My Body and Other Adventures: Me, My Husband, and Both of Our Boyfriends
T he last time I was in a monogamous relationship, I was 13. We broke up because I felt like he was too jealous and clingy, and I wanted more independence. That’s why I went through high school and college flirting and dating, but never getting serious. I just figured that I would have “a series of meaningful relationships,” but never settle down for the rest of my life. This was also very tied up with my bisexuality, as same-sex “platonic life partners” were a big part of my imagined future. Later, I realized that they weren’t actually meant to be that platonic.
I was 100% satisfied with this fabricated vision for my life. I’d have my own home, my own assets, and plenty of fulfilling romances. I really didn’t think marriage would ever interest me, and so no one was more shocked than I was when, at age 25, I found myself walking down the aisle. How did I move so quickly from my conviction that I would never marry to matrimony?
I learned about ethical non-monogamy.
Here’s the thing. In all my youthful, radical, “I’m not cut out for marriage” musings, it never occurred to me that you could be with more than one person romantically and sexually at the same time. I just assumed my options were singledom, monogamy, or serial monogamy. Then, when I was 22, my mom introduced me to this weird young man. He delighted in being outrageous and was a bit of a devil’s advocate edgelord, not normally the type I would go for.
He told me that he was polyamorous. As soon as he said it, I thought me too! I had never heard of polyamory in any modern context outside of fantasy novels or my polygamist Mormon forebears — but not actual people I knew.
That word polyamory opened a door. Maybe he was not my type, but this was someone who had the language to talk about something I’d always known about myself but never been able to express. We started talking and never stopped. We discussed art, philosophy, and politics during many brunches together. He held me when my dog died and he conspired with friends and family to get me my current one. Little did he know that the puppy Orsino would someday be ours together. Over the course of three years, we went from friends to dating, to engaged, to married. Through it all, we knew that monogamy would never be for us.
That doesn’t mean that we were out having sex parties or swinging every other night. In fact, for a few years, we were almost exclusively involved with one another. We had new relationship energy and had no interest in leaving our little nest, let alone going out with other people. But even then, we maintained that we were not monogamous.
There are many ways to be non-monogamous, and we’ve explored a few of them throughout our eleven years of marriage. We dated other people, had some threesomes, accidentally hosted an orgy, and were in a throuple. We fell in love singly and together, we had our hearts broken, and we always helped each other pick up the pieces.
We both got busier and ended up forming lasting attachments with others. Now my husband has a boyfriend, and I have a boyfriend. My husband and I and our partners have all talked about seeing other people and some of them occasionally do, but for the most part, none of us are dating much; even pre-COVID our brand of non-monogamy was getting pretty tame.
I don’t think I have the energy right now to maintain more than two romantic relationships. And no-strings-attached sex, although fun, just isn’t doing it for me either. I’ve been happy with my two partners for years and am actively avoiding new relationships. I may be domesticated, settled, and even a little boring, but I’m still not monogamous. We practice what has been called relationship anarchy, although that sounds like more of a free-for-all than it is. That said, we don’t have hierarchies, we practice safe sex, and we don’t have a lot of rules. We communicate honestly about when we want to meet or date another person and are allowed to be open about feeling threatened by our partners’ partners. We believe together we can negotiate the best relationship for us, and we don’t need to pattern it on what other people think.
Yes, I have two partners, but for all intents and purposes, we function like an old married couple, just with some extra people. The three of us have spent the last two days literally watching paint dry as we try to decide the best shade of gray for our living room accent wall. We’ve narrowed it down to “Chain Reaction” and “Cool Ashes,” although “Pencil Sketch” is still in the running. After writing this, my boyfriend is going to help me plant my snapdragons in the front yard while my husband takes our dog for a run on the beach. This is not the orgiastic non-monogamy that many people imagine when I say I have a husband and a boyfriend.
And yet, it’s still important to me to know that we are not monogamous or even monogam-ish. It’s so rare that you meet someone that you really click with, that it’s important to me to know that I won’t have to turn my back on those opportunities because of archaic rules. That’s the romantic reason I value my relationship anarchy.
There’s another reason. I’ve always loved the idea that someday, I will become a sex-crazed cougar with a string of virile men in their twenties lined up for my pleasure every night, never wearing panties, having lunchtime quickies in between. Of course, I will be ethical. There will be no cheating, and I will leave the young men better than I found them, but it will be very, very slutty. I have no idea where this fantasy comes from, and I don’t care. It’s something that makes me smile and a door that I never want to close. It doesn’t even have to happen; something about the knowledge that I could wake up 20 years from now and decide to have lots and lots of sex with a string of grateful boy toys delights me.
My relationships are feeling stable right now, and it would be easy enough to freeze it here and say no more dating, no more partners, this is our family unit and try to mimic some kind of traditional structure. I’m a domestic homebody introvert who is happiest with people I know well. Bars, loud noises, and crowded places overwhelm me, and I have to hype myself up to meet new people. While I’m the happiest lounging around the house with no pants, that doesn’t have to be the whole story. I will always treasure the idea of being a slut in potentia just waiting to emerge from my cozy, domestic cocoon.
Published Apr 19, 2022
Updated Sep 3, 2024
Published in Issue XI: Slut
