I Think I’ve Always Been Polyamorous

I just didn’t realize it until a couple of years ago.

About five years ago my husband James and I opened up our marriage to other lovers. After 20+ monogamous years together, I inexplicably had the strong desire to bring another man into our bed. Fortunately, once I got up the courage to tell James, he was all for it as long as we could play with a woman as well. What started out as a sexual exploration quickly turned into an entire way of life for us. Before long I realized that I was in love with the man we had started seeing, and as we spent time with other couples and women as well, we started to understand that this was who we truly were. We were polyamorous.

Some people who don’t know a lot about polyamory assume that it’s mostly about sex and although that is often an important component, polyamory is really about having intimate connections of different kinds with more than one person at a time. I haven’t seen my partner Nat (the one I realized I was in love with) in person for a long time because he now lives on the other side of the country from us, but he’s still a member of my family none-the-less. Swinging is about sex; polyamory is about emotions and connection, which may include sexual connection.

As time has gone on and we’ve gotten a bit more experience with this way of life, I’ve come to realize that I was always polyamorous — I just didn’t have any expression for that before James and I decided to affirmatively go in that direction. I don’t know if polyamory is a sexual identity or a lifestyle, or a combination of the two. What I do know is that once we worked through the kinks of shifting from monogamy to polyamory, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to me, and in retrospect, I see that it’s who I’ve always been.

When James and I first met, in our early 20s, I can remember hearing the Stephen Stills song Love The One You’re With on the radio. Some of the lyrics are If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.

“I don’t really like this song,” James said when it started to play.

“Oh, I do,” I replied.

He and I had dated long distance for a year shortly after we first met and I never went out with or slept with anyone else while we were apart because I thought that’s what was expected of me, but at the same time I didn’t understand the wives and girlfriends of rock stars breaking up their relationships when they discovered that their men were sleeping with other women on the road.

“Of course they are,” I thought. “Why do you expect it to be anything different?” The problem was that they apparently weren’t talking about what the real expectations were. The culture of monogamy is so strong that even most rockstars didn’t think that they could overtly buck it. But I still didn’t understand why these guys didn’t just say upfront,

“I love you, but when I’m out on tour, I get lonely and have access to groupies and a whole bevy of other women. I’ll promise to always use a condom and get tested regularly, but if you want to be with me, just understand that this is not a sexually exclusive relationship. It has nothing to do with my love or commitment to you. It’s just the way things are. Are you up for this or not?”

I was 16 or 17 when I had this thought. I hadn’t even had a real date yet, and already it made sense to me that sex and love are separate things and that commitment has nothing really to do with sexual exclusivity.

My sophomore year of college, I had my first serious boyfriend, Bryce. I was crazy about him and tried my best to be a cool and accommodating girlfriend. But before I’d met him, I’d already asked the guy that I had casually seen over the summer to come up and be my date for the homecoming festivities. I didn’t feel like I could uninvite him, just because I now had a real boyfriend, although that wasn’t how Bryce saw it. He thought that I was his.

I shouldn’t have asked the other guy so far in advance, but I was young, hadn’t dated much and was a bit insecure. I wanted to be sure I had a date for homecoming. It caused a bit of a rift between me and Bryce, and that only deepened when I went home for Christmas and got invited to a New Year’s Eve party by my long-time high school crush, Tad. Nothing much happened between us at that party except some flirting, but it made me realize that I was far from ready to settle into exclusivity. Bryce took that as a rejection of him, rather than as a rejection of heteronormative dating, and not long afterward, we broke up.

My junior year boyfriend, Dan, wasn’t much better. At least he was significantly taller than me, which was a nice change, but he was also very shy, and somewhat anti-social. I often went out to weekend parties without Dan because that kind of thing didn’t appeal to him. I went to another homecoming weekend with a friend I was a little bit interested in because Dan wouldn’t go. He didn’t want to come with me, but he also resented me for having a social life with guys other than him. I guess I was supposed to just stay home if he didn’t want to attend something, but I wanted to dress up for Halloween and otherwise participate in the main social activities of my university. It was fine that Dan didn’t want to, but I wasn’t going to let that hold me back. He broke up with me soon afterward.

