‘Nothing about this is new. It’s as old as the hills,’ Fisher said. ‘What is new is that women are now also being more adulterous — and so people are beginning to be more open about it.’

Try Googling some statistics about what percentage of partners in monogamous relationships cheat. Studies obviously bring back mixed results because, well, people lie. Even in self-disclosure studies (versus studies where one partner may report that they have never cheated, but their partner did), rates of infidelity are as high as 40%. According to Wikipedia’s summary of studies, around 30-40% of unmarried relationships and 18-20% of married relationships see at least one instance of sexual infidelity. Again, let’s remember that this very likely is not capturing all instances, and let’s also remember that this is only covering sexual infidelity and not emotional affairs. The numbers aren’t that shocking once you remember that well over 50% of marriages end in divorce, but still. If you told any married person that, statistically, there was a 40% chance they were being cheated on, they’d say oh no, not me. But yes, dearest, you. And then there are the percentages of people who say they would have an affair if they knew they would never get caught, and those percentages are supposedly somewhere in the high 70s.

The percentage of people who would cheat if they knew they’d never get caught are so high because (and obviously I’m generalizing here) what keeps people from cheating is not true love – it’s the fear of getting caught. Maybe that’s slightly unfair, because the things some people might be most scared of when getting caught is causing irreparable hurt and emotional damage to the one they love, so in some sense it is true love that keeps them from cheating. My point, however, is that it’s not just true love in and of itself that keeps people from wanting to connect with others – it’s just the fear of losing their marriage or hurting their partner. If they knew that wasn’t going to happen (enter nonmonogamy), most people would cheat in a heartbeat.

While the percentages of infidelity have almost certainly gone up in the past decade with the development of Tinder, Ashley Madison, and the internet generally increasing accessibility, rates of infidelity have never been negligible. So why are we starting to talk about this more and more? Women.

I think this is for two reasons. First, women were previously much less likely to cheat, because they were financially dependent on their spouses. To put it bluntly, if they got caught and the marriage fell apart, they’d be fucked…on so many levels. Second, because women cheated less, cheating was less talked about, because as a gender women are more inclined to talk about things, particularly feelings. So, women became financially independent, started cheating more, and started talking about it, and here we are.

In some ways, I see women as the pioneers of nonmonogamy. Maybe they didn’t invent it, and maybe it wasn’t even their idea. Who knows. But in the sense that women are largely responsible for the development of gender equality in all its forms, they were and are pioneers in destroying the power imbalance in traditional monogamous relationships, particularly marriage. By destroying that power imbalance, they brought to light a very real issue that had been shrouded in darkness for years: that men cheated, that it was generally accepted and ignored, and that they had to put up with it to stay in a stable marriage. Now, maybe the “hey we can cheat too” response from women wasn’t the greatest, but to the extent we are now as a society realizing that monogamy doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for a long time for most people, maybe it’s a good thing.

I want to apologize for the sexism rant I’m about to go on, but it’s more of a #sorrynotsorry sort of situation. The bitter truth is that, although women have pioneered this movement – this movement of shedding light on what was happening, of saying that we deserve honesty, of saying that we will not trade sex for money, either as prostitutes or as wives – we still get the short end of the stick, even in 2018. Women who sleep around when they’re single are still seen as whores, sluts, loose, and dirty. Women in open relationships are seen as piranhas, promiscuous, standard-less, waiting to pounce on every man who walks by. Even further than that, the men who are in open relationships with these women are seen as whipped for “letting” their woman sleep around. Yet, men have been engaging in this behavior for centuries with little to no consequences and even praise from their peers.

I live for the day that we will see true equality in this area, and it doesn’t even have that much to do with nonmonogamy. I live for the day when traditional monogamous relationships will contain the same kind of honesty and standards of equality for sexuality (and for all things) that I seek in my nonmonogamous relationships, and I live for the day when the world’s view of women will no longer negatively affect women or the men who love them.

The post Non-Monogamy: A Sexism Issue? appeared first on Working Girl Blog.

Like so many of you, my parents split when I was young, and it was messy to say the least. I’m not sure how I came out as “normal” as I did. By “normal”, I just mean relatively emotionally stable and with my self-worth at least mostly intact. Although I was not conscious of it at the time, I look back to this moment in life, and that was the time that I realized that my perfect Christian parents who preached the love of Jesus and the sanctity of marriage exemplified none of those things at all. This actually did not drive me away from Christianity or organized religion at all, but it had to be the thing that started driving me away from the idea of traditional marriage. But I need to be clear on something here – I wasn’t driven away from it because I was bitter or disillusioned with love or family. I was driven away from it because these people who had told me they would love each other no matter what and that their marriage was God-ordained couldn’t make it work. So, I left that situation thinking that maybe my parents didn’t know everything after all.

I proceeded through middle school being home-schooled and then attended Christian high school. Do you know what I encountered? More of the same: teachers who taught about love and marriage and family, but who were divorced or estranged, or teenagers who were so sexually frustrated that they ended up having unprotected sex and teenage pregnancies or got married as young as 18 to someone they were not meant to be with for life. At this age, I still didn’t register it – I thought that all these people had fucked it up, and that I was strong enough and committed enough that I would do it perfectly. I would find the Christian guy, we would date properly, I would have sex on my wedding night, and I would be in love with one person forever. (By the way, I managed to accomplish all but that last part, and it’s no longer something I’m proud of at all.)

So, I went to college, I had almost solely Christian friends, and I maintained a decent bubble. I met a great guy (really, truly to this day one of the best guys I know), we dated properly, and we waited to have sex until our wedding night (though guiltlessly engaged in a lot of pre-marital behavior that probably neither of our parents and none of our friends would have supported). It was during these years that many things were happening simultaneously, which I will do my best to distill for you here. First, I was watching other friends get married and become quickly unhappy with people they had been madly in love with just a couple years before. I was watching couples who had waited to have sex for years become completely dissatisfied with their sex lives in just months. I was watching people “follow God’s calling for their lives”, yet they were completely unhappy day-to-day. Second, the year after college, I took a year off and did a year of AmeriCorps, during which I acquired a large, close-knit group of non-Christian friends. That was the first time I realized that I could have intense connection with, deep love for and incredible support from people who had nothing to do with and wanted nothing to do with organized religious or spirituality. These two things were really the start of my then-husband and I starting to branch away from the church and tradition and to proceed down a path that was all our own. This was around the time we started experimenting with drugs and watching porn together. We did so carefully and responsibly, and we were happier than ever.

