily in the dark out of some sense of shame, I would ask this: Should children be exposed to their parents’ porn library or sex-toy collection or dungeon? Of course not. And why shouldn’t they be? It’s not because those parents think what they are doing is wrong—nor should they. It’s because children have no business knowing about or seeing that stuff. My daughter doesn’t know anything about sex at this point, except that it’s something grownups do. She is exposed to nothing more than any child of parents in a traditional marriage is, and arguably less than the children of parents who are single and dating.

Guess what else our daughter doesn’t see? Fighting and resentment and unhappy parents, which children should be protected from. What kids shouldn’t be hidden away from is love, and that’s all our daughter witnesses—from us and from friends and family members who come to our home. And aren’t love and support what everyone agrees children need more of? Lute explains it like this: “Yes, lovers/step- parents constantly coming and going and families falling apart and reforming at the drop of a hat certainly sounds

like a less than ideal environment for children to me. But this is just what monogamous people imagine polyamory must be, just like straight people for so long imagined that gay people did nothing but have sex.”
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As Lute suggests, the very people making negative comments about poly families are quite often the ones having the experiences that truly harm impressionable young people. Lashing out at families that look different is as wrong, hurtful, and unfounded as it is easy.

If I needed any proof that our daughter has no idea that her parents’ marriage is different from any other marriage she’s privy to, I got it recently after watching the film
Arctic Tale
with her
.
The movie tells the story of two polar bear cubs and one walrus calf growing up in the wild. It’s about global warming. But it’s also about animal life cycles—and it therefore got my little one’s mind a-turnin’ about love, flirting, relationships, and where babies come from. At one point in the film, the “teenage” animals become sexually interested in other animals and begin their courting rituals.

“Why do people date when they’re teenagers?” Emily asked me.

“Well, I guess because that’s usually when people start thinking that they might like to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend,” I told her.

“Well, Jemma is twenty-six and she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Does that mean she can just keep dating?”

“If she wants to,” I said, barely able to hold back a smile. “And she can date as much and for as long as she likes.”

“Oh,” Emily said, satisfied with my response and re- engrossed in the film.

And with that brief exchange, I saw that she sees Jemma and me as best friends and nothing more. Jemma is a great influence on Emily, too, and so Christopher and I can rest assured that whatever we are all doing is not only working for us, but also succeeding without affecting Emily. Morality and values for me are about trusting my gut to tell me what is contextually, fairly, and honestly “right,” instead of blindly following universal and deceptive rules that are wrong. It’s about evaluating situations and consequences more—realizing how the world really operates—and thinking less about what a church or someone touting the family-values agenda of the Republican Party says to do lest we burn in hell.

Can it really be moral to beat or kill someone because of whom they love? Can it ever be ethical to deny rights to people because of the living arrangements they choose? Is hate really a family value? I don’t think so. And I don’t want to live in a world that thinks so. That lack of critical thinking seems to be our biggest problem when it comes to this morality question. I’m not in an open marriage because someone told me that’s the “right” thing to do, but because it’s where thinking and experience have brought me. And that is my definition of values and ethics: looking at the bigger picture and examining, truthfully, how I fit into it.

Unfortunately, I can make all the philosophical arguments I want, and there will still be people who don’t even know me waiting in line to call me a bad mother. And as if that isn’t enough in the realm of morality, I’ve also mentioned the other accusations that have been liberally thrown at me: of being consumed by sex, of being an addict, even. What’s particularly ironic is that I was actually much more focused on sex
before
I began exploring the idea of open marriage than I am now. Why? Because I wasn’t satisfied. Now that I am, I have more time and energy and brainpower to put to use in other ways—from parenting to traveling to writing. This situation is not dissimilar to the nose job I got in college. Before that surgery, all I thought about was my nose—how big it was, how people must always be looking at it, how hideous I thought it made me look. But once I had the surgery, I didn’t give it a second thought. I feel exactly the same way about my sex life. Before I considered this whole open-relationship thing, when I was on the verge of losing it and thinking about leaving Christopher and uprooting my whole life, thinking about sex consumed me. Now I am entirely at ease. I am happy and content with my life and the direction it’s taking. Go figure.