By my senior year in college, I was done with heteronormative rules. Trying to be a “good girlfriend” hadn’t gotten me anything but the realization that I was expected to be beholden to my guy in a way that didn’t feel natural to me. No thanks!

I had a friends-with-benefits relationship with two different boys at the same time that year. In the mid-1980s a woman like me who slept with two men she wasn’t officially dating was considered a slut, but I didn’t care. I was finally living a life that was more in line with who I really was. Friends kindly referred to me as a “free spirit.”

The summer between my last two years of college, I had an internship with a professional organization. My boss, Jay, was everything that I thought I wanted in a man at that point in my life. He was smart, incisive, funny, confident and he had a sexy mop of dark curls. I was smitten! The problem, besides the fact that I was 20 and he was in his early 30s, and that he was my boss, was that Jay was married. We both felt the attraction between us but didn’t even so much as flirt — at least not beyond the kind of friendly banter that was entirely appropriate for the workplace.

One of our co-workers had a house-warming party near the end of the summer, and I knew that Jay’s wife was out of town for a few weeks. I fantasized the whole time about going home with him after the party and after a passionate night, spending the next morning together reading the paper together in bed and discussing what we read. I wasn’t trying to horn in on his marriage and I certainly never entertained the thought of Jay leaving his wife for me. I think I was just really hungry for some time with a man rather than the boys who were all that had been available to me so far. Nothing happened, however.

Years later when I thought back on that summer, I used to believe that I was just too immature to understand what marriage truly is. But more recently, I’m starting to think that it’s more likely I just wasn’t wired for monogamy in the first place and was subconsciously realizing that. I didn’t see being with someone who was already with someone else as inherently wrong.

Of course, the lack of honesty and integrity is the part that’s not OK, but what if that hadn’t been a factor? What if an above-board polyamorous connection had been a possibility? I wasn’t just hot for Jay; I thought he was the man of my dreams. I didn’t want to just bed him; I wanted to connect with him mentally and emotionally.

Several years later when I was working on Capitol Hill I somehow learned that Jay was working for a Senate committee nearby. We met for lunch and I gave him a tour of the historic building where I worked. After a nice visit, we shook hands, said goodbye and I never saw him again. Several of my co-workers asked me later if Jay was my boyfriend. Apparently, the chemistry and interest in each other was still quite palpable.

I’ve always been a bit of a follow the rules kind of person, except for the places where I can see that the rules don’t serve a practical purpose. If choosing monogamy serves you, that’s great, but based on new research that shows that women get bored with monogamy even before men do, the rate of infidelity, and the rate of divorce, I’m going to say that monogamy doesn’t serve as many people as we’d culturally like to believe.

People should be in the types of relationships that they want to be in, monogamous ones included, but since discovering how natural polyamory feels to me (and to my husband now that he has embraced what he wants rather than what society said he should want), it does make me wonder if there are others out there who are inclined that way as well and have just never had the opportunity to find it out.

Beside my long-distance relationship with Nat, James and I are in a three-way relationship with a woman named Tamara, and we sometimes see other people with or without her as well. Fortunately for me, I unknowingly married someone who was also really comfortable with polyamory and pansexual relationships. It took us more than 20 years of monogamous marriage to figure that out, but once we did, it’s been a really good fit for us both.

There’s an old saying that life feels like chaos in the moment, but when you review it, it’s easy to see how one thing leads you to another. Looking back on my life, I can see how I’ve always been polyamorous at heart, I just didn’t get to explore and express that fully until the recent past. I’m now to the point that I forget at times that the rest of the world not only doesn’t live this way but finds it a bit shocking that we do. And for the most part, that’s OK. We are doing what feels good and feels natural for us, at long last, and that’s what really matters.