What Happened Next, or How My Open Marriage Started to Derail

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I alluded to the difficulty of setting up rules and regulations for an open marriage in my last post. One of the biggest challenges couples in open relationships face is the fact that both partners will meet other people. People that they might like a lot. People that might eventually threaten their primary relationship.

This is exactly what happened to us. And I was the guilty party. I was the one who met someone and started to have inappropriate feelings for him.

Here’s what happened:

I met a Swiss man named P online. He was already in a relationship – although he was not married to his girlfriend and they were not living together. P didn’t seem particularly unhappy in his relationship, apart from the complaint that his girlfriend didn’t seem to like any of the “cultural” activities that he did. She didn’t want to go to museums or plays and couldn’t talk about art or books. This, P decided, could be remedied by going outside the relationship. I was perfect to share these experiences with him, since I loved many of these things myself, and so we decided to meet at a hotel bar for a drink.

From the very beginning, I was enamored with P. When I first saw him, he was sitting in a corner booth in the hotel bar with a glass of wine. Blond, tall, well-dressed, he seemed poised and calm. I liked him instantly, but he made me nervous. He spoke German, French, and English fluently. He had plans to learn Japanese. He worked for a very famous creative agency and had been a professional volleyball player. In other words, he was slightly intimidating.

I had a glass of wine. Then I had another. After three glasses, we had gotten through the awkwardness of the first meeting, exchanged stories about our motives for having an affair, and made plans to see each other again.

He walked me back to my apartment entrance. As he was about to leave, I decided to kiss him. I was tipsy and I very much wanted to, so I stood on my tip-toes and said, as I leaned in: “Do you want to kiss me?”

It wasn’t really a question, though, it was more like a statement. That first kiss sent a shiver down my spine. It was like a spark that awakened long-dormant sexual urgings. I felt 16. His hand slipped down my back and gently cupped my ass and I almost swooned. I think I fell into him.

After he left, I kept thinking about him. We made plans to go to a museum together a few days later. And when I saw him again, standing in front of a piece of art in a light blue sweater, I felt a happiness that I hadn’t felt in months. And that should have been my first clue. Right there. That I was happy simply to be in this man’s presence. To gaze at him as he read about the painting in front of him.

We had something else in common, something that I’ve never had in common with anyone else: both our mothers had died when we were the age of 14.

That should have been my second clue. That is a type of bond that is unusual and dangerous. One feels that the other understands him perfectly. That no words are needed. It’s like being in a very private club that no one really wants to be in, but offers a certain kind of understanding that isn’t available to those who have never experienced an early, and tragic, loss. We liked each other for it. We felt attached and comfortable from the instant we discovered our common experience.

It wasn’t planned, in other words. What began between us was spontaneous. We only meant, I think, to have a fun affair. To spend afternoons at a museum or to go out for a drink and talk about life. But that’s not what happened next.

What happened next was I made a disastrous decision to see P when my husband was visiting me in NYC, after I told my husband that I wouldn’t see anyone else for the month we were cohabiting. It was a difficult month for S and I, and I desperately wanted to see P, to see his face, to hear his accent as he talked about his job, to drink a glass of wine with him. I wanted to see P to escape the difficult conversations I was having with S about our marriage. P was like my safety valve. I needed to blow off some steam.

I told myself that I would only see P for a drink. Just a drink. That one drink wouldn’t necessarily be breaking the promise I made to S. And S had gone away for a few nights to visit his father. I was alone in NYC.

So I made plans to see P after all. And when we ended up in his office, having sex on the receptionist’s desk, I shouldn’t have been surprised by my own capacity for betrayal and deceit. I shouldn’t have been shocked by my desire to flout the rules I had agreed to with S. I should have recognized the seed of my growing affection and need for P for what it was: I was falling for him.

And that would be my biggest mistake of all: Not being honest with myself.

The Challenges of an Open Marriage

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After I began seeing K, I told my husband (S) about him.

It’s not that I wanted to exactly, but S guessed that something was different. Maybe it was my bubbly attitude. Maybe it was the way I talked in generic terms, such as: “I went to a restaurant with a friend last night.” Whatever it was, S asked me abruptly one day if I had been seeing anyone. I told him the truth. That was our #1 rule: total admission of events and complete emotional honesty.

