Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (4 page)

A week later, I sat watching from my bedroom window as a young guy in a Chevy Nova pulled into our driveway. Even from that vantage point, I could tell he was cute, with his pretty-boy looks and rock-star hair. He was about five foot ten, with a prickly mustache and a face like Kiefer Sutherland’s. He wore a fitted, lavender Izod with the collar flipped up, Guess jeans that were entirely too tight, and docksiders.

“Hey,” he said when I opened the door for him. “Kevin.” He put out his hand and I shook it.

“Hey,” I replied.

“Hello, Debbie,” he said to my mom, who was standing in the doorway that led from the kitchen to the foyer. She lifted her hand to wave but didn’t say a word. She looked stunned. I didn’t find out until after the date that she had never met Kevin, and that she’d built up a mental image of what she thought he’d look like—a quiet artist type, not some “gigolo wannabe,” as she called him.

He took me to a Chinese restaurant in the mall and ordered a bottle of wine. He was so confident that the waiter didn’t even hesitate. When Kevin saw the look of surprise on my face, he just winked and said, “It’s cool.”

Kevin was three years older than I was. When we met, he was about to turn twenty-one and I was about to turn eighteen. He was so sophisticated and mature, so slick. I was sure a guy like that would never be interested in the drama-club nerd I saw myself as back then. I was sure he would see in an instant that he was way too cool for me. I was in awe.

When the waiter returned to pour our wine and take our order, Kevin ordered for us. No one had ever ordered for me before, and I felt so grown-up. His gesture seemed romantic and adult—and cocky, which I liked. The only boys I’d gone out with had been fellow debate-team members who generally relied on me to call the shots. I felt like I’d won the teenage lottery.

“Is your real name Jennifer?” he asked after the waiter walked away.

“Uh-huh. Why?”

“Well, Jenny’s such a little girl’s name, and you are no little girl.” He reached across the table and took my hand. “Is it okay if I call you Jennifer?”

“Uh-huh,” I managed. I felt like I was on
Candid Camera,
as if any minute my dad was going to jump out from behind the fake palm, laughing as the camera crew revealed itself.

Back then, I was extremely insecure about how I looked and how guys saw me; I was always aware of not being on par with my classmates, many of whom looked like they could have given Brooke Shields a run for her money. At that moment, though, sitting across from Kevin, I finally saw a glimmer of hope. Here was this guy, this hunk, flirting with me, showing off for me. I felt my own power as I sat across from him that night, the power of my own sexuality and allure. And I liked it—a lot. I have heard people say that we’re attracted to the people who reflect the vision of ourselves we most want to see, and I loved the sexy girl Kevin’s baby blues were mirroring back to me that night.

The minute the bill came, he swiped it off the table. I reached for my purse.

“I got it, babe.” No one had ever called me “babe” before, and again, I felt as if I were trapped in some sort of surreal world, as if this guy had swooped in out of nowhere to rescue me from teenage obscurity. I was overwhelmed by the feelings he awakened in me.

When he dropped me off at home, he opened my car door and walked me to my front door. “Call you tomorrow?” he asked. In that moment, I was convinced that it wouldn’t be long before we slept together. He started calling me his girlfriend about a week later. In May, he took me to my senior prom and was every bit the perfect date. He made me feel pretty and smart and sexy and talented. He helped me to shed the dork cloak that I had been hiding under for

so long. I wasn’t even out of high school, so it wasn’t as if I was thinking about getting married, per se, but he made me believe I was a catch, and I had, perhaps for the first time, that feeling that someday, someone would undoubtedly want to marry me.

My parents were ambivalent about my dating Kevin. But I was happy, and I wasn’t drinking or using drugs or staying out too late, so they didn’t have much to complain about.

It wasn’t long after prom that I decided I was ready to sleep with him. It was as ideal a first time as I could have dreamed up. His parents were away, and he set up a romantic tableau, complete with candles and music. He had never pressured me; he had waited until I was ready. “I want you to be sure,” he told me that night. “I don’t want to be that asshole who ‘took’ your virginity.”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I love you.” “I love you too.”

