When my boyfriend’s not my boyfriend.

Thanks for the comments on that last post. Monday was a bit nuts for me, but I am glad to report I’m now feeling much better.

I didn’t go into detail about the terminology discussion with my boyfriend, because I figured it had enough material to be its own entry. Which brings me to: its own entry.

The simplest summary of our discussion is that my boyfriend doesn’t introduce me to people as his girlfriend (he uses the term “good friend”). Even though we both use these terms with each other behind closed doors, he does not feel comfortable saying so around others, and I find this to be misleading and dismissive.

Of course, he has good reasons, and that’s where the complexities sneak in. Obviously, when any two people start dating, they meet each other’s friends and networks; and as we’ve dated, I’ve met his friends, and we’ve met friends of those friends, and friends of the friends’ friends, and so on, such that in the past three months we have both managed to forge a completely new social circle from the ether. Which is swell.

The problem is that all these lovely new people in our lives tend to make assumptions, like all people do, and the first assumption anyone makes when a man and a woman show up together, repeatedly, to social events and public places, is that they are sleeping together. Not incorrect in our case, but it makes it difficult to explain, Well, yeah, but I’m also married to someone else. Especially when that someone else isn’t here to make his presence known; in his absence, it’s just been me and Boyfriend, over and over, now known as an official item amongst our new friends.

And when Husband returns from his business trip later this year? How am I to introduce him? How will our friends square away my relationships? They will likely think that I’m a cheating whore and Husband is a victim; and even if they get the open marriage, it will certainly seem odd to suddenly introduce my primary partner after so many months of seeing only the secondary. We are all three hyper-aware of the potential for social fucking up here, and Boyfriend in particular is concerned with slighting Husband.

Because it is too difficult to introduce ourselves in the most honest way — “Hi, nice to meet you, this is my married girlfriend Jane” — we are left scrambling for identifiers. One cannot simply throw polyamory or non-monogamy at total strangers, even good bar buddies or potential friends; one must suss out whether such concepts are acceptable in a given group or with a given individual, so we unfortunately cannot be upfront about it. We tend towards simpler answers in small talk scenarios.

So if we present ourselves as boyfriend and girlfriend, while truthful, it cuts Husband out of the picture, only to create awkwardness down the road; and if we don’t present ourselves as such, then we’re not being truthful, not to mention implying that we’re available when we’re not. And so, he calls me his “good friend.”

The funny thing is, no one has ever asked me about the status of my relationship with him. This only became an issue on Monday because, after hanging out with a dozen new people that evening, he revealed that several of the guys had pressed him on the nature of our relationship. I was even more upset that he didn’t defend us upon being questioned, and so, we talked the issue to death that night. And we still reached no conclusion.

While I would prefer to answer something like, “we’re dating, but not exclusive,” or the cop-out, “it’s complicated,” it’s not always easy to drop subtle hints or reframe the conversation. I want to be honest and upfront, but we can only take that so far with social grace. Ultimately, he can only call me what he’s comfortable calling me, and I do understand that.

My horoscope did not warn me about yesterday.

So, yesterday.

First, I came out to my therapist about my open marriage. Certainly that’s information she should have had weeks ago when I started seeing her, but, as I explained to her, during the first few sessions, my mother was sort of the monopoly of conversation topics, and once the subject of non-monogamy hadn’t been broached after four visits, I found it awkward to explain it. So I just had to embrace the awkward and make the whole session about it, summarizing a year’s worth of events as best I could, hoping she wouldn’t react critically.

At least there was that — she was perfectly neutral on the subject. I’ve heard from some poly resources that many therapists frown on non-monogamy, but mine simply said that her concerns for my relationship were the same as her concerns for a monogamous one: balances of power, motivating forces, identity, etc. Fair enough.

After the up and down of THAT, I went home and spoke with my long-distances hubs on webcam, trying to distill the therapy session down into conversable pieces, which led to a long discussion about our marriage (again) and whether or not we’re each in it for the right reasons. And let me interrupt myself here to say: by that point, I was already tired of this topic. I have been OBSESSING over my future/marriage/relationships/career/direction for weeks upon endless weeks, and I am just so damn tired of constantly hashing it out. I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. For a while, I’d like to think about something simple. Like what to make for dinner. Or bunnies.

