Choosing Non-Monogamy

When I tell people about opening our marriage people often assume that something is wrong. Nothing is wrong: I have a perfect life, or at least a perfectly ordinary life. I simply want more.

I had the inklings of non-monogamy in my early 20's. I met my future husband when I was 19 and we were married at age 24. In the months leading up to our wedding I kept an anonymous blog called "Confessions of a Reluctant Bride" where I tried to reconcile the role of marriage and romantic love in a post-feminist era.

This is what I wrote at the time: “There is much to be lost in a marriage, just as there is much to be gained. This, a public and anonymous blog, is the only space left where I can attempt to tell my version of the truth. The truth of a woman who objectively values the security of a happy marriage, but who isn't sure she's ready to commit to security, or to happiness.”

My concerns at the time were that I would lose something of myself. My freedom, my independence. Things 2^nd wave feminism had taught me to value above all else. I needed a man like a fish needs a bicycle, right?

I was also concerned about my ability to be monogamous. Even though I was deeply in love with my husband, I continued to have crushes on other people. I’d cheated on him and we’d broken up several times, often so I could pursue other romantic interests. I also had a strong emotional attachment to a male friend whose friendship had played a significant role in my life. I didn’t want to lose that bond, or the richness I found in my flirtations.

I might have decided to forsake marriage all together, but there was family and societal pressure. I also knew that I wanted Mac in my life forever, married or not, and a wedding became more about making everyone around us happy. There were also practical reasons for marriage: we wanted to do the Peace Corps, and in order to serve together we had to be married.

The date approached and I made sure my wedding vows were more about promising to travel together and stick by each other, and not about forsaking all others. I didn't know that non-monogamy was, or would ever be, an option, but I wanted to be sure I wasn't promising something I couldn't deliver.

After the wedding, we moved across the country to Oregon. We worked and took classes while we waited for our Peace Corps assignment to come through. Less than 6 months after the wedding I developed a monumental crush on my Spanish professor, a Columbian woman with wild curly black hair and poetic sensibilities. I’d had inklings of crushes and flirtations with women in college, but nothing of this magnitude. The story of Mac and I seemed to be coming to a close. Ours would be a story of a college love and a starter marriage. I would come out and we would go our separate ways. It was uncomplicated: no children, no financial entanglements.

My hopes for a relationship with my professor withered in the face of her monumental professionalism. Mac and I moved to Panama for our Peace Corps assignment. I spent months heartbroken, listening to the Columbian guitar music that had been her passion. About a year into our Peace Corps service Mac and I got pregnant.

We moved back to Oregon and my extra-marital romantic and sexual interests faded as my focus shifted to our children. I remember feeling relieved by my diminished desire: this thing that had the potential to destroy my marriage seemed to have been vanquished by motherhood.

As the years slipped by I realized that desire had not disappeared entirely, it had merely been suppressed. I remember one sunny day at the park when two stay-at-home dads showed up to kick a hacky sack while their kids played in the sandbox. It was hot and after a while they took their shirts off. I was horrified. This is a family park! There are KIDS here for Christ’s sake! I was so embarrassed and outraged I couldn’t look at them. It was as jarring as finding pornography streaming on a big screen before a G-rated film. I was subconsciously working very hard at suppressing emotions that I thought could tear our little family apart.

Desire for new sexual and romantic partners came flooding back as I came out of the intense years of birthing and raising young children. I went back to work part-time when my youngest son was two. I started hanging out in social situations that didn’t revolve exclusively around mothers and infants. I was surprised and delighted to find that my libido, dormant all those years, was vibrantly alive.

I talked with other moms about their experiences of sex and desire. Almost none of the married moms I talked to were in sexually satisfying relationships with their husbands. Most often my friends’ husbands wanted sex more often than they did, and the conversation was about how to satisfy the husbands, or put them off, with the least amount of hassle possible. Finding personal sexual satisfaction seemed to be limited to upgrading the vibrators we’d all had since college. Low female desire seemed to be a biological fact. The narrative was: men want sex and women don’t, so how can we get them to stop hassling us about it.

I wasn’t happy with this solution. There had to be something more. How could it be that we had all these women trapped in sexually unfulfilling relationships? I read a study that found men typically have an easier time becoming aroused and performing with long-term partners (partly due to the psychology of erections and knowing if it worked the last time it’s likely to work again.) Women, however, in general are more easily aroused by the excitement and novelty of new partners. Marriage has always been used as a way to control reproduction, and it seems, to control female desire as well.

For women, low libido and feeling sexually unfulfilled seems to be less about biology and more about the social constructs of marriage and monogamy. Books like Sex at Dawn and other peer-reviewed articles confirm that, at best, humans are only intermediately monogamous when looking at the range of monogamy to promiscuity seen in the animal kingdom. I came to understand my low libido as a symptom of monogamy, and to see my desire for extra-marital relations as a part of the way I was genetically wired.

But what could I do, caught as I was in a culture that values marriage and monogamy? Sublimation of desire seemed like the socially acceptable thing to do: to channel passion into some artistic or work-related endeavor. But I was tired of denying my body. Sublimating desire felt like a step-back for feminism. As a woman I’d spent so much time self-critiquing my body, feeling used for my body, and sometimes feeling disembodied. I wanted a brain-body connection back – I wanted to honor desire by fanning the flames, not extinguishing them.

I also wanted to reclaim my identity as a woman, and as someone independent of my roles as wife and mother. I’d retreated into motherhood – because nobody expects anything of mothers but patient exhaustion and selfless giving. I disappeared there: giving of myself to care for children and home and spouse until only a shell of the woman I once was remained. I wanted to rediscover myself in this new chapter of my life.

           

There is a lot of personal growth that needs to happen in order to successfully open a marriage. So much so that sometimes I think the discovery in non-monogamy, the real novelty, is less about the new person and more about the newly awakened self. It is the richness of that discovery that keeps me walking down this path.

Some days I feel like I’ve taken my perfect life and thrown it all away for base pleasures. Other days I’m amazed by the things I’ve learned and the woman I’ve become through the beauty and pain of non-monogamy. I wanted more than a perfect life, not knowing if that was even possible and I’ve found that there is more - more love, more heartache, more self-knowledge, more tears. There is so much more to me than wife and mother, and I see those parts of me reflected by new friends and lovers. I had a perfect life and now I have a messier, less perfect life that is bigger, more expansive than I ever believed possible.