Third, around this time, we were becoming close with another married couple who also practiced non-monogamy, and who I don’t believe stumbled into my life by accident. We learned little bits here and there from them and how they dealt with incorporating other people into their relationship even though the wife identified as much more monogamous than did the husband. I watched them become the happiest couple that we knew, and it was by a long shot. This doesn’t mean that they were perfect, nor does it mean that they were happy because they were non-monogamous, but it did mean that traditional relationship was not the key for everyone.

This isn’t the post where I’m going to share my ex-husband’s and my entire story and experience with our open marriage. That’s for another time. The point of this post is that THE MODEL DIDN’T WORK for everyone. It fucked some people over at the age of 18, it left most adults that I knew in loveless and sexless relationships, and it wasn’t necessary in order to have deep and true connection with others. When my ex-husband and I truly started struggling near our divorce, we received countless letters, emails and phone calls from family members talking to us about how dark times would come, but that we needed to stick it out. They talked to us about the joy of growing old together and how sometimes you just need to find a way to make it work. Yet, why was there all this value placed on making it work? What inherent value does staying with one person forever hold if you’re not happy? And where was this joy they were talking about? I hadn’t seen it in any of their lives. It was at this moment that I really stepped back and decided to not take advice from people who didn’t have anything that I wanted. It’s simple, really, but I had been taking advice from those people my entire life.

This was really the moment that I became non-monogamous, if there ever was to be a moment identified. I decided that I was going to follow what felt right to me and start experimenting with what made me feel happy, stable and fulfilled. I wasn’t going to follow the rule book, but I wasn’t going to buck against it either. I was going to break away from tradition, though not bash it or refuse to acknowledge its merits. I was going to place zero value on what others thought of my decisions and focus on what was right for me and my path, being willing to go through heartbreak and trial by fire in the process, and being willing to leave behind all that I knew, being forced to start completely fresh. THAT is how I ended up where I am today.

If you’ve thought about breaking tradition in some way, but have no idea where to start, this is one of best articles I’ve read on the subject.

The post How I Became Non-Monogamous appeared first on Working Girl Blog.

I’m in love with two men, and they both know it, and they are both in love with me. And it’s one of the most wonderful and enlightening experiences of my life. Falling in love is amazing. If you can make it work, you should do it as often as you can for as long as you can. One part that’s so amazing about it is watching your entire world melt away as this one person who you didn’t even know just a few months ago now becomes your universe. The human mind and heart are incredibly adaptable and fickle.

But another amazing part of it is that each lover loves you for completely different reasons, and when you fall in love with someone, you get to see yourself through that new lover’s eyes in ways you may never have before. Falling in love with Gavin – God, it was a long process. I’d adored him forever, but fell in love with him really through ration and reason. I’m not saying falling in love with him wasn’t emotional – in fact it was incredibly emotional, and when he told me he loved me, I cried. But so much of the reason I actually fell in love with him was because of how amazing he is. He doesn’t care what other people think, he has dreams and passions that are outside the box, he is incredibly funny and makes me laugh so hard every single hour we are together, he’s vegan, and we share nearly every single interest in life (like working out, Indian food, love of hotels, travel ambitions, places we’d like to live, True Detective, late night snacks, sleeping on opposite sides of the bed, stand-up comedy, and much much more). Falling in love with him made sense, and he makes sense as a life partner. So, our decision to enter into and stay in a long term relationship is founded on facts, not feelings, but the feelings are there too. They feel intense, but slightly less magical, because there is no magic to it – it’s completely explainable. We are perfect for each other, so of course we’re in love.

Hayden, on the other hand, boy oh boy. I worry that our kind of love is not the kind that lasts a lifetime, but honestly, I’ve been surprised so far at the steady increase of our feelings for each other and the stability of our relational connection. But our love doesn’t make total sense. It makes sense in only one way – that we had a deep magnetic soul connection from the time we first met, and it wasn’t physical or sexual, it was just the universe. When we began dating, we both felt it – the pull, the undeniable intimacy that was already between us even though we didn’t know what it was. We couldn’t look at each other for too long, because the intensity was just too much. And it wasn’t sexual. At least not that part of it.

But other than that connection, which is not to be undervalued, it does not make sense. I’m 28, he’s 40. I’m a first year associate, and he’s a partner. He has a kid, and I don’t, nor do I want any. He eats meat at every meal, and I’m vegan. He’s not into holistic health, and I’m all about it. He doesn’t believe in signs from the universe (despite his admitting our undeniable energetic connection), but I live my life by them. He doesn’t think sleep is that important, and I need about 9 hours every night to feel good. I’m a morning person, and he’s a night owl. I’m a spiritual Christian, and he’s a culturally Jewish atheist. I’m polyamorous, and he’s monogamous – like actually monogamous – not just by default, but actually because it’s what he truly desires.

So what is this intensity of feelings for each other even built on? It’s not built on anything that I can see. When he says I like you so much, and I ask why, he says I don’t know, I just do. I would say the same back to him, whereas if you asked me that about Gavin, I would be able to list 100 reasons why. This freaks me out a little, because it makes me feel like our love (and it is love, not just infatuation, and I have no doubts about that) could just flit away at any second. I feel like it’s a universal connection of energy that exists pursuant to something that is completely outside of our knowledge or control, and we might wake up one day, and it might just be gone. And maybe we were just lucky enough to catch it and get to live it for a while, knowing that it won’t last forever.

I try not to dwell on these thoughts, because I do believe in the law of attraction, and I don’t want to put that thought into the world. I don’t want to create that world. I want to continue to create the world with Hayden in it. That being said, I just wonder, will I ever be able to explain it? Or is it just to forever be a mystery?

So, of course, I talked to him about it. As most things, I didn’t mean to talk to him about it, but I am terrible at hiding any feelings, good or bad, from my partner in a romantic relationship. And, of course, he came through with his quiet brilliance once again. I told him how with my high school ex-boyfriend, my ex-husband, and with Gavin, the relationship was built on a rational foundation consisting of 100 special things I did only with that person, but that he and I didn’t really have that, and we were so different. It made me feel like our love was destined not to last. He didn’t panic or worry. He just told me exactly what I needed to hear.

