Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships (29 page)

I was able to ask myself honest questions like, What if I had
announced my love for another person first? What would be different right now-am I being fair? What are my fears, and what
is needed to quell them? What really makes our relationship primary? Am I suffering from leftover monogamous thoughts? Am I
really polyamorous? I came to realize that like all the other times
we've gone through rough moments, it was just another growing
point, [a] chance to see if we could actually walk the [walk]... It's
easy to have a primary and be polyamorous when neither person
feels love for another partner.

Khane and Ignacio's experience demonstrates some important
points. They take promises seriously When they reassure one another,
they talk about what's happening in the present rather than make a
guarantee of forever. They embrace uncertainty They are committed
to "walking the walk" of polyamory: calling yourself poly means
accepting the reality of falling in love with other people.

But what if falling in love was not part of your agreement? That's a
different ball of wax. Let's say you practice a style of nonmonogamy where
loving more than one partner is not part of your agreement. You've
abided by the rules and had only casual sex partners outside the relationship, but one day find yourself experiencing more intense feelings for
one of them. First, you must come clean to your partner. Then begins
the harder work: what will you do about it? Some people who have this experience break off the relationship with the new partner to preserve
the primary partnership. Others renegotiate the terms of their relationship
to accommodate additional loving relationships. What you do depends on
what you and your partner want and the needs of the primary relationship.

If you are in a monogamous relationship and are considering some
style of nonmonogamy, chances are both partners did not raise the
issue simultaneously-one of you approached the other about it. If
you initiated the conversation, make sure to give your partner plenty
of time and space to think it over. Point him to books, websites, and
other resources, and then let him absorb the information at his own
pace. If your partner was the one who brought it up, do not feel pressured to make a decision right away Do your research, give it careful
consideration, ask questions, and be sure before you decide.

If you decide to try nonmonogamy, the transition can be a rocky
one. When a couple moves from monogamy to nonmonogamy, cracks
in the relationship are often exposed and magnified. Therapist Joy
Davidson says: "When primary partners bring up the issue of nonmonogamy for the first time: a) the relationship paradigm is immediately
altered; b) [the] conversation forces the exploration of needs that are not
being met and emotional secrets that have been kept."3 Confronting the
dysfunctional patterns, unmet needs, and other demons in your relationship is not easy, and this could be a good time to seek counseling.
You want to resolve any major conflicts and issues and bring the relationship to a place of stability before you explore nonmonogamy If you
don't, things are likely to go awry very quickly. As you think about what
style of nonmonogamy you'd like to try, be honest about what you want.

When you begin actually being nonmonogamous, the dynamics
between you and your partner will likely change. It's very difficult, but
necessary, to let go of your monogamous baggage and any investment you had in "the way things used to be." For example, in the beginning
of his relationship with Lucy, Theo believed that Lucy avoided telling
him when she wanted to hook up with other people because it brought
up old upsets:

Reflecting on Change

Coping with change is an important skill to learn. Once you get
over the shock and disorientation it inevitably brings, ask yourself these questions:

• How does this change affect my current relationship(s)?

• What are the negative implications of this change?

• What scares me about this change?

• What are the positive implications of this change?

• What pleases me about this change?

• What do I need to help make the transition brought on by
this change easier?

When she was in Boston and I was in New York, she would call
and say, "I'm on my way home. I'll call you when I get home, and
we'll have our nightly check-in." Then she would disappear and
end up screwing somebody... She didn't want to deal with talking to me about it. She was turned on and wanted to go play, and
she didn't want to have to hash it out... When people are not
experienced in nonmonogamy, talking about being with somebody else has the emotional charge of all this history: whether you
cheated on somebody or whether you were dating more than one
person, having to deal with [other people's] upsets-all that stuff
people don't want to confront.

Theo's observation shows how you can unconsciously revert to
the restrictive ideas of monogamy If you played by all the unspoken
rules of monogamy when you were in your monogamous relationship,
you learned some things you're going to have to unlearn: That you
should feel love and sexual desire only for your partner. That you must
not tell your spouse you find another person attractive, you've developed a crush, you like flirting with someone, you want to have sex with
them, or you have a fantasy about them. That one person can fulfill all
your needs; if you have a need your partner cannot or does not want
to meet, file it away, because you're out of luck. Accepting that you can
be attracted to, have sex with, and love more than one person can be
hard. Learning to talk about wants and needs that involve people other
than your partner is not something we are taught. Communicating in
a totally new way will take some time and getting used to.

When you first adopt nonmonogamy, go slowly Ruth and her
partner began fantasizing about what it would be like to have a third
partner, and they swapped stories before they actually did anything.
Ruth believes this helped them grow comfortable with the idea and
distill what was important to them. Now she and her partner are part
of a triad.

When George and Emma first decided to open up their relationship,
George says:

At first, for a while, we did the team thing. [We said] we can be
involved with somebody else, but it has to be both of us. Then we
started branching out to the idea of having experiences separately, and we both had those. We had a lot of the jealousy issues
along the way, a lot of `I'm not getting attention paid to me' and
`You're out [while] I'm stuck at home.' There was a little bit of on
and off: let's not be open, quite so open, how are we going to structure this, how are we going to do this. We went back and forth
figuring out how we actually wanted to do this poly thing.

They eventually became part of a closed triad with Penny Recently,
the three decided to open up the triad, and this change has been another
challenge:

It's at a time when none of us has somebody immediately. A lot of
times, opening up happens because `Oh my god, there's this
person I'm interested in, here's this opportunity, let's open up so I
can take advantage of this opportunity!' That skews things rather
badly. Drawing on our past problems and mistakes, [we said] we
were interested in having this hind of relationship, so why don't
we go ahead and proactively take this step before anybody is in
the position of being forced to or having to advocate for it-before
there's any other weird dynamic layered on top of it.