Once that conversation was over, I proceeded to have an argument — ahem, discussion — with my boyfriend about the use of the term “boyfriend,” which led into a tense discussion about whether or not we’ll be able to stay together in the forseeable future. This made me want to cry a lot, and also run away to join the circus because, seriously, what the fuck am I doing with my life?

I just could not get a break yesterday. It was just one giant emotional clusterfuck, snowballing every few hours with the same compulsive anxieties about how to manage my relationships and their precariously balanced futures. And frankly, it really shouldn’t be that way; I have two amazing men who both love me very much, and that knowledge really should be enough to make me sit down and shut up. So. I’m getting there.

7,000 miles.

I’m missing my husband tonight.

I haven’t addressed this issue yet, so now’s just as good a time as any. Thanks to the nature of his work, my husband and I have been separated by several continents for two months now, and it will be another two months before this changes. This, more than any issue that non-monogamy can throw at us, is an enormous obstacle.

It is a long time to be apart, especially if you are the kind of person who does not pine well (yours truly). I deal with emotional difficulty, it seems, by severing my connections. It’s a bit like trying to stop a bleeding cut by severing the whole limb. Not really constructive to overall well-being.

With my husband so far away for so long, it is tempting to follow my impulses, to turn, run, refocus, ignore, anything to move past the fact of not having him here. The biggest challenge I face is trying to remain present for him when I just want to be extracted from the whole hot mess.

But tonight, I really miss him. I just miss him. That’s it.

Reconnecting.

Mornin’, everyone. It’s early, I’ve had a cup of tea, and I want to repeat a conversation I had last night in blog form.

An old friend came to visit me last night. He and I attended college together, and it’s been probably five years since we last had any contact. Thank god for the internet, or he would have had to spend his business trip to this flyover state all by his lonesome. Instead, we got to go out for drinks, sushi, and plenty of reminiscing and updates. (On a completely self-indulgent note, I learned that my ex-boyfriend is now bald and married to an incredibly boring woman whose last name HE took… I wish him well.)

My friend hasn’t changed much since college, which I found utterly delightful; we always had a lot in common and a good mental connection, which we were able to pick back up again as though we’d been regularly in contact all this time. I wasn’t exactly sure how the evening was going to roll, but I knew that I wanted to tell him about my open marriage, because it makes me sound cool and progressive. No, really, because I didn’t see any reason NOT to tell him; I wanted to let him in on my life, and anyway, I wanted to be able to introduce my boyfriend to him as such.

We were eating sushi and talking about a mutual friend’s terrible wife, and I launched into a miniature tirade about how marriage is bullshit yadda yadda yadda. He said he agreed. Then I wondered: was he married? I thought he was, but he wasn’t wearing a ring, and his relationship with his girl, back in the day, always struck me as very…fluid. (Constant breakups, moving in, moving out, starting to plan a wedding, calling it off, that sort of thing. In the days when I thought relationships were supposed to be much more rigid, this made no sense to me and I couldn’t understand why they ultimately stayed together.)

“Did you ever get married?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Where’s your ring?” I asked. “Fell in a trash compactor,” he said. Well, that answers that.

And then he explained to me that marriage is swell and all, but he and his wife know that independence and personal space are very important; that if either of them ever wants out, then they’re out; and if either of them ever wants to pursue someone else, then they can. “So,” I said, getting all excited about this conversation segue, “it’s an open marriage?” “Kind of,” he said. “It has limitations. My restriction on her is that she can only go after men more attractive than me.” (Did I mention my friend is hilarious?)

After a little more conversation, I understood that his relationship was open, though not really labeled as such. Neither he nor his wife had ever acted on their flexibility, but knowing it was there seems enough for them, at least for now. “You do what works,” he said. “Maybe this works now, maybe in ten years it doesn’t. But you constantly reevaluate.” OH MY GOD I KNOW.

