Exploring Open Relationships: Part Four

At the moment I’m largely limited to dating people who are going to be ok with being in an open relationship because I’m not going to just settle into monogamy by default at this point. It’s also worth pointing out that where I live (SE Wisconsin) most of the liberal/Pagan-friendly folks I’ve met are in (or prefer) open relationships. I’ve jokingly referred to my online profiles as “poly-bait” since most of the folks that contact me that write more than just a “Hey baby” message are in open relationships.

*** Note: This series of articles goes into me exploring what relationships mean to me, and what I want out of relationship. As I tend to, I write this from a pretty open/vulnerable place, but it might be TMI for some folks. Thus, you’ve been warned. ***

My relationship difficulties have been compounded the past years by the fact that I’m very cautious when it comes to dating within the Pagan community. 90% of my social interactions are with Pagans, but most Pagans are “off limits” for me because I’ve met them in context as an author/teacher/ritualist. From an ethical perspective, I strongly feel that need to ensure I’m in a peer dynamic with someone before I’d consider a relationship, and even then, I’m leery because of the potential for community drama if the relationship doesn’t work.

Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt.

The Future?

I’m starting to accept that maybe I never fall in love. I don’t like that idea, I really don’t. Maybe my hormones are to blame; maybe my body just doesn’t produce enough oxytocin for the “falling in love” thing. Or maybe I met my “one true love” and it didn’t work out. Maybe it’s just a chemical factor of dealing with depression, or just faulty wiring in my brain chemistry. Maybe it’s because I think too much. Maybe it’s from dissociating my emotions when I was a kid to cope with the bullying. Who knows.

Right now I’m focusing more on balancing out my own conflicting tendencies in relationships.

See, when I find someone I like–even if it’s not “big love”–I tend to get complacent; I don’t really want to seek out new partners. I think it’s largely because of my introvertedness, and certainly in part because my focus is on my work. It’s difficult enough for me to give one partner enough attention, much less more than one partner.

Nowt that I’m actively dating two men at the same time, and exploring relationships with others, I’m not sure that I’m all that good at this. I feel kind of socially overwhelmed, and I’m pretty sure that when I give time to one person, I’m failing to give time to another, and that’s more social stress than I really want to handle. I keep coming back to the fact that I’m not really polyamorous, and multiple relationships are more work.

And it’s work I’m not really good at, if I’m honest with myself.

It’s certainly part of my introversion that I can only cope with having emotional relationships with so many people. I just don’t have a lot of brain space for more; I only have so much social capacity. Just as I can only have so much general social activity before getting exhausted, I seem to have that capacity limit for more intimate friendships and romantic relationships.

I also wonder if there’s some significant functional difference between folks who are genuinely polyamorous and those of us who aren’t. In my case, I’m always going to end up focusing my relationship compass point toward the place where I am getting the most needs met. The person I have the most emotional connection to, the person who is the most compatible with me, the person I seem to share the most chemistry with.

The thing that most monogamous people fear when their partner says, “I want to open our relationship and date other people,” is that their partner is going to 1. Start spending more time with the new partner and neglect them, and 2. Prefer the new partner that they are dating and leave them. I’ve seen open relationships where that doesn’t happen, and I’ve seen open relationships where it does. Maybe that’s the core difference between someone who’s genuinely wired for polyamory and someone who’s wired for monogamy, I’m not sure.

All I can say is that open relationships can be a time suck.

Time and Relationships

The irony in some of this is what initially drew me to open relationships was the casualness factor. After writing a few thousand words on this topic in this series of blog posts, I’ll just be blunt: I got into this to find a way to have intimacy and sex with people I had at least a basic emotional connection to but without a huge time obligation to. I can’t do completely anonymous sex, my attraction engine just doesn’t work that way. I’m too much of a sapiosexual, and I need a connection with someone. However, nor can I lie and promise someone monogamy, long-term-relationships, and falling in love when that doesn’t seem realistic. I needed to find a way to get that need for connection, intimacy, and sex met in a way that worked for me.

Frankly, I don’t have the kind of hours available each week for someone who is looking to me for their primary (or sole) romantic relationship. True, I’d make that time if I really fell for someone and thought we had the potential for a solid relationship, but I’m not willing to put in that kind of time for someone I don’t have that level of connection to.

Maybe that’s harsh, but that’s where I draw the line.

My relationship this past year has worked out great in this respect. He and I have gotten together sometimes weekly but usually once a month. Sometimes we go out, sometimes we don’t. We talk a lot online, we get along really amazingly well though we occasionally argue on philosophical topics. What has made our relationship work–other than the fact that we’re mostly sexually compatible–is that we don’t have huge expectations of each other time-wise. We have fun when we have time to have fun.

Monogamy or Open?

I’m also not unaware of the irony of some of my relationship challenges. All I ever wanted was monogamy, but I’m apparently not great at that because my partners don’t feel they get “enough” of me. And in open relationships, I’m not particularly good at that either for the same reasons; being with multiple partners, and (potentially) in at least friendship relationships with their partners, is often way more social energy than I have to offer to other human beings. (Some weeks all I can cope with are my cats.)

Right at the moment my relationship with my new boyfriend is working well, in part because he and I were both surprised to find ourselves really not just attracted to one another but also connecting on an emotional wavelength. The chemistry there is far deeper than I expected.

But I suppose this also reminds me as well why I’m just not naturally polyamorous, because it’s difficult for me to be attracted to one person and seeking someone else. It’s also been difficult for me to pay adequate attention to two boyfriends at the same time, so I’m struggling with that. I’m starting to feel a bit like I do in a monogamous relationship when my partner’s disappointed that I’m not able to give them enough of my time that they feel valued. And that’s stressful.

Maybe some day I fall in love. Maybe I find a deeply-fulfilling long-term monogamous relationship with someone. Or maybe it’s more monogamish; open relationships don’t scare me the way they once did, so long as I’m confident in the core relationship. In the absence of deep-big-love, it’s nice to connect to people in relationships. I’ve connected to some amazing friends in this way, and sometimes I have even found more emotional connection than I expected.

Friends-love plus chemistry is still pretty rare and amazing, in my experience, so I’m always grateful when I experience that.

Transparency and Explorations

If I reflect back on my previous relationships, there’s no less emotional commitment from me in an open relationship than when I was in monogamous relationships. The difference for me now is, things are more transparently on the table, as it were. I don’t have to pretend that I’m only ever going to be interested in that one person romantically Until The End of Time. And this way, I can be more transparent about when I need to take time to focus on other things, whether that’s a date with another lover, or if I have a book I need to finish editing.

