Polyamory: Our Journey Through Ethical Non-Monogamy

Content note: this post talks about sex.

Polyamory (from Greek πολύ poly, “many, several”, and Latin amor, “love”) is the practice of, or desire for, intimate relationships where individuals may have more than one partner, with the knowledge and consent of all partners.

Mel and I opened our marriage in 2012. Scratch that, let’s back up further. It was December of 2006, and Mel and I had just gotten married. We were young, bright eyed, religious, and naive. In others words we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. Oh, and we were still virgins too.

Protip: don’t save yourself for marriage, it’s a stupid stupid stupid idea.

When we got married, we had pretty traditional views on what marriage was supposed to be. We kinda assumed we would have kids relatively soon, we’d move to the suburbs, we’d be religious, and we’d be monogamous. It’s not that this is what we necessarily wanted, it’s just what we assumed would happen. This is what every other couple around us was doing after all. Anything different was so far removed from reality that our brains didn’t even register it as a possibility.

Fast forward a year or two. We went to a Post Secret event at our university and afterwards we got drinks at a local wine bar. As we sat there chatting, Mel asks me “so what is a secret you’ve never told me?” I hadn’t really thought about it before, and didn’t have a great answer, but I ended up telling a story related to my Grandmother’s death from cancer a few years prior. I then turned the question to Mel.

She tells me about a crush she had on someone else.

This wasn’t just any crush either, this was one of those intense crushes that consumes you, becomes a source of torture. She suffered through this crush for months, unable to confess her feelings to her crush, unable to tell me about it either. She and her crush had something of a falling out a month prior to her telling me this story, and it devastated her.

I had no idea.

What surprised me the most about this story was, rather than feeling jealous, or upset, or anything else, my primary feeling was one of empathy and sorrow. I hated that Mel had to go through all of that alone.

I think that moment flipped a switch in us. We realized we could, and should, talk about this stuff with each other. So we started talking more about relationships and sex over the years that followed. We had conversations like “what if we had someone watch us have sex?” or “what if we had a threesome?” We didn’t act on these impulses then, but we were having the conversations.

Fast forward to 2011. We had been in California for a little under two years by this point, Texas and the conservative society we left behind a fading memory. I had become aware of polyamory through a blogger I followed who was in a polyamorous relationship at the time. Mel was spending more time on her own too for various reasons…with attractive people hitting on her in the process.

Mostly she just swatted them away like usual, but occasionally she would find them attractive as well. She would flirt a bit, get them to buy her drinks, then leave by herself. She would come home after and tell me her stories and we’d have amazing sex (by our standards back then anyways).

Eventually she met this one guy, and they hit it off really well. I could tell the direction this was heading in, and, given our previous discussions, I told her I thought she should sleep with this guy.

So in late summer 2012 she did.

We had officially opened our marriage.

And I was an emotional train wreck.

It’s odd. Feeling miserable because of something you really want. And I did still want it regardless of how miserable I felt. This was probably the most emotionally turbulent time of my life.

I heard how Mel talked about him, saw how her eyes would light up. Later when we started having threesomes I saw how he would make her scream in pleasure, something I was incapable of doing at the time. It struck right at the heart of my ego and sense of self, and fractured both of them.

Which is exactly what I needed.

I didn’t really know who I was, and I had several personality flaws I wasn’t fixing. I was coasting, largely unaware I was even doing so, because monogamy encourages people to coast.

Non-monogamy was the forcing function of self improvement in my life.

There was a direct comparison with how I saw myself reflected in Mel, and how this new guy was reflected in her. All of a sudden, there I stood with a mirror shoved in my face, showing me who I really was and I was unable to look away. I finally saw the real me.

And I didn’t like who I was.

First and foremost, I lacked empathy. I didn’t really care how other people felt, and I mostly looked out for myself. I viewed everything through the lens of how it helped or hurt me.

I wasn’t a particularly caring or empathetic partner to Mel in the early days of our relationship, I know this now. We didn’t get in fights at first, something I thought was a good thing then, but I realize now it wasn’t. Whenever Mel brought up a contentious topic, I didn’t see how discussing it would help me, so I would dissociate and just wait for her feelings to pass while occupying myself with other things. This isn’t healthy.