He explained to me that, when I was younger, I may have been looking for people who served as guideposts in my development, who supported the way I saw the world, and who were compatible with me in tangible ways, but now that I’m a bit older and more fully formed as a person, I was just looking for people who validated and reflected how I felt and the energy that I craved being around. This rang so true to me. I don’t even know that it explains our connection in any meaningful way, but all I needed was a reason why things felt so right with him, and that was it. We vibrate on the same frequency. I feel like when he looks at me, he understands everything in my head, and there is a depth to his soul that intoxicates me. And that’s all I need in life right now. I don’t need someone who likes to go to spin class or cook vegan food or read spiritual junkie books or go out with my 28 year old friends. I just need someone who understands me and loves me, who I exchange energy with in a way that makes me feel good and complete. And Hayden is exactly that.

The post Infatuation or Love? appeared first on Working Girl Blog.

We had barely talked for the last 10 days. Gavin was traveling in Europe on a boys’ trip, and I’d been getting killed at work. We’d spoken on the phone for maybe 30 minutes total over the last week, so we weren’t exactly feeling super connected, but it didn’t matter. It was a great week for our relationship. I feel like I’d had a week full of all the other people in my life acting like idiots. At work, my boss asked me why I did something…that he told me to do. My other boss asked me why I had billed so few hours…when it was a holiday week and he knew I’d been out with a hemiplegic migraine (yes, that’s the kind where you lose muscle control in your face like you’re having a fucking stroke). Hayden had started being wildly uncommunicative about his plans. I stopped by his office late Friday afternoon only to find out that he was about to leave for Long Island in about ten minutes, but had just sort of forgotten to tell me. I tried to get Seth’s best guy friend to come to NYC for Seth’s birthday this summer, but he just whined about not having money or time (both of which he has plenty of). I went to a friend’s birthday party with girlfriend from work last night, and the whole time all she kept saying was things like “Oh, I didn’t know there was going to be food here,” “Why am I so hungry?” “I’m going to eat an almond,” “I changed my mind,” “Should I eat a piece of cheese?” and other fucking nonsense, while proceeding to eat nothing and starve herself and drink wine. My sister lost her virginity at 32, and it turned out to be pretty uneventful for her, which really threw me for a loop. I’ve been working my ass off, having crazy long days at the office, and struggling to find balance in life generally, and meanwhile all the people in my life are just acting a fool. Ok, not all of them, but they’re all either acting a fool or doing things that are just really hard for me to process.

And then there’s Gavin. My sister said it best: the thing about Gavin that has impressed me the most is not just that he’s so great, but it’s the consistency of his excellence. He is so consistent, it’s almost infuriating. Don’t get me wrong. Gavin fucks up. Oh, he fucks up regularly, but it doesn’t matter and isn’t memorable because of how he acknowledges it, quickly works through it, and immediately comes around to just continuing with excellence. He is never defined by his mistakes, and that is solely because he doesn’t believe those to be part of who he is. He knows who he is, so when he messes up, it’s like he just thinks to himself, that’s not who I am, lets it go, and moves on to be who he knows he is. It’s unreal. He is, to date, the greatest gift in life I’ve been given.

During weeks like this, when Hayden and friends and coworkers and bosses are messing up hard and either not at all recognizing it or recognizing it and letting it define them, I am more appreciative than ever of the abundance of care and love that Gavin brings to my life and the consistency of his excellence as an individual. He astounds me.

Meanwhile, he has been traveling the world going out and meeting tons of girls every day and sort of realized that, well, they all suck. He was texting me the other day just telling me out of the blue how much he loved me and I asked why he was feeling that way. He said he didn’t know, so I pried.

“Is it because you’ve seen the likes of women around the world and realized what a special snowflake I am?”

“You know, I hadn’t thought it in that exact way, but now that you put it that way, yes.”

And yes, Gavin is currently my primary partner. But that’s the thing about relationships, and it’s actually the thing about a lot of things in life – people want to make it last forever. That’s why they want commitment, because they think it means forever. People want to live forever, be in love forever, be best friends forever. But why? I guess it’s because we are scared of death and heartbreak and loss, and evolutionarily speaking, we are pain-averse. But I don’t want to be pain-averse to my own detriment. I’ve ended so many friendships with friends who were truly close to me because we were heading very different directions and no longer built each other up in the way we once did, and I didn’t think that our history was any reason in and of itself to continue hanging out. I feel the same way about romantic relationships. Breakups are fucking hard, especially the ones where you choose it because you know it’s the right thing, but emotionally you don’t want to do it. Death is a whole other category, but I’m not scared of it in the way a lot of people are. In a very real way, I want to die – not in a suicidal way, but I sort of look forward to the intrigue of entering the only experience in life that you have to do completely alone. I know I have no control over that, and I feel a weird peace about it. I don’t feel the need to live forever, and if I died today, that would be fine by me.

Good things, including life itself, do not have to last forever. The sooner you realize that nothing good lasts forever, the more you can savor it in the moment and appreciate it and not criticize it or overanalyze it (which may arguably make it last longer…law of attraction, anyone?). And that’s the thing about Gavin – he’s the shit, but it doesn’t have to last forever. Of course, I sort of hope it does, but that’s more because I would love to have the experience of truly growing older with someone. Right now, I don’t really have anyone in my life other than my siblings who has been there for more than a couple years, and I think I’d like that. Of course I don’t want to experience heartbreak over Gavin or lose him – how could I want that? All I’m saying is that, if one day, we aren’t right for each other anymore, that’s ok, and I’ll let him go. I’ll cry a lot of tears, but I’ll let him go, because making our connection last is not a goal for me. My goal is just to do what’s right for both of us and to savor every ounce of time we have thriving and growing together.

So, when I realize that this is the way I think about things, I sort of wonder if I’ll ever really have a primary partner. Gavin and I had such a great week because we realized how great we both are for each other, and we re-realized how much we love and respect each other, but I am also 100% open to the idea that I might meet someone who I love and respect more or who will be more right for me than Gavin is. That’s hard for me to even conceptualize right now, but the reality is that Gavin and I will both keep changing, and we may not always be right for each other, and that’s ok.