Exploring open relationships has one additional benefit. Perhaps TMI, but I write romance about threesomes, and I have interest in that and a few other sexually adventurous things. Being in open relationships means that I have the option to try out a few of the fantasies on my bucket list. Maybe (in reality) they are as awkward as people tell me, but, I’ve talked to other friends who’ve had fun with them, so who knows. All I can say is that most people living in the assumption of monogamy don’t get to even consider doing anything like this, and tend to think of themselves as deviants for even wanting anything outside of their one relationship.

In fact–I see this a lot when I’m promoting my romance novels. I’ve written some menage-a-trois werewolf romance novels, and that genre’s pretty popular, as well as books with foursomes, fivesomes, and moresomes, usually featuring one female character and her multiple male mates. Usually it’s in the “shifter” genre (werewolves, wereleopards, etc.)  of paranormal romance, but there are other romance novels where it pops up. Apparently this is a huge fantasy that many women have, but never act on, because it’s so “bad” and shameful they’d never consider doing it. 

The male fantasy of being with two (or more) women is sort of a staple of porn, but women who have a similar fantasy are thought of as sluts, whores, and deviants.

Being a sex positive person, I don’t see any of these things as inherently bad, but there’s such a cultural stigma about anything that isn’t heterosexual/monogamous, or that isn’t geared toward the male gaze and heterosexual male desires, that most people never explore any of that.

Conquering Lonely

Living alone for the past years has helped me to get past some of my fear of loneliness. And, though not all of my experiences of dating in the past years have gone well, they’ve at least helped me to consistently disprove that old tape that says, “I’ll never find anyone to connect with, never find anyone that gets me.” I’ve found a number of people who get me, and I’ll meet others in the future who get me.

The old tape still plays in my head, and what I know of human psychology says that I’ll always deal with that. But I have a nice little workaround for it now, because I can pretty easily say, “You’re wrong. That’s not the truth.”

What the past years have certainly taught me is that there are a lot of different ways to do relationships. Monogamy doesn’t have to be the default, but monogamy isn’t also some failing on my part for not being open-minded. Just as people have chemistry (or they don’t) people also have preferences. I’m not truly polyamorous–loving multiple people–but nor am I into totally casual sex either. In general, I experience that polyamorous folks tend to focus more on love relationships, and swingers tend to focus more on sex, particularly sex that centers on a heterosexual couple’s relationship. However, there’s a huge amount of crossover and a spectrum between them.

I’m not entirely sure what to call myself or where I’m at. I’m in open relationships at the moment, and I’m open to monogamy with the right person. What’s more important to me these days than defining what types of relationships I’m in are my boundaries around my work. That’s where my priority is. I think, as I’ve written this, I’ve ended up with more questions than answers, but that’s no surprise for me.

Future writing:

I’ll be working up some future articles about sex, sexuality, and relationships. What would you like to read about?

A few topics rattling in my head are the difficulties of being in open relationships, specifically, the huge social stigma attached to them. And also, some of the social trends I’ve encountered in the differences between folks who identify as polyamorous, the folks who identify as swingers, and the crossover space between those. There’s also the whole sex positive vs. sex pressuring, the whole cultural identity around “We’re such deviants, we’re so counterculture, we’re bad and naughty,” and a few other things I see out there that impact and interweave with our cultural ideas (and problems around) sex. (Me, think too much about this stuff? Naw.)

Exploring Open Relationships: Part Four

At the moment I’m largely limited to dating people who are going to be ok with being in an open relationship because I’m not going to just settle into monogamy by default at this point. It’s also worth pointing out that where I live (SE Wisconsin) most of the liberal/Pagan-friendly folks I’ve met are in (or prefer) open relationships. I’ve jokingly referred to my online profiles as “poly-bait” since most of the folks that contact me that write more than just a “Hey baby” message are in open relationships.

*** Note: This series of articles goes into me exploring what relationships mean to me, and what I want out of relationship. As I tend to, I write this from a pretty open/vulnerable place, but it might be TMI for some folks. Thus, you’ve been warned. ***

My relationship difficulties have been compounded the past years by the fact that I’m very cautious when it comes to dating within the Pagan community. 90% of my social interactions are with Pagans, but most Pagans are “off limits” for me because I’ve met them in context as an author/teacher/ritualist. From an ethical perspective, I strongly feel that need to ensure I’m in a peer dynamic with someone before I’d consider a relationship, and even then, I’m leery because of the potential for community drama if the relationship doesn’t work.

Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt.

The Future?

I’m starting to accept that maybe I never fall in love. I don’t like that idea, I really don’t. Maybe my hormones are to blame; maybe my body just doesn’t produce enough oxytocin for the “falling in love” thing. Or maybe I met my “one true love” and it didn’t work out. Maybe it’s just a chemical factor of dealing with depression, or just faulty wiring in my brain chemistry. Maybe it’s because I think too much. Maybe it’s from dissociating my emotions when I was a kid to cope with the bullying. Who knows.

Right now I’m focusing more on balancing out my own conflicting tendencies in relationships.

See, when I find someone I like–even if it’s not “big love”–I tend to get complacent; I don’t really want to seek out new partners. I think it’s largely because of my introvertedness, and certainly in part because my focus is on my work. It’s difficult enough for me to give one partner enough attention, much less more than one partner.

Nowt that I’m actively dating two men at the same time, and exploring relationships with others, I’m not sure that I’m all that good at this. I feel kind of socially overwhelmed, and I’m pretty sure that when I give time to one person, I’m failing to give time to another, and that’s more social stress than I really want to handle. I keep coming back to the fact that I’m not really polyamorous, and multiple relationships are more work.

And it’s work I’m not really good at, if I’m honest with myself.

It’s certainly part of my introversion that I can only cope with having emotional relationships with so many people. I just don’t have a lot of brain space for more; I only have so much social capacity. Just as I can only have so much general social activity before getting exhausted, I seem to have that capacity limit for more intimate friendships and romantic relationships.

I also wonder if there’s some significant functional difference between folks who are genuinely polyamorous and those of us who aren’t. In my case, I’m always going to end up focusing my relationship compass point toward the place where I am getting the most needs met. The person I have the most emotional connection to, the person who is the most compatible with me, the person I seem to share the most chemistry with.

The thing that most monogamous people fear when their partner says, “I want to open our relationship and date other people,” is that their partner is going to 1. Start spending more time with the new partner and neglect them, and 2. Prefer the new partner that they are dating and leave them. I’ve seen open relationships where that doesn’t happen, and I’ve seen open relationships where it does. Maybe that’s the core difference between someone who’s genuinely wired for polyamory and someone who’s wired for monogamy, I’m not sure.

All I can say is that open relationships can be a time suck.

