Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (9 page)

The weekend I met Grace was during a time when I was already having crazy fantasies that I’d miraculously meet some beautiful woman with whom I could have a marvelous affair. Someone who craved me.

And, go figure, I found exactly what I was looking for. Grace had never been with a woman before. She was caught in a sexless and loveless marriage that was destroying her. Her story was so pitiful, it almost made me grateful for the kind of difficulty I was experiencing. No sex is one thing; no love or support is quite another.

She arrived late, bustling into dinner with apologies and explanations. “How many times have I been here?” she said to everyone and no one in particular. “And still, I get lost every time.” She charmed me immediately. She was a deeply intelligent but incredibly scattered woman with fair, freckled skin and long, curly hair that refused to cooperate with the clip she tried to hold it back in.

That night, Grace and I found ourselves alone on the porch after the group of women we’d been talking to had retired to bed. We sat in wooden rockers, looking up at the winter sky, and talked about everything and nothing. We were only four hours from home, but I felt like I was a million miles away from my life. The retreat was at a historic home that had been turned into a bed-and- breakfast, and the whole experience reminded me of a kind of commune, which I sometimes fantasized about living on—full of artistic, thinking women, all working together and supporting one another.

Grace and I started talking about love and sex and relationships and marriages.

“My husband has never made me come,” she told me that night. It felt clear from that moment forward that we were going to end up sleeping together. How could that be? I wonder now. How could I have felt so ready for and open to cheating? And though what I did was nothing short of cheating, I somehow felt that Christopher wouldn’t take it as badly—if he were to find out—because she was a woman, not a man. It’s funny where our minds go when we’re determined to rationalize something we desperately want to do but know we shouldn’t.

As soon as Grace and I kissed, I actually felt relieved because my anxious urge had been quelled. Yet I also felt guilty for betraying my husband, and terrified that he would find out. Simultaneously, I thought that being with Grace

would make me able to love Christopher better. It might sound as if I was making excuses for my behavior again, but I really wasn’t. And I continue to stand by my reasoning. It turned out I was more fulfilled with Christopher when I was with Grace, because I no longer wanted something from him that he simply couldn’t give me.

One of my interview subjects, a forty-year-old woman named Ella, said this about her open relationship: “We both know we can’t be everything to each other, and we’d rather not be.” Many people who are in open relationships come to this conclusion. But Ella’s primary partner knows about her outside relationship, and at that point, mine did not.

I imagined my affair with Grace as a roadside stop, the kind you make to refuel and regenerate. I felt so good when I was with her. She loved my body. She loved making me feel good. And she loved that I could and wanted to do the same for her. I envisioned getting my strength back through my relationship with Grace, and then returning to my marriage, committed to working harder to be “happy” within socially prescribed confines. At the time, I had no idea what a contradiction that sentiment really was.

In
Against Love,
Laura Kipnis explains, “When it comes to love, trying is always too hard.”
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But at the time, it was that self-delusion that kept me going. After all, I was better at being with Christopher while I was with Grace. My resentment and anger about his ignoring my sexuality disappeared, and I enjoyed being with him, taking care of

our daughter together, and being all the other parts of me that I am, too. But I was still struggling with how to have both things—how to maintain an outside relationship and be happy at home. I never imagined that doing so could actually translate into a lifestyle that would work for Christopher and me. Loving more was helping me to love more, not less, yet it still seemed impossible to merge my two lives, and the idea of being in an open marriage still hadn’t crossed my mind. I had no idea what an open marriage was. All I knew was that I was having an affair, and that eventually either that or my marriage had to end.

Because Grace and I lived in the same city, we saw each other as often as we could. She was terrified that her husband would find out, and she’d convinced herself that he would because of me. I have no clue why, since she knew I had just as much to lose and no reason to reveal our relationship. She was freaked out that either I was going to tell her husband, or someone would see us or know about us and tell him.

In the end, she was the one who told him.

“I thought it would turn him on,” she told me on the phone the next day. She was crying, and her voice was shaky. She sounded scared.

“And clearly, it didn’t.”

“No. He’s furious . . . at you.” “At me?”

“He’s convinced that you were the one who put me up to this, that I would have never done something like this without being pushed. He wants to talk to you.”

“No,” I said emphatically. “Absolutely not.”

“You have to, or else he’s going to tell Christopher.”

“Shit,” I said, feeling the weight of what I’d been avoiding. I think I truly believed that I could simply be with Grace for a while, until some natural fizzling-out point, much like the experience I had had with Sophie Anne. The last thing I wanted was to hurt Christopher. While Grace was talking, I realized what I had risked.
Christopher might leave me,
I thought. But in that same instant, I knew I didn’t believe he really would. He would be sad about the choice I had made, but I also felt sure that we could survive.

I felt confident about this outcome in part because things were so good—better than they had been. I was happy and relaxed. And I felt certain that Grace and I could continue our relationship without having to end our marriages. Why couldn’t we? Our routine was so easy to maintain because of our circumstances: Because Grace had a child, our kids could play together while we spent time talking. We were never intimate when the kids were around. We would just talk and watch them play. We planned our alone time together for certain evenings, when her husband was out or mine opted for an early night at home with our daughter. It was surprisingly easy to balance it all. In a lot of ways, my relationship with Grace felt more like an intimate friendship

than anything else. I spent as much time with her as I did with any best friend I’d ever had. I loved Grace and I loved my husband, and it worked. The problem was that I was keeping it a secret, and that didn’t work. I hated lying, and when I was confronted with telling the truth, I was terrified of how Christopher would feel about me.

After Grace told me her husband was demanding to talk to me, there was a painful silence as she waited for me to answer. But I didn’t feel as if I had much choice in the matter, so I agreed. I agreed to talk to her husband, even though all I really wanted was for the whole situation to just disappear. That night, Grace’s husband called me at home. I was as ready for him as I could be.

