“Open” vs “Poly”: Can Polyamorous People have Friends with Benefits?

Dale and my relationship started as a swinger dynamic, my partner, Drake and Dale’s wife, Leslie, included. At some point Leslie had lost interest and so we stopped seeing each other as a group — but she told Dale that he could keep seeing me, and even reached out directly to tell me it was okay with her if that was something I wanted.

“But,” she added, “I just want to make sure you understand that Dale and I are emotionally monogamous.”

Not wanting her to feel threatened by such an obtuse question as, “What does that mean?” I simply agreed, told her, “yes, of course, I understand,” and then stored the information away to figure out as I went along.

The sex was good with Dale and so, for the first time since becoming poly — no, scratch that, for the first time in my life, I wondered if it might not be so bad to make the deliberate decision to try “Friends with Benefits.” It was simple and I wouldn’t have to get caught up in the anxiety of an actual, emotionally-connected relationship in order to find sexually fulfillment.

I figured if I just tuned into how Dale interacted with me, if I mimicked his behavior, I would figure it out too. This has come to mean that I let him text me, not the other way around, and I accept invitations to go over to his place, only once inviting him to mine. I go over, we’ll chat for a while and then we’ll have sex. I generally leave shortly after as he’s never implied I should stay any longer to snuggle or hang out or have dinner or anything like that. Chat, sex, leave.

Within these confines, intimacy has still grown slowly and steadily, so slowly I’ve barely realized it was happening. When I found myself resting my head on his chest after sex one time, The XX playing on his phone, I stiffened, but remained. He made no gesture to move either, so I lay there wondering if he was as nervous as I was. When I finally moved, unable to sit with the discomfort any longer, he said only, “God I could listen to their voices forever,” appearing entirely oblivious to the intimate moment that had just occurred. I took this as a sign that a few moments of resting together after sex was probably okay.

But for me, “emotional monogamy” isn’t a thing. I knew this about myself going in, I knew this from the first time I hear that term in Leslie’s text. My shift to polyamory was based on this philosophy: you feel romantically for whomever your silly heart decides to feel it for. Wishing to not develop a crush or fall in love, urging yourself to get over an unrequited love — it doesn’t work. What you can do though, is control the way you respond to your feelings, the actions you decide to take.

And so, in the formal, polite way we speak to each other, I watch my behavior when I’m with Dale. I’ve never reached that blissful state with him that I used to reach so easily with lovers, sex breaking apart any remaining layers of ice. Dale and I talk about our lives, catching each other up on our partners, work, exercise routines and new experiences with non-monogamy. Sometimes we delve into the philosophy but I speak about the topic from a detached point of view, thinking of other people as examples for the abstract concepts, never about Dale.

For example, once we talked about the importance of schedules and time management and I thought about Drake. When discussing fairness in dating, I thought about Drake and my last serious other partner, Shay. “Fairness isn’t,” I articulated to Dale, “about behaving the same as each other; rather, it’s about understanding each other’s needs and behaving fairly towards those needs — even if it causes very different behavior.” He nodded but seemed unclear.

I never consciously thought about my needs versus Dale’s, being fair to his needs, asking that he be fair to mine. But at 2:30 am on Monday morning, I find myself awake and thinking about this. I realize that in fact, I’ve been doing it the whole time. I’ve been acknowledging my needs and making sure he is fair to them — not by telling him about them for him to care for me, but by avoiding seeing him more often than I was able to protect them myself. Maybe this is what a non-emotional relationship is based on, I think as I stare into the dark of my bedroom. Taking care of your own needs, rather than sharing them with someone and hoping they’ll take care of them with you.

My reaction to Dale’s invites to get together usually involve a quick, unconscious process of checking in with myself about whether he will fit my particular needs at the moment. This generally means assessing whether I am horny or not. It involves looking at Drake and my schedules, seeing if there are times they don’t overlap during times Dale proposes getting together. It involves thinking about potential other dates I might have that week, and whether those people are more likely to fulfill my emotional desires for a relationship along with the sexual ones. If it turns out that I can spend time with Drake or someone with more romantic potential, I put Dale off: “Busy those days, sorry. Maybe next week?”

