#i tend to find real-life discussions of sex and romance generally unpleasant; but this is something you sort of just have to deal with.

[widowshill]

happy aro week to everyone who celebrates. give your local aro a hundred dollars to compensate for their suffering (me).

[nonmonogamama-blog]

My Non-Monogamous Origin Story

I have anxiety. It arrived with the birth of my firstborn as an unpleasant postpartum present and it's never left. My anxiety tends to chill out on a beanbag in my brain most of the time these days, but now and then it starts jumping around excitedly like hyped-up toddler and consumes all of my energy. It can be crushing, it can be brutal, and it can surprise me with the things it decides to freak out about.

After 6 years of blissful marriage and two children, my husband and I began to learn something about ourselves. We were both inclined towards non-monogamy. Now to someone unfamiliar with this term and its implications, that would sound like we enjoyed cheating and sleeping around. Not true. Well, not quite. The thing is, my husband and I did like sleeping around - together in a way that was 100% consensual for all parties involved. We enjoyed our share of three and foursomes and considered it all good fun. The  tricky part was that I was becoming somewhat emotionally involved with another man that we had never been intimate with.

I know, I know, there are alarm bells going in your head right now. Doesn't this mean you're having an emotional affair?! you're asking me, eyebrows raised and skeptical. Well, yes, that's pretty much what was happening. I felt a love connection, if you will, with someone other than my husband - in addition to my husband. The problem was, I didn't want to upset my husband by mentioning it... I was also in a lot of denial about my own emotions too. Why?

Because you can't feel love towards more than one person at a time. Duh.

So is this when anxiety hopped from its lounging state to send my heart rate racing and turn my brain to scrambled eggs? Nope. I was fine because I was keeping everything in control by not bringing it up or admitting to anything. Psh, it was perfect! This is what you do in life when you're a married woman with interest in someone outside of your relationship because you're married. This was the only viable option, to talk to this guy I was interested in on Facebook messenger and not ever acknowledge my real feelings to him or anyone else (including me) ever. Problem solved!

Only not at all. I'm not married to a stupid man. He's pretty incredible all around, but he's remarkably perceptive. He got wind of my phone habits and caught on to my silly grins when I was chatting with "that guy" about nothing in particular. I probably made it all easier to spot because I was in denial and thus convinced I had nothing to hide anyway... though I was totally hiding things. *sigh* Looking back, I do a lot of face-palming.

One day, my husband was discovering he had quite a pit in his stomach about my activities and what they might mean. He did the unthinkable - he looked at the Facebook messages on my phone. Now, he'll be the first to tell you that stooping to snooping made him feel like crap. He's not that kinda guy, but he caved under his own anxiety-brain-toddler's insistence and the deed was done. What he discovered really shook him up.

There, in blue and white, was a record of all my conversations with this guy and they looked oddly familiar. Whipping out his own phone, my husband discovered a virtual carbon copy of his text messages with me. I didn't do it consciously, but I had been sending the same messages to both of them; talking about my day, the cute things my kids were doing, what I was making for dinner, etc. This hit my husband hard.

When he confronted me about it, he was understandably upset. Was I mad that he snooped on my phone? Perhaps surprisingly, I was actually relieved. My husband pointed out that I was emotionally involved with someone else and we kicked off some wonderfully deep and meaningful discussions. I can't relate to you the flow of our talks, but they became punctuated with moments of powerful physical connection. Simply put, as we waded through the muck of what my conversations and connections with someone else meant, my husband and I grew closer and more in love than we had been in years. Not that we weren't happy in our relationship, but we we're working parents with a lawn to mow and a rather demanding dog... romance wasn't the top of our to-do lists. Suddenly, we were staying up late each night, whispering tenderly and exposing our souls to each other, making love in a deeper way than I could ever remember.

Cue the anxiety.

Things were going swimmingly and my husband and I were more emotionally in touch that ever - and I was one panic attack away from being bedridden. How could it be that talking openly about my affection for someone else was making my ties to my husband feel stronger and more powerful? Didn't this all fly in the face of everything I understood about marriage and love? What the heck was happening?! Did I actually know what love was? I began to panic.

