Poly Life
Jealousy in a mono husband, poly wife marriage
by Brian O’Connell
Don’t be jealous, it’s just sex. Don’t be jealous, I’m just infatuated with him. Don’t be jealous, I can love two men at once.
I heard that often during my first years of marriage. Jealousy is a human emotion. We were born with it for a reason, but it’s also dangerous and, if one is a mono man married to a poly woman, at some point jealousy has to die.
I’m no longer jealous of Nancy’s lovers. I’ve lived with her while she had another lover stay with us for months. I’ve sat reading the morning newspaper, having coffee, all the while hearing my wife making love to another man. Not once, not twice but hundreds of times.
I’ve carried my wife’s suitcases to a waiting taxi with her lover inside and said goodbye while she jets off for a months long holiday. I’ve heard my wife turn the locks on the front door after a weekend away with her lover. I’ve lived through numerous pregnancy scares knowing I was not the one who potentially fathered the child.
We haven’t seen each other since early February of this year when she left with one of her lovers for an extended holiday on an Indian Ocean island. Then the pandemic swept through the world and she and her partner decided to stay where they are until a vaccine is found. That means I may not see Nancy until early next year, knowing that every night she is in the arms of someone else and I’m staring at the ceiling in a dusty city I now call my temporary home.
I think she feels us drifting apart and now when she writes and calls, she pleads with me to try to recapture some of the jealousy that sparked the early eroticism of our marriage. She’s worried about my loss of desire and thinks bringing that powerful emotion back into our relationship can keep her in my thoughts. That perceived loss of passion on my part worries her deeply.
She’s been writing about her past lovers, in graphic detail, in order to bring to life that emotion inside me. She’s spent hours bringing her illustrious past back to life, telling me secrets I never knew and sharing erotic adventures I never knew she experienced. She wants me to imagine her coupling with her lover and feel an overwhelming emotion overpower me until I finally demand to replace him. She wants me to see her affairs, not as I once accepted as just part of my marriage, now as betrayals that need to be atoned for by reclaiming what is rightly mine. She wants me to resent her lovers, resent her infidelities and go back to how I felt when she had her first affair. In her phone calls she explicitly tells me her lover ‘fucked your wife last night, again,’ hoping that a surge of jealousy rolls through me. She’s never done this before, but I sense a sadness in her voice, as if she is mourning for something that has passed long ago.
It’s hard to imagine regressing in a relationship, but I will do anything in my power to make Nancy happy and even more if it means saving our marriage.
How do I resurrect something I’ve suppressed until its death?
I never want my marriage with Nancy to whither away so I will see if I can water the plant of jealousy that my wife wants rekindled in our life. I want what she wants, to think of her again with overwhelming desire, to dream every night of holding my wife in my arms again and to imagine her erotically as the wild woman she is whilst she is away.
