How I started talking about non monogamy with my husband
Spoiler alert: it took years for the conversation to happen
Lots of people are often curious about my open relationship. And I get asked one question more than any other question.
“How did you start a conversation with your husband about having sex with someone else?”
First of all, it’s not like we had one conversation and then BOOM we were okay with opening up our relationship. It started with many, many, many, many conversations (so many!).
Our first way of broaching the topic was indirect. Both of us circling around the topic by speaking about our sexual experiences before we met. You see, both of us fully admit we would have preferred to meet a little later in life. And we have been open about this fact to each other for a long time. We both feel that this would have given us more time to “sow our oats” before settling down together. We are clear that we are happy we met, obviously. We have been together for more than 20 years and have had three wonderful children together, and a good life. But I was 18, he was 23 when we met for the first time. To say that neither one of us had a lot of previous sexual experience would not be an understatement. He’d had one four-year relationship with one woman before me. I had had a series of boyfriends. These relationships had not lasted long. And I had not gone “all the way ”with any of them. So when we met, I was pretty green and never got a chance to explore my sexuality with anyone else.
Watching the movie “Before Sunrise” was also a way for us to broach the conversation. For some reason, the movie triggered in both of us a little bit of angst . We kept being honest with each other. In our conversations, we continued to admit feeling like we were a little low in our sexual stats. We kind of felt like we had missed out on some of life’s (sexual) experiences. How we didn’t feel like we had ever had the chance in our lives to experience a lot of relationships, or sex, with others.
And the “light” conversations ebbed and flowed over the years… we occasionally talked about regret, or desire to spice things up with a third… The conversations really centred around a mild malaise/regret about how early we had met. But they set the stage for some more serious conversations where the shit got a little bit more real.
As I said, these conversations led us, over time, to slowly admit that our relationship was not entirely working for us. Yes, we reassured ourselves frantically, we loved each other, we were committed to each other, happy we had met of course… but…. Something was missing. Something fundamental.
But each time we had “the” conversation, we retreated back to safety. It was like we had tip-toed to the edge of a cliff, peered down at the reality of speaking the whole, real truth down at the bottom of the cliff, and decided to retreat back to safe territory. Speaking the words out loud — like actually saying “I want to have sex with other people” — scared the shit out of us.
I think we were both scared because we didn’t know exactly how the other would react. What if telling my husband that I regretted being a virgin when we met caused him to leave me? What if speaking out our deep-down feelings ruined everything we had built up together over the years???
The start of the conversation that actually took us over the edge.
And then finally, one day early in the new year, in the doldrums of a cold winter evening, we had an honest conversation. We were bored, restless, fueled by a glass or two of wine. And probably thinking a little too hard about what is the meaning of life. Maybe because we had both had birthdays in December and were starting to see the years tick away… But it happened. I don’t know which one of us said it first (which seems to annoy people who ask me, because it seems important to a lot of people whether I initiated or he initiated our open relationship, and all I can say is that it was mutual). But, regardless of who it was, one of us opened their mouth and said: “What if we opened up our relationship and gave each other permission to have sex with someone else?”
What guts to ask. And how amazing that the recipient of the question didn’t completely freak out.
That simple question led to a whole bunch of feelings and thoughts and conversations. It was like an explosion in both our lives. We had finally said the words out loud and, like, now what? Did we act on the desire? Did we retreat back to the way things were? Could we unhear the question and go back to believing that we were fully satisfying each other’s sexual needs?
Arguably foolishly, once the question was out there, we moved pretty fast. It had taken us years and years to get the words out, to admit our truth and I guess we were both eager to act on it. So from that point on, the conversations were fast and furious. Over a few evenings we went from tentative steps around the whole topic of non monogamy, to full scale planning on what we should put in our online dating profiles.
In retrospect, I now see that my husband was way more hesitant than I was. He probably would have put the brakes on and slowed things down a bit if he could have. But I was like a freight train at that point and hard to stop. It’s not that he was against the idea in principle, I mean he was pretty excited to get the green light to have sex with other women, but he was definitely feeling other emotions too. Like hurt (why was he not enough for me?), and anger (why did I not want to have sex with him more often but yet would have sex with other men?) and fear (would I leave him for someone else?). I was so excited that I didn’t pause to listen to him try to express these other feelings. It was like as soon as he said yes, I wanted to race off to start having sex with a new person.
And can you blame me? An entire life of not knowing what it was like to have sex with anyone other than my husband…
So we raced off and created our online profiles, started dating, had our “first times”. It was a whirlwind of excitement for a while. But, as you can imagine, the whirlwind was soon replaced by a shit storm of deep, raw, scary feelings.
It turns out that our conversations over the years had allowed us to express what we wanted (which is good), but they hadn’t prepared us at all, like not at all, for what would happen next.
