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 our brief encounter: an end to my year-long experiment with polyamory.
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
Jameson was my opposite in almost every way. Tall, energetic, social. Most of all he was surprising, and falling in love with him was no less shocking. He was married at twenty and divorced at thirty. He was thirty-four when I met him on my first day of work: Charming but earnest. Promiscuous and unashamed. He was also an ex-Jehovah’s Witness and had been shunned by many of his friends and family, per the religious guidelines.
I flirted immediately.
“I’ve never worked in a bar before so,” I gave him a lazy smile. “Feel free to boss me around.”
He laughed, asked me questions. As a nomad who was usually on the move, I’d learned to boil myself down to an elevator pitch: I’m a born and raised Utahn, yep, it’s just me and my dog Scout. Nope, not married, not even close.
He asked me out on our second day working together.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever marry again,” he warned me at dinner that night. “Or be monogamous.”
I was unfazed. He reminded me of my best friend, Alina. She was a teen mom turned adult film actress living in a deep red state. She and Jameson were both people who, in some way or another, lived so radically it became far easier to embrace honesty and all the hate that came with it, rather than juggle multiple versions of themselves based on who was in the room.
I was in no rush to commit either, since I had just settled down in Salt Lake again after three years on the road, so Jameson and I were on the same page. But he still took our relationship seriously. He wasn’t flaky or unresponsive, coy or misleading. We talked about the other women he was dating, and I could tell he genuinely cared about each of them. I told him about the ex-boyfriends I was still friends with, like Noah, the one who regularly hung out at my house so our dogs could reunite.
“In fact, he’s at my house right now, probably passed out on my couch,” I said.
“Your couch?” Jameson asked, as he garnished a martini glass with an olive.
“We’re not sleeping together,” I said.
“You don’t gotta lie,” he sipped his new concoction.
“Why would I lie?” I said, and gave him a whip with my towel. “Don’t get me wrong, I do still sleep with my ex occasionally, just not that one.”
He spewed his drink out, laughing. Then he wiped his mouth, slung his arm around my neck, and said, “You’re alright, you know that?”
We played a lot of pickleball and bananagrams. We flirted at work, and I regularly overheard him telling coworkers and friends how much he liked me. He was quick to point out observations and give compliments. “Do you know what I love?” He would start, then proceed to list something specific and lovely. Like after I met his shy roommate from Colombia and he said: “You were so nice to Karen today. I really appreciate how you took the time to get to know her.”
After two months of consistently hanging out, he sat me on my kitchen counter and backed up just to look at me. “I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. A little hiccup of crazy to come out.”
“Uh oh,” I asked. “Am I too healthy for you?”
“No! After a decade of an unhealthy marriage, absolutely not. What can I do to prove how much I like you? Want me to use condoms with everyone else? I’ll do it, I swear.”
“Raw dog exclusive?” I asked and he laughed and laughed. Our first tiff came a week later, when we were kneeling in my bed, struggling to angle the projector just right at the wall. He brought up the topic of condoms again.
“Did we decide for sure that’s what we’re doing?” He asked.
I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t know, didn’t we?”
“Well, hmm, I’m sorry. Full disclosure, I didn’t use one the other night with Billy-Anne.”
I pondered this for a moment. Tears poked at my eyes. I felt for the first time, the ramifications of messing up in our situation. How correspondingly larger the hurt.
“Fuck,” he said, “Did I upset you? I’m so sorry,” he scooted closer and hugged me into him. “I’ll wear condoms with everyone else. Carly? Tell me what you want?”
I wanted to say Yes, idiot, that’s obviously what I want. But I took a deep breath, said the truer, more difficult thing. “I don’t want you to make any promises you can’t keep.”
“I can keep this promise,” he said. “I want to. I hate that I just hurt you, I’m sorry.”
I smiled, nodded, let it all go. “Thank you for being honest.”
There were other slip-ups he admitted to quickly. Each new discussion sometimes brought discomfort, but more often than not, brought a sense of closeness, even awe that we could be so candid with each other. There were no ignored phone calls, no tipping away of his phone screen, no hiding of his password. People at work would try to catch him in a lie for me. “Oh yeah, I ran into Jameson at the bar with so and so the other night…” I was happy when I could smile and say, “Oh yeah, she’s visiting from Texas.”