Knowing that, will I ever be ready, either with Gavin or in any relationship, to take the traditional leaps? Like moving in together or getting a dog or planning a vacation together 6 months in advance? Like commitment? I promise I’m not as terrified of commitment as I sound. I’m really not. But I just sort of wonder if I’ll ever be able to really do those things with someone. The reality is that I want those things, and that’s why this thought scares me so much. I want to be close with someone and spend holidays with someone’s family and go on vacations together and move in together. I also always want to have a nonmonogamous relationship, and I’ll never deny the fact that I might meet someone who will be better for me. That’s true of every relationship – there’s always the possibility you’ll meet someone better for you, but most people wouldn’t act on it. I would. And that’s never going to change.

But if, in some way, that’s going to leave me always feeling a little bit alone because I can’t have the type of experiences I want, like living with a partner, then is it worth it? There’s only one thing that comforts me in this mental and emotional struggle:

These are questions I just don’t have to answer right now. Thank god.

The post Am I Scared of Commitment? appeared first on Working Girl Blog.

Why Having Sex Outside of Marriage Makes Me a Better Mother

I see articles like the one above, and I’m happy – I’m happy that ethical nonmonogamy is getting press and going “mainstream,” except that every single article I see is talking about someone with a name like Gracie X, a Pilates teacher who lives in California, has a daughter named Tallulah, and dons black catsuits with kinky boots. Of course she’s dating someone named Oz.

No shade on Gracie X. I think Gracie X should do exactly as she pleases, but Gracie X is also a large part of the reason I’m misunderstood as a human, so you can understand my frustration. As soon as people find out that I’m nonmonogamous, this is what they picture: swingers’ parties, communal living, BDSM, and kids with hippie names who don’t know who their real father is. And there’s nothing wrong with any of those things, except that they’re just not me.

I’m a Midwest grown New York City girl. I have a J.D./M.B.A. and work at a large law firm as an M&A attorney. In my free time, I lift weights and run, write a blog, eat a lot of delicious vegan food, and drink booze. I’m not particularly involved in the nonmonogamous community. I’ve been to one make-out party, I have no nonmonogamous friends, and one of the two guys I’m seriously dating doesn’t even really believe in polyamory or nonmonogamy. I’m not particularly into role play, I don’t seriously practice yoga, and I have no desire to have kids with multiple men (or even one man for that matter).

I quite literally never tell people I’m polyamorous, because they will assume ALL kinds of things about me that are not even close to reality. I rarely tell people I’m ethically nonmonogamous, which tames the reaction slightly, but it’s still not great, because, thanks to the media, the only image people have of that is Gracie X.

Comparing this stereotype to the black community? I’ll admit that’s pretty unfair, but it’s at least the same in the sense that stereotypes of the black community were largely perpetuated by the media continuing to portray blacks in limited ways, mostly as uneducated, violent, or gang members. Comparing my stereotype to gays is, I think, completely fair. People used to hear the word gay and assume rampant group sex and AIDS. We now know that was ignorant, and there are lots of gay people who are, shockingly, totally “normal.” Same goes for vegans. Not all of us are outdoorsy, free the nipple types.

Now, look. I GET IT. The comparisons are still wildly unfair in the sense that the consequences of what people assume about me are almost nothing. Sure, I’ve dealt with some social discrimination due to my open relationship style, some of which I’ve written about, but in reality, my life is great, and people thinking I’m something I’m not hasn’t had any really bad effects on my life or career. It is light years away from what gays or blacks have had to deal with, but that’s not really the point. The point is, doesn’t society ever learn? Don’t we ever learn that when nontraditional groups emerge or come to light, we should pause and try to understand and not just jump to conclusions? I guess not.

And I might sound whiny. I’m sure I do. But it’s annoying to me that I have to hide my open relationship from my coworkers because I am legitimately afraid of how it will effect my professional development. It’s annoying to me that I can’t share my amazing and deep relationships with my two main partners with my family because they’ll judge me. These are beautiful, healthy parts of my life that I want to be completely in the light. They are also things that I need support and help with from time to time, and it sucks to feel completely alone in it. It feels really unfair.

If that’s the only burden I really have to bear in all of this, I realize I’m lucky, but it’s not the way it should be.

The post Fighting the Stereotype appeared first on Working Girl Blog.

I knew it was supposed to happen the day that I met him, and I wouldn’t take it back for the world. People say it wasn’t meant to be. I disagree. It was meant to be for the time that it was, and now it’s not, and that’s true of almost all great things in life.

His name was Matthew. I met him at the ripe old age of 18. He was tall and lanky, just like my brother and pretty much every guy I’d ever really liked up till that point. He was shy, but strong. He was quiet, but not insecure. Most of all, he was Christian and quite the polar opposite of me, two things I was told for my entire life were necessary in a partner. I absolutely had to marry a Christian because…well…just because, and I absolutely had to marry someone who was completely opposite from me in personality and temperament because 1) opposites attract and 2) I was a wild and boisterous girl who needed to be tempered. At least that’s what I was taught to believe.

Before we get into the details, let me make one thing clear. I loved my husband very deeply, and I still do. He was a true partner in life, and the intimacy we shared was unlike anything I witnessed in any marriage I can think of. He was everything most girls would want in a husband, and I truly believe he will make some girl the happiest girl on the planet. Leaving him was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but that girl was not me.

We dated for exactly one year, one month, one week, and one day before he proposed to me. He took me on a bike ride through the arboretum to lead me up to a stretch of bike path where he’d painted the sidewalk with giant bike lane letters saying “? me marry you will”, written in reverse order like bike letters are. He’d sprinkled rose petals everywhere, and when he got down on one knee, he took off his Under Armour bike shirt to reveal a black button down underneath. It was perfect. He was perfect. He loved me so much and would have done anything for me. We got married 6 months later, and I wouldn’t change a thing about my wedding day. I was barefoot outside, our ceremony was under 20 minutes long, and I drank good beer and danced my face off the rest of the night.

I had cold feet the week beforehand. I broke down balling to Matthew in his empty apartment as he was cleaning it out, getting ready to move his stuff into our new home together. I was able to get over the cold feet. I didn’t get over it because I was comforted by the fact that supposedly everyone has cold feet. I got over it because I was comforted by the fact that Matthew was everything I was supposed to have in a guy. This was NOT a hindsight is 20/20 situation. I clearly thought to myself in that very moment that even if I ended up being really unhappy and feeling trapped, it was alright because I knew I was doing the right thing and marrying the right person who would be “good for me”, keep me from becoming crazy, and make me into the Christian woman I was supposed to be. What that actually meant was that I was marrying someone who was going to keep me from being myself, realizing my full potential, and finding the path I was supposed to be on, and that part I didn’t realize at the time, nor did he, nor does he now.

