This So Fucking ISN’T a Quick Fix

As will probably become clear as my wife SepiaQueen and I come back to the subject of polyamory (frequently, no doubt), before we embarked upon the path, we were having some marital troubles.

No one had cheated. No one was hiring divorce attorneys. No one was physically or psychologically abusing anyone. No one had gambled away the family bank account. No one was horribly disfigured and unable to meet marital obligations. No one had been abducted by aliens and returned with a whole new personality. Neither of our soap opera “evil twins” had shown up, locked their look-a-like in a small cabin and began mayhem by pretending to be the real spouse. Neither one of us had become a right-wing idealogue with love for the Tea Party and a newfound respect for Sarah Palin (*shudder*).

Plain and simple, things had simply gotten in a rut, both sexually and emotionally.

More accurately, my wife felt like she was in a rut in our marriage, and thus our marriage was possibly doomed. It’s true. Mostly, the stresses and worrying were from her side of the equation, and it was her dissatisfaction that was doing most of the job of running our marriage into a ditch. Now, this doesn’t let me off the hook. I’ll cop to my own failure and sins in a moment.

We did have sex on a semi-regular basis. Actual penetration was hit-or-miss…maybe once a week sometimes and once a month (or longer) at others, but we did manage oral with decent regularity. We certainly talked and listened to one another and had plenty of love. But in the end, my wife felt like we had become friends with benefits and wondered where the passion was.

As I pointed out, you can’t maintain fiery passion over an entire marriage. That’s too hard, and we’ve been married more than a dozen years. But while she understood that intellectually, it didn’t help one bit, and she actually did consider whether it might be time for us to split up.

Fortunately for me, my wife (like me) is a person with a significant lazy streak (though good work ethics…go figure) and an even bigger practical streak. Breaking up would have been bad business, and so she stuck around. Which is good, because it allowed us to finally figure out what was wrong in our marriage.

I don’t even remember exactly how the conversation started (even though it was only a couple weeks ago as I write this). But my wife made it clear that while she loved me, and we were more than just friends, there was something lacking in our relationship. I met most of her needs, but not all of them, and those unmet needs had been unmet so long that they had become a serious impediment to us staying together.

She proposed polyamory. Or, as some call it, ethical non-monogamy or consensual non-monogamy. She needed someone…quite possibly a woman (not necessarily to be shared with me) or maybe a man…maybe even both. That person didn’t need to live with us, but she needed to be able to have a real relationship with that person (or people). Something far more than a fling but clearly secondary to our marriage and parenting of our kids.

I took it pretty well. It’s a bit of a blur, so I’m sure I had some confusion and reluctance at first, but I saw the logic of it.

I also saw where I had gone wrong, and this is where I cop to my own sins. While I may not have been in any way a source of being dissatisfied with our marriage and our life, I had been responsible for the build-up of regrets and denials my wife had been forced to endure and which made her think, erroneously, that there was something wrong between us (when in fact the problem was that we need more between us…namely, more people).

Well into our dating lives, and shortly before I proposed to SepiaQueen, a man entered her life. She was powerfully attracted to him, but didn’t want to throw me over (or refuse my offer of marriage) for him. He was intellectual (I’m no slouch, but he’s an academician, and thus brainier, I’ll admit) and they had a powerful sexual tension between them. But I was stable and SepiaQueen loved me, and so she chose between us, declaring me the winner.

I was not ignorant of this man’s existence; my wife is a very honest person. It was clear to me that she felt strongly toward him, and at one point during an argument with her, I confronted her with it. I told her that she may love me, but that she was IN love with him (whatever that means…I think there’s a distinction, but maybe not as important of one as I originally thought). Eventually, in trying to work through it, I told SepiaQueen that if she had to get an itch scratched, with him or someone else, she could do so. But make it short-term, come back to me, and don’t fuck the guy in our own bed.

While I hadn’t denied my wife the ability to step out, I had marked territory nonetheless. And while we all do that, and there are good reasons to create boundaries, I had failed to understand something.

My wife didn’t need flings.

She needed something complementary but secondary to me.

Over the years, when troubles came up in the marriage, there would be times I would reiterate that if she needed to step out on me briefly with another guy (or woman), I wasn’t going to be mad. But she never acted on that. Again, I failed to understand what she needed. In fact, we both did.

It wasn’t until recently that SepiaQueen started learning about polyamory and the ways in which it sharply deviates from things like bigamy, adultery and old-school Mormon-style plural marriages with one guy having several wives (but never one woman several husbands). That was when she finally had words to express what she needed.

I understood this time (thank God) and I supported her. But what I didn’t expect was to embrace polyamory myself. I could understand and allow her to pursue that lifestyle, but it was only after a couple days of hashing out the preliminaries of what polyamory might look like in our lives (and what implications it might hold for our life together) that I understood I need it, too.

In a different way, but still, we both began to see two things. One, it would be unfair to allow her to be polyamorous and not me as well. Two, were I to also embrace such a lifestyle for myself, it would help me get my unmet needs satisfied as well as take pressure off SepiaQueen.

While she needed primarily an emotional and sexual relationship secondary to ours, I needed an outlet for my kinkier side, and less so for the emotional needs. That is, we realized that if I found someone who embraced my kinks and fetishes, that would mean less pressure on SepiaQueen to engage in activities that she wasn’t really into. She was willing to do them, but they weren’t natural to her, and that added pressure in our sex life at times.

In the process of that realization, it went farther. SepiaQueen began to realize she was kinkier than she thought (and we’ve tried out some interesting things as a result of that) and I realized I might need more of an emotional connection than I thought aside from her, perhaps something that satisfied some of my geekier aspects to which she doesn’t relate well.

In short, needs that both of us had, neither of us had been able to define before, and for which the only practical solution is polyamory.

So, while it might seem to many on the outside to be a “quick fix” act of desperation to save our marriage, it isn’t.

No, to be more precise, it’s like we’ve been living with a disease that no doctor could quite diagnose. Once there was an accurate diagnosis, we finally knew what kind of treatment to pursue for a cure to this condition that keeps cropping up from time to time (like a really bad STD) and was gradually killing us.

Now we can get on the road to better marital health, and once again be “until death do us part” (except that it might not just be the two of us making that commitment anymore)