The “I love you’s” started slipping out between us, and we did not bother to reign them in. This love was friendship love, that dipped into romantic love, but did not pigeon hole itself there.
After safe-sex talks, we made other agreements. Some were obvious, like not sleeping with anyone if they had a partner who wasn’t on board with the arrangement. Eventually, when he asked me to be his girlfriend, we agreed to talk about potential sexual encounters before they happened.
Agreements we made easily. Definitions were harder.
Misconception #2 : definitions are the same for everyone
In Sally Rooney’s Normal People, main characters Connell and Marianne are best friends and sometimes lovers. They are clearly in love, but spend much of the novel dating other people or separated by long distances. Their story, which spans years, is full of emotional conflict mostly centering around miscommunication. Rooney often employs a time-jump technique to explore these misunderstandings. One chapter will end with the characters happily together, and in the next chapter we find several months have passed and the dynamic has shifted. In one pivotal scene directly after a time jump, Marianne reveals to the reader that Connell said he wanted to date other people. Later we find out Connell remembers this conversation differently and had no desire to date other people. They disagree with each other on exactly what was said, leaving the reader to attribute the misunderstanding to the characters insecurity.
We aren’t shown verbatim what was said, reminding readers that a narrators framing is unreliable. It is cleverly done and truthful to the characters experience. However, I found the most common misunderstandings between me and Jameson were due to our own assumptions of a words definition, rather than a misremembering that is only revisited months after the conversation happened. The “terms” of the relationship between the characters in Normal People are never really discussed at all, and by the end of the book, the characters are still (mis)communicating in the same way.
Ultimately, Rooney wrote the miscommunication she wanted to portray, and wrote it well. But challenging a characters connotation of a word is an alternately juicy opportunity that may frustrate readers less because the ambiguity of unreliable memory is not needed. Every relationship has unique agreements. Conflict arises when we assume our partners expectations match our own, instead of talking about them beforehand.
“Fooling around” meant something different to me than it did for Jameson. In my view, “a lot” of sexual encounters meant more than a couple per month. In his view, anything under ten didn’t seem like much at all. We only discovered how differently we viewed these phrases after living the reality of them. I saw just how complicated things could get after we implemented a rule of No Sleepovers with other people.
“I like this. I like reserving some things to be just for us,” he said. “The intimacy of falling asleep with you is so special.”
I went to bed a few nights later knowing he was going out with one of his other partners. He promised to text me when he made it home safely, but when I jolted awake at 4 a.m., I checked my phone and saw nothing.
I called him a few times and he didn’t answer, and no matter how I tried to convince myself he might’ve just forgotten, I began to spiral on the realization that he might’ve been careless or drunk enough to break the rule. Or worse, I wouldn’t believe him if he told me he’d been home the whole time.
Finally, at 5 a.m., he called me back. I could tell he was in the car.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m just leaving.”
“Okay,” I said and waited for the explanation.
He went on to tell me about the concert they saw, how they made it back to her apartment around 1 a.m., how he was ‘pretty tired’.
“Okay, and?” I asked.
“And?”
“It’s 5 a.m. Did you fall asleep or something?”
“I didn’t mean to,” he said.
“You didn’t feel yourself start to get tired?”
“Well, I slept through my alarm,” he finally said.
“What do you mean, your alarm?” I asked.
“I was just going to take a quick nap and sober up. I had an alarm set for 3 a.m. I didn’t mean to sleep through it.”
“A quick nap?” I sputtered. “That’s what Uber is for.”
He realized how hurt I was and apologized. I accepted his apology and thanked him for his honesty. But the dispute called into question the feasibility of imposing certain rules and how we would enforce them. What counted as a sleepover? Were naps off-limits too or just naps past midnight? Would we have to initiate a curfew or could you technically stay out until 6 a.m. as long as you didn’t fall asleep?
It felt uncomfortable and silly. And after awhile, it also became exhausting.
