My Husband and I Just Realized We’re Polyamorous
Until this week, we had no idea
How can you spend 15 years sharing a bed with the same person and still not know everything about their views on sexuality and relationships?
The same way you can spend even longer with yourself and still not know how you feel about everything.
Earlier this week, we came to a new realization about ourselves.
We’re not as monogamous as we thought we were.
Parting Ways with Monogamy?
We didn’t come to this breakthrough in any dramatic ways.
I didn’t fall in love with a woman I locked eyes with at the library.
Mr. Austin didn’t decide he wanted to take things further with an acquaintance.
Neither of us told the other that maybe we should open up the relationship or start seeing other people.
No, we just watched a YouTube video together. That’s it.
Alayna Joy’s satirical interview series I Don’t Bi It is worth your time — it’s hilarious. But this episode in particular didn’t just make us laugh, it also made us talk.
After listening to Stevie Boebi discuss polyamory, my husband turned to me and said, “Wait, does this describe us?”
And sure enough, it did.
And the more we talked about it, the more it seemed silly that we hadn’t realized it before.
We’re both open to extending our relationship beyond our little dyad. We would gladly welcome the right person into our lives and become a trio.
We’re also not 100% exclusive when it comes to sex. We’ve been in a few threesomes (and one foursome) earlier in our relationship, and we haven’t completely closed the door to having more in the future.
And yet this whole time, we identified with one label and one label alone: monogamous.
Polyamory is a Term with Some Baggage
One of the reasons it took us so long to come to this realization is that we had all these fuzzy associations with polyamory.
We know that the textbook definition of polyamory is being open to loving more than one person, and being open to having more than one relationship.
But it’s a term with some baggage.
It’s not its fault. Polyamorous people, as far as I can tell, have been more than clear about what they mean by the term. But the media hasn’t listened, and the people who throw the word around without any real experience with it haven’t helped.
Given the cultural environment we’re in, we sort of took in this idea that polyamory was linked with sex. And not just related to it in some way, but that polyamory is “a sex thing.”
In other words, we were kind of guilty of conflating polyamory with swinging.
And that didn’t appeal to us. It still doesn’t.
We’re not going to go on Tinder to look for someone to hook up with. In fact, neither of us is going to set up a Tinder account at all, not even a funny one.
Neither of us really want to go to a club of any kind, let alone a swinger’s club.
And unless “key party” means we’ll be working side-by-side, typing up our latest blog posts, count us out.
We’re kind of demisexual (check out Shannon Ashley’s post for a great explanation for what that means). Despite the way we spent our teens (and some of our early 20s), we’re not really the hookup types. We need to feel a real bond with someone before we start to think of them in that way. For us, sex has to come from a deep relationship, not precede it.
Because we had made all those subconscious associations between polyamory and something like the swinging lifestyle, the term didn’t really feel like a fit.
So, we stuck to “monogamous” even though we had a tendency to color outside those lines.
Non-Monogamy Isn’t a Live Option
Probably the biggest reason we never stopped to wonder if we’re polyamorous (or non-monogamous in any way) is that expanding our relationship or starting a relationship with someone else isn’t exactly a live option for us.
First, we have four young children. With one baby and three other kids who can’t meet most of their own needs, we’re not exactly full of free time.
And even if we had time to go out and meet people, I doubt it would lead to much.
We’ve memorized the lyrics to Baby Shark. One of us is always on diaper duty. We have to plan, prepare, and pack school lunches. A lot of our time is spent managing a sticker chart, policing chores, and doling out rewards. It’s not really the kind of stuff that would make either of us interesting on a date.
Being parents of so many young children means we also never send out the right kinds of signals.
When we go out, we have a gaggle with us at all times. Trying to make sure our brood doesn’t tear the grocery store apart doesn’t make us the most approachable couple.
We almost never get to go out alone, and when we do, it’s a really solitary affair. No one is approaching Mr. Austin for any conversation when he’s in the children’s section of the library, stocking a bag full of picture books in a rush so he can hurry back home to rescue me from four pint-sized tyrants.
And we sort of live in a bubble.
Mr. Austin works from home and I write from the comfort of my laptop. Neither of us has a workplace where we could meet new people.
We spend most of our free time together. Instead of splitting up so one of us can stay home while the other checks out an art gallery, attends a lecture (Mr. Austin is kind of a dork), or tries a $10 cocktail from the hipster bar down the road, we just hang out. We watch YouTube videos or stand up comedy on Netflix. We cook together. And yes, sometimes we just sit around and talk about all the cool stuff we read on Medium.
That’s what our life is like at the moment, and it’s what our life will be for the foreseeable future (we have a few more years before all our kids are in school). Whether we would be okay starting a relationship with someone else hasn’t come up because there’s such a slim chance of us meeting someone, let alone making enough time to get intimate with them. We’ve been monogamous by default.
Labels Matter
In a way, this was both a big revelation and a really minor one.
It was big because we’ve never really considered ourselves anything other than monogamous. And now we realized that we don’t really fit the bill.
But it’s also kind of small because I didn’t really learn anything new about Mr. Austin. I knew he had a sort of loose attitude toward monogamy.
He also didn’t learn anything new about me. He knew that I lean in favor of an open relationship. He’s also heard me grumble “This is why I need a wife” whenever he’s too busy for me.
So, what’s new? Mostly the label. We have a new label for this thing we’ve crafted between us.
Labels get a bad rap.
Lots of people insist they don’t want to be labeled.
Once in a while you’ll meet someone in a long-term relationship who insists they don’t want to put labels on it.
That’s fine. But I like labels. I like the way they organize my thoughts. They’re a shorthand that helps me communicate with my spouse and with others.
Labeling myself helps me understand who I am.
I don’t know how this new label will change things. I don’t know if it will change my relationships or how I see myself. I don’t know. But I’m looking forward to finding out.
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