This gave me ample room to explain my own marriage structure to him, succinctly and accurately, and, as expected, he completely understood where I was coming from. It was so nice to be able to reconnect with an old friend and fill him in on some of the more complex developments in my life without worrying about being judged or misunderstood. I’m so used to protecting my relationships and shielding that truth from my conservative social circle that sometimes it gets built up in my mind as this huge horrific secret that’s impossible to share. It’s good to have that myth knocked down every once in a while, to find out that some people will actually just accept my relationships as they are.

Funny women.

I went to see Funny People last night, which is essentially about relationships and contains a plot thread regarding marriage, affairs, fidelity, etc. I can’t discuss the specifics because I don’t want to spoil the movie, but it does bring up several related ideas: negotiating relationships is hard, there’s a lot of give and take, very few people are happy, and marriage and fidelity are complicated, difficult notions.

When the movie was over, my friend and I began discussing it, and after several minutes, he said, “Man, I can’t believe the first thing out of your mouth wasn’t something like, ‘OH MY GOD I am telling you this is what’s wrong with marriage and monogamy and everything in the world blah blah blah.’” (Please imagine that spoken as a shrill Monty Python-esque female imitation.)

To be fair, the thought had crossed my mind; in most movies, when I see a couple having difficulties with their marriage, my reaction is usually a head shake, a clucking sound, and a smug sentence like, “You know, none of this would be a problem if they just opened the relationship.” But I didn’t actually do that here.

My friend pointed out that I had a scowl on my face throughout a particular scene, which he assumed was for the monogamy treatment, but it wasn’t; it was actually a scowl aimed at Leslie Mann’s character, because, kids, bitch crazy. My world-weary sighs were not for the myth of monogamy being perpetuated yet again in (oh my god, this rant is so cliche I’m not even going to finish this clause), but for the sake of all the male characters who had to put up with another whackjob female’s emotional whims; and trust me, they were quite emotional and quite whimmy. I wish I could lament the use of a stereotype, but I found her flighty selfishness to be exceedingly familiar (have you met my mother?).

Mann’s character is in a less-than-brilliant marriage, fraught with distrust and doubt and plenty of suburban-marrieds jokes, but  non-monogamy isn’t actually my solution to every cheating spouses conundrum. You know what would help most marriages out more? Not being a crazy whore. And this goes for both genders! Communicating and being rational go a hell of a lot further than sanctioned affairs when it comes to helping out a relationship. So, yes, I might roll my eyes when I see people do stupid things for the sake of monogamous lipservice, but I roll my eyes harder when I see loony women wrecking their relationships left and right.

Everyone’s getting married.

I just learned that my best friend from graduate school is now engaged. This follows on the tail of another friend from graduate school tying the knot last weekend. I also attended an engagement party for other friends last Wednesday, and spent yesterday in a Target looking for wedding congratulations cards for three friends’ recent marriages. Gee, I must be in my late 20s.

They don’t make cards that say, “Congratulations on participating in society’s favorite trap! While I certainly hope the best for you as you two are wonderful people who mean well, statistics indicate that you’ll likely spend several blissful years together followed by a lifetime of mutually-resigned misery. What a beautiful blessing!” It’s just as well. I could make the card myself, but people don’t usually appreciate the message; hence I keep these thoughts to myself. But, internet, it’s on my mind this morning. Every time someone gets engaged, I have this weird mix of pity and loss inside my chest — like, fuck, another one bites the dust.

I don’t know why I’m so soured on marriage when my own is pretty great. Last night I was in a bar with my boyfriend and was thinking about all of this, wondering aloud why people still insist on getting married despite its ridiculous mythology and terrible track record. “I mean, my marriage is awesome,” I told him, “but I’m different. Even before we opened our marriage, I still thought we were the best married people ever. I’ve never met anyone with as good a relationship. Not my friends, not my parents, not anyone.”

Okay, I may have been a bit drunk, and sounding a little insufferable. But my point still stands that I don’t have a lot of positive examples of marriage to turn to. I don’t see a lot of happy marrieds out there. And I do wonder why happy single people continue to buckle — peer pressure? societal pressure? expectations? It seems so strongly scripted, so required.

This entry is feeling a little first-thing-in-the-AM-without-coffee, so I suppose I’ll get to writing out those wedding cards. I hope that all of my friends can prove me wrong.