Misconception #3 : Equality
When I think about the double standards or sexual inequity reflected in our culture, I think of two things: the horny husband who’s obsessed with not getting enough sex, like in the 2011 movie Hall Pass, when two wives give their husbands a “week off of marriage” to do whatever they want. Or I think of what I would see most commonly among real life couples around me: the heterosexual, got-married-to-young ex-mormons who want to spice things up in their marriage. They go searching for a third person to bring home, but these are, of course, stories where only threesomes with other women are allowed. Woman on woman intimacy is eroticized and “safe” for heterosexual masculinity while male/female intimacy destabilizes masculinity and is therefore excluded. Polyamory is only okay for the women to engage in if A. it is with another woman, and B. he can join in.
Jameson and I had different goals out of polyamory. Ultimately, as an ex-Jehovah Witness, he was looking to rebuild a life within a community full of lovers and friends. He loved meeting new people and attraction was easy for him. I understood why this aspect appealed to him — in polyamory, people often default to exercising their sexual freedom because sexuality is still very restricted in many cultures. It can also be fun and exciting.
Jameson would average one or two dates or hangouts per week, which often resulted in one or both of them turning sexual. On the other hand, I only had sex with one girl and one ex-boyfriend (one time) throughout the entirety of our year-long relationship. We acknowledged our differences, mainly: I didn’t want to go on that many dates and rarely found myself attracted to other people. Not to mention I was far too busy. Some polyamorous couples find the “imbalance” uncomfortable. They feel the need to force a certain kind of equality, i.e, they both can go on one date a week, and even if one partner didn’t feel like going on that date, they did anyway, just to avoid being alone at home. I stubbornly and quietly rebelled against this idea. To me, fairness wouldn’t mean forcing Jameson or myself to “match” each others sexual habits.
In my opinion, polyamory’s true philosophy is about much more than sex - it’s about autonomy in all forms. This includes sexually, but more importantly for me, this meant more freedom with my time, finances, and non-traditional friendships. I was renovating my house and had no intention to add a man’s name to the title. I liked to be alone for days at a time and didn’t like asking for permission. I was exploring my sexuality and attraction to other women. I was helping an ex-boyfriend (and very dear friend) through an emotional crisis, and once, that included help financially. There aren’t many husbands who would ‘let’ their wives do that.
When Jameson found out, he said: “That’s really fucking cool. He’s lucky to have you.”
Our differences were usually what made things exciting, especially at first, even if they did produce a kind of whiplash. I’d spend all day reading, crafting, building something, and he’d be out with friends, long after I’d put myself to bed. One morning, the day before I was showing my house to a potential renter, he called me and sleepily told me about his night - drunken city wandering with co-workers, searching bars and workplaces for a sober friend to take their drunken group home.
“Are you still coming over to weed?” I asked, since he’d promised to the night before.
“Mmhmm,” he mumbled. “Maybe I’ll just sleep a bit longer though.”
I find myself sometimes wanting to pull back (because I think it’s “good for me.”) I journaled that morning after we hung up. Other times, I want to recklessly experience him. Maybe because I know I’m strong enough now to handle the consequences. And isn’t that what strength is good for? I tapped my pen in my notebook a lot those days, trying to understand every confusing stab of disappointment or discomfort.
There was a knock at my front door. When I answered it, I was surprised to find Jameson standing there, with gardening gloves and a bouquet of flowers. He scooped me up, kissed me, and we weeded for six hours.
I felt guilty for ever doubting him.
It was like this a lot. I ping-ponged between certainties - there’s no way this could work out, we’re too different, this doesn’t have the legs for longevity. Then the pendulum would swing to the opposite side of the spectrum - this is so great, he genuinely supports everything I do, he is my biggest cheerleader.
We’d been together for six months when I accepted a job in California. I had one month to pack my bags, and figure out how to handle a relationship with this man who had elbowed his way into my life and found a space there.
“I have to go,” I said. “This is too good of an opportunity.”
He nodded. “I agree.”
“What do we do?” I fretted.
“I’m coming with you,” he said, “obviously.”
We said we’d try long distance for a few months, and if things were going well, he could move out to the estate I was managing. We were going to roll the dice, as I kept calling it in my head. He bought me a promise ring, though not for marriage.
“I promise to meet you in California.” He said as he slipped it on my finger.
