Are you non monogamous because you’re vain?

Liz Sinclair
5 min readApr 8
Photo by tabitha turner on Unsplash

When I wrote my first Tinder profile and included details on being a 40+ year old non monogamous, married mother-of-three, and accompanied it with a blurry picture of the back of my head, I didn’t really expect that a lot of men would be swiping right on me. But I was wrong. They came in droves. Within days I had a little icon at the top of my Tinder page indicating that 99+ men had right-swiped me.

And with that little icon, all my insecurities about being too old, too much of a mother, too married, not attractive enough, unsexy, too fat, not worthy, not interesting enough, disappeared. Voila. I was popular! I was desired!

When I started meeting some of these men (not all 99+!) in real life my ego continued to be boosted. I heard many compliments. More compliments, in fact, on those dates than I had heard in aaaaaages. My husband, dear man that he is, does not give out compliments liberally. A “you look nice” when prodded sufficiently is about all I ever get. And, if you want the truth-truth, I had probably scared him off of complimenting me because I was more likely to reply with a snarly “what do you want?” than a “thank you” if he ever did.

So getting the attention of men, who either because they were naturally more comfortable handing out the compliments, or because they were genuinely attracted to my incredible looks (as if!), or because they wanted to get in bed with me, boosted my ego to new levels. Suddenly I was hearing, “you’re so beautiful”, “your eyes are incredible”, “I love your body”, “you have perfect tits”, “god your ass is sexy”, etc.

And it wasn’t only on my dates that I started to notice the attention of men. I suddenly noticed that men at the coffee shop, or at the grocery store, heck even at the mall, were checking me out. I was getting more eye contact, more little smiles than ever before.

I don’t know if I had always been attracting that kind of attention over the last 20+ years, or if it was new. Maybe men were sensing my new-found confidence? Maybe sensing my non monogamous woman on the prowl pheromones? Whatever it was, I was getting attention like never before.

And it felt so good.

As much as I’d like to be that kind of woman that does not need external validation, it…

Liz Sinclair

Ordinary, middle-aged, university educated, working mother of three in a long-term loving marriage. Oh, and also non monogamous.