Here Comes the Hard Part

Chronicle of an Open Marriage #12

So far, our experiment with non-monogamy and bisexuality has been pretty painless. Hubs went out three times to have fun with a partner he found on one of the apps, and twice with a second man, and generally came back feeling good about those encounters, but not fantastic. And I liked it like that. In the back of my mind, I was kind of hoping he’d get tired of this experiment.

That’s what happened to a friend of ours — the one whose example gave me the idea of opening our marriage in the first place. He was a divorced heterosexual man who was hooking up with other men because he couldn’t find women partners, or so he said. Wow. You can do that? I marveled. Then I wondered if it could be a solution to the unequal libidos that have plagued our marriage for all its years. So I suggested my husband seek sex outside the marriage — with other men. (And if you have a negative reaction to that, read this before getting worked up. It has all the deets.)

But now our friend has found a woman to date, and he says his guy dates are over. So naturally, I wondered if that would happen to Hubby too.

Nope.

Still, I haven’t been too worried. The only time Hubs came home euphoric was after his very first date, when all his years of wondering what it would be like to have sex with another person, let alone with another man, broke through the dam of our self-imposed restrictions and cascaded through him in a waterfall of relief. Okay. I get that!

As a man who was still a virgin at 21 when we met, he’s felt like an oddball his entire life for having had only one sexual partner in these hypersexualized United States.

And as a bicurious person, on some level — a very deep level that he almost never visited — he yearned to find out what it feels like to have sex with another man.

I knew there was danger in my proposal to open the marriage. And I logicked it thus: if he finds out through these encounters that he’s actually a homosexual who has been fooling himself (and me) all these years, we both ought to know that. We love each other, but shouldn’t waste the rest of our lives in a primary relationship that doesn’t really suit him. Right?

Enter the perfect match

But one reason I’ve felt comfortable about proceeding is there were problems with the two men he’s hooked up with so far. One was friendly enough, perhaps even too friendly for Hubs’ introverted tastes, but only wanted a particular kind of sex which wasn’t fulfilling to Hubs. The other was difficult to relate to — too young and abrupt, almost perfunctory. Yet now, just this week, Hubs met a third man, and like Goldilocks’ porridge, he seems to be just right.

I was away when the date took place, and emailed him in the middle of the night to inquire how it went. That’s one of our agreements. He keeps me informed.

“It was good. He was nice,” Hubby replied promptly — also apparently up in the middle of the night. Was he missing me?

But then, two hours later, he sent another message. “Actually, it was wonderful. I’ll tell you about it when you get home.”

That made me want to get out of bed right then and speed home to get the full story. That made me immediately anxious and upset. So, with the wisdom of age and recent counseling, I told him that. “I’m glad to hear that, but also a little insecure!” I wrote back, adding details about exactly when I’d be home.

Then came a surprise. He reassured me in a loving and even poetic way.

“I said ‘wonderful’, not ‘magnificent’ — magnificent would be buried between your thighs on a bad day. Then there is stratospheric — that would be on a good day. On a great day…well, there just isn’t a word for it...”

That helped me keep a lid on my anxiety until I got home.

Side effect of maturity

You might think that second email was a reasonable or even expected way for Hubs to respond to my expression of discomfort and insecurity — but not for my man. For him, it was unusually vulnerable and mature.

That’s one of the magical things that has happened as a result of this experiment. It feels to me like my husband of multiple decades is finally growing up.

Hubs has many traits that I enjoy and admire, but maturity isn’t one of them. He’s intelligent. He’s funny. He’s creative. He’s handsome. He’s got a unique and insightful perspective on the world that I don’t hear anywhere else. But intimacy is a serious problem for him. It’s difficult for him to sincerely express his love for me, or to hear my expression of love for him. Trying to have a serious talk with him is like pulling teeth. He prefers to joke, often in a snarky way that I consider juvenile. Other times, if we’re sincerely expressing emotion, it’s negative emotion — we’re in a fight.

Over the years, I’ve come to think that Hubs’ ego is damaged. That he can’t be sincere and open because he’s deeply insecure.

But going outside the marriage to have sex with men has removed some kind of emotional barrier within him. In making himself available to others, he’s also become more available to me, to our relationship, and even to himself. Perhaps the psychic energy it took to keep his bisexuality under wraps, pretending it didn’t exist or wasn’t important, required that he keep all his emotions in check? Like he just couldn’t open his emotional treasure chest for fear of what would spill out. I don’t know. But whatever the explanation, I’m grateful for the change in him.

