Portrait of an Open Marriage. Take Two.

by Jenny Block

I have gotten in the habit of calling my relationship with my husband an open marriage, strictly for lack of a better term. But it wasn’t until I met Jemma that I started calling it polyamorous for one very simple reason. I love her. When I started seeing her, my heart expanded just like when someone has a second child. As much as the expectant parents might worry that couldn’t be possible, it is. There is no shortage of love to go around when there are people around to love. What a great word. Polyamory. Many loves. Who wouldn’t want that? Of course, I could hardly believe it was possible myself until I was in it. Wouldn’t I fall out of love with my husband? Wouldn’t it be a scheduling disaster? What will my kid think? Aren’t I just immoral or a slut or a freak?

But the truth is I love Christopher as much now as ever. Nothing, not even scheduling, is a burden when it comes to love. Emily, my daughter, thinks Jemma is my best friend, nothing more and nothing less. And she is. I don’t tell Emily about my interest in porn or my toy collection or anything else about my sex life. And that’s the only part of my relationship with Jemma that I’m keeping from her, for now, and rightly so. She knows I love Jemma and she loves her too. And my husband adores her as well. She often comes over for dinner or spends the weekends at our place, playing scrabble with me, watching Hannah Montana with Emily, or talking wine and recipes with Christopher.

That’s the extent of Christopher and Jemma’s relationship. It’s purely platonic. As of this writing, Christopher doesn’t have any outside lovers. His choice, of course. Turns out there are plenty of couples out there in the same boat where one partner chooses to exercise his or her freedom to have outside partners and the other does not. The truth is, equity in a relationship stems from having freedom, not necessarily from acting upon it and Christopher’s choice, he’ll be the first to tell you, does not mean in any way that he in unhappy with mine.

And as for being immoral, a slut, or a freak, well, those are judgments and I like to remember that old saying about glass houses. Besides, I discovered there are a whole lot of people out there in open and swinging and poly and other “alternative” lifestyles. And, the ones I know anyway, have proven to be thoughtful, kind, intelligent people who are trying to figure out their way in the world just like anyone else. And if name-calling is required, which I wish we could skip all together, there are just as many immoral people and sluts and freaks in the monogamous world as there are in the polyamorous one. And monogamous relationships fail just as polyamorous ones do. How many people you have sex with or love doesn’t speak to your character, just to your choices.

Sound boring? It is. Wonderfully, perfectly, normally boring. I don’t regret for a second the way things were before Jemma, and I would never be so presumptuous as to suggest I know the paths my life might take in the future. But that’s just it. Life is a journey. And as far as my sexuality goes, that journey has included so many things from monogamy to open marriage to polyamory and from heterosexuality to bisexuality. It’s all a spectrum as far as I can tell, gender, sexuality, relationships, love. We all fit somewhere on it with very few of us at either end. It isn’t always easy to choose that gray area in between. But, for me, it has always been worth it. What’s the point of living an unexamined life?