The biggest challenge of an open marriage is negotiating a policy that will guide your actions. Rules are a must. As my favorite sex columnist, Dan Savage, often attests.

An open marriage isn’t something you can just “wing.” But that being said, it often requires diligent maintenance and on-the-fly renegotiation of the rules. Because no one really knows how they will react to being in an open marriage until they find themselves in one.

Before S and I decided to try opening up our marriage, we had countless discussions about it. Over many hours. We read articles and advice pieces about it. We sorted endlessly through the pros and cons and the potential effects on our new marriage. In the end, however, every couple – every individual – needs to make her own decision. Comfort levels differ on this topic. Indeed, some of my friends couldn’t even talk to me about this; it made them too uncomfortable to imagine themselves in a similar circumstance. Also, it made them queasy to envision their husbands or wives having sex with someone else. Open marriages, I know, are not for everyone.

(Maybe marriage isn’t for everyone – but that is a discussion for another day.)

Jealousy, I suspect, is the biggest monster in every open marriage. Even if we want the opportunity to stray, we don’t necessarily want our partners to have sex with anyone else. I’ve heard about one-way open marriages, wherein only one partner has sex outside the marriage, but I can’t imagine that is any easier than when both partners are doing the deed with others. We might not be programmed to stay with the same person for 25+ years, but neither are we programmed to stand idly by while our sex partner meanders.

S and I felt strongly that honesty would quell jealousy. After all, most things are never as bad or as scary or as great as we imagine them to be. This was no exception. The greatest danger was in our own imaginations (we are both writers, after all). And so we built in the honesty clause so that we could dispel any fears we had that the other person was falling in love with someone else.

Because that is the elephant in the room when you open up your marriage: The potential for one or both of you to fall in love with someone else.

Sex – even if it is “just sex” – is intimate. It’s hard to keep personal details or “feelings” to oneself. And I think this goes for men as much as it does for women. Sex is connective. It is bonding. It is the sharing of oneself with another. And so, there is always potential that one person will develop an emotional attachment to someone.

In the end, that is what happened to S and I. And it was me who developed the attachment. It wasn’t “love” per se, but it was something other than “friendship.” And it was dangerous.

And it wasn’t, as you might be thinking, with K…

The Open Marriage – Part 3

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Here are the things I regret now about that first night with K: We slept in his bed. We drank champagne leftover from his wedding (to be fair, I didn’t know this at the time). I played with the family dog.

He opened up a door into his life and I willingly walked through it.

At the time, I didn’t know what this would mean for either one of our marriages. But I should have. I’m not saying that I regret my affair with K; it brought me too much happiness and insight for me to be sorry that it happened. But I might have made different choices. That being said, I do feel some guilt over the depth of our intimacy. What he said to me was far more intimate than what we ever did in bed.

My biggest mistake, I suppose, was in thinking that I could control the situation. In every way. I thought I could contain my emotions, manage his feelings for me, and keep everything in check.

And then we saw each other three times in succession in just one week.

He came to visit me in the middle of the day the day after we began our affair – skipping out on work for a few hours to sit in the park on a rare warm day in the late fall. We ate sandwiches and he asked to see me again that night. This should have been a red flag. I blame my inexperience for the fact that I said yes and didn’t see this as a warning sign that we were going too deep, too fast.

We had dinner at a place down the street from his apartment. He was playing roulette and I was aiding him. We went back to his apartment for the second time and had sex on the couch. He rented a movie so that there would be a record of him being home, I suppose. It was playing in the background.

Everything felt comfortable. It was like we had known each other for ages. That was the surprising thing.

I began thinking about him all the time. We went one night without seeing each other and then went out again. This time in my neighborhood. When he said he wanted to see my apartment, to see how I lived, I balked. I didn’t want to let someone into my home – the home I was supposed to share with S – because it felt too close to me. Sure, I had already seen his pictures and taste in furniture. Hell, I had tripped over his wife’s running shoes on my way to the bathroom.

But I didn’t want him to see inside of my life.

Because, if I’m honest, I knew what that meant. I was letting him in. Literally.

I did, though. Let him in. When we were lying there, wondering aloud what the hell we were doing with each other, he said to me: “Everything about you is ace.” It was the way he looked at me, I guess, that made me realize we had crossed a barrier. Some unwritten, unspoken, unseen boundary had forever been crossed and we both knew it. We had changed our marriages in some way – unalterably and willingly. And, no matter what happened, we were going to have to live with it.