It would be utterly and completely impossible for me to give you a complete picture of my marriage. I feel this overwhelming need to explain every detail so that you can understand. My mom always told me I had an overdeveloped sense of justice, and being misunderstood is self-admittedly my biggest frustration and fear. No time like the present to get over that. I have to accept that as I share my experience, people are going to receive and process it as it makes sense to them, and the opinions they form are none of my concern. Sometimes I think I’ve mastered that life lesson, but oh goodness, that’s far from the truth.

Matthew was not a typical Christian guy who did all the right Christian things and held to rules on principle. Except that sometimes he did. That was our biggest disagreement. He wanted to hold to certain rules, social conventions, and gender roles, but other ones he was totally fine with throwing out the window. He thought that since he’d been willing to throw a few out the window for me that I should be satisfied with that and conform to the rules on the rest of the issues. But that made him God in our relationship, deciding which things were ok to be flexible on and which moral and social constructs must stay in place because to break them would be crazy…and what would people think? There was a part of him that just needed to be told, “Honey, this isn’t the ‘50s anymore”, which coincidentally our marriage counselor said to him. Then there was another part of him that needed to be told he was not our marital God, deciding what was right and wrong based on nothing more than his own comfort level and guilt complex.

Matthew was pretty open minded to sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. I mean that. We both experimented with hard drugs together on several occasions, sharing a lot of important firsts. We got fucked up on cocaine one New Year’s Eve (and had a casual four-some with another couple, but that’s a story for another time), and we also did mushrooms together on a few occasions, sharing deeply spiritual and emotional experiences as a result. In those moments, he got it. He never hesitated to participate in that stuff, he never felt guilty about it, and he never took issue with me doing drugs, even outside of his presence. He enjoyed a good night of drinking and occasionally smoking weed. We enjoyed watching porn together, and he’d watched me make out with more than one girl.

Sounds like a pretty great setup for a freedom-seeking girl, right? Well, sort of. At the same time, he wanted me to conform to a lot of other religious and social standards. He wanted me to be a wife in the classic sense of the word: pack his lunch every day, not be too loud or outspoken when we were in social situations, not hang out with my male friends (or, if I was doing that, lie to his family and tell them I was hanging out with someone else because he was worried about what they’d think). He thought I swore too much and was a little too flirty generally. He told me once that, at the time we got married, he knew I wanted to go to law school but didn’t think I’d ever actually do it.

It was great that he gave me that freedom and that we got to experience so many things together. It was great that he let me have more freedom than most wives I knew even when I was outside his presence. What wasn’t great was that anytime I wanted to do something new or push the boundaries further, which to me felt like the natural course of things, he would put his foot down. It wasn’t that he put his foot down that bothered me. It was how he did it. He didn’t say, “No, babe, I don’t think I’d be comfortable with that because I’m not ready for it yet or because I’m worried about XYZ issues in our relationship.” Instead, he’d say things like “You’re crazy”, “If you proposed this idea to anyone else, no one would agree with you”, “Absolutely not – that’s just plain wrong because the Bible says XYZ”, and he even one time called me a slut (not as a joke). His generously granting me freedom was not only a gift I was to repay him with physical gestures of love, usually acts of service, but the freedom was also non-negotiable for the most part. We negotiated, but only within his comfort zone, and he had hard lines that he would never cross, primarily because he was terrified of what other people would think if they found out and secondarily because he had a moral or religious hangup with it. The first time I proposed the idea of an open relationship to him, he responded saying, “I truly feel like this is a Devil’s snare to poison your mind and our relationship.” Of course, it wasn’t the Devil’s snare when he would get blackout drunk or when we did cocaine or when he rekindled his lifelong love affair with porn after being porn-free for over 3 years, with which I took no issue.

But I understood the religious construct. I grew up with it too, and that shit runs deep. The feelings of guilt and anxiety and the strong belief that we have to hold to the letter of the law in order to be rewarded and blessed is not easy to shake off. Let’s put that aside. I believed that, with time, Matthew could shake off a lot of those old ways of thinking and come to a new understanding of who God was. As it turns out, I was at least partially right about this. We speak about it together to this day, and he is definitely still figuring it out, but he arrived at a point where he decided to “live as a non-believer” for a year or so and see what it was like. He kept telling me how much value it had and how differently he’d started to view the world and think about things. Even towards the end of our marriage, he couldn’t stand going to church anymore because it all just seemed so fake and rehearsed. That makes me so happy for him, and I hope he continues down that path.

At the time, however, we had a bigger problem on our hands, and if Matthew and I were still together today, this would likely still be a huge problem. During one of our discussions about the potential of an open relationship he told me, “You can fight and fight to try to change my mind, but in the end I need you to respect my decision. If you can’t, then leave. I want to be married to someone who is fully committed to finding everything they need in our relationship.” Yes, that’s a quote. We were discussing it via email so we wouldn’t get into heated fights about it and could get all our thoughts and feelings out clearly. Reading it again today makes me shudder. It wasn’t until two years after this conversation that we actually called it quits, but this was really the start of the deep internal struggle.

If there is one thing I know, it’s that you can never find everything you need in any one human relationship. The idea of searching for everything you need in a relationship comes from people who have no idea who they are or what they want. That was when it started really sinking in. He didn’t know who he was without me. He had defined his entire life around having me as a partner so that his entire happiness, drive, personality, goals, and, most notably, spirituality depended on me. The moment I gained this awareness, the burden became almost unbearable. I started to slowly see all these little things: Matthew depending on my entirely for his relationship with God, him depending on me for assurance that what we were doing in life was ok, him depending on me to push our relationship forward in intimacy and to avoid complacency, him depending on me to be his personality and his showpiece when we were out at social events, him depending on me to be the face of our marriage to his family, and him depending on me to be the sole provider of both friendship and romantic love in his life. He had no one else. He didn’t have any close friends, he wasn’t very close with his family, he didn’t understand self-love or personal development, he didn’t have a strong sense of spirituality or confidence in his relationship with God, and he wanted me to manufacture all of that for him. He thought he found a special snowflake and could find everything he needed in our relationship.

