On Divorcing Not Only My Spouse But Also Monogamy

“I AM REALLY, REALLY GOOD AT BEING POLYAMOROUS!” I shouted.

In my current middle-aged relationship landscape, I don’t have a lot of strict parameters separating romantic connections from friendly ones. Each relationship is its own tiny universe, unique, expansive, singular and peerless. Each relationship has its own contours and deserves better than to be uncomfortably slotted into a limited space. I have intimate romantic friendships with zero sexual component, and other people that I don’t really know how to classify or define the vibration between us, and the good news is, I no longer feel like I need to. I also have a cohabitating partner whom I adore, and who does a really exceptional job of supporting and loving me on a day-to-day basis.

This perspective evolved slowly, as part of my experience of exploring nonmonogamy/polyamory after I got divorced. Before I turned 40, I spent my adulthood fully bought into the idea that you were only allowed to passionately love ONE PERSON in your whole life, and that person was also the ONLY person you could have sex with, and you were also supposed to be LEGALLY MARRIED to them and also SHARE A HOME with them, until you were dead. This seems absolutely cuckoobananas to me now, but it really made sense at the time. What a positively unfair amount of pressure to put on a single relationship that’s supposed to last the rest of your life! 

I don’t think every monogamous relationship is bad, to be clear – I had the bad luck to sink myself in a marriage that was poisonous to me. And a big part of that experience was me overextending myself to try to perform ~Wife~ in the manner I thought I was supposed to; pouring myself, everything I had, into supporting the person I’d promised to stay with. It didn’t feel right or natural, and it was only a matter of time before I would run out of gas and break down. 

Monogamy is grand for lots of people. It’s a choice, like anything else. It’s just not for me, at least not anymore, or at least not right now. Certainly I will never again put myself in a situation where my capacity to fiercely love lots of people is a threat to my partner, and a source of profound shame for myself.

Is it fair to say that a huge part of the human experience is just figuring out how to build gorgeous and tender connections with other people? Pre-divorce, I thought a healthy committed relationship required a merciless crushing of my independence and my individuality in the name of compromise. I thought a proper pairing meant the total dissolution of two separate people into the couple state. I was a ~Wife~ before I was anything else, to my former spouse, and, slowly, to myself as well. I said, “Marriage is hard work.” I said this a lot. I wrote about it. Marriage is hard work. Marriage is basically a whole extra job. Marriage is hard work at a whole extra job in a mine buried a mile beneath the surface; no one up top really knows what might be happening down there, but there is work, relentless, unyielding work, work to preserve the marriage, to keep it together, at all costs, and for what? Why? Because I promised? Sure, all relationships require effort. But when I said “marriage is hard work” what I meant was “I can no longer feel parts of my own body, and I might be dying.” So I quit. And when I quit being married, it felt exactly like walking out of a subterranean prison and feeling the sun on my face.

Of course then I had to spend a few years figuring out how to be myself again.

Some people who do consensual nonmonogamy or polyamory feel really strongly that this is an intrinsic fact about them. That they were born polyamorous, and had to learn how to be who they are in a world where such things are not widely socially acceptable. That’s not me. I’m very good at being monogamous. I’ve never cheated on a partner, ever. I am definitely capable of emotionally isolating myself to a single companion.

But I recently had a conversation with a monogamously partnered friend, who mentioned a couple times how he is “committed to” his monogamous relationship, and I had a wild revelation: I am also really good at being polyamorous. The words my friend was using were so familiar. I’d used them myself! And yet these phrases also sounded like an old language I had forgotten how to speak, this idea of being committed to a monogamous relationship at the expense of any other potential romantic relationships, or at the expense of my many passionate but platonic friendships, or at the expense of my relationship with my own damn self. 

I realize, typing this, how ordinary the idea of being committed to a monogamous relationship sounds, certainly to most of you. It was shocking that it didn’t sound ordinary, to me; it sounded awful. Not awful for my friend, of course, but awful for me, in the same way that when I disclose being nonmonogamous to monogamous people, the first thing they say is – and they’re often weirdly aggressive about it – “Oh I could never do that! I get too jealous!” At the idea of being committed to a monogamous relationship, my whole body reacted. Oh, I don’t want to do that. I get too oppressed.

This was stunning because I have spent the last several years feeling like a fake polyamorous person. I haven’t read all the books. I don’t know all the permutations of relationship styles, structures, and orientations. A bunch of the lingo escapes me, and I find it pretty irritating anyway. I don’t surround myself with polyam community, because I don’t actually like a lot of it. And I am not filled with compersion – this is often described as “the opposite of jealousy,” in which a person feels happiness at seeing their partner being happy with someone else – all the time, although I’ll admit I am way better at it than I ever thought I would be, when I first began this process of re-understanding, and that kind of advancement seemed far beyond my abilities. I am not totally free of jealousy either, although it doesn’t cause the problems it once did, because I don’t avoid it anymore, and I listen to the inner wisdom it offers instead. 

But I’ve felt like a fraud. And suddenly I felt the full weight of my quest for authenticity in my self and in my relationships pounding me right in the chest. I shouted at my therapist, “I AM REALLY, REALLY GOOD AT BEING POLYAMOROUS!” and she, having had a front row seat to this transformation over the last six years, said, “Yes, you have decolonized your own mind, and that’s quite an accomplishment.” And YES! WOW! I HAVE! 

I am bad at recognizing my own achievements, but in that moment I wanted to run down the street, yelling at people, I AM A REAL FREE PERSON WHO HAS WORKED VERY HARD AND BROKEN THROUGH ALL THE BAD RELATIONSHIP STUFF IN MY BRAIN TO BE ABSOLUTELY AMAZING AT LOVING LOTS OF HUMANS! I DON’T TRY TO CONTROL THEM! I TRUST THEM WITH MY FEELINGS! I AM MAYBE KIND OF INVINCIBLE AT LEAST IN THE SENSE THAT I KNOW I AM STRONG ENOUGH TO BE EXTREMELY VULNERABLE AND SURVIVE WHATEVER COMES! 

This didn’t just happen, of course. It’s the culmination of years of really intense internal work. I simply didn’t see it all clearly until now. 

It’s so crucial to my life now that I continue to surprise myself. The thing I fear most about aging is becoming too settled, stodgy, stuck. When I was younger, being settled was all I wanted – I longed for stability more than anything else. I wanted to be safe in a legally binding marriage, in a home with a mortgage; I wanted to be secure in one spot with deep roots. I wanted there to be no questions left to ask or answer. I wanted to know exactly what the rest of my life would look like. I spent most of my adult life trying to make all of this happen, only to realize it wasn’t what I wanted at all. That ever happen to you?

Age and infirmity will probably settle me one day. What I want now is to know myself, over and over again. And I’ve never gotten to know myself by standing still. I’ve gotten to know myself by facing challenges – by looking for challenges and chasing them down on purpose, sometimes. 

bell hooks told us, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” I’ll repeat what I said earlier: is it fair to say that a huge part of the human experience is just figuring out how to build gorgeous and tender connections with other people? Is it reasonable to want to spend the rest of my life looking for the unknown parts of myself that can only be discovered in relationship with others, and to help those I love to see those hidden places in themselves as well?

Until the next one, which might be less doggedly internal, or might be more so, if that is even possible. 

Lesley