Time and Relationships

The irony in some of this is what initially drew me to open relationships was the casualness factor. After writing a few thousand words on this topic in this series of blog posts, I’ll just be blunt: I got into this to find a way to have intimacy and sex with people I had at least a basic emotional connection to but without a huge time obligation to. I can’t do completely anonymous sex, my attraction engine just doesn’t work that way. I’m too much of a sapiosexual, and I need a connection with someone. However, nor can I lie and promise someone monogamy, long-term-relationships, and falling in love when that doesn’t seem realistic. I needed to find a way to get that need for connection, intimacy, and sex met in a way that worked for me.

Frankly, I don’t have the kind of hours available each week for someone who is looking to me for their primary (or sole) romantic relationship. True, I’d make that time if I really fell for someone and thought we had the potential for a solid relationship, but I’m not willing to put in that kind of time for someone I don’t have that level of connection to.

Maybe that’s harsh, but that’s where I draw the line.

My relationship this past year has worked out great in this respect. He and I have gotten together sometimes weekly but usually once a month. Sometimes we go out, sometimes we don’t. We talk a lot online, we get along really amazingly well though we occasionally argue on philosophical topics. What has made our relationship work–other than the fact that we’re mostly sexually compatible–is that we don’t have huge expectations of each other time-wise. We have fun when we have time to have fun.

Monogamy or Open?

I’m also not unaware of the irony of some of my relationship challenges. All I ever wanted was monogamy, but I’m apparently not great at that because my partners don’t feel they get “enough” of me. And in open relationships, I’m not particularly good at that either for the same reasons; being with multiple partners, and (potentially) in at least friendship relationships with their partners, is often way more social energy than I have to offer to other human beings. (Some weeks all I can cope with are my cats.)

Right at the moment my relationship with my new boyfriend is working well, in part because he and I were both surprised to find ourselves really not just attracted to one another but also connecting on an emotional wavelength. The chemistry there is far deeper than I expected.

But I suppose this also reminds me as well why I’m just not naturally polyamorous, because it’s difficult for me to be attracted to one person and seeking someone else. It’s also been difficult for me to pay adequate attention to two boyfriends at the same time, so I’m struggling with that. I’m starting to feel a bit like I do in a monogamous relationship when my partner’s disappointed that I’m not able to give them enough of my time that they feel valued. And that’s stressful.

Maybe some day I fall in love. Maybe I find a deeply-fulfilling long-term monogamous relationship with someone. Or maybe it’s more monogamish; open relationships don’t scare me the way they once did, so long as I’m confident in the core relationship. In the absence of deep-big-love, it’s nice to connect to people in relationships. I’ve connected to some amazing friends in this way, and sometimes I have even found more emotional connection than I expected.

Friends-love plus chemistry is still pretty rare and amazing, in my experience, so I’m always grateful when I experience that.

Transparency and Explorations

If I reflect back on my previous relationships, there’s no less emotional commitment from me in an open relationship than when I was in monogamous relationships. The difference for me now is, things are more transparently on the table, as it were. I don’t have to pretend that I’m only ever going to be interested in that one person romantically Until The End of Time. And this way, I can be more transparent about when I need to take time to focus on other things, whether that’s a date with another lover, or if I have a book I need to finish editing.

Exploring open relationships has one additional benefit. Perhaps TMI, but I write romance about threesomes, and I have interest in that and a few other sexually adventurous things. Being in open relationships means that I have the option to try out a few of the fantasies on my bucket list. Maybe (in reality) they are as awkward as people tell me, but, I’ve talked to other friends who’ve had fun with them, so who knows. All I can say is that most people living in the assumption of monogamy don’t get to even consider doing anything like this, and tend to think of themselves as deviants for even wanting anything outside of their one relationship.

In fact–I see this a lot when I’m promoting my romance novels. I’ve written some menage-a-trois werewolf romance novels, and that genre’s pretty popular, as well as books with foursomes, fivesomes, and moresomes, usually featuring one female character and her multiple male mates. Usually it’s in the “shifter” genre (werewolves, wereleopards, etc.)  of paranormal romance, but there are other romance novels where it pops up. Apparently this is a huge fantasy that many women have, but never act on, because it’s so “bad” and shameful they’d never consider doing it. 

The male fantasy of being with two (or more) women is sort of a staple of porn, but women who have a similar fantasy are thought of as sluts, whores, and deviants.

Being a sex positive person, I don’t see any of these things as inherently bad, but there’s such a cultural stigma about anything that isn’t heterosexual/monogamous, or that isn’t geared toward the male gaze and heterosexual male desires, that most people never explore any of that.

Conquering Lonely

Living alone for the past years has helped me to get past some of my fear of loneliness. And, though not all of my experiences of dating in the past years have gone well, they’ve at least helped me to consistently disprove that old tape that says, “I’ll never find anyone to connect with, never find anyone that gets me.” I’ve found a number of people who get me, and I’ll meet others in the future who get me.

The old tape still plays in my head, and what I know of human psychology says that I’ll always deal with that. But I have a nice little workaround for it now, because I can pretty easily say, “You’re wrong. That’s not the truth.”

What the past years have certainly taught me is that there are a lot of different ways to do relationships. Monogamy doesn’t have to be the default, but monogamy isn’t also some failing on my part for not being open-minded. Just as people have chemistry (or they don’t) people also have preferences. I’m not truly polyamorous–loving multiple people–but nor am I into totally casual sex either. In general, I experience that polyamorous folks tend to focus more on love relationships, and swingers tend to focus more on sex, particularly sex that centers on a heterosexual couple’s relationship. However, there’s a huge amount of crossover and a spectrum between them.

I’m not entirely sure what to call myself or where I’m at. I’m in open relationships at the moment, and I’m open to monogamy with the right person. What’s more important to me these days than defining what types of relationships I’m in are my boundaries around my work. That’s where my priority is. I think, as I’ve written this, I’ve ended up with more questions than answers, but that’s no surprise for me.

Future writing:

I’ll be working up some future articles about sex, sexuality, and relationships. What would you like to read about?

A few topics rattling in my head are the difficulties of being in open relationships, specifically, the huge social stigma attached to them. And also, some of the social trends I’ve encountered in the differences between folks who identify as polyamorous, the folks who identify as swingers, and the crossover space between those. There’s also the whole sex positive vs. sex pressuring, the whole cultural identity around “We’re such deviants, we’re so counterculture, we’re bad and naughty,” and a few other things I see out there that impact and interweave with our cultural ideas (and problems around) sex. (Me, think too much about this stuff? Naw.)

Exploring Open Relationships: Part Two

When I was first exploring more casual relationships, this was also the first time that I was seeing/dating men in the Pagan community. I immediately ran into the social complexities of that. I had just finished the leadership program at Diana’s Grove, and I was realizing how very, very quickly a bad breakup could lead to disharmony. I think I managed to keep on good terms with most of those guys, but I recognized that the whole prospect was fraught with peril.

