Dear
Viny,
Wow,
this is weird, but my whole life turned weird a year ago, so maybe
this is normal. Quick stats: 48, stay-at-home mom, 21 year marriage,
monogamous to the core, husband dropped the polybomb a year ago. I'm
still sifting through the rubble trying to find anything worth
saving. We've been in therapy for a little over 6 months, but I'm
still struggling and I'm afraid I will never be comfortable with
this. I went from a tight, loving secure partnership to having doubts
and fears and insecurities out the wazoo. I know I'm absolutely not
interested in sharing the kind of deeply intimate emotional and
physical relationship I have with my husband with any other man. And
I can't understand why he wants to. I'm battling the "why am I
not enough/good enough to keep you interested in me" demons. I'm
also deeply squicked out about the physical aspects of sharing my
husband's body with someone else. The thought of touching, kissing,
making love with him after he's been inside someone else is deeply
uncomfortable.
So
after that rambling mess, here's the issue. In therapy, I was asked
"What can your husband do, in lieu of emotional and physical
fidelity, to assure you of his love and commitment? What can he
do/say/give you to help you feel safe/loved/comfortable?" I'm
having a really hard time coming up with anything tangible when the
voice in my head keeps screaming "NOOOOOOOO!!!! Don't do
this!!!!!"
We're
not one of those couples joined at the hip, we both have separate
friends and hobbies as well as the multitude of things we share, so
it's not like I expect him to be my everything. But I did expect him
to be my only deep love and intimate partner. And I was really hoping
he felt the same about me. Now I feel like I'm being demoted and that
I'll eventually be dismissed. You know, First Wives' Club. "Yeah,
honey, thanks for raising my kids and helping me build my business
and restore our kickass Victorian home, but this is Vicki and I
really want to bone her now, sooooo…."
Dammit,
rambling again. I guess, two things, how do I trust him in this when
it seems like our whole marriage was a lie, and two, how do you get
over the ick factor of your beloved having sex with other people?
Thank
you,
Faithfully
His
***
Dear
Faithful,
My
heart goes out to you. You’re
putting on a brave face, but you are clearly in a lot of pain —
and I can totally see why.
Your situation is tragic, in the classic sense. Like a person whose
spouse was diagnosed with cancer, or someone whose house was leveled
by a tornado, you are in an emotional tailspin because your life has
been permanently altered, in a way that you would never have chosen
for yourself, by a force beyond your control. And to make matters
worse, it was your loving husband who set that destructive force in motion. From
your point of view, he might as well have said, “Honey,
I’ve
been praying for cancer,”
or, “What
I think this place really needs is a natural disaster,”
and BAM: a year later,
you’re
still picking up the pieces, shellshocked, going, “How
do I put this back together?”
and “What
the hell were you thinking?”
Obviously,
I do not mean to imply that polyamory is a bad thing. I am simply
recognizing that your husband’s
revelation — “I
think I might be poly,”
or “I
would like us to open our marriage,”
or whatever he said to you
— was
a life-changing event you wish had never happened.
For
that reason, the first thing you are going to have to do is to work
through your anger and grief and come to a place of acceptance. Your
husband is not exactly the person you thought he was. The
relationship you had, which felt right to you, did not feel right to
him. Going forward, you and your husband do not have entirely
matching visions of the “good”
life. Those are the stark
facts, ma’am,
and regardless of what the two of you decide to do about dealing with
your differences, you desperately need to come to terms with this new
reality. Only after you have accepted your life, as
it now is, will
you be able to think constructively about how
it might be.
Getting
your old life back is not an option. As soon as you’ve
made peace with that, you will be in a position to think about how
you want to move forward. Moving forward always requires saying “yes”
to something, and you
can’t
say “yes”
to anything as long as
you’re
still screaming, “NOOOOOOOO!!!!”