I feel cruel as I spell out my behavior. But this has been my way of attempting to respect a concept I don’t understand. But I’ve been finding more and more that just being horny isn’t a good enough reason to fuck Dale. In fact, the thought of Dale has stopped inspiring me sexually, which is surprising, as the sex is always good. But the aftereffects are short-lived, a physical satisfaction followed by nothing.

*

And then yesterday he tells me, “I miss you when we don’t see each other in a while.”

I’m in a mood, a less controlled mood, happy and spirited and so instead of thinking hard about his profession, I simply reach across the couch, falling on him with a full-body hug and an “aw!”

I have never ‘awed’ him before. Maybe he’s never given me anything to ‘aw’ about. I ‘aw’ expressions of affection and sweet acts of kindness — whether towards me or just told to me. Perhaps I’ve ‘awed’ a story or two he told me about Leslie, but even that, I can only think of one and it was one she told me, not he. When Dale proposed to her a half year ago, he tied the engagement ring to their dog, Hal, and sent him in to wake her up in the morning.

Was this the first time Dale was telling me something sweet? Or have I not been hearing him when he had?

Thinking back to one of the last times we got together, about a month ago when he called me “baby,” during sex, I figured it was a heat of the moment kind of thing. From what I gather about FWB relationship, you don’t call the person “baby.” But now, as he tells me he misses me, the thought pops up: I’d been so busy worrying about figuring out and respecting his relationship boundaries that I hadn’t considered that he might not understand what they were either. What if looking to him for how to act wasn’t a fool-proof method of learning proper behavior? What if he was developing feelings for me, what if he was beginning to express them?

Even as I’m hugging him and saying “aw,” I’m thinking, “But I don’t miss you.” That was one of those things that wasn’t allowed, right?

We talk a little more, sharing stories of our recent trips — his to New Zealand with Leslie for their belated honeymoon, mine to New Orleans with Drake for a winter break trip. He tells me they went skydiving and bungee jumping; I tell him about French and Spanish architecture and jazz clubs.

We are on the couch leaning on each other slightly, their dog Hal between us, both of us petting the dog, not really touching each other. Finally we begin allowing our hands to connect over Hal’s insistent nudging for attention. We move closer and Hal jumps to the other side of the couch. When we kiss, it’s slow — really, really slow. This feels intimate, but for the first time since I first started seeing him alone, I don’t feel the need to speed it up. I don’t feel the impulse to skip over the intimate stuff and get straight to fucking. Is it because he told me he missed me?

He strokes his fingers along my back, my stomach. Instead of my usual, thought-imposed reaction to touch him back the same way — to meet his touch with a “fair return” touch — I allow my hands to do what they want. In this case it means gripping his shoulder.

He finds a spot on my leg, his hand under the waistband of my leggings, and he stops moving. It’s as if he has pressed a button and I am instantly incredibly turned on. He has always read my body well. After the first time Drake and I had sex with him and Leslie, Drake and I went home and talked. “I think he must read sex tips or something, because he definitely seemed to know what he was doing,” I told Drake. But after a year of sex, I realize that isn’t it.

I stop moving, grip his shoulder harder, press my lips into his, not moving, just pressing, breathing. We stay there for several moments.

Dale asks if I want to go to the bedroom. I go down the hall while he gets a chew toy filled with peanut butter for the dog. He then joins me in the bedroom and I sit on the bed while he kisses me again, and we gradually remove each other’s clothes. He begins to go down on me and I let him. Like most men, he tends to go directly for my clit, pressing his tongue inward, too hard, causing overstimulation and eventual numbness. This time though, instead of stopping him, I direct him with “yes” and “no” and even tell him “that’s too much.” I don’t feel guilty or selfish. He finds a spot I like and gives lighter pressure. When I murmur, “mm-hm” he pauses to ask, “Like that?”

I sense he is trying to get me to come, and while this doesn’t happen, he does bring me to a place I haven’t reached with anyone except Drake with in a while, a place of feeling good enough to almost surrender.

He teases me, kissing me but holding his cock away. My hips rise up and I’m tempted to put him inside me, but I keep my head enough to resist. I feel the urge to slap him for torturing me — a violent impulse I have gotten with certain types of sex, an impulse to resist losing myself — but instead I rise up to kiss him. I find myself not wanting to hurt him but wanting to give in to him, surrender to him maybe even to submit to him. I find that in this moment I trust him, and I trust he will make me feel good.