*** Note: This series of articles goes into me exploring what relationships mean to me, and what I want out of relationship. As I tend to, I write this from a pretty open/vulnerable place, but it might be TMI for some folks. Thus, you’ve been warned. ***

Heck, I realized there was even a challenge just by connecting to Pagans on an online dating site. Imagine; I’ve been talking to a Pagan guy for a while via an online dating site, and then I realize I’m not interested in him romantically…and then I run into him at a local Pagan event. That leads to awkwardness at the very least, if not worse. If we’re both just attendees that’s one thing, but when I was in the position of running events and leading workshops and rituals, the potential for complicated group dynamics increased. Or, if it turned out that they were the leader of a Pagan group I was thinking of working with.

Hurt feelings over romantic rejection have fueled more than a few Pagan conflicts. And, on the flip side, I was becoming more concerned that my position as a leader/teacher/ritualist would cause a power dynamic. How could I know whether someone was genuinely interested, or whether they were just attracted to the “glamour” as it were? You can see where this all starts to get complicated, and that’s before any actual dates/relationship have happened.

I faced this scenario with a number of the men I briefly became lovers with: We went out, maybe had sex, and I realized that we weren’t really compatible. In some cases I liked them as friends, but not romantically, but didn’t want to hurt their feelings…and yet, I certainly couldn’t keep having sex with them just to not hurt their feelings. And in our society, we are trained to take it as a personal affront when someone “friendzones” us. I mean, I know I’ve struggled to have better boundaries around the fact that some men just aren’t going to be attracted to me, and that’s not a judgment against me, it doesn’t mean I’m bad or not attractive, it’s just that people have preferences. Chemistry is a factor. You can’t “make” someone be attracted.

So frequently, I wish I could simply say, “I’m just not that attracted to you,” or, “The way you have sex isn’t really compatible with what I need,” or whatever the issue happens to be, and have that be ok.

During this time period, I also hooked up with a guy who turned out to be not polyamorous, but a cheater. He had told me he was poly before we got together. I discovered that he was, in fact, a cheater while he was driving 6 hours to Chicago. He was going to be in town for something and we decided to get together again so he was going to stay at my place. While he was on the road, his girlfriend instant messaged me in a panic; she’d logged onto his computer and found my information. I talked to her for about 5 hours and discovered that he was a chronic cheater. When he arrived, I told him he could sleep on the couch.

Here’s the rub. He and I had met on an online dating site but we’d first met in person after he attended a Pagan event I helped to organize. And his girlfriend identified as Pagan as well. She was absolutely enraged and in tears and she said, “I’ve heard so much good about this Diana’s Grove place, I’ve always wanted to go, but to find out that one of their leaders would cheat like this, I never want to go there ever.” I sat listening to her pain for hours, and it took that long for her to understand that I was in the dark on this. That I had thought he was polyamorous because that’s what he told me.

Hopefully you can see the impact of one little thing; one date, one time having sex, one relationship, can have huge ripple effects. You make a mistake, or someone takes offense at something, and people get hurt.

After that span of months I was really unsure what to do about relationships. And I was really longing for the simplicity and stability of a monogamous relationship again. Dating is a lot of work for an introvert! It takes time to vet people, to get to know them, to meet them, to discover if there’s chemistry…and for me, having sex for the first time is fraught with peril; without diving into TMI land, I have a few issues that make sex with someone for the first time a little difficult. And, because I know that, I have some anxiety around it, which makes that even worse.

When I’m considering having sex with someone, I first engage in a lot of transparent communication about what works for me, and what doesn’t. I can’t even tell you how many men have told me, “It’s all good, we’ll do whatever you need,” or “Yeah, that sounds hot, that’s cool,” and then in actual practice, they were quite disgruntled to do anything different from their usual.

I will say that this particular time period in my life did at least give me the skills to get better at weeding people out based on their behavior either via email, instant messenger, or phone chats. “Baby, you’ve never been with me before” is a big old red flag that is now almost a sure-fire way to get me to say “No, I won’t go out with you. Bye.”

Thus, when I met Mark, it was all too easy for me to fall into a relationship with him. He was a motivated community organizer that shared a fair percentage of my geekdom. I did resist it at first, and we talked a lot about the impacts of dating within the community, particularly at the leadership level. He seemed reasonable and grounded, at the time, so I fell for that. Of course, what I didn’t realize at the time is that he was cheating on his wife with me; he’d said their relationship was over. I’m upset that I’ve been fooled by that more than once.

I’ll fast forward through most of that, but I’ll touch on this point: When he cheated on me for the first time a year after we started dating, it was with a woman that I actually liked rather a lot. She had been polyamorous for a long time, and she had been shocked when she found out that he was cheating and that he wasn’t actually in a poly relationship. I invited her over to confront Mark, and the three of us talked things through like adults. I’m sad that I didn’t get the chance to know her better. In a different time, in a different place, I’d have been happy to be her “metamor.” That’s a word I learned that night–the lover of your lover.

I think that might have been the first time I ever seriously thought that I could have a friendship connection with someone that my partner was dating. I’d always thought that, in that scenario, I’d automatically feel antagonistic, and I didn’t. (Because it’s tangentially of interest, fastforwarding in time again, I’ve become friends with a number of the women Mark’s been in relationships with, whether women he cheated on me with, or women he dated after me.)

Mark agreed to go to therapy, and I began considering the notion of what it would look like to be in an open relationship. I was clear that I wasn’t ok with opening up our relationship until he could get a hand on his compulsive cheating, but I also recognized that I just didn’t have enough libido to keep up with him.

And of course–those of you who have been through this particular excruciating phase of a post-cheating relationship will probably resonate a lot with this. The problem with trying to rebuild after cheating is that sex can rebuild intimacy…but I was dealing with depression and I had almost no libido at all. I couldn’t keep up with him before the cheating, and after, I had even less desire for sex.

If you’ve read my Pagans and Predators series, you’ve read a fair amount about the latter stages of my relationship with Mark. More cheating, more betrayal. The thing was, I’d have been mostly ok with him dating other women if I genuinely thought that he’d still come home to me, but I could never trust that.

The other concern I had came from my own experience dating within the Pagan community, and watching other Poly people navigating that. I think there’s a math algorithm there–the more Pagans you date, the more likely you are to run into a community-destroying breakup catastrophe.

I’ve also found that Polyamory/Swinging/open relationships in general are also a compounded risk because if the relationship between two people doesn’t go well (or end well), each person’s other partner or partners sometimes get involved in the fallout.

I trusted my judgment, but I didn’t trust Mark’s. And, that’s for pretty obvious reasons at this point.

