Transitioning from an Open Relationship to a Poly
Relationship
Last spring, I, Mimi, developed a crush on a past
acquaintance of Marc’s. Marc and
Scott had long ago lived in the same apartment building and hung out a few
times, but they hadn’t spoken or seen each other in about 13 years.
When they
became FB friends, I notice something about Scott and Marc’s exchanges that made
me sit up and take notice, and so it didn’t take long for me to “friend” him. After a bit of harmless flirting on
each other’s FB walls and a bit of encouragement from a cousin, I sent Scott a
message telling him I have a crush on his FB personae. He responded with a little bit of
excitement and a whole lot of trepidation. He knew Marc and I are in an open relationship but, at the
time, had no idea how it works. He
also was not, in any way, looking for any kind of relationship.
I was persistent, however, so after many FB and text
messages, a few 3-4 hour phone conversations, and one spontaneous “date” in an airport
during a layover between Denver and New Orleans, we were in a hot and heavy
cyber relationship. Our cyber
affair was a lot about sex, but it was also (if not equally) a lot about long
and intimate conversations about our lives.
A couple months later, Marc and I were renting a house on
the northern California coast for the summer. Marc had briefly returned to New Orleans for a photo shoot,
and Scott and I were having our weekly “phone date”.
Scott was talking about his work when, at one point, he
said, “Right now, you’re probably thinking I’m crazy.”
I chuckled and said, “That’s not what I was thinking.”
There was a long pause. “Well, what were you thinking?”
I didn’t hesitate at all. “I was thinking I love you.”
I heard him sort of catch his breath. Then he responded by saying, “Really?” I was about to say “yes” when he said, “I
love you, too, Mimi.”
The next day, when Marc and I talked on the phone, he asked
me if I told Scott that I love him. Marc
had suggested we were falling in love before, so it was definitely on the
radar.
I said, “Yes, I did. And he said that he loves me, too.” Suddenly, Marc and I were no
longer just having an open relationship; we were doing polyamory.
The way we—and many others—see it, an open relationship is
when partners can have sex with people outside of the relationship. Polyamory means multiple loves—poly (multiple)
amour (love).
Why the distinction?
There are poly relationships that are not open. Multiple partners are in emotionally
intimate and committed relationship to each other, but all agree not to have
sexual relations with anyone outside of the plural relationship. Polyamorous, but not open. On the other hand, there are open
relationships that are not polyamorous. Partners in a relationship can be sexually involved
with others outside of the relationship, but there is no emotional intimacy or
commitment to others outside of the relationship. Open, but not polyamorous.
When Scott and I started to feel emotional intimacy and love
for each other, and especially when we acknowledged it, the three of us found
ourselves in a polyamorous relationship.
Scott and Marc are not sexually or emotionally involved with each other,
but I am sexually and emotionally involved with both of them. Because they love me and I love them,
we are poly partners.
We will probably blog in the future about how we are
negotiating polyamory with each other, and perhaps ask for a guest blog from
Scott now and then, but for now, we thought we’d offer our perspectives on that
transition from “open” to “poly”.
So what is it like to transition from being open to being
poly?
Marc:
My ideal for our open relationship involved casual intimate
relationships with others, and I had no intention of pursuing a much deeper,
emotionally intimate relationship with the women whom I was interested in. However, I did know that Mimi
felt differently, and wanted to pursue this more intimate relationship, if the
opportunity appeared. I figured I
would just deal with the feelings that this type of relationship would bring up
in me when, or if, the time came.
Hearing your partner say that she is in love with someone else, even in
an open relationship, was difficult and scary to me initially.
When Mimi and I opened our relationship initially in 2005,
and then re-jiggered things in 2006, we both agreed that we’d each have “veto”
rights regarding the other’s relationship with external partners. I thought I’d be using that in a
scenario where it seemed that Mimi was getting “too close” to someone else,
which represented, in my mind, a threat to our relationship.
I think we are influenced by convention and normativity
throughout our lives, and one of those conventional, hegemonic “norms” is that
people can only truly love one other person at a time. When Mimi told me that she loves Scott,
but that she still loves me, more than ever, it was hard to believe that this
could be possible. I had always
told her that yes, it’s tough to deal with insecurities and jealousies that can
occur when your partner is physically intimate with someone else, and that, I
can rationalize and deal with, but what the Big Kahuna for me was this “LOVE”
thing.