We’re on a new ride

Having my husband become more emotionally available to me is only one of the many surprising and inexplicable changes that have occurred since opening the relationship. Making this kind of radical shift in our perspective so deep into our long-term relationship has put us on a whole new track together. It’s like we were trundling along pretty comfortably in a horse and carriage and then we stepped onto a train.

I’ve talked about these changes in multiple other stories and don’t want to be repetitive, but still, the list is astonishing. Here are a few of the major shifts that have happened since we opened the relationship in early December.

• I’ve become more sexually available to Hubs
• I’ve become more orgasmic
• Hubs has become more emotionally open and mature
• I’ve felt less oppressed by the sexism that I perceive in our marital structure and relations
• I feel less like a mommy, in charge of meeting all Hubs’ needs (which was an icky, dead feeling), and more like a vital, equal partner
• My sexual fantasies have changed in ways that are healthier and more satisfying for me
• I feel more permission to look at other men and enjoy flirtation
• I feel more permission and less guilt for going off on my own to do things I enjoy and Hubs doesn’t
• The world and my life seem to contain more possibilities
• Hubs feels able to express a part of himself that was previously forbidden

Playing with fire

Still, all these benefits come with a cost. Opening the relationship is putting it at risk. In reading about other non-monogamous or polyamorous relationships, I fixate on the stories of destruction. They aren’t hard to find. Many marriages don’t survive this kind of experimentation.

When I got home the next day, things went well at first. Hubs told me about his wonderful encounter with this new man. He bragged about how good he was in bed, and teased that I didn’t truly appreciate him. He showed me a text from the third man that said, in part, “I am crazy about you.”

Not long after that, we had a fight. And what shot out of my mouth was telling. “Just get out of my life!” I shouted. It was an expression of what I fear most, and what Hubs fears, too. Are we going to lose each other and our long-term marriage? Our Catholic upbringings threaten and taunt us. You’re just being hedonistic. You’re not meant to have everything you want. You are going to pay the wages of this terrible sin.

Yet I don’t really believe that Hubs’ desire is based on hedonism. He denies himself pleasure in so many other ways. I believe it’s an effort to salve old psychic wounds and to finally, fully realize himself. And though our love for each other isn’t Disney — isn’t standard romance — I believe it’s solid and real.

Switching to active lover from passive beloved

One thing that’s gone on for the length of our relationship is that Hubs has been the lover, and I’ve been the beloved. He’s always wanted to spend more time with me than I wanted to spend with him. He’s always wanted to have more sex with me than I wanted to have with him. He’s always loved me more than I’ve loved him. At least that’s how it seemed.

I’ve heard that dichotomy expressed another way: In every relationship, there is a gardener and a garden.

But however you express it, there’s a problem. The relationship is unbalanced. And while it seems that the beloved, or the garden, has all the power in the relationship, that wasn’t my experience. What happened, instead, is that the power was twisted. What Hubs lost in one place, he took back somewhere else. There was bitterness underground. There was resentment. And part of me believes this kind of power imbalance is the entire basis of the patriarchy that is destroying the planet and killing us all. Men resent the power women have over them via sexual desirability, so they feel compelled to oppress them (and others) in multifarious ways.

Another problem with being the beloved partner in a relationship is that you are objectified. You aren’t real. Women, particularly, will know what I mean. To be put on a pedestal is also to be reduced to an ideal, which is predefined and not fully human. To be put on a pedestal makes one unreachable, unknowable, unseen.

But as it turns out, opening up our relationship has also turned this lifelong power structure on its head. Within our new parameters, the power is shifting. Now Hubs is taking on the passive role of the beloved, and I’m getting the opportunity and agency and strength and vitality and absolute pleasure to become the active lover — to run towards him instead of running away.

Reading that last sentence over, it seems at odds with what I said earlier, that Hubs was always running away from deep emotional connection before. Hmmm.

I guess we’re both running in new directions now. And in all cases, it feels like we’re running towards something, towards the heart of the matter, instead of running away. That’s what I want for us both.

What happened next? Read Chronicle of an Open Marriage #13. Find all of my stories about opening our marriage on the list below, or about sex in general on this one. Get an email whenever I publish. And have a sweet day.