More than that, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. When I was married and we opened up our relationship, I didn’t ever date anyone. When I’m already in a relationship, I just don’t have the desire to go out and date people; meeting new people is tiring and exhausting. I’m an introvert, not an extrovert. Extroverts tend to thrive on meeting new people, they love the newness of it. For me, that’s work. And even if I end up liking that person, it’s still work. Because then the relationship has to be maintained.

And, let me be totally honest here: One of the biggest complaints I’ve faced in my long-term relationships is that I don’t pay enough emotional attention to my partner.

I face this weird paradox; men fall for me and they are in love with my passion and my creativity. They love my artwork, my writing, my event planning; they love the spark and fire and what I throw into that work. And they want me to turn that love and focus onto them.

I’ll be honest again: I’ve never felt that way for anyone I’ve been with.

I’ve had feelings of deep friendship with men I’ve been with, deep friendship love. But not hot, fiery, “I’m in love with you” oxytocin-rush kind of feelings. I’ve come close a few times, I’ve started to have some feelings with specific people, but I’ve never been in love with anyone I’ve been with.

In the past I’ve joked that I can’t really be polyamorous because I just don’t have time for more people. “My work is my primary relationship,” I’ve said. And in the past years, that really has become true in so many ways. And yet, I also don’t seem to be “present” enough when I’m in a monogamous relationship for my partner to be satisfied with the time I can give them. This has left me with a lot of confusion about what to do about relationships.

Part 3 coming tomorrow!

Exploring Open Relationships: Part Two

When I was first exploring more casual relationships, this was also the first time that I was seeing/dating men in the Pagan community. I immediately ran into the social complexities of that. I had just finished the leadership program at Diana’s Grove, and I was realizing how very, very quickly a bad breakup could lead to disharmony. I think I managed to keep on good terms with most of those guys, but I recognized that the whole prospect was fraught with peril.

*** Note: This series of articles goes into me exploring what relationships mean to me, and what I want out of relationship. As I tend to, I write this from a pretty open/vulnerable place, but it might be TMI for some folks. Thus, you’ve been warned. ***

Heck, I realized there was even a challenge just by connecting to Pagans on an online dating site. Imagine; I’ve been talking to a Pagan guy for a while via an online dating site, and then I realize I’m not interested in him romantically…and then I run into him at a local Pagan event. That leads to awkwardness at the very least, if not worse. If we’re both just attendees that’s one thing, but when I was in the position of running events and leading workshops and rituals, the potential for complicated group dynamics increased. Or, if it turned out that they were the leader of a Pagan group I was thinking of working with.

Hurt feelings over romantic rejection have fueled more than a few Pagan conflicts. And, on the flip side, I was becoming more concerned that my position as a leader/teacher/ritualist would cause a power dynamic. How could I know whether someone was genuinely interested, or whether they were just attracted to the “glamour” as it were? You can see where this all starts to get complicated, and that’s before any actual dates/relationship have happened.

I faced this scenario with a number of the men I briefly became lovers with: We went out, maybe had sex, and I realized that we weren’t really compatible. In some cases I liked them as friends, but not romantically, but didn’t want to hurt their feelings…and yet, I certainly couldn’t keep having sex with them just to not hurt their feelings. And in our society, we are trained to take it as a personal affront when someone “friendzones” us. I mean, I know I’ve struggled to have better boundaries around the fact that some men just aren’t going to be attracted to me, and that’s not a judgment against me, it doesn’t mean I’m bad or not attractive, it’s just that people have preferences. Chemistry is a factor. You can’t “make” someone be attracted.

So frequently, I wish I could simply say, “I’m just not that attracted to you,” or, “The way you have sex isn’t really compatible with what I need,” or whatever the issue happens to be, and have that be ok.

During this time period, I also hooked up with a guy who turned out to be not polyamorous, but a cheater. He had told me he was poly before we got together. I discovered that he was, in fact, a cheater while he was driving 6 hours to Chicago. He was going to be in town for something and we decided to get together again so he was going to stay at my place. While he was on the road, his girlfriend instant messaged me in a panic; she’d logged onto his computer and found my information. I talked to her for about 5 hours and discovered that he was a chronic cheater. When he arrived, I told him he could sleep on the couch.

Here’s the rub. He and I had met on an online dating site but we’d first met in person after he attended a Pagan event I helped to organize. And his girlfriend identified as Pagan as well. She was absolutely enraged and in tears and she said, “I’ve heard so much good about this Diana’s Grove place, I’ve always wanted to go, but to find out that one of their leaders would cheat like this, I never want to go there ever.” I sat listening to her pain for hours, and it took that long for her to understand that I was in the dark on this. That I had thought he was polyamorous because that’s what he told me.

Hopefully you can see the impact of one little thing; one date, one time having sex, one relationship, can have huge ripple effects. You make a mistake, or someone takes offense at something, and people get hurt.

After that span of months I was really unsure what to do about relationships. And I was really longing for the simplicity and stability of a monogamous relationship again. Dating is a lot of work for an introvert! It takes time to vet people, to get to know them, to meet them, to discover if there’s chemistry…and for me, having sex for the first time is fraught with peril; without diving into TMI land, I have a few issues that make sex with someone for the first time a little difficult. And, because I know that, I have some anxiety around it, which makes that even worse.

When I’m considering having sex with someone, I first engage in a lot of transparent communication about what works for me, and what doesn’t. I can’t even tell you how many men have told me, “It’s all good, we’ll do whatever you need,” or “Yeah, that sounds hot, that’s cool,” and then in actual practice, they were quite disgruntled to do anything different from their usual.

I will say that this particular time period in my life did at least give me the skills to get better at weeding people out based on their behavior either via email, instant messenger, or phone chats. “Baby, you’ve never been with me before” is a big old red flag that is now almost a sure-fire way to get me to say “No, I won’t go out with you. Bye.”

Thus, when I met Mark, it was all too easy for me to fall into a relationship with him. He was a motivated community organizer that shared a fair percentage of my geekdom. I did resist it at first, and we talked a lot about the impacts of dating within the community, particularly at the leadership level. He seemed reasonable and grounded, at the time, so I fell for that. Of course, what I didn’t realize at the time is that he was cheating on his wife with me; he’d said their relationship was over. I’m upset that I’ve been fooled by that more than once.

I’ll fast forward through most of that, but I’ll touch on this point: When he cheated on me for the first time a year after we started dating, it was with a woman that I actually liked rather a lot. She had been polyamorous for a long time, and she had been shocked when she found out that he was cheating and that he wasn’t actually in a poly relationship. I invited her over to confront Mark, and the three of us talked things through like adults. I’m sad that I didn’t get the chance to know her better. In a different time, in a different place, I’d have been happy to be her “metamor.” That’s a word I learned that night–the lover of your lover.