Afterward, I cried. Not about anything, really—almost as a release, I guess, or maybe even as a substitute for the orgasm I hadn’t had, didn’t know how to have.

“Oh god, are you okay? Are you sorry we did this?” he asked.

“No. No, no, no,” I assured him. “I’m just . . . wow . . .

I’m just . . . I can’t believe I’m not a virgin anymore.” “So . . . it was okay?”

“Of course. It was great. I’m so glad it was with you.” “I am too,” he said. “Want to do it again?”

“Uh-huh.” The second time around, I willed myself to let go and allowed my body to take over. Kevin rolled onto his back, pulling me on top of him. At that moment, I understood what it meant for something to come naturally. I moved my body rhythmically with his, and came in a way that made my private fumblings in the dark seem like sparklers compared with these fireworks. I was hooked.

Later that night, Kevin turned to me and said the words that were to become the mantra of my sexuality: “You are responsible for your own orgasms.” He told me that I had to ask for what I wanted and needed, and that there was nothing worse than expecting one’s partner to be a mind reader. It was a new opening, and it forever shifted the way I looked at my own sexuality. Granted, because this was my first sexual experience, Kevin’s comment set the bar quite high in terms of my owning what I wanted and getting what I needed, but there it was.

my breakup with Kevin was as hurtful

as our relationship had been wonderful. I found out from friends that he was sleeping with another girl while we were working at adjacent summer camps: a Swedish exchange student, of all people, named Olga. I felt stupid and rejected, ugly and small, when I finally laid eyes on her. She was his age and seemed so worldly. She was tall and blond—and had boobs. I totally understood why he’d want her instead of me.

After some weeks of dealing with my heartache, I finally crawled out of my teenage drama and begin to see the whole experience for what it was. I was lucky. My first time had been with a guy I loved and trusted, and who made me feel confident about my sexuality and my own reign over it. And even losing him to every boy’s porn fantasy didn’t negate that.

I felt alternately empowered by and terrified about my experiences with Kevin. On one hand, I felt cocky and secure (“I’ve been down love’s rocky road, and I refuse to fall prey to its terrain”), and on the other hand, I felt terrified (“I’m never going down that road again. It’s too painful”). But ultimately, I spent so many hours talking to Janelle about what dating in college would be like that Kevin started to seem inconsequential.

By the end of that summer, I was excited about the freedom that awaited me in college. I was glad that I had loved Kevin, but also happy that I’d built up a degree of callousness after having my heart broken. I decided I was going to protect myself and not be so quick to trust just anyone with my heart. Lesson learned: Love is not a guarantee of anything. And if you open yourself to enjoying it, you also open yourself to being crushed by it. Not that I wasn’t still looking for love; I figured Tennyson must have known what he was talking about when he wrote, “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

“It’s good,” Janelle told me. “You’ve had your firsts— first love, first fuck, first heartbreak—and now you can

move on.” Somehow, I knew she was right. Maybe it was because I’d read Judy Blume’s young-adult novel
Forever
so many times, and had witnessed the protagonist, Kat, transition from losing her virginity to the boy she loved to falling for another guy, and perhaps it really was because of how amazing my first time had been. Or maybe it was just about trusting that this was how these things go. I had grown up hearing and believing that I would date lots of people before I found The One. So, even in the depths of my own drama, I knew I was at the beginning, rather than the end, of something big.

Part of my getting over Kevin also involved thinking a lot about the nature of monogamous relationships. We were young, true, but the whole time I had been faithful to and totally smitten by him, doing what I was “supposed” to do by being a committed girlfriend, he had been cheating on me. And he had just proceeded with our relationship as if nothing had changed between us. I had to stop and wonder for a moment just what his actions meant, and I was unable to reconcile my thoughts about the situation. Of course, Kevin’s behavior spoke to his character, but it also made me realize that I would rather have known about his infidelity, and have been able to decide for myself where our relationship would go, than find out the way I did.