Semi-Ethical Slut

In fun cross-posting news, I wrote a lovely little essay about how my last relationship ended, posted over at NerdyPerv.com. Here, the first bit to give you a taste:

I am honest to a fault. I will correct the record to reflect reality as accurately as possible, even if it means getting myself in trouble or looking foolish. In college I told a bouncer who had let me into a club that I was only 20. I’m that committed to truth.

This means that I’m as upfront as possible in my relationships, and expect nothing less than complete honesty from friends and lovers in return—I couldn’t be in an open marriage without such a policy. It brings to mind the term “ethical slut”—an identifier in the non-monogamous community that is both a tongue-in-cheek nod to our perceived sexual promiscuity and an acknowledgment that such “promiscuity” only works with care, honesty, and respect towards all involved parties. I do my best to uphold my side of the ethical slut bargain.

Recently I had a relationship with a guy I’ll call John. After seven months of sleeping together, John left town to attend a wedding, and in retrospect (it’s always in retrospect, isn’t it?), that was the beginning of our end. I was unsurprised and unfazed when he hooked up with a bridesmaid at the wedding (who am I to stand in the way of taffeta-clad booty?), but upon his return home, he announced his intention of conducting a fully-fledged relationship with that piece of taffeta.

John began referring to his bridesmaid as his “girlfriend,” and the bridesmaid professed her love for him. Neither of these things would have been unnerving, I suppose, if a) they weren’t living 22 hours apart, and b) he hadn’t continued to sleep with me.

Please go read the rest at NerdyPerv! It’s a quality start-up site with some good people behind it. Plus I think I wrote a nice little piece.

Okay, shameless plugs complete. Back to your regularly scheduled lack of updates.

Another open celebrity?

I hate magazines and I hate celebrities, but every once in a while I will be in a situation where it is necessary to read a magazine about a celebrity. Today at the hairdresser was one of those situations, and I flipped through the July 2009 issue of Glamour.

Actually, I was rather intrigued to read the cover interview with Sandra Bullock. I’m not a huge fan (my husband) is, but the headline that went next to her said, “Sandra On Doing Life (And Marriage) Her Way.” Maybe I’m just looking for support, but as soon as I read that, I thought, “Could Sandra Bullock be in an open marriage?” Why else emphasize marriage “her way”? How many ways are there, really, at least from the perspective of Glamour? Right? I had to read the interview.

It’s a short interview, and it’s not great, but it all but says that she’s in an open marriage. Here’s my evidence:

Sandra Bullock: Yeah, and it’s funny, the other night I was talking to this man I’m sleeping with…but, as I told you, Anne Fletcher, I won’t talk about my personal life. Anyway, I said, “Isn’t it funny how you’ve never seen me do one of the things I love the most?”

Anne Fletcher: Jesse’s never seen you dance?

Sandra Bullock: I didn’t say it was Jesse…

Anne Fletcher: OK—the man you are sleeping with has never seen you dance?

Sandra Bullock: Never.

If that’s not proof that she and Jesse James have an open marriage, then I don’t know what is. It’s a rather straightforward comment. I particularly love that she refers to “this man I’m sleeping with,” which is absolutely language that I have resorted to, not having good terminology for extramarital relationships. It’s such a familiar turn of phrase to me that I wish I could give Sandra Bullock a hug.

I’m only disappointed that she doesn’t spend any more time discussing it. Granted, it is her personal life, and I certainly don’t begrudge her her privacy! But if she’s going to flat-out say that she sleeps with men who aren’t her husband, then she needs to give a short explanation. She hints, then cuts off any further delving with “I won’t talk about my personal life” — which is hardly fair to the audience or to herself, as it leaves space for rumors and misinformation.

I can’t criticize, really. I’m sitting here doing my damnedest to be anonymous. I guess it’s because I can’t be open about being open that I wish someone like Sandra Bullock would — and if you’re going to put the implication out there, it seems like a better choice to see it all the way through.

What’s so wrong?