My husband is an amazing man. Not just because he's the most tender father or the hardest-working bread-winner I know, but because he has the ability to know my heart's every nook and cranny better than myself sometimes. The things I would shut out or hide away because of fear or unease are the things he cradles gently in his strong hands and holds out for me to examine. And so he helped me examine my heart in this matter.

I can so clearly recall him stressing to me that he wasn't uncomfortable at all with my having connections or affections for other people, simply that he didn't like secrets. So he led us through discussions that seemed to defy all conventions of marriage and yet they made so much sense to us both. Our attraction to each other, our comfort around each other, our contentment in our home life all increased exponentially as we came to terms with the idea that we were non-monogamous.

We were (and still are) both comfortable with the idea that each of us might make deep connections outside of our marriage. Close friendships that could involve love and physical intimacy without taking anything away from our married life. In fact, we find that these outside relationships make us happier people in our marriage.

Welcome to non-monogamy, dear reader. Some people like to call it polyamory, but I identify more strongly with non-monogamy. Hyphenated. Because reasons.

Now, I'd like to go ahead and voice that my husband and I are an able-bodied, white, cisgender, heterosexual couple with two kids, a nice house, and a dog. We are the picture of "American Dream." The privilege inherent in our relationship, even in our unconventional adoption of non-monogamy, is staggering. So let me just lift up all the other non-monogamous folks out there, the gender-queer, POC, same-sex, asexual, aromantic, and every other possible identity or combination under the sun who find non-monogamous relationships the best option for them. Whether it's a matter of consensual outside fulfillment, deep commitments to multiple partners, belief in the autonomy of your partner, or something else that motivates your relationship structure, keep on doing what's right for you and know you're supported!

So ok, my husband and I find we're happier when we're in a non-monogamous relationship structure. Cool. But how does that work? We have jobs and kids and busy social schedules... so how do we live non-monogamy?

Enter the creation of our covenant. My husband and I decided that the "how" of our outside relationships was less important for us to figure out than the "how" of our marriage. It was pointless my setting a bunch of boundaries for his engagement with others - blanketed boundaries simply don't work when you're talking about connections with individuals. I might feel really comfortable about someone he's involved with and have no problems with her being over for dinner with the family once a week, while I might feel less at ease around a different partner. These things just aren't something you can predict or strive to control beforehand, so we decided to focus on how we would interact in our relationship instead.

If you're a Unitarian Universalist, like we are, then the idea of creating a covenant is second nature in any situation where you're expected to interact with other people. However, if you're from a different background, you might be wondering why I'm using a word that you associate with melting people's faces off thanks to the best Harrison Ford movie ever in the context of my relationship structure.

A covenant is defined simply as an agreement. It is generally a list of actions or behaviors that two or more parties agree to. For my husband and I, our covenant of non-monogamy looks something like this:

We commit to open communication between us with honesty and integrity.

We will keep up-to-speed on each other's emotions and state of mind through regularly checking in with each other.

We will assume good intentions.

We will maintain our personal integrity by being honest with ourselves.

We commit to confrontation with compassion should we need to have difficult conversations.

We will grant each other time to process or sit with our thoughts or emotions as needed.

We will remember the purpose of our relationship structure is to be content and thriving in our marriage and additional relationships we may have.

My husband and I hold ourselves and each other lovingly accountable to this covenant and let me tell you what, it's the ultimate preventer of anxiety-inducing predicaments for me. Any situation we face can be framed within the context of our covenant and we're able to hold meaningful, constructive conversations about anything life throws at us. In fact, this covenant really extends beyond our relationship structure and has just become the umbrella under which we live out our married life. It's wonderful to have this as a touchstone.

Of course, our covenant is a living one, so in a year or even just a few months, it might look quite different. So long as we both agree to the proposed change, my husband and I can make this covenant include fewer or more points as our relationship requires. That is also something to soothe the potential anxiety for me - knowing that I'm guided and secure, but not trapped.

And so that was the beginning of my journey into a non-monogamous marriage. It's strange sometimes, it comes with plenty of challenges, but it's also remarkably fulfilling and has brought me and my husband piles of joy. In my books, it's very much worth it and feels natural, even when it gets weird.