A week later, my husband S would ask me if I had slept with anyone else since we had opened our marriage.

And I would have to tell him yes.

The Open Marriage – continued

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For weeks in October 2011, I had been toying with the idea of going out on a date with another man, but I hadn’t been able to pull the proverbial trigger. I had scoured Ashley Madison for possibilities and exchanged less-than flirtatious notes with a few people, but nothing made me want to leap across the artificial boundary I had created for myself. Until I got a note from K.

To recap, K was British, in his early 30s, recently married, and worked in a creative field in Manhattan. His messages were always playful and made me laugh. For me, this is akin to making me orgasm. (Side note for all the men who complain that women don’t really want someone with a sense of humor – some of us really do. I’ve been known to go out with a guy simply on this ability alone. And no, he wasn’t also rich and handsome. Neither, actually.)

We planned to meet up on a Wednesday night at a bar called The Other Room in the West Village. It’s dark, comfortable, with a great selection of beers and wines. When I got there, it was empty. I sat at the bar and ordered a glass of wine.

As the hour of our meeting approached, I played with my phone, checked email, looked at the weather. Anything, really, to tamp down the growing nerves that were beginning to attack me. As the minutes ticked by, I started to worry that K wasn’t going to show up at all.

Then a face appeared in my peripheral vision, smiling, as K said: “Mac, I presume.”

My stomach fluttered. K was tall, fit, handsome, and well-dressed. His manners were – àpropos of his upper-class British upbringing – perfect. He instantly made me feel relaxed. And relaxed is not something one usually feels when one is thinking about starting an affair.

There are three types of affairs, I think:1. The first begins slowly and develops over time with someone you know – coworker, friend, old lover. 2. The second type is a fling – sudden, unexpected. This happens a lot on business travel or out at bars. 3. The third is the calculated affair. This is what K and I were doing and I think it is the rarest type. Not many people sit down and consciously say: “I want to have an affair.”

In other words, K and I were winging it. We didn’t know what we were doing. His honesty about that, and his admission that he didn’t know if he would walk up to me in the bar or not, was what relaxed me. He wasn’t someone who did this kind of thing all the time. In fact, he had never done anything like it before. We were feeling each other – and the situation – out as we went. Which was nerve-wracking. Which was why it was so amazing that he could put me at ease.

Before we knew it, we were into our second and third drinks and talking about our marriages, our careers, and our childhoods. My childhood was cinematically awful (I’ll probably go into it later, when it becomes pertinent to explaining some of the more disastrous choices I have made over my lifetime). K’s childhood was also surprising – both his parents were quasi-suicidal and he had cheated death twice before the age of 30. K had married his best friend and had discovered that once they had settled in together, his marriage felt more like a business merger than a passionate love affair. Which unsettled him. He maintained, however, that he loved her deeply. But that, due to his dances with death, he wanted more “living” out of his life. And this was his way of getting it.***

The part of his life that was about death I understood. Deeply. I had lost my entire family to freak accidents by the time I was 24. His ability to hear my story and to, in some way, empathize, was a rarity. Most people were in shock after hearing about my past. K merely nodded and asked questions.

After a couple of hours, we decided to get dinner around the corner at a British-type pub and restaurant. We sat at the bar, eating hamburgers, and K told me about his job and his ambitions. After I had shoved a handful of fries into my mouth, K turned to me and said: “Look, I’m going to kiss you now. Because I want to and I won’t be able to concentrate on what we’re talking about until I do. Is that OK?”

I nodded but pointed to my full mouth.

K leaned in, put his hands gently on my cheeks, and pulled my face in close to his. When he kissed me, I felt my heart start to beat faster. And I smiled.

And that was it. That was the beginning of our affair. A single kiss.

At some point later that night, I think while sitting on the leather couches in front of a blazing fire at Soho House, I decided to go home with him. That same night. I had made my decision. And he had made his.

What happened next would change both of our lives forever….

To be continued.

***[Please note that while I will always explain the rationale for my dates' choices, as they were told to me, it doesn't mean I am condoning them - or absolving myself. This is a record of events. I am recreating the narratives that were originally told to me. Maybe you will find that helpful, or interesting, or thought-provoking. Maybe not. But I will never question the validity of what someone said to me unless it was obvious they were lying. I am writing this to understand my own actions. It would be up to them to unpack their own.]