Still, it’s nearly impossible for me to conceive of any other outcome than breaking up with Kevin. At eighteen, I wouldn’t have dreamed of being in an open relationship, and

I cannot imagine that Kevin would have dared to ask that we try something like that, or that the concept would have crossed his mind. It certainly didn’t cross mine. It didn’t fit into any paradigm that existed in my eighteen-year-old consciousness. Kevin just figured he’d have his cake while, uh, eating the camp nurse’s, too. But had he said, “I want to see other people,” and had I been free to do the same, I have a feeling that it wouldn’t have left such a sour taste in my mouth. So ultimately, just as Kevin opened some doors for me about taking control of my own sexuality, he also established the foundation of my thinking about the importance of openness and honesty in relationships, even when that honesty might be painful, which it almost always is.

it wasn’t until years later that I started

to put these thoughts together for myself, and began to understand the roots of my own feelings about honesty and communication and just being open to, well, being open. But my early apprehension about the nature of monogamy, and just how problematic it can be, jumps out at me now in hindsight. When I read
Anatomy of Love,
by Helen Fisher, as an adult, I saw articulated exactly what was going on in my teenage head as I was getting ready for college: “Despite our cultural taboo against infidelity,” Fisher writes, “Americans are adulterous. Our social mores, religious teachings, friends and relatives, urge us to invest all of our sexual energy on

one person. . . . But in practice a sizable percentage of men and women spread their time, their vigor, and their love among multiple partners. . . . ”
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When I look back on my first breakup, I realize (somewhat objectively, I think) that Kevin got things from both Olga and me. I needn’t have been jealous, and his choice to be with her shouldn’t have made me feel bad about myself. I was a person he was drawn to, and so was she. He should have been more honest with us, to be sure, but I now realize that he was searching for something that humans are biologically programmed to seek: variety. I realize now that he didn’t have to love or want me any less in order to also want someone else—though we are certainly socialized to believe that this should not be the case.

Alfred C. Kinsey, the famed biologist whose research in the field of human sexuality shook the scientific world in 1948 with the publication of
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,
wrote, “Many females find it difficult to understand why any male who is happily married should want to have coitus with any female other than his wife.”
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And that’s where I found myself. I would argue that most women whose husbands and boyfriends cheat on them find themselves incapable of believing that it’s possible to be happily committed and cheating simultaneously. I didn’t think Kevin was happy with both of us. My immediate reaction was one of self- criticism and doubt—that his wanting to be with Olga could

mean only that he was unhappy being with me. But now I’m able to see how he could have wanted to have both of us for different reasons. It’s just that both Olga and I wanted to be Kevin’s one and only, as people generally want to be the sole focus of their partner’s affections. But what if that desire were purely societal and we could rid ourselves of it? Jealousy thrives only when you feed it.

Jealousy is not a feeling generated by our biology; it’s societally derived. Some people attest that jealousy keeps their relationships exciting, while for others it’s a destructive force. Some people feel that a partner’s jealousy is proof of the depth of the partner’s feelings for them. I can certainly see how people create the idea of jealousy out of their fruitless need to own and fulfill completely another person’s sexuality, and that jealousy only generates more jealousy. In their groundbreaking 1972 book
Open Marriage,
Nena and George O’Neill explain, “Jealousy is primarily a
learned
response, determined by cultural attitudes.”
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We foster jealousy in ourselves by thinking we own someone, and that we can be everything in the world for that person. Then we become unhappy when we find that we can’t. The entire idea of being sexually exclusive and wholly possessing our spouses, the O’Neills point out, “breeds deep-rooted dependencies, infantile and childish emotions, and insecurities.”
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What if, instead, we were to feel secure in our relationships and acknowledge our needs and our partner’s needs? We would have greater security and acceptance in our relationships,

and we would nurture trust and honesty, instead of jealousy. As the saying goes, we reap what we sow.

In
The Myth of Monogamy,
David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton share the thoughts of a man living in Africa with two wives, who explains that although he is equally desirous of both of them, he is “wearied” by whichever one he is with after a few days with her. But then, he continues, “When I go to the other I find that I have greater passion; she seems more attractive than the first. But this is not really so, for when I return to the latter again there is the same renewed passion.”
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