I think that might have been the first time I ever seriously thought that I could have a friendship connection with someone that my partner was dating. I’d always thought that, in that scenario, I’d automatically feel antagonistic, and I didn’t. (Because it’s tangentially of interest, fastforwarding in time again, I’ve become friends with a number of the women Mark’s been in relationships with, whether women he cheated on me with, or women he dated after me.)

Mark agreed to go to therapy, and I began considering the notion of what it would look like to be in an open relationship. I was clear that I wasn’t ok with opening up our relationship until he could get a hand on his compulsive cheating, but I also recognized that I just didn’t have enough libido to keep up with him.

And of course–those of you who have been through this particular excruciating phase of a post-cheating relationship will probably resonate a lot with this. The problem with trying to rebuild after cheating is that sex can rebuild intimacy…but I was dealing with depression and I had almost no libido at all. I couldn’t keep up with him before the cheating, and after, I had even less desire for sex.

If you’ve read my Pagans and Predators series, you’ve read a fair amount about the latter stages of my relationship with Mark. More cheating, more betrayal. The thing was, I’d have been mostly ok with him dating other women if I genuinely thought that he’d still come home to me, but I could never trust that.

The other concern I had came from my own experience dating within the Pagan community, and watching other Poly people navigating that. I think there’s a math algorithm there–the more Pagans you date, the more likely you are to run into a community-destroying breakup catastrophe.

I’ve also found that Polyamory/Swinging/open relationships in general are also a compounded risk because if the relationship between two people doesn’t go well (or end well), each person’s other partner or partners sometimes get involved in the fallout.

I trusted my judgment, but I didn’t trust Mark’s. And, that’s for pretty obvious reasons at this point.

More than that, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. When I was married and we opened up our relationship, I didn’t ever date anyone. When I’m already in a relationship, I just don’t have the desire to go out and date people; meeting new people is tiring and exhausting. I’m an introvert, not an extrovert. Extroverts tend to thrive on meeting new people, they love the newness of it. For me, that’s work. And even if I end up liking that person, it’s still work. Because then the relationship has to be maintained.

And, let me be totally honest here: One of the biggest complaints I’ve faced in my long-term relationships is that I don’t pay enough emotional attention to my partner.

I face this weird paradox; men fall for me and they are in love with my passion and my creativity. They love my artwork, my writing, my event planning; they love the spark and fire and what I throw into that work. And they want me to turn that love and focus onto them.

I’ll be honest again: I’ve never felt that way for anyone I’ve been with.

I’ve had feelings of deep friendship with men I’ve been with, deep friendship love. But not hot, fiery, “I’m in love with you” oxytocin-rush kind of feelings. I’ve come close a few times, I’ve started to have some feelings with specific people, but I’ve never been in love with anyone I’ve been with.

In the past I’ve joked that I can’t really be polyamorous because I just don’t have time for more people. “My work is my primary relationship,” I’ve said. And in the past years, that really has become true in so many ways. And yet, I also don’t seem to be “present” enough when I’m in a monogamous relationship for my partner to be satisfied with the time I can give them. This has left me with a lot of confusion about what to do about relationships.

Part 3 coming tomorrow!

Exploring Open Relationships: Part One

I’ve always considered myself monogamous, even when I’ve been in open relationships in the past. All I ever really wanted, growing up, was to find my soulmate and be with him forever. For a while in my late-teens/early twenties, I was anti-marriage, but then, I was sort of finding my footing as a feminist and I was looking at marriage solely as an institution of the patriarchy. I suppose that didn’t really last long as I got married in my early twenties; the call to settle down with one person was the stronger call.

*** Note: This series of articles goes into me exploring what relationships mean to me, and what I want out of relationship. As I tend to, I write this from a pretty open/vulnerable place, but it might be a bit TMI for some folks on the inner workings of my experience of romantic relationships. Thus, you’ve been warned. ***

Ever since my (fairly catastrophic) relationship with my ex, Mark, I’ve pretty much been in open relationships. As I’m committed to the process of personal growth and of “know thyself,” I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts on this, since it’s definitely changed who I am and who I think I am as a person.

In the past, what I ended up doing was dating someone that I sort of liked but wasn’t in love with, and then I got comfortable with them and we sort of went monogamous by default. And, I wasn’t totally happy, I wasn’t in love, but it was nice to not be alone. In those relationships I know that I’ve thought, “I’m not in love, but I like them a lot. Maybe I’ll love them more in time. Maybe my attraction will grow.” It’s rare for me to find someone I click with to begin with (and rarer still for me to actually be physically attracted to someone) so I frequently experience the fear of relationship scarcity. Scarcity/Loneliness go hand in hand for me. “I’ll never find anyone I like, I’ll never find anyone that gets me” is one of the tapes that my brain likes to put on repeat whenever I’m not in a relationship.

So I’ve stuck with a few relationships long past their expiration date in part because of that fear of loneliness. And that’s not fair to me, or to my partners.

Since my really bad breakup at the end of 2011, I’ve resolved that I’m not going to get into a monogamous relationship with someone unless I’m falling in love, or at least, the realistic potential for that. For the past years:

1. I’ve been living in a very conservative area of Wisconsin, and
2. Most men aren’t really satisfied with the minimal amount of time I can commit to dating,

That’s left me primarily dating men who are in open relationships (either married or in a primary relationship). I have an online dating profile, and I’d say that 90% of the messages I get (that are from actual people with compatible interests) are from men in open relationships.

This has worked out well for me in many ways. My focus is on my writing and artwork, and I sometimes vanish for days at a time when working on a project. I check my calendar sometimes and realize that weeks have gone by since I’ve seen another human being in the flesh. For that matter, I’m sometimes on the road traveling and teaching for days or weeks at a time. When I’m with someone who’s already in a relationship, they already have a daily routine, they don’t have a huge amount of time to spend with me. Their family and primary relationship(s) are their priority.

I might see them once or twice a month, and that’s about all the social time I can spare if I’m going to keep my focus on my work. Men who are looking for more from me are going to get frustrated, so these days I work hard to communicate up front what I’m able to offer to a relationship.

Only once in the past 4 years have I dated anyone where I considered it a monogamous relationship. We met online, we really clicked, we spent the better part of a week together, and then he started to “ghost” on me. It was long distance, and I went to see him about a month later, and then he withdrew even further. After multiple queries on my part for more communication, he broke things off. I was just starting to have some feelings for him. I think he had an expectation of who I was from when we met online, and I somehow didn’t fulfill that expectation…and in retrospect, he and I wouldn’t have worked out anyways. I’m glad I gave things a shot with him, but that experience was rough for me because it just reinforced my “I’ll never find anyone who gets me” tape.

When I got married in my early twenties, I thought, “I’ll be in this relationship for the rest of my life.” I wasn’t in love, but my husband and I got along well. I thought, “I suppose this is as good as it gets.”