“I have things I’d like to say to you in person,” he told me. I suggested we meet at his house the next day. When I arrived the next morning, Grace was there, cowering in the background, skittering in and out of the room, getting ready for work while her husband and I sat knee to knee in their living room. The conversation didn’t go well. He started it by calling me a slut, and things went downhill from there.

When you decide to cheat, you choose to accept the consequences of being found out—and they are not likely to be positive. People who are being cheated on are generally not happy, although on certain occasions, the partner who’s being cheated on is relieved, or, at the very least, not surprised. A Salon.com article by Carol Lloyd describes just

such a situation. Lloyd writes, “The first time my husband confessed to cheating on me, I began giggling like an idiot. ‘My God!’ I cried. ‘You promise?’ I was giddy with relief to find we both had dipped into the same shallow philandering waters: making out with ex-lovers while out of town. We lay in bed and gently tormented one another . . . finally tiptoeing into a new understanding.”
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Lloyd’s experience is unusual only in that she and her spouse were able to share and discuss the fact that they were cheating on each other. But it’s more likely that you will end up with a very unhappy, and perhaps very angry, person on your hands when you confess to an indiscretion. Cheating by its very nature is about deceit, and no one likes to be deceived. And being the deceiver comes with its own host of issues—namely guilt.

Delia, a twenty-year-old woman in an open civil union in New Zealand, describes her experiences with cheating: “Prior to becoming polyamorous, I was in three long-term monogamous relationships. I cheated on both the first and second, and was cheated on by the third. I felt immense guilt over the first ones.” Via email, Delia told me that she felt guilty “mostly for feeling bad about not feeling bad!”

Liza, another interview subject, also talked about the effect that cheating has had on her life. Even though she has never cheated, both of her parents did. “I saw how incredibly destructive it can be, and how devastating it is on the other partner,” she told me.

Aside from the fact that I wasn’t considering an open relationship at that point, Grace’s husband was an extremely jealous man who did not like the idea of sharing his wife with me. He was also controlling and selfish. He needed to own Grace. Her primary complaint about him was that she felt like his property, and not particularly highly valued property at that. But he didn’t see that. He believed his obsession with possessing her was a sign of his love for her. Many people make that mistake, and it’s always the person being possessed who suffers the most.

As angry as Grace’s husband was—and he was
angry
—I know things would have been far worse if I had been a man. It’s ridiculous, but it’s fitting in a culture that still values men over women, and in which lesbian sex isn’t seen as “real” sex. I was an annoyance to him, but not a threat. It seemed to me that he should have been far
more
threatened that I was a woman, simply by virtue of the fact that I was able to give Grace everything that was missing from their relationship. Perhaps, if he’d been a different person, he could have grasped how my being in Grace’s life might have helped their marriage. But, of course, that wasn’t how he saw things.

Our six-month affair ended in disaster. For Grace it challenged too much, involved too many risks, and introduced too many questions, but for me our relationship was an opening, an awakening. I’d been ignoring what I wanted and needed. In my marriage, I’d simply accepted

things as they were, without regard for how I was feeling. Herein lies the rub: If, out of the blue, you have an experience that not only wakes you up, but also reminds you of what you used to enjoy, it’s tricky to go back to sleep. This type of encounter can challenge all those beliefs you have come to accept as normal. It upsets the life you were living, because it opens a door that can’t be shut easily. And it forces you to rely on yourself and ask yourself what your truth is. When your experiences counter your beliefs but also feel so right, you can get yourself into a very confusing place, one that takes some working through to figure out how to handle it.

And that’s where I found myself. My affair with Grace started me thinking about the nature of sexuality, and questioning the institution of marriage altogether. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it before. I’ve always been a big reader of everything from feminist manifestos to literary erotica. I take
Cosmo
quizzes and read
The Hite Report.
I’ve read Anaïs Nin and Camille Paglia. But I’d never let myself seriously consider the ramifications of my sexuality on the life I was living. It was like this ever-looming disconnect. But rather than living my truth, I’d just allowed myself to believe that I was a freak for the sexual feelings I had, and for liking sex without necessarily connecting it with love. Rather than accepting that my tendencies might be incompatible with traditional married life, I mistakenly believed that I was strong enough to overcome them, or at least live with ignoring them. But I couldn’t.

Being with Grace reminded me of how much I liked sex, desired women, and was attracted to men other than my husband. It was as simple as that: She had forced me out of my comatose state. I was no longer going through my daily life with my body in motion and my mind on pause, because, if I was honest with myself, I cared about honoring my sexuality. Before that, I’d been wrestling with the idea that my desires were not being met, but that it was my fault: I was too fat; I was a mom and thus no longer sexy; my husband had fallen out of love with me. But none of those excuses held up: I lost the weight; I felt sexy; Christopher made it clear again and again that he loved me for me. Really, the issue was much bigger, and it had to be addressed head on if I was ever going to feel happy in my marriage. There was just no way around it.

i was shaking when I got home from

Grace’s house that day. I was sad and angry and I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew I had to tell Christopher about the affair.

“But why?” he said when I told him. “Why?”

“You don’t want me. I thought you’d be happy,” I said. But that was putting the blame on him, which, as easy as it would have been, was not what I wanted to do. I changed the conversation’s course almost instantly. “I’m not happy,” I confessed. My morning with Grace’s husband had left me mad and resentful and scared, but I needed to be honest,

too. I wanted to beg Christopher’s forgiveness, but I also wanted to scream at him,
This is your fault, you asshole! Why don’t you want to have sex with me anymore?
But it wasn’t just about that: I also wanted to be with other people. I wanted different experiences, different relationships, different kinds of sex.