I was also really shy. Being shy and introverted is perfectly fine if that’s who you are, but I now think it’s important to understand why we’re shy and introverted. I am naturally introverted, still, but I think I leaned on that as an excuse to not engage with people. I now realize I feared rejection, and I passed this off as “well they’re just going to cause stress in my life, so why would I want to engage with them anyways.” This isn’t healthy either.

So I vowed to change.

I’m pretty different now than I was four years ago. I’m outgoing, confident, charming, empathetic (to some extent), and I dare say pretty damned cute! Now, when I tell people I was a shy, awkward, introverted boy growing up they’re pretty shocked.

I like the new me.

These changes extended beyond just dating as it turned out. I’m a better developer and member of the technical community now specifically because I’m more empathetic. I wish more developers could learn this lesson.

So Mel and I have been poly for about 4 years now. Other partners have come and gone for both of us, and we’ve learned a lot and changed a lot along the way. Opening our marriage caused us to reevaluate a lot of things about our relationship; what it means to be married, in love, and the role we play in each others lives.

Polyamory brought us closer together.

This may sound counter intuitive, but it’s absolutely true. What we found is that when we were monogamous, the flaws that each of us had were magnified. If there was something emotional or sexual one of us couldn’t provide the other, then that meant we couldn’t have that thing ever for the rest of our lives. Is it any surprise most people dwell on their spouse’s shortcomings? But, when we opened our marriage, this inverted itself completely. Now, it was possible to have those things we couldn’t provide each other; we weren’t preventing each other from fulfilling our desires. This caused us to focus on all of the amazing things we do provide each other instead.

We appreciate each other a lot more.

We also have both gotten a lot better at sex, and it turns out we’re quite sexually compatible after all, something we weren’t sure of earlier in our marriage. Our sex life with each other has improved significantly, which goes back to why waiting for marriage to have sex is a terrible idea.

Most importantly, we’ve gotten better at communicating. To be successfully polyamorous, you have to communicate. A lot. About everything. All the time. I think we’re getting to this point.

So what does polyamory look like for us? There are a lot of different variations of polyamory, but ours is a little closer to the “dictionary definition” of polyamory. We have various types of relationships with other people. Sometimes they are casual, friends-with-benefits relationships (we call them “play partners”), sometimes they are full-blown dating relationships, and there’s everything else in between.

Some polyamorous relationships have lots of rules, and indeed we did have a lot of rules in the early days. Lots of people have rules around who they can play with, under what circumstances, how close they can get, getting permission, etc. These days though, we only have three rules, and they are very basic, pragmatic rules. We have amassed a pretty large collection guidelines, best practices, and tips though. Unlike a lot of polyamorous couples, we very very rarely enforce things on each other. We trust each other enough to make smart decisions, and that those decisions won’t hurt the other, that we don’t need to enforce things on each other. We do play together sometimes, but we mostly play separately. We tell each other everything.

Our form of polyamory requires a deep trust in each other, something Mel and I have built up over the 13 years we’ve been together. It requires honesty, something Mel and I now have, although that wasn’t always the case. It requires empathy, something that I certainly didn’t have before, and even Mel needed to work on, but we now have. It requires a dedication to ensuring everyone feels safe and cared for in your relationships, which is really hard as it turns out. I haven’t always been great at this, but I’m getting a lot better.

Is polyamory for everyone? No, not even close. While it does solve some problems in relationships, in reality you’re trading one set of problems for another. For us, the new set of problems is a lot easier for us to deal with than the old set, given our personality types, but our personality types are somewhat atypical. I think for most people it’s the other way around, they can deal with the problems of monogamy more easily than they can the problems of polyamory. Which is completely fine, everyone should do what makes them happy, not what is prescribed them by others.

For us though, polyamory makes us happy. Our lives are much more fulfilling. It has enabled us to explore ourselves more, both sexually and emotionally. We’ve made connections with some amazing people and had experiences that helped us to grow in much needed ways.

Most importantly, it brought us closer together, and showed us what it truly means to be married and in love.

P.S. If you would like to learn more about polyamory and open relationships, I highly recommend the book Opening Up, and the website More Than Two.