Building a non-monogamous relationship

Curious Mermaid
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read

There are lots of different journeys that you can take into a non-monogamous relationship, but this is a story about mine.

When I met him, Jack was divorced, and had come on a similar journey as I had been. Like me (see last post), his journey took him away from monogamy and into a sort of exciting but scary and slightly lonely single person free-for-all.

Jack had had bad experiences of monogamy, so he didn’t want to be tied down. He, like me, considered himself kinky and experimental and wasn’t inclined to settle for a relationships on anything less than his terms.

We told each other when we started chatting on an online dating site that we weren’t looking for anything serious.

We agreed that monogamy wasn’t what either of us wanted, and that both of us were pretty much fine on our own. We just wanted to have some fun. I wanted to explore my submissive side. He wanted to explore his Dom side. Cool, that works!

We went on a lunch date first.

I liked him, a lot. (He was just pleased to find out I was real- he’d thought I was a catfish).

After that, we texted like mad, all day, every day. Enough to fill a book. (That’s not an expression: I know this because, as a romantic gift, Jack actually printed out our early text messages and stuck them in a book; there were so many, they didn’t actually fit and the book wouldn’t shut).

Then a second date, where we stayed out for hours, talking and laughing and drinking cocktails.

We finally kissed when I drunkenly launched myself at him in the cocktail bar. It wasn’t classy, but it was fun, and my God, was it sexy.

We seem to have started an open relationship

Around 3 months later, we moved in together. We barely discussed it. It just happened. The whole thing felt like 100% play, no work. It was easy.

Ironically enough, the thing that brought us together was the shared belief that relationships were better when each of you had space to be alone, and free. The thing that attracted me to him was that he didn’t want to be tied down. He didn’t need me. It was exactly the same for him.

So now, we didn’t want to live without the other one, but we couldn’t live without being ourselves, and it was clear this would somehow need to involve other people. Both of us are bisexual; plus he’s a switch (about 75% Dom/25% sub) while I’m no Domme- so it was clear we wouldn’t completely be able to meet each others’ needs.

Essentially, we didn’t have to ‘decide’ being open. It just happened because we both were inherently non-monogamous, and both totally in love. AKA: The easy way.

But then we did have to do some work.

We now had to figure out what kind of an open relationship we had found ourselves in. For those interested, there’s a bunch of books on non-monogamy you probably know about already; we started with Opening Up. (Some of the resources we found linked here.)

And then we talked. There’s a LOT of talking involved. That’s the only piece of advice I have for people wanting to open up their relationship: Get ready to talk about EVERYTHING, for, like, way longer than you would have expected.

We sat around talking.

In amongst our piles of books, spilling out of moving boxes.

In between me trying to understand how one person could possibly own so many different spices….

And him, trying to understand how I could possibly shed so much hair it would clog our vacuum cleaner…

And we talked, and talked.

What we want. What we need. Our fears, anxieties and baggage. What we thought we’d feel about watching the other one have sex with someone else. How we felt about kink. The logistics of sleeping with someone else in our shared house. About whether maybe one day whether we’d consider being in a triad and whether we liked the idea of group sex (spoiler: yes). Everything that could possibly one day cause anxiety, or jealousy, or worry, or sadness, we talked about to see if we could minimise the surprise of it. The first few months were like one big risk assessment meeting (but more fun, because it was interspersed with doggy-style on the couch).

Because we love talking, and sharing ideas with each other… even the talking part was mostly fun, though. Up late at night in our newly shared bed. Over breakfast, while his child played with toys in front of the TV. In car journeys to go see our parents. We talked for hours.

Then, months later, we started the ‘doing’ part.

And we’ve been finding our way around ever since.

Two people sitting at a table looking at maps
Two people sitting at a table looking at maps
Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

Originally published at The Curious Mermaid.

Curious Mermaid

Written by

Sexuality, kink and BDSM, mindfulness, spirituality, ethical non-monogamy, reading. I blog at http://thecuriousmermaid.com/

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