I differ on the definition of what is happening in our life
at the moment. For me, it seems as
though since Mimi is in a loving relationship with Scott and since she is also
in a loving relationship with me, SHE is in a polyamorous relationship. I am in an open relationship with Mimi
and since I’m not in an emotional or physical relationship with Scott, it doesn’t
feel like the three of us are “doing polyamory” per se, BUT since Mimi and
Scott have decided to pursue this type of relationship, we all three have to
negotiate what for me has been heretofore uncharted waters. The closest thing we had experienced in
the past was when Mimi and I dated a woman for about 9 months The three of us
were physically intimate with each other, and had a friendship–level emotional
connection, but none of us became so emotionally intimate that the terms “love”
or “polyamory” really came up.
For a while, I felt like Scott got the good stuff without
any of the speed bumps – he got to enjoy his relationship with Mimi, while Mimi
and I did a lot of difficult negotiation and mutual establishment of
boundaries, but once the three of us sat down TOGETHER and hammered out some
ground rules and came up with boundaries we were all comfortable with, it was
better for me. I think it was
better all the way around.
In doing this negotiation, I feel as though I’m
participating in their relationship, and by default, Scott participates in Mimi
and my negotiation, and we all three have a relationship to each other, but I
am personally moving forward in what I consider to be an “open” rather than
polyamorous relationship with Mimi, while she has a relationship to Scott and
to me that she considers “polyamorous”.
Again, all of the negotiation is work that we both choose to
do as we think it helps us evolve as humans, helps us do emotional work that we
would need to do regardless, and, in the long, run, will bring us both closer
to each other.
So, yeah, it can get complicated, but again, like we mention
in most of our blogs, as long as all concerned parties are kept in the loop,
are consenting and honest, it can be done well.
Mimi:
I don’t really draw a line between sexual and emotional
intimacy. That is not to say that
I don’t sometimes experience sexual intimacy without emotional connection or
that I want to f#&k everyone I get close to. I can be just into the sex part and I have many people in my
life I love but with whom I have no interest in being sexual.
But when the sexual chemistry and the emotional intimacy are
there, I go with it. I want to go
with it. It’s so rare and
beautiful, and I really do love that combination. And that’s exactly what happened with Scott. Just as it doesn’t make sense to me to
cut off my erotic desire for others because of my commitment to Marc, it
doesn’t make sense to me to cut off emotional intimacy with others either.
The transition to polyamory was, for me, the most natural
thing in the world. In fact, it
didn’t feel so much like a transition as an inevitable development, and I have
told Marc and Scott and a few others that I feel more at home and comfortable in
my self now than before.
Even though it feels natural to me and I have absolutely no
doubt that I can love more than one partner (I’ve loved more than one partner before
Marc or Scott), that doesn’t make it any easier on Marc (or Scott, for that
matter). Introducing emotional
intimacy and the possibility of a long term poly relationship to the dynamic
changes everything and requires a whole different kind of work and play to do
it successfully. We’ll get more
into this later on the blog, so I won’t go into detail about the nature of the
work here, but let me tell you, polyamory takes a shit load of time and energy. Sometimes I think polyamory should be
like getting that RV and touring the country or moving to Florida—wait until
you retire and have the time!
The big difference, I think, between being open and doing
polyamory is the perceived threat to the primary partner (Marc in this case).
In a mono-normative culture (a culture that insists that the
only viable, moral, natural kind of relationship is one with two people who are
monogamous), the dyad (two and only two people) is the only way to do
committed, emotionally intimate sexual relationships. Within this logic, introducing a third person poses an
enormous threat. In our case, this
logic says that I, Mimi, am going to have to eventually choose either Marc or
Scott to re-establish a dyad. But
if you let go of the idea of the compulsory dyad, and there is no requirement
that I choose Marc or Scott, my love for Scott doesn’t pose a threat to my bond
with Marc. I never have to choose
so neither one is the other’s adversary or competitor.
Now, if Scott insisted on monogamy or even an open dyadic
relationship with me, then he would pose a threat to my primary relationship
with Marc. I have experienced this
in the past—a lover expressing a desire to have me “all for himself”. In that case, I ended the relationship. Marc is my primary partner. That isn’t going to change, so above
all else, I protect that bond.
Scott knows and accepts this, and so it works.
And, so far, both Marc and Scott are willing to do the work
and play around this, and I couldn’t be more grateful and thus, committed to
Marc and open to Scott.
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