The burden was quite literally unbearable. I remember when we split up, I was talking to him about my spirituality and the road I was heading down. I was talking about feeling a “leading” in my life or seeing open doors and clearly knowing what I was being called to do. We got talking about meditation and prayer and love and connections with other people. He looked at me and said, “I know once you’re gone, I’ll never think about this stuff anymore. I’m going to miss that.” I told him he could choose differently on that front – choose to think about it, engage with it, and find people who wanted to explore it, but he said he just knew he wouldn’t. He was resigned to complacency in so many facets of his life and covered this up by throwing himself headfirst into his work and personal building projects. He dumped his mind and heart into engineering, carpentry, cycling, and design. He loved it, and he was talented, but it was his avoidance mechanism to keep his mind and hands busy so as not to encounter the deeper things in life. It scared him, and to this day he openly tells me that he struggles with thinking all the time about whether he’s believing or doing the right thing. I almost never battle with that and am completely at peace, and as hard as I tried, I could not be that peace for him. He has to find it on his own, and if he does find peace, THAT will make me the happiest girl in the world.

The post Why I Divorced the Man I Love appeared first on Working Girl Blog.

I learned that not caring what people think is not a state of mind. It’s a state of action. If you really don’t care what other people think, you will do exactly what you want when you want. Do you have any idea how few people do this? Do you have any idea how life-changing it is? This is one area where my partner is light years ahead of me. The other night, we parked in the grocery store parking lot around 9:30 p.m. and started heading toward one of the entrances. “Oh, I bet this one is closed” I said, knowing that stores often only use one main entrance late at night. “Come on” he said, motioning me to keep walking toward the door. As we approached, we saw a sign that said that entrance was closed and could not be used after 8 p.m. “See? We can’t go in this way” I said, as we were still several feet away. “Come on” he said again patiently as he proceeded toward the door. To my surprise, the door opened, and in we went. This might sound like the tiniest thing in the entire world, but it’s not. It’s huge. He walks through life with the attitude that he doesn’t do what he’s told simply because he’s told to. When he sees a closed door that says DON’T ENTER, he walks towards it anyway. If it doesn’t open when he gets there, he’ll find an alternate route, but make no mistake – he expects it to open. Do I believe that things in physical reality actually change because of our thoughts and beliefs? I’m not sure. I haven’t quite come to terms with the idea that expecting the door to be open might make the door actually be open. The rational inside of me screams that this cannot be the case, but the truth is that we’ll never know. In any case, I’m not sure it much matters, because the point is to walk through life healthily entitled and fearless, expecting the best to come your way. That is the kind of person I want to be.

Do you have any idea how often you have an opportunity to exercise this kind of power? I saw a girl get on the train yesterday just head of me. She was carrying several large bags, and it was clear by the way she was looking around that she wanted to sit down. There was a woman sitting on the bench clearly taking up what could have easily been two seats, but the girl with the bags just looked longingly and settled for a spot against the wall. I walked right over and, with just my body language, made it clear I was going to sit down. The woman taking up two seats slid right on over and out of my way. I sat down comfortably and turned on my audiobook while watching the girl with the bags still waiting for a seat. At the next stop, she took a seat from where someone else got up. Why didn’t she sit down at first? No matter how you spin it, it comes down to this: she wanted to sit, but she didn’t sit because she was worried what other people would think about her. She either didn’t want to ask the woman to move because she was worried about the conflict or she just has general social anxiety about talking to strangers. Maybe she just felt awkward or like she didn’t want to impose on others. Again, this might seem like a small thing, but it’s not! Walk through life with the attitude that you deserve the best. In every situation, stop and ask yourself what you want and then do that thing. I wanted to sit, so I did. No woman taking up more than her fair share of the bench was going to stop me, but honestly, I didn’t even think about her. I just did as I pleased.

This attitude is the same reason that I come into work at 11 a.m. when there’s no reason for me to be here earlier, while the rest of my coworkers get here at 9:30 to sit at their desks and do nothing. It’s the same reason I am in an open relationship despite my friends thinking I’m going through an experimental phase or that it’s bound to fail. It’s the same reason that, since high school, all my closest friends have been guys, despite people thinking that my ex-husband was pussy-whipped because of it, and it’s the very same reason I have fully embraced every inch of my body and don’t hesitate to show it off whenever I can even though I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I just don’t care. It’s my cup of tea, and I’m over here happily sipping away.

The post Do What You Want appeared first on Working Girl Blog.

We live a world of scarcity, a starvation economy where there’s never enough for ME, and I have to fight everyone else for what I need and want. I once heard Brene Brown talk about Lynne Twist’s quote: the first thing we do in the morning before our feet even hit the floor is think I didn’t get enough sleep, and the last thing we think before our head hits the pillow at night is I didn’t get enough done, and everything in between those two moments is a litany of scarcity. I refuse to buy into that, and I certainly refuse to bring scarcity into my romantic relationships. I choose a life of abundance.”

If you’ve read even one book about open relationships, you’ve heard this argument before: the starvation economy theory does not apply to intimacy. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, hang in there. The starvation economy theory, at least as it’s used in this context, is the idea that when you love or are intimate with many people in your life, you love each of those people less than you would love just one person. It’s the idea that love and intimacy are commodities that you can spend, implying that you have a finite amount and will eventually run out. If you spend more on one person, that means you spend less on another. Polyamorists like to say that this concept is an illogical attack against nonmonogamy because any parent who has 10 kids will of course deny they love each child any less than a parent with only 3 kids. Anyone with 5 close friends will say they love and cherish their close friends just as much as the person with only 2 close friends. In most social situations, we don’t think of love or intimacy as commodities at all, and I’m sure the polyamorists have a fair point here. We can love many people at once without any detriment to the others, but come on – do we really think our capacity for love is infinite?

First of all, we have to clarify what we mean by love and intimacy. When we say love, do we just mean the feeling of love, or do we mean the expression of love? The expression of love is certainly a commodity. Think about the 5 love languages, quality time and touch being two of them. Certainly those are commodities – the more time we spend with one person, the less time we have to spend with another, and often the more we touch one person (especially sexually…), the less we are able to (or want to) touch another, at least to an extent. So, until we find ways to surpass this dimension of limited space and time, our expression of love is clearly limited, finite, and quantifiable. As for the feeling of love, I can’t think of a time I ever felt like I loved too many people, and the number of people I love has seen a lot of variance.