I always feel a bit awkward writing or speaking about this because there are a number of men in my life that I’m still friends with, and I don’t want to hurt their feelings. It’s not like they, themselves, were “bad,” this is more of a case of being incompatible, or just lack of chemistry. We humans take offense to, or hear as critique, things connected to how our partners felt about us in relationships. It’s not any man’s fault that I didn’t fall in love with them any more than it’s any man’s fault that they aren’t attracted to me; nor is it my fault I’m not attracted. Chemistry is what it is. So, as you read my perspective on these relationships, understand that I’m talking about my own processes, thoughts, and feelings (or lack thereof). 

I met my ex husband when I had just turned twenty, and I had just been with my first boyfriend a few months before that. I wasn’t in love with him either, but he was a nice guy and a good friend. I’d fallen in love before that, but that guy wasn’t interested in me that way, and (I’ll spare you the angst) I went into a depression spiral and gave up on true love. In hindsight, I understand that it’s not his fault he didn’t love me; like I said, chemistry is what it is. 

It took me most of my twenties to deal with my body image issues, so I was still fairly well sucked into the whole “Nobody wants to be with the fat chick with acne.” So when my husband fell for me, I went with the flow. I didn’t believe in true love and soulmates any longer, and I suppose I thought some version of, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” In fact, I recall some people in my life telling me this when I expressed that I wasn’t sure about getting married to him. “Don’t lose this guy, he’s good for you,” people told me. What I think they meant was, “You’re fat and not that attractive, and you found a guy that likes you, don’t screw this up and end up a spinster.

That fear of loneliness is a real kicker.

They meant well, I know they did, but I got married when I probably shouldn’t have. He wanted me to be in love with him, and I wasn’t. I liked him. We were fantastic roommates. We were both fiction writers and Ren Faire/Fantasy nerds, so that worked out. Sex was ok at first. But, I had no passion for him.

We got married when I was 23, and hindsight being 20/20…if I knew then what I know now, I’d have saved us both some pain and just stayed friends with him instead of caving to his desire to get married.

Opening Our Marriage

How he and I came to be in an open relationship is that he finally came out to me about some particular fetishes he was interested in. I had always known he had some fetishes and kinks I didn’t share; we’d tried out a little BDSM and role play early on, but most of that didn’t really work for me. I’m too kinky for your totally vanilla person, and I’m waaaay too vanilla for anyone heavily into fetish.

When my husband finally admitted to needing some heavy-duty fetish stuff, this was way out of my league. We opened up our relationship so that he could go explore that.

It was easy for me to open up our relationship. I wasn’t in love with him, so I wasn’t really jealous. That may sound harsh or strange, but when I look back at my younger self that sums it up. I loved him as a friend and I wanted him to be happy, but him spending time with other people didn’t really emotionally impact me much.

I didn’t take advantage of our open relationship, though. At the time, I was something around 330 or so pounds; that’s the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life, and my husband was far heavier than me. And whether it was his weight, or the fact that he was finally exploring his sexual interests, sex stopped working for us. But I was so overweight (and introverted, and busy) that I didn’t really feel comfortable trying to date anyone. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have even known how, I’d never really dated anyone to begin with.

In my late twenties, I did finally develop a crush on someone I met at a Pagan gathering. I knew that I’d never have a long-term relationship with that person, but I was interested in exploring things with him, and that’s the first time I ever actively pursued anyone.

I’ll fast forward through the massive life changes here–I broke up with my husband. The combination of actually having feelings for someone new and realizing that I was even capable of feeling that kind of passion and attraction, as well as discovering what I really wanted to be doing with my life (building Pagan community) as well as everything else that had built up over the years…I finally was in the headspace where I could end things. At the time my husband angry but later he thanked me. And I’m truly glad he’s happy; last I talked to him he had a boyfriend who was into the same fetishes and they were moving in together.

As for the guy I had a crush on–I tried being one of his polyamorous romantic interests, but that didn’t really work out either. He and I ended up as friends, though I had to nurse a broken heart to get to that place.

I then ended up in another relationship after someone introduced me to the Wonderful World of Online Dating. I’d intended to keep that as an open relationship so that I didn’t get stuck in the trap I had been in with my marriage, but he didn’t want to be in an open relationship so I (once again) caved. And that relationship dissolved after less than two years. I freely admit that I stayed in that relationship as long as I did because it was the first time I had ever had sex with someone where things were really good.

When that relationship ended, I went through a period of time I refer to as “borking my way through the Zodiac.” I didn’t make it all the way around the wheel, but I did instead discover a few things. One is that totally casual sex does not work for me. I can do friends with benefits, with a focus on the friends part. I’m too much of a sapiosexual. I need to know someone, connect with them. I had this theory that if I could just meet my sexual needs and not need to deal with the complexities of relationships, I’d be better off.

I disproved this theory for myself fairly quickly.

Part 2 will be posted soon!

Exploring Open Relationships: Part One

I’ve always considered myself monogamous, even when I’ve been in open relationships in the past. All I ever really wanted, growing up, was to find my soulmate and be with him forever. For a while in my late-teens/early twenties, I was anti-marriage, but then, I was sort of finding my footing as a feminist and I was looking at marriage solely as an institution of the patriarchy. I suppose that didn’t really last long as I got married in my early twenties; the call to settle down with one person was the stronger call.

*** Note: This series of articles goes into me exploring what relationships mean to me, and what I want out of relationship. As I tend to, I write this from a pretty open/vulnerable place, but it might be a bit TMI for some folks on the inner workings of my experience of romantic relationships. Thus, you’ve been warned. ***

Ever since my (fairly catastrophic) relationship with my ex, Mark, I’ve pretty much been in open relationships. As I’m committed to the process of personal growth and of “know thyself,” I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts on this, since it’s definitely changed who I am and who I think I am as a person.

In the past, what I ended up doing was dating someone that I sort of liked but wasn’t in love with, and then I got comfortable with them and we sort of went monogamous by default. And, I wasn’t totally happy, I wasn’t in love, but it was nice to not be alone. In those relationships I know that I’ve thought, “I’m not in love, but I like them a lot. Maybe I’ll love them more in time. Maybe my attraction will grow.” It’s rare for me to find someone I click with to begin with (and rarer still for me to actually be physically attracted to someone) so I frequently experience the fear of relationship scarcity. Scarcity/Loneliness go hand in hand for me. “I’ll never find anyone I like, I’ll never find anyone that gets me” is one of the tapes that my brain likes to put on repeat whenever I’m not in a relationship.

So I’ve stuck with a few relationships long past their expiration date in part because of that fear of loneliness. And that’s not fair to me, or to my partners.