Misconception #4 : Time
In a New York Times article called “The Trouble with Wanting Men,” Jean Garnett chronicles her attempts to re-enter the dating world as a woman in her mid-forties. She spends much of the article expressing dissatisfaction about her resigned fate as a heterosexual. After an open marriage that ended in divorce, her cynicism towards love is understandable. But when she meets an educated polyamorous man, a “sex nerd” who is overly communicative, she’s still unimpressed. She’s met this type before. The type who has “read all the literature and knows all the proper terms.” Someone who treats polyamory like a second job or a passion project.
Ultimately, I don’t know why Garnett passed on Sex Nerd, or if she was even interested in having an open relationship again. But her disdain towards the knowledgeable and thoughtful aspects of this man confused me. Since when is Sex Nerd an insult? Especially in the context of Garnett living as a divorcé post failed open-marriage.
Going by her definition, Jameson and I were definitely Sex Nerds. He was an incessant ruminator, like me. He knew what it meant to wonder and wonder until you’d exhausted yourself, and keep wondering still. He caught my trains of thought before I could send them too far away into the land of hypotheticals. He was proactive in addressing concern, initiated conversation on uncomfortable topics, and handled the topics carefully and thoughtfully. At first this was incredibly refreshing, but eventually I found myself wanting to avoid the conversations altogether.
There was an uncomfortable truth developing quietly under the surface of our relationship: For polyamory to really work, you basically have to treat it like a second job. To respect each partner, to prioritize having all the discussions needed, sorting through the unique baggage new partners bring to the table, especially when they’re unfamiliar with the ins and outs of open relationships — it all takes an incredible amount of time. I started calling it “mental math,” when referencing the variables and changing equations I felt I was constantly juggling. Unless Jameson and I agreed to only having random hookups with people we’d never meet again, I was struggling to see a world where I had the time and mental capacity to be in a long-term open relationship.
“We don’t always have to do this, you know,” he said to me one night.
“Hmm?” I asked, looking up from my book.
“We can just be monogamous sometimes. If we’re busy or stressed out. Or like… for a bit after we move in together.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “Like give ourself a break.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Just explore California, enjoy the estate.”
“Agreed,” I said, smiling.
Through research and my own experience, I found non-monogamous couples were regularly shifting through versions of polyamory that felt most authentic and manageable to them. In open relationships, communication errors forced out fresh understanding. Jealousy was bargained with and became mundane. New relationship rules were formed, revised, and often dropped. And couples sometimes found the need to simplify their outside commitments and became more monogamous during busier periods (like when raising young children). They could then return to the open lifestyle when they had the space to do so. Alternatively, couples with robust and established polyamorous communities might embrace or rely the support of their other partners during these same periods.
I moved away in January of 2024, and after several months of visiting back and forth, he moved in with me in April of the same year. I told him I wanted this to be the season of picnics in the gardens, camping in the gazebo, listening to owls and coyotes together, of nights spent reading, lit only by candle light. He said he wanted that too.
So I was wide open and soft in the palm of his hand when he cheated on me.
Misconception # 5 : There’s no such thing as infidelity in an open relationship
He’d gotten a haircut the same day he decided to fuck her. They cut off too much of his mustache. We’d been living together for only two months.
When I found out from someone else two days later, I did not feel contained anymore. I felt myself spilling over my edges, losing bits of myself alarmingly fast – optimism, surety, safety, they splashed out into parched desert soil and dissolved before I could even identify the lost parts. The first thing I said was, “We’re breaking up, you know that right?” Then I yelled at him how men are pigs. They’re all pigs. I buried myself into my bed covers, not finding it comfortable, moved to the couch, too stiff, then the armchair, but everything felt wrong. And I was too sober for this, way too sober for this, too fucking sober for this. I rolled a joint with shaking hands. I lit the joint and sucked and kept sucking. What the fuck. I was so utterly confused. I was furious. I put so much work into understanding polyamory, in bettering my responses to it, in working on regulating my emotions and taking accountability for my feelings. And the second he had to do one hard thing, he immediately caved. Sex had some kind of power over him I had not fully realized until that moment. He ruined such a good thing, and we were just getting started, what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck. “You couldn’t have waited a little longer? You couldn’t have fucking waited?” I asked. Crazy thoughts came, like, maybe he has a tumor in his brain. It was like he went and got his hair cut and came back a different person. A clone took his place. If a fully mustached version of him walked into my apartment and said he’d just been abducted by aliens and he’d only just escaped, for just a second, I might have believed him.