He finally puts a condom on and enters me. He is so hard it hurts and we move slow. We talk to each other, something that, besides calling me “baby” that one time, he’d been doing for a while, telling me I look good, or that my underwear look hot. But from my end, my overactive, anxious brain has never let me respond. It feels so intimate to talk, just as, back when we first started seeing each other, holding his hand had felt too intimate — especially with Leslie there. There was a time early on I noticed my hand gravitating towards Dale’s and then gripping it. I immediately worried it wasn’t okay to show this kind of affection. But by now, hand-holding has become natural, one of those intimate acts I haven’t noticed developing but is now part of our dynamic.

Talking during sex feels similarly intimate, and, even without Leslie in the room, I am conscious of her warning, emotionally monogamous, and resist such things if I notice them happening. But in this moment, I am not thinking of her, or of anything. I am telling him “yes,” and “I want you.” I ask him, “are you ever too turned on to come?” and he replies “yes, when I stop myself too many times.”

But he does just that — stops himself several times. I don’t feel rushed or bad for not having come yet, for not letting him off the hook, giving him the unspoken “go ahead” so he can come. My orgasm, which was easy from the very first time we had sex, had lately grown allusive.

*

My body’s refusal to orgasm with Dale started a few months ago, after we had been seeing each other alone for some time. Leslie suggested I surprise him for his birthday. This would be the first time in a while that she would be present during sex between Dale and I.

The short version of the story is this: she got him into the bedroom and left the front door unlocked. I came in to surprise him. When I opened the door, I found him on his back, naked and hard, Leslie still fully clothed on top of him. He pushed her aside and sat bolt upright, looking as though he was about to kill me while I stood grinning awkwardly in the doorway. “Happy birthday!” Leslie and I exclaimed cheerfully.

It was pretty hot, actually, seeing the fight-instinct in his eyes and tense muscles, but I could tell he felt uncomfortable. Once the initial shock wore off and we got down to the menege a trois, none of us quite seemed to know what to do and with whom. Leslie and I kissed, Dale and I kissed, they kissed, we touched each other a bit, and eventually, Dale and I fucked while Leslie watched (something she says she “absolutely loves”). I could tell he was trying to make me come, but I was terribly aware of how much better he and I knew each other’s bodies than she’d last witnessed. And so I couldn’t give in to that state of vulnerability and exposure for fear of her seeing a breach in their emotional monogamy. I didn’t default to honesty, but to an avoidance of causing her pain and being told I was doing this whole thing wrong.

I didn’t orgasm that night, and when Dale expressed concern afterwards, asking if I had come, saying sorry he’d been unable to wait longer, Leslie told him to stop making me feel bad, that sometimes someone just doesn’t orgasm and he didn’t need to make me feel worse. But he hadn’t made me feel bad; her input had. Whatever communication and vulnerability we had developed up to that point was stifled and I hadn’t been able to orgasm with him since.

*

Until Sunday. We have sex for a really long time. I am really turned on, so much so that I want to ask him to fuck me hard, just to end the agony of it, though I know it will kill any chance of me coming too. But instead, each time he gets close, I ask, “are you okay?” or “are you close?” — and then we stop moving.

By the third time, I say nothing. We hold still inside of each other — or I suppose it’s just him inside of me — frozen with our legs entwined, arms gripping, until his urge to come passes.

Eventually I come. I tell him I want to and he tells me to, that he wants me to. He waits until he is sure I am satisfied before he comes too. He doesn’t turn me over as he often does. His orgasm doesn’t seem as intense — and yet I feel so much more intimacy.

Lying back, I notice that Leslie left an outfit — a skirt and matching shirt/cardigan set — hanging on the dresser drawer handle. I had noticed it when we first came to the bedroom, laughing to myself at the thought that even now she was watching. But I had stopped noticing it there just as I had stopped thinking of everything, the thoughts keeping me from experiencing my body. It felt great. And afterwards it feels great. I feel empty, as I used to feel after being with Shay. Leslie’s matching cardigan set doesn’t change that feeling.

The question though is, is that okay? What is emotional monogamy? Is that a resistance to intimacy? To communication of needs? To vulnerability? Because I’m finding that without those things, sex just isn’t enough for me.