We obsess over those things we long for. Fulfill that longing and
poof
—our obsession is gone. This concept is applicable to healthy obsessions only, and I use the word “obsession” in a purely nonclinical sense. If you’re wondering what makes a healthy obsession, a good test is to ask yourself

whether, once quelled, it is feeding you or merely growing into a deeper infatuation. Consider the following obsessions, any of which might be healthy or unhealthy: plastic surgery, tattoos, eating, or sex. If you get your Brazilian butt lift or your tattoo, or if you eat that thing you’ve been craving or have sex with whomever you’ve been wanting to have sex with, and you feel good, content, full, finished, then that’s probably a healthy thing that you were simply really into, perhaps a little possessed by, but not to the point of your needing clinical help. But if you do any of these things and they simply leave you feeling out of control, unable to stop, and wanting more, more, more, then you might need to consider what’s really going on. I know that I don’t want more and more and more. Where sex is concerned, I just want more than my husband. For a while, that meant a few men a year. For now, that means one other woman. I have absolutely no desire for anyone else. And I have no reason not to be completely honest about that—which I know is a huge luxury.

Trying to keep your obsessions in check is a lot like dieting. That’s why all those crazy fad diets don’t work, and why a program like Weight Watchers does. You cannot completely and irrevocably deny yourself something, especially something that you love, and expect to walk away unscathed. It will catch up to you. Instead, indulge in moderation. Lead your life in a reasonable fashion that doesn’t work against your biology, and (no surprise here)

that thing will no longer rule your life. Think of open marriage as Weight Watchers: Nothing is off-limits. You just have to work out a plan that works for you—or, in the case of open marriage, you and your partners.

I write better, sleep better, parent better, eat better— you get the idea—because I am not always wondering what else I could have, what I might be missing out on. I’m not constantly wondering whether I should leave my husband because I’m not fulfilled. I can have whatever “else” I want, and just knowing that makes me not dwell on it. Open marriage is not about leading a life focused on sex; it’s about leading a life free from fretting about it. And for me, it’s been about liberating myself from focusing inward to a degree that was destructive to my husband and myself.

As I mentioned earlier, people often accuse open- marriage participants of being incredibly or unusually selfish, whereas, at least for me, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I have to think about other people all the time in order to make this work—my daughter, my husband, my lovers, their other partners. I have failed at this at times, and small disasters have ensued. But that’s taught me that I do have to be particularly conscious, communicative, and honest. I believe it’s more selfish to spend one’s time obsessing about sex, and that Christopher and I were both worse off prior to opening our marriage, because we spent time thinking about what we didn’t have, rather than what we wanted and could get from each other. We felt sorry for ourselves and

blamed each other. What is truly selfish, though, is people’s thinking their way of life is any better than anyone else’s.

Our society has gone crazy around the idea of selfishness. We live in a world that’s all about having the most money, having the best body, “having it all,” regardless of how you have to get it. Meanwhile, women specifically are told that we can have it all, but we are simultaneously expected to be selfless when it comes to anyone and anything in our lives, from our partners to our children to our colleagues. We are never supposed to put our needs before others’; we need to be good wives and good mothers. We certainly give lip service to having moved beyond this particular paradigm, but we’re deluding ourselves if we think we really have.

In her book
Surrendering to Marriage,
the title of which alone gives me the chills, author Iris Krasnow writes, “Surrendering to marriage means we must be forgiving and flexible when what we really feel like doing is spewing venomous remarks. We must give back rubs or our bodies when we feel like reading or sleeping. We must keep our marriages alive, and revive them when they are dying.”
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The book has sold amazingly well. Countless numbers of women have signed on. Countless years of fighting for women’s rights have been lost or ignored in the process.

And if you think Krasnow is simply some sort of crackpot, think again. She graduated from Stanford and is a professor of communications at American University. She’s appeared on
Oprah,
CNN, the
Today
show,
Good Morning

America,
the CBS
Early Show,
NPR’s
All Things Considered,
and
The Hour of Power.
She has a wide platform and an equally broad audience, which makes her message all the more frightening. And make no mistake—the “we” Krasnow is referring to here is us women. Boys will be boys, you know. Women who opt for marriage, however, are choosing to sublimate their personal desires.

I’m sorry, but I can’t, won’t, and don’t accept that because I don’t believe it. I spent my entire youth and the early years of my marriage adhering to the “it is what it is” argument. Finally breaking free from that mentality allowed me to explore an altogether different way of living that feels more authentic. Krasnow writes, “When my husband feels pampered, he is more affectionate, more positive about me, about us, about everything. And that sets off a cycle of compassion and loving-kindness and passion that keeps us going around and around. . . . ”
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Wow. Sounds like something straight out of the 1950s. That sort of behavior would make me feel like a slave.
Keep smiling,
I’d tell myself as I picked up his things.
Please, sir, may I have another?
I’d think as I listened to his complaints.
This is a woman’s lot,
I’d remind myself as he did as he liked and I accepted and enabled it all. I don’t think so.