Since my really bad breakup at the end of 2011, I’ve resolved that I’m not going to get into a monogamous relationship with someone unless I’m falling in love, or at least, the realistic potential for that. For the past years:

1. I’ve been living in a very conservative area of Wisconsin, and
2. Most men aren’t really satisfied with the minimal amount of time I can commit to dating,

That’s left me primarily dating men who are in open relationships (either married or in a primary relationship). I have an online dating profile, and I’d say that 90% of the messages I get (that are from actual people with compatible interests) are from men in open relationships.

This has worked out well for me in many ways. My focus is on my writing and artwork, and I sometimes vanish for days at a time when working on a project. I check my calendar sometimes and realize that weeks have gone by since I’ve seen another human being in the flesh. For that matter, I’m sometimes on the road traveling and teaching for days or weeks at a time. When I’m with someone who’s already in a relationship, they already have a daily routine, they don’t have a huge amount of time to spend with me. Their family and primary relationship(s) are their priority.

I might see them once or twice a month, and that’s about all the social time I can spare if I’m going to keep my focus on my work. Men who are looking for more from me are going to get frustrated, so these days I work hard to communicate up front what I’m able to offer to a relationship.

Only once in the past 4 years have I dated anyone where I considered it a monogamous relationship. We met online, we really clicked, we spent the better part of a week together, and then he started to “ghost” on me. It was long distance, and I went to see him about a month later, and then he withdrew even further. After multiple queries on my part for more communication, he broke things off. I was just starting to have some feelings for him. I think he had an expectation of who I was from when we met online, and I somehow didn’t fulfill that expectation…and in retrospect, he and I wouldn’t have worked out anyways. I’m glad I gave things a shot with him, but that experience was rough for me because it just reinforced my “I’ll never find anyone who gets me” tape.

When I got married in my early twenties, I thought, “I’ll be in this relationship for the rest of my life.” I wasn’t in love, but my husband and I got along well. I thought, “I suppose this is as good as it gets.”

I always feel a bit awkward writing or speaking about this because there are a number of men in my life that I’m still friends with, and I don’t want to hurt their feelings. It’s not like they, themselves, were “bad,” this is more of a case of being incompatible, or just lack of chemistry. We humans take offense to, or hear as critique, things connected to how our partners felt about us in relationships. It’s not any man’s fault that I didn’t fall in love with them any more than it’s any man’s fault that they aren’t attracted to me; nor is it my fault I’m not attracted. Chemistry is what it is. So, as you read my perspective on these relationships, understand that I’m talking about my own processes, thoughts, and feelings (or lack thereof). 

I met my ex husband when I had just turned twenty, and I had just been with my first boyfriend a few months before that. I wasn’t in love with him either, but he was a nice guy and a good friend. I’d fallen in love before that, but that guy wasn’t interested in me that way, and (I’ll spare you the angst) I went into a depression spiral and gave up on true love. In hindsight, I understand that it’s not his fault he didn’t love me; like I said, chemistry is what it is. 

It took me most of my twenties to deal with my body image issues, so I was still fairly well sucked into the whole “Nobody wants to be with the fat chick with acne.” So when my husband fell for me, I went with the flow. I didn’t believe in true love and soulmates any longer, and I suppose I thought some version of, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” In fact, I recall some people in my life telling me this when I expressed that I wasn’t sure about getting married to him. “Don’t lose this guy, he’s good for you,” people told me. What I think they meant was, “You’re fat and not that attractive, and you found a guy that likes you, don’t screw this up and end up a spinster.

That fear of loneliness is a real kicker.

They meant well, I know they did, but I got married when I probably shouldn’t have. He wanted me to be in love with him, and I wasn’t. I liked him. We were fantastic roommates. We were both fiction writers and Ren Faire/Fantasy nerds, so that worked out. Sex was ok at first. But, I had no passion for him.

We got married when I was 23, and hindsight being 20/20…if I knew then what I know now, I’d have saved us both some pain and just stayed friends with him instead of caving to his desire to get married.

Opening Our Marriage

How he and I came to be in an open relationship is that he finally came out to me about some particular fetishes he was interested in. I had always known he had some fetishes and kinks I didn’t share; we’d tried out a little BDSM and role play early on, but most of that didn’t really work for me. I’m too kinky for your totally vanilla person, and I’m waaaay too vanilla for anyone heavily into fetish.

When my husband finally admitted to needing some heavy-duty fetish stuff, this was way out of my league. We opened up our relationship so that he could go explore that.

It was easy for me to open up our relationship. I wasn’t in love with him, so I wasn’t really jealous. That may sound harsh or strange, but when I look back at my younger self that sums it up. I loved him as a friend and I wanted him to be happy, but him spending time with other people didn’t really emotionally impact me much.

I didn’t take advantage of our open relationship, though. At the time, I was something around 330 or so pounds; that’s the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life, and my husband was far heavier than me. And whether it was his weight, or the fact that he was finally exploring his sexual interests, sex stopped working for us. But I was so overweight (and introverted, and busy) that I didn’t really feel comfortable trying to date anyone. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have even known how, I’d never really dated anyone to begin with.

In my late twenties, I did finally develop a crush on someone I met at a Pagan gathering. I knew that I’d never have a long-term relationship with that person, but I was interested in exploring things with him, and that’s the first time I ever actively pursued anyone.

I’ll fast forward through the massive life changes here–I broke up with my husband. The combination of actually having feelings for someone new and realizing that I was even capable of feeling that kind of passion and attraction, as well as discovering what I really wanted to be doing with my life (building Pagan community) as well as everything else that had built up over the years…I finally was in the headspace where I could end things. At the time my husband angry but later he thanked me. And I’m truly glad he’s happy; last I talked to him he had a boyfriend who was into the same fetishes and they were moving in together.

As for the guy I had a crush on–I tried being one of his polyamorous romantic interests, but that didn’t really work out either. He and I ended up as friends, though I had to nurse a broken heart to get to that place.

I then ended up in another relationship after someone introduced me to the Wonderful World of Online Dating. I’d intended to keep that as an open relationship so that I didn’t get stuck in the trap I had been in with my marriage, but he didn’t want to be in an open relationship so I (once again) caved. And that relationship dissolved after less than two years. I freely admit that I stayed in that relationship as long as I did because it was the first time I had ever had sex with someone where things were really good.

When that relationship ended, I went through a period of time I refer to as “borking my way through the Zodiac.” I didn’t make it all the way around the wheel, but I did instead discover a few things. One is that totally casual sex does not work for me. I can do friends with benefits, with a focus on the friends part. I’m too much of a sapiosexual. I need to know someone, connect with them. I had this theory that if I could just meet my sexual needs and not need to deal with the complexities of relationships, I’d be better off.

I disproved this theory for myself fairly quickly.

Part 2 will be posted soon!