Divorce #2 – Final Today

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A note for all my new readers: For the next couple of months – at least – most of the entries at The Daily Dilettante will be about the events that led up to my divorce, which was finalized today. On Black Friday. Fitting, no?

The events that I’ll be writing about here happened over the past 15 months. As with any relationship, my marriage crumbled slowly, in stages, as a result of an accumulation of bad decisions (mostly on my part). These blog entries are a way for me to narrativize what happened in order to try to make some sense out of it. That’s what we do as humans, right? We tell our stories to understand something more about ourselves.

All this being said, and while I’m very sad that a love affair is over, I’m not sorry. If I regret anything, it’s getting married again in the first place. S was – and is – my best friend. But we made the mistake of getting engaged a week – one week!! – after my first divorce. In short, S really wanted to get married and I really loved him. And so I agreed to something that I knew – from the beginning – would be tricky for me. I knew from experience that I react to marriage like a bad rash. To be clear, I don’t mind the idea of commitment – I’m not commitment phobic – but there is something about marriage as an institution that troubles me. It feels so outdated and yet we don’t know any other way to commit to each other. The divorce rate highlights how much we are struggling with how to define ourselves in relationships.

A warning to readers old and new: These entries will often be brutally honest. If I’m going to write about this, then I am going to write everything. Which probably means that sometimes I will seem like a horrible person. My actions might seem morally reprehensible. All I ask is that you keep an open mind as I wrangle with my personal history.

Heraclitus might have been right when he wrote that character is destiny. This is my attempt to figure out my own. But my hope is that maybe it will resonate with some of you, too.

The Open Marriage

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It all started innocently enough with a conversation over dinner in Napa, late August 2011. My husband S and I had been given a gift certificate by my aunt and uncle and we were enjoying the ridiculously gorgeous view at Auberge Soleil. After one too many glasses of wine, I asked him what we were going to do once I moved to New York City to start a job that September.

Our situation was complicated by several factors: 1.) We were both in academia and academics are like soldiers – they go wherever there is a job to be done; 2.) S had a very, very good job at a top university that neither one of us thought he should leave; 3.) There was no way, even if he wanted to leave, that he could find work in the short time frame I had been given to get my butt to Manhattan to begin work; 4.) Both of us were career-driven and unwilling to give up our dreams – even if that meant separating for at least a year.

A year alone, miles away from your partner, is a long time. We didn’t have enough spare cash to do what a lot of couples in similar situations do, or fly back and forth regularly to see each other. Our visits would be limited to holidays and breaks. We would be going months without seeing one another in the flesh. And even in the digital age, with video chat, that is a recipe for growing apart emotionally.

As we sat at dinner, drinking wine, we tried to figure out what we were going to do. The answer, though scary and nontraditional, seemed obvious. We would negotiate an open marriage.

The conversation was awkward, even as we got drunk together. Husbands and wives are not supposed to sit around talking about having sex outside their marriage. We felt like teenagers about to break every rule in the book. We were nervous, and yet we felt like we had a strong enough bond to weather the strain that such a situation would inevitably put upon us.

We decided that: Kissing someone else was OK. Sex might be on the table if we were careful to choose a sex partner that was also in a committed relationship. NO SINGLES. We both felt that single people would be more vulnerable to falling in love, to wanting more, to blowing up the other person’s relationship.

We also decided – and this was far more difficult – that we would have a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, But Be Honest If the Other Person Asks” approach. Neither one of us were sure we could handle the sordid details of the other person’s sex life – or if we could even handle knowing that the other person had gone out on a date. This was uncharted water and we were trying to bulwark against hurting each other.

When I moved that September, I was busy setting up what I thought would be “our” apartment. S had shipped most of his things with mine. I unpacked, started my new job, contacted old friends, and was far too busy to feel lonely. But then, after about 7 weeks had passed and all the boxes were unpacked and I was settled into my new routine at work, I began to feel the loneliness creep in. Slowly, at first. I would go home to my empty apartment (S still had our cats in California) and I would watch silly TV shows to try to distract myself. But as I spent almost every night by myself, I started to think about joining Ashley Madison.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, or who have never heard of it, Ashley Madison is a site for married or coupled people who want to start an affair. I had heard of it because my first husband (we won’t go there yet) used it and Friend Finder for sex partners. (Note: My first marriage was not “open”, per se, and I had no clue my first husband – B – was sleeping with other women.)