Well, for the sake of moving forward on this sucker, let’s talk about an article I just came across today — just today, even though it was clearly added to the internet in March — because, damn, does it sum up my thoughts on the matter. A woman wrote into Em & Lo and tried to justify cheating on her husband by saying,

I notice you are against any infidelity and look down on those who have affairs, but you’re okay with [...] all kinds of things that normal folks (who occasionally stray) find disgusting. [...] We’re not evil. Give us a break, okay? [...] You preach about free, uncommitted sex with both the opposite sex and the same sex (as long as a condom is involved) and hey, that’s fine.  Just don’t judge the rest of us. There are reasons for the things we do.

Apparently, it’s more important that your sex is traditional than honest. I gotcha. Thank god, Em & Lo said some really great stuff defending their position on honesty:

We’re all in this monogamy biz together, and it’s our civic responsibility to keep each other honest and faithful. We don’t care if you’re not spreading STDs [...] — you’re still spreading lying, disrespect, and some seriously bad karma.

Amen! I am just feeling sensitive about this topic today because I had a “discussion” with my ex in which he (again) accused me of cheating on my husband. He understands how my marriage works, and yet has repeatedly tried to tell me that what he’s doing (cheating on his girlfriend) is no different than what I’m doing (participating in honest non-monogamous relationships). He believes that because the act is the same — sex is sex — then the intentions and the discussions and all the fidgety little feelings that accompany it are irrelevant.

So then I start to wonder, is he right? (Because I am easily taken with self-doubt, even when talking to manipulative liars.) He slept with three other women while he was dating a girl in another state; she thought they were exclusive. The only difference between us, I suppose, is that my husband does not think we are exclusive. Is this knowledge that important? Is it enough to set me apart from my ex? Am I any different, really?

God bless Em & Lo for reminding me that, HELLS YES, this sets us apart! I maintain, as I always have, that it is the honesty that makes this work (mutual respect for all parties involved helps, too). Cheating is terrible because of the lies and the deception, not the sex. Open relationships are wonderful because of the trust and communication, not the sex. Trying to boil the equations down to just the sex leaves us stuck in a morally-gray vacuum.

To ask what’s so wrong with cheating on someone is to ask what’s so wrong with hurting someone’s feeling — it just feels like a really basic kindergarten lesson. I suppose people are free to question basic assumptions all they want, but seriously? This one? Kids, it would all be so much better if we just quit hiding shit. One last quote from Em & Lo to send us off:

We know that a sanctioned affair isn’t really the “done” thing yet. But you know what? It should be! Slowly, more and more people are catching on. And we’re going to keep on preaching our honesty message until the rest of you cheaters get on board.

Preach on! Thanks for that column, dears.

Marginal.

I am concerned that I am doing a poor job of explaining how my marriage came to be open. For one thing, I still haven’t described what my marriage was like when we were monogamous. For another, I haven’t given much background on my self, my sexuality, and my upbringing, nor have I given similar information about my husband. Furthermore, I am concerned that my attempt to describe “the opening” in a brief but detailed way has been inaccurate and marginalizing to my husband.

So I told him that. To which he responded, “But I was marginalized at the time.”

He’s right. My retelling of events feels more awful than it did at the time, because I’m in a completely different place than I was at the time. The hindsight just serves to highlight how self-centered I was then.

But that doesn’t mean that I was wrong, or that we made bad decisions, or that I should have been any other way. My behavior may have been a little egotistical, a little shabby, but it was necessary for my husband and I to get to the place we’re at now. As he explained to me, “My role at the time was as your supporter. I definitely urged you to express your desires—as I always do—but I needed you to say what they were before I could do my part and walk through that door with you.”

I may have been the one asking to open our marriage, but I wouldn’t asked, I think, if I thought it would break us. I still feel guilty, in many ways, for some of the things that happened at that early stage, but my husband’s unconditional support was and is a huge source of strength.

He reminded me about how closed off I became when I realized I was attracted to someone else, how much I pulled away from him, from us, from everything. And he said, “It wasn’t so much about marginalizing me as it was about your internal struggle to find the courage to speak up…I was there to help you relax about the rules. And in that way, I’ve never been marginal. That’s always been my role.”

Well said, darling. Maybe we’ve had our moments of asymmetry, our moments of imbalance. But, ultimately, we’re both happier now, and we’re on the same page. That counts for a lot more than my ability to spell it out on a blog.