But really. It was still him, the very same him. As optimistic as ever – his faith in what we could overcome woefully off course.
It made a sick sense in my gut: The way he looked up to my community of friends and ex-partners, my confidence and self-acceptance. Unmatchable when paired with his impulsivity. I forgave the little “harmless moments” because the honesty was so refreshing. Despite the embarrassment of making him move out after he just moved in, I knew it was over and done with. When he asked if there was a chance we could still work, I told him there was no way. If he stayed, there’s no way it wouldn’t eat me up; no way I didn’t lose sleep. If he stayed, he would consume my thoughts and my joys and my fears, he would be my anxiety and my validation and I wasn’t losing sleep for fucking anybody.
I didn’t think about the other woman much. I didn’t really care about her role in it, other than that she tried to be my friend and so I didn’t want to see her again. But 20 year olds were drawn to mistakes. As they should be, with their whole life ahead of them. He was not a twenty year old and he didn’t get to make twenty year old mistakes.
In fact, the alarming fifteen year age gap between them was another on the list of reasons the betrayal sickened me so much. Not to mention he broke all three of the very simple rules we had ever made. So I was mildly enraged when two separate people acted confused when I told them (begrudgingly) that he cheated on me.
“But weren’t you in an open relationship?” They asked.
I’ll say it simply, because I am still exhausted by the subject, even as I find myself wanting to write about it now, sitting next to my new (amazing) parter, almost two years later. Every couple has rules and agreements, has differences with what they consider ethical and unethical. Porn, masturbation, flirting, kissing, emotional entanglement. All of these have to be determined and agreed upon by the mutual parties. To agree to the rules of a game and then break them for your own personal gain is cheating. Simple as that.
We didn’t leave the apartment for three days straight while I dragged every answer out of him I could think of one day wanting. He asked me things he didn’t think to ask me before, back when we had years and years to talk. Who was my favorite writer? (Rainer Maria Rilke) Who would I have sex with first after him? (Probably my ex) Wouldn’t couples therapy be fun? (Yes, probably, but it’s not happening).
He asked if I think he has a mental disorder or a sex addiction.
“Jesus, I don’t know, go see a therapist,” I said, rolling another joint. “You clearly have self-esteem issues.”
I looked for the signs I should’ve known. Namely, his impulsivity. But he made me the benefactor to his life insurance policy. He wanted my location and to share his – I’ve never done that with a partner before. He bragged endlessly about me. I still believe he wanted to have an honest, healthy relationship, and he simply wasn’t capable of it. I wasn’t crazy to believe you, became my mantra, I wasn’t crazy I wasn’t crazy I wasn’t crazy.
He asked me at least once a day, in one way or another, if I would let him stay, if we could work on things together, if he could win me back, prove it to me. He said he would never do it again, he saw how horrible the situation is, how serious it all was. He tried other approaches. He said he was in denial, it couldn’t be over. Now he knew the extent of his issues, he could work on them. Can we talk in a month? Let’s meet up in September. Let’s meet up in one year. What if he just moved out but we kept dating? I can check his phone every night to make sure he’s being honest. He’ll do anything I want him too.
But I didn’t want to be his mom or his babysitter. I didn’t need another project. He wasn’t ready for a healthy relationship, polyamorous or not. So I gently told him no, kissed his hand. I had finally stopped crying after this part, by day 7.
Day 9 I was quiet all day. He told me he missed me.
“You miss a me that doesn’t exist anymore,” I said.
On day 16, he moved out.
Ultimately, for me, polyamory was about testing the edges of my comfort, questioning established relationship dynamics, and practicing a more autonomous style of love. Ironically, the times I have seen polyamory work best is the No Rules type, which only works if you trust your partners decision making 100%. Or there is the novelty type, the “monogam-ish” couple who may flirt here and there, engage in interesting opportunities when they present themselves, but don’t necessarily go looking for them. And ultimately, unless you are privileged and passionate enough to commit significant amounts of time to its establishment, an open relationship may just end up being a failed experiment (though admittedly, a very fascinating one).
From the House of L Caecilius Jucundus in Pompeii, now at Naples National Archaeological Museum