To be fair though, even though I could feel the feeling of love, or even the feeling of being in love, towards many people without loving the others less, there are other things that come along with the feeling of being in love that actually are commoditized. Work with me on this. When you’re in love with someone, you’re supposed to think of them when something funny happens in your day. You spill coffee on your white blouse or the partner at work you’re talking to pronounces the word recalcitrant with a hard “c” like recalkitrant. Assuming you’re dating and falling in love with people who care about how your day goes and share the same sense of humor with you, what do you do? Send 4 text messages? Just write one and copy and paste it? Since being polyamorous with my current partner, I haven’t fallen in love with anyone new, and I’ve already caught myself having to retell stories over and over to the people I’m dating or talking to. When you’re in love with someone, you’re supposed to be aware of their absence in your life and let them know their presence is missed. How many people can you really miss at the same time? How many people can you really message “Hey babe – just thinking of you and wish I were with you right now” and mean it? Are these relationship expectations just things that the media has told us? Well, they are things the media tells us, but having been in love before, I think that often they are unavoidably real reactions to falling in love with someone. Falling in love affects you constantly, and that’s half the fun. You cannot tell me that you could really be falling in love with two people at the same time while also maintaining your relationship with your primary partner. I mean, do you not have a day job? That shit is all consuming. So then, does the standard of open relationships that contain a primary partner just start to mean a rotating second partner? One comes in, another goes out? Or does it mean that I might fall in love with someone new outside of my primary partner, get through the honeymoon phase with that person, integrate them into my life in a more “normal” and less consuming way, and then move on to fall in love with someone else? Maybe this sounds heartless or fulfills the rumor that I’m a man-eater, but I really don’t see it that way, and I’d venture to say the guys I’ve been with don’t see it that way either.

I really enjoy falling in love, but I also really enjoy having deep relationships with people and getting past the honeymoon phase to where someone can really know you and love you for who you are. I also like experiencing that with different people, because the person I am is different in each lover’s eyes. Seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes is one of the most powerful parts about falling in love. I’m not an infatuation junkie or a love addict (I’m not entirely sure that’s a thing, but if it is, I’m not one). I don’t just search for that next high. In life, I can truly say that I am completely content alone, but my life is enhanced as I add others. I search for people with whom I very much hope to have long term connections. These connections can manifest themselves in all different kinds of ways, and I love that unknown. Of course, most people never make it past the initial dating phase, and if they make it to the falling in love phase, they don’t usually stick around for the long haul of being integrated as a permanent or semi-permanent fixture in my life, so I don’t really foresee having a problem of running out of love…or time, or kisses, or feelings for any of my partners. If, one day, I am lucky enough to fall in love ten times outside of my primary partner, and if even two of those people stick around to become secondary partners for me, those would be some insanely successful results, and even then, I don’t think I’d be close to my max capacity for love or expression of love.

So, as for the starvation economy of intimacy, I don’t know the answer. I think we can all agree that we don’t each have a finite amount of love that gets doled out, person by person, the last person suffering the most or receiving the least. That being said, we are spiritual beings living within the limits of a physical world, and, because we are not God, the expression of our love has limits. What are those limits? I don’t really need to know because, in my experience, I don’t think I’ll come even close to reaching them, and if I do, I’ll not only fall on my knees thanking my lucky stars for the endless rush of blessings into my life, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

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“I promise that, right now, I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone or ever thought it was possible to love someone. I promise to work really hard – harder than you’ve ever seen me work – to protect and preserve our intimate connection and our life together. . . . If we can’t make it work, I promise to be honest and to treat you with love and respect as we go our separate ways.”

And that’s ok, because, as Louis CK would say, no good marriage has ever ended in divorce.

No, my partner and I are not currently discussing marriage. Not even close. If we were going to discuss it, I would venture to guess that we would start the discussion around age 30 or so, with a wedding not soon to follow. But if you’ve ever been in a truly intimate relationship, you know that these things come up and that it doesn’t feel like a big deal to talk about them. So, yeah, we’ve talked about it. I’m pretty sure I’ll never get married again. First of all, I’m not even divorced yet. HA! It’s so much fucking trouble to get it done, and my ex and I have just been too lazy. To be fair, I’ve filled out my paperwork and am waiting on him, but it’s a real pain in the ass, so I’m understanding of his procrastination. If I ever have to go through this again, I’ll shoot my eye out, so why get married in the first place? I am not one of those divorcees who is now bitter and jaded and doesn’t believe in marriage. Well, I’m not a divorcee at all yet, but you know what I mean. I think I still believe in marriage for some people (I’m actually not entirely sure, but it doesn’t really matter). It’s just not for me. I don’t say that because I have a fear of commitment or because I have some agenda to fight against the state’s institutionalization of love and family. Rather, I say it because I believe it is entirely impossible to make promises about your future actions and feelings for the rest of your life.

I can never again in good conscience promise to love someone forever or promise to stay by someone’s side no matter what. I would rather never get married again, but my current partner would really like to get married and have a wedding someday. He says it’s not fair because I already got to have that, and I can sympathize. My wedding was fucking awesome and one of the happiest days of my life. I’d be blessed to have two, but what is a wedding anyway? A wedding is a huge party that you spend an arm and a leg on so that you and all your closest friends can party like it’s 1999. Hell, I’d do that again, but does there have to be a marriage? I have no problem signing the paper, filing joint tax returns, owning property together, or maybe even buying some kids, but what I cannot do is stand at the alter and say “’til death do us part.” If he wants to have a wedding, let’s have a wedding. Let’s only invite the people we actually like. Let’s do everything just the way we want to, sending convention to the wind. For me, that means walking up that aisle, looking him in the eye and saying, “I promise that, right now, I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone or ever thought it was possible to love someone. I promise to work really hard – harder than you’ve ever seen me work – to protect and preserve our intimate connection and our life together. I promise to do my absolute best to take care of you and be your partner in every area of life that you want or need. I promise that, at this moment, I fully intend to spend the rest of my life with you. I really hope that we get to grow old together and truly enjoy every moment and that it continues to be in both our best interests’ to hold each other’s hand and be each other’s confidant, support, and best friend. If we can’t make it work, I promise to be honest and to treat you with love and respect as we go our separate ways.” Ok, so maybe we could leave that last line out just for the sake of people who are listening, but we’ll both know that’s what we mean. I absolutely cannot hold the convention of marriage above both my own and my partner’s wellbeing. I cannot promise to stay with someone when I truly believe it is not in either of our best interests.

