My Year of Polyamory
+ five conversations we’re still not having
I knew immediately she wanted to fuck my boyfriend. I thought it was cute. She showed him smutty passages from her dark romance book so he would know how “edgy” and “grown up” she was and he threw her into the pool a couple of times. I thought, Aw. Cute.
The girl: a random tagalong to my twenty-eighth birthday party.
The book: ethically questionable and laughably unrealistic.
The result of the experiment... Still figuring it out, I suppose.
I call it an experiment because that’s exactly what it was. I fell into it accidentally, but not in the way often portrayed in literature and cinema.
Misconception #1 : The affair-to-polyamory pipeline
There are many different labels to describe the various relationship structures outside of monogamy. Their differences usually revolve around the level of commitment involved between parties. For the sake of consistency, I’ll be sticking with “polyamory” or using the term “open relationship.”
In Miranda July’s novel All Fours, the protagonist leaves her husband and child to embark on a cross-country work trip, but ends up staying in a nearby motel instead. Over the course of the novel, she lies about her whereabouts, develops an obsession with a random rental car associate, and drops thousands of dollars renovating the motel room. Eventually, she cheats on her husband with an older woman, which results in the protagonist and her husband entering into a vaguely open relationship. After a year or two, the couple divorces but remain friends.
Stories framed as being about polyamory often seem to center around bored, upper-class couples and their very privileged mid-life crisis. I understand why affair stories have an audience, and that some couples have a misplaced desire to attempt an open relationship after infidelity. But successful polyamorous relationships rely on trust and honesty as much as, if not more than, a monogamous one.
In a monogamous relationship, there are often certain avoided topics. For example, you may not be allowed to admit you find your sister-in-law attractive. Or your partner is uncomfortable with you bringing up past sexual encounters or framing them too positively. Or maybe the topic of masturbation is avoided altogether. In polyamorous communities, dishonesty around these subjects is laughable.
I thought All Fours was a decent book. But the affair-to-polyamory pipeline is a tired cliché, and I didn’t find it personally relatable. Cheating is not polyamory. Throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what can save a failing marriage is not polyamory.
Here’s how it happened for me