Signing up for Ashley Madison (AM for short) felt creepy. I wasn’t sure what type of men I was going to find on a site dedicated to being unfaithful. I had set up some rules for myself. I would search for men who were also in open relationships or married men who seemed happy in their lives. I didn’t want to go out with men who were angry, bitter, depressed. And trust me, AM is filled with those types of people – people who feel trapped in a less-than-great marriage by kids or finances or circumstances or fear.

I uploaded pictures, filled out my profile, and sifted through almost 200 messages in my first few days alone. AM is like any other dating site, except that people are far more direct. We were all there, after all, for sex. Not romance. Not a second relationship. Not a long-term thing. Sex. Maybe some people dressed it up and also wanted some romance (I know I did), but we were all trying to find substitutes for our partners. Sure, it felt dirty and gross sometimes. And goodness knows there were men who were – for lack of a better description – just disgusting perverts in their messages.

It took me two weeks to get up the courage to meet someone in person. He was recently married. Handsome. Successful. British. (Think Paul Bettany.) But more importantly, he was funny. His messages made me laugh. So we agreed to meet in the West Village at The Other Room for a drink.

To be continued….

Divorce #2

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My recent foray into dating came as a result of a separation last fall from husband number two. It’s been a long, long time since S and I decided to see other people (yeah, you read that right – we were stupid enough to try an open marriage). Our decision to file for divorce came in March, right before my 40th birthday, and after much angst and heartbreak on both our parts. It was clear to both of us that things weren’t working; we weren’t on the same proverbial page.

S and I were – and still are – best friends. There is no one else on the planet that I love more than him. And yet, something was missing on my part. I could not get past the idea that I didn’t love him the way he deserved to be loved.

In other words, this is not going to be a blog about a woman scorned – although I am not judging any of the women who have been trampled on out there who also want to write about it. In fact, to a large extent, every single relationship breakdown that I’ve experienced has been at least 50% and sometimes up to 90% my fault. I have walked away from two marriages and a couple of long-term relationships over the past two decades of my life. In that time, I’ve learned that a part of me is a lot like Dickens’ depiction of Estella in Great Expectations. I was built to conquer and, ultimately, to wound.

And yet, I am not immune. My heart has been broken so many times, in so many different varieties of ways, that I often wonder how I have anything left to rend. But, still, it’s possible to wound me deeply. (In fact, two men have very recently caused me bouts of tears – the stories of which will be retold here in the weeks and months to come).

And yet the thing that tears at me the most now is guilt and regret over hurting S. No one has ever captured the nuances of romantic pain better than Dorothy Parker, so I’ll just let her express what I’ve been feeling about this divorce:

A Very Short Song – Dorothy Parker

Once, when I was young and true,

Someone left me sad -

Broke my brittle heart in two;

And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,

Love is but a curse.

Once there was a heart I broke;

And that, I think, is worse.

Our divorce becomes final this Friday. A single day after Thanksgiving. I cannot decide if this is high comedy, an example of what the Chinese call “eating bitter melon”, or fitting. A combination, perhaps.

And in the past year, I think I have been dating men to: 1.) figure myself out; 2.) avoid the pain of separating from S; 3.) have a lot of therapeutic sex; 4.) avoid thinking about turning 40; 5.) decide what kind of man – if there is one – that might be able to both put up with my very special brand of bullshit and make me feel content and secure and happy. The reason I think I need to write about these experiences publicly is because I have found – through talking with my friends – that it helps all of us to share our stories. It’s a way to feel less alone and to start to collectively work things out.

I honestly believe that there is a cultural shift going on out here. Women are more empowered than ever before. And yet, we don’t know how to navigate the shifting social worlds we all inhabit (and this is true of men just as much as it is true for women). We are embracing our sexuality and yet are still a little scared of it as well. In essence, the old rules of dating and marriage are not working for a lot of people, but we don’t know any other method of going about relationships. I guess this is my small contribution to the discussion. And my own shared effort to work out the ultimate question we all ask ourselves:

What do we WANT in a relationship and how do we get it?