It strikes me as pure insanity to continue doing something that you know isn’t good for you just because five or ten or twenty or thirty years ago you promised you would. You know what that sounds like to me? Pride. I can only think of two reasons why people would do such a thing: moral/religious conviction and pride. I had to get over both when I separated from my ex, and that was not easy. Once I was able to shed the marriage-is-for-life-and-if-you-get-divorced-God-will-punish-you mindset, I then had to get over the if-I-just-stick-it-out-and-suffer-God-will-reward-me mindset. Once I did both of those things, I still had to get over what everyone would think. I thought of all the people who told us we were getting married too young and that we should wait. I thought of all the people that thought we had a perfect relationship and what they’d think. I thought of all the people I’d told how different Michael’s and my relationship was and what true intimacy we shared. I thought of all the people who knew about our experiment with a semi-open relationship and how they’d definitely think that was the cause of our divorce. It was nothing but pure and raw pride holding me back from doing what I knew was right for me and for him. I had to stand up and scream, “I was wrong. We were wrong.” (I actually don’t think we were wrong. I think we were right and then it became wrong, but it doesn’t matter too much for this discussion). When he told his mom, she literally said to him “We tried to tell you…”, which was “I told you so” in different words. You’d think the “I told you so” people would be happy that you were changing your mind, separating, and making what they thought was the right decision, even if it was a little late. Instead, it was the same people who said “I told you so” and thought we shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place who were completely convinced that we should stay married no matter what. Again, pure insanity. It was like they were so overwhelmed by their own pride that they said, “We tried to tell you, but because you didn’t do what we said, you made your bed, so lie in it.” Thank God for being an adult and getting to do as I please. I mean that.

Phew, that was a small tangent there. The point is that, if my partner really wants to get married, I’ll do it, but it won’t really be a marriage per se. It will be my promise of present feeling and future intention and nothing more, which I still think is pretty powerful and that I know will be enough for the right guy.

The post Why I’ll Never Get Married Again appeared first on Working Girl Blog.

“I am just desperate for your attention, and I don’t want you to give your time to anyone else. I don’t want you to work or have any friends or any hobbies or speak to anyone else. I just want you to pamper me and love me and give me all your attention, and I know it’s insanely irrational, but I can’t stop.”

“…You are literally shopping right now for a date with another guy tonight. You are a crazy person.”

One of my biggest pet peeves is when my partner and I encounter a hurdle or have a problem, and even my good friends will say some stupid shit like, “Well, you signed up for this.” I don’t say that to you when you have a problem with your husband, bitch. I don’t look at you and say, “Don’t talk to me about your problems in your marriage. You signed up for this monogamy.” Problems resulting from monogamous relationships are just considered status quo. It’s the socially accepted norm, and everyone is expected to endure it and figure it out. Even in an age of rampant divorce, sticking with it and figuring out a way to make it work no matter what is considered the noble thing to do. Yet, when my partner and I want to stick with our open relationship and figure out a way to make it work no matter what, we are considered headstrong and stupid. We are told it can never work and that we are foolish for trying. That’s kind of hilarious when well over 50% of marriages end in divorce and nearly every person I know has been cheated on at one point in their adult lives.

Now, to be clear, I am not in an open relationship because I think guys (or girls) can’t be faithful. I am not a fatalist polygamist. I don’t think open relationships are the necessity of the future because people just need to accept that individuals need more than one sexual partner. I actually don’t believe that at all. I truly believe that a monogamous relationship can be a beautiful thing, and I even believe there can be inherent value in saving yourself for one person and conquering the struggle of refusing all others. I think that a monogamous couple can experience a special kind of physical intimacy, and most importantly, I believe that monogamous couples can be truly happy and fulfilled. I don’t know any who are, but I’m just saying – it’s possible.

One of the repercussions of my partner’s and my open relationship is that, despite having been together for over 2 years, his family doesn’t know about us. Whenever he goes back to his home state to hang out with friends and family, I am not invited, nor am I really included in that part of his life in any way. It gets tough sometimes and hurts my feelings because, contrary to popular belief, I am not just an unfeeling man-eater.

When he’s home and getting dinner with his two best guy friends and both of their girlfriends, yeah, I feel pretty ostracized from his life. When I call him and he declines my calls because he’s with his parents, yeah, it hurts my feelers a little bit. It won’t be this way forever, though. Because I was coming out of a four-and-a-half-year marriage and my partner and I both knew we wanted an open relationship, we didn’t broadcast to everyone that we were seeing each other. We’ve kept it relatively under wraps except for our good friends. So someday, maybe someday soon, his family probably will know that we are romantically involved in some capacity, although I’m not sure how much we’ll tell them.

In the meantime, however, I am pretty much zero part of that part of his life. So, when he goes home for a while, especially when we are already long distance and I’m in New York hooking up with other people, the distance between us can grow. I shouldn’t even say it like that. The distance between us can grow in my mind, which sometimes leaves me feeling desperate for attention in a completely irrational way. Even if I know hands down that he cares deeply for me, and even if we’ve spent an hour on the phone just the day before, and even if he tells me he loves me all the time, and yes, even if I have a date with another guy that night, I can start to feel irrationally anxious and become an emotional train wreck.

“Well, that’s what you get for being in an open relationship – his family’s not going to know about you and this is what happens” people will say. Do you have any idea how many MORE problems entered my life due to my ex’s parents knowing about my and my ex’s relationship? Goodness gracious. I’d take this any day. That’s the thing: we choose our battles. We all make decisions about our own relationships. We choose which friends know what we truly fight about, we choose how much we share with our families on our child rearing philosophy, and we all lie about where we spent the weekend or how often we go to church. Everyone hides certain things from their families, and very few people tell the truth to anyone about the nitty gritty of their romantic relationship.

My partner and I have chosen this battle. It is not easy every day, but neither is any relationship. But do you know what? It’s perfect for us, and we’ve decided to make it work no matter what.

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