George believes they made the transition from closed to open smoothly
due to the fact that there was no one waiting in the wings.

You may be single with a history of monogamous relationships
when you decide to become nonmonogamous. When Madeline, a 35year-old mother and massage therapist from the Midwest, ended her
marriage, she decided to become nonmonogamous:

It was a conscious decision... It was six or eight months after we
separated before I was interested in dating anybody or going out
or even having sex with anybody... I started going out with this
guy, we hit it off, and it was very clear from the beginning that
this was not going to be serious. Neither one of us was interested
in having a boyfriend or a girlfriend... Very gradually, other
casual things started happening... I thought to myself, this is what
my life was like in college or in my early 20s, where I don't have
to be tied down to one person. In fact, it's rather nice to have this
choice of different people who will fulfill different needs. I think
the decision wasn't necessarily conscious but it became this revelation that, yeah, I can do this and this is good for me. I never [do] anything behind anyone's back. I don't tell everyone everything,
but everyone I'm seeing knows that I see other people.

Samiya is a 36-year-old bisexual African American woman who
works in government and lives in Maryland. After ending an eight-year
lesbian relationship, she thought her dissatisfaction was with the specific
relationship. But then she began seeing someone new and questioned if
monogamy was right for her:

A few years ago I was dating another bi woman. She liked to play
around quite a bit and experiment. At that time, I came to realize that there were certain things I want that I would never have
in that relationship... I just knew that if I were with her indefinitely
I would still want to seek out [other experiences], not because I
didn't love her but because that's what I need to feel balance.

When she embraced nonmonogamy, it changed other aspects of her
life:

I started really asking myself: What is it that I want? What is it
that I need? And spending some time just with myself, not going
according to what other people said I should be, that's when
things developed more freely... The funny thing about living this
truth about myself is that I feel able to live the truth in other
areas of my life... Once I was able to admit this for myself and
live it, I don't have the desire to run around hiding things. I don't
try to be so-called nice about my ideas or my views in other
areas-whether it's work, friendship, family.

Making the transition from monogamy to nonmonogamy requires
patience. Give yourself time to reframe how you think about and share
your desire for other people. Go slowly, pace yourself-don't jump
into having a secondary partner, two fuck buddies, and a lover all in
one month. Make agreements with your partners and stick to them.

This book has dealt nearly entirely with nonmonogamy, but there are
plenty of instances when nonmonogamous relationships become monogamous. Sometimes the change is temporary When the people I interviewed
talked about shifting from nonmonogamy to monogamy for a fixed
period of time, it usually came about as a way of addressing a problem,
reconnecting and reestablishing trust, or coping with some significant
change or crisis. For example, Leslie and her triad partners Ed and Colin
decided to close their triad to additional partners while Leslie received
treatment for cancer. Barbara's partner chose a period of monogamy for
himself to deal with an addiction. When my partner moved across the
country to live with me, we decided to be monogamous for six months
while he settled into a new city, a new job, basically a whole new life.
With so much for him to adjust to, I wanted to give him a sense of
security and let him know that he would be my priority.

Gabrielle, a 32-year-old Native American woman from Seattle,
has had mostly polyamorous relationships; in fact, only two of her 20
relationships have been monogamous. Her current primary relationship with her husband, Jeff, started as polyamorous five and a half
years ago. Recently, a woman began pursuing Jeff:

She had been playing with a lot of friends of ours. As soon as she
would get involved with a man and have sex with him, she would
basically just dump him like a hot potato. She was going through
most of our friends and doing that. When she was pursuing
them, she was really dominating their time and treating their
partners like crap. She started doing this with me, and I said,
"No, I'm not comfortable with this chick, she's really freaking
me out, and she really pisses me off."

Gabrielle vetoed the woman, but Jeff played with her anyway
Gabrielle felt betrayed. She asked him to be monogamous with her so they could work on reestablishing their trust. She became monogamous
as well:

I just wanted to decomplicate the relationship. I thought if I was
going to ask him to be monogamous with me, I needed to make
the same commitment to him; that was pretty much just an
equality and fairness thing. I didn't think he was being malicious
with what happened. I just thought we needed some time rebuilding our relationship, rebuilding our trust... It was hard to give
up my relationships... [especially] the guy I was pretty serious
about. I still miss him. But it was necessary so that my primary
relationship could move forward.

The tight-knit poly community to which Gabrielle and her husband
belonged began to ostracize them:

As soon as we decided to be monogamous, within a matter of
weeks we stopped getting invited to parties, stopped getting
invited to our friends' houses, and all of our poly friends stopped
having time to spend with us... It seems that if you're not poly,
then it threatens their existence. They're very insecure about
being poly and want only people who are like them or accept
them to be around them.

The lack of support has been very difficult, but Gabrielle believes
monogamy is what she and her husband need right now They are
open to exploring nonmonogamy again once they have worked on
their issues.

Some people decide to try monogamy and agree to it for the foreseeable future. Nonmonogamous people who strongly believe in open
relationships and make them a philosophical preference can become
deeply invested in them. If you've spent a lot of thought and energy
rejecting traditional monogamy, it may seem as if you're stepping backward to decide your relationship should be monogamous. If you are considering this option, know that it doesn't mean you have failed at
nonmonogamy or that you're buying into society's norms.