The Polyamory Fairy Tale
Part I of the Bad Polyamory Story
I was in an open marriage for eight years out of 15 years. I had developed an elegant and tidy story that I’d tell people about it. I’d spit out, “he had an affair in one breath. It made us strengthen our relationship. And we evolved into opening up.” This is and was such a BullShit Fairytale; the only thing it needs is, “and we lived happily ever after.”.
The real story is fucked up and confusing. Five years into our marriage, we were super typical. We had a kid, were super monogamous, and wanted to get out of the east coast. He was up for a transfer but had a low chance of getting what he wanted. He made a list of 27 west coast locations. In a lark, he added a remote island in slot #27. He got stationed in his last choice in what felt like a giant fuck you from the universe.
I pretended for about 10 minutes that I would move with him. I wanted to be a good military wife. I went through the show of looking for jobs on the tiny island. I felt relief that there was nothing that matched my level of education. We decided for the kid and me not to go there with him and do what the military called a geo bachelor. The transfer process was confusing and complicated. The powers that bee didn’t believe that I wasn’t actually going with him. To add complication, his new boss accused him of having a marriage of convenience. And threatened to nail his balls to the wall if that was true.
We survived the transition and fell into a pattern of living apart. A year into it, I noticed that he seemed depressed, but I chalked it up to winter depression. I worked full time, raised a three-year-old by myself, and didn’t have much room or energy to worry about him. Again, not a great wife, definitely not a good military wife.
He texted me at 3:45 am on a Tuesday, requesting that I call him when I woke up. I called him back, standing on the deck of our tiny apartment, trying not to wake up our kid. I didn’t even let him say hello before asking, “what is wrong?”
After what had to be 15 years of silence, he said, “I cheated on you.”
“What? How? When?” Poured out of my mouth. My brain broke. This did not fit my picture of who he was and who we were. I wasn’t a good military wife but was good enough that cheating should not happen.
Like most liars, he had already told me some of it. I knew he had met a crazy woman in a bar, who he had helped deal with her broken foot after she kicked a wall. I knew she had told him that his name should be Frank, the exact name of his abusive alcoholic fathers.
What he had left out was, he slept with her. He left out that she was blackmailing him and blackmailing him without the creativity I would have used. She required daily ice coffees to keep her from telling his higher-ups. As I put the pieces of this story together, it made more sense. He wasn’t telling me because he was guilty. He wasn’t telling me because he valued me or our marriage. He was telling me because he needed to get out of the hell he was in. He was telling me because he had to tell his boss. And if he or this woman told his boss, we could be hurt. He could be demoted, fined, and confined to work.
In some reversal of the fuck you — he told his boss and did not get in any trouble. His balls were not nailed to the wall after all.
Shortly after he told me, the woman he fucked found me on Facebook. She shattered the story I had made up about her in doing so. I told myself she was young, skinny, and so hot that he could not help falling into her vagina. But no. She was old, fat, and no one would describe her as attractive.
I deleted my Facebook account to protect myself from future intrusions. That didn’t bring the relief I was hopeful for. I spotted a piece of red thong underwear sticking out of my drawer. I threw out every stupid pair of thongs I had purchased in an attempt to be sexy for him. Wearing a string up my butt did not keep him from cheating, so why bother.
Shortly after the reveal, he returned home on his apology fix the marriage tour. I prepared and geared up to be angry at him. As soon as I picked him up from the airport at 3:45 am again, he looked tired and depressed. It seemed stupid to be angry when he was angry at himself enough for four or five wives. I was that character in the soap opera that you felt confused and angry at the same time.
I tried to talk with him about cheating and fixing our marriage. I took responsibility for not noticing him changing. He was embarrassed and apologetic, but there was no room to talk about how we could avoid this in the future. In the middle of me forcing him to have another conversation about it, he got a call from the woman’s daughter. She was in the hospital, in a coma. She had attempted to kill herself. That sucked the life out of any hope of us repairing our relationship.
Given that there was no way to “fix the marriage,” my brain went to a unique but stupid solution. We could open up our marriage. I wasn’t mad that he slept with someone. I was confused, yes, angry, no. I didn’t want him to lie to me anymore. I didn’t want a marriage where he told me bits and pieces of things. The deception was the problem. Not the fucking. I started reading and researching. I found out that there were people who practiced having ethically open marriages. It was perfect. I could avoid getting blindsided by him lying to me again.
I proposed this solution to him, and he agreed. He could be my husband and sleep with strange pussy as long as he told me about it ahead of time. I didn’t see the flaw in my arrangement. Polyamory took away his ability to enjoy the process of getting away with anything. Candy tastes sweeter when snuck from the jar when your mom isn’t looking. I pretended this was a collaborative decision, but it was one that I made, and he never got on board with it. I know now that I was trying to control an uncontrollable thing—people who love each other hurt each other.