I’m
not going to try to convince you to say “yes”
to what your husband
wants. But I do think you ought to start by saying “yes”
to what you
want — not
in some imaginary world, in which your husband’s
polybomb never exploded, smashing your sweet heart to smithereens,
but in this
world, the weird and wackadoodle place where you —
you, of all people! —
have been reduced to
asking some Viny chick for “alternative”
advice online. Whether you
like it or not, this world is now your world.
So,
now that you’re
here, how do you figure out what you want? That’s
a tough question. I can’t
answer it for you, but I can give you a good starting point to begin
soul-searching: imagine yourself, twenty years from now, telling a
good friend, “That
polybomb my husband dropped on our marriage back in 2014 turned out
to be a blessing in disguise.”
If you can imagine
anything good — good,
according
to you —
coming out of the wreckage
of the marriage you once thought you had, then there’s
a “yes”
you can feel good about
working toward.
Now,
to answer the two questions you actually asked.
Question
#1: How can you trust your husband, given that your whole marriage now
feels like a lie?
In
my opinion, your inability to trust your husband isn’t
the real problem here. The real problem is your inability to trust
yourself: you thought your husband wanted the same kind of marriage
that has always appealed to you, and you turned out to be wrong. It
doesn’t
matter why
you believed
what you did, only that your belief turned out to be false,
and now you’re
afraid: if you were
wrong about him once, what’s
to prevent you from being wrong about him again? The answer is:
nothing. You will probably be wrong about him, yourself, and
everything else in the world in lots
of ways before all is said and done. And that is okay. You see,
trusting a partner is just a choice you can make —
not because that person
has proven, beyond all doubt, that he or she “deserves”
to be trusted, or because
you’re
sure you can’t
possibly be wrong, but because you have decided it’s
the best choice for you.
And in order to make a deliberate choice to trust someone else, you have to trust your own ability
to make good choices.
I
am sure there is evidence both for and against the story you’re
currently telling yourself, the one in which your husband was lying
for twenty years, while you played the part of his dupe. So, it’s
time to decide: do you or do you not want to believe that awful
story? May I suggest that the “tight,
loving secure partnership”
whose loss you are
presently mourning was not a complete fabrication? That it was in
fact based on mutual attraction, respect, and positive regard —
and that all of these
things are still possible, if you choose to believe in them?
Question
#2: How does one get over the “ick”
factor
of sharing one’s
lover with another person?
This
question surprised me, because I have never felt grossed out by being
with a partner who has recently been sexually involved with someone
else. (Emotionally threatened, yes; physically revolted, no.) Sex is
inherently sexy to me —
so,
although I seem to be more paranoid about STI risk than many
non-monogamous people I know, I really don’t
mind the idea of this or that beloved appendage having been in some
orifice that doesn’t
belong to me, so long as reasonable safe-sex precautions have been
taken. I have never been the type to insist on showers and clean
sheets after my partner has been physically intimate with someone
else. Honestly, it’s
never occurred to me, before now, to wonder why not —
but
I guess I simply assume that a person cherished by my partner is
worthy of my love as well, at least by extension. It doesn’t
bother me to think there might be some symbolic or energetic “trace”
of
a foreign body on my lover’s
body, because I do not perceive my lover’s
lover as foreign,
like a pathogen or a noxious weed.
It’s
more like, “Your
invited guest is my invited guest.”
Then
too, I have never thought of anyone else’s
body as mine,
to share or not share, as I see fit. I firmly believe that each
person’s
body is his/her/their own. Another person’s
body may be shared with me, for a period of time, as a gift; my
sacred task is to appreciate that gift without expecting to keep it
for myself.
Although
you and I are coming from very different paradigms, I suspect that
you will feel much less squicky about sharing your husband’s
body if you do in fact choose to share
him, for reasons that feel right to you. It’s
amazing what a little agency can do. I also think that if you can
shift your perspective just a bit, “Vicki”
(the hypothetical
home-wrecker in your First Wives’
Club scenario) will turn
out to be, on closer examination, a person —
just a person, much like
yourself, with needs and hopes and fears (and maybe even a few
stretch marks). Are other people so gross, really?
There
is one final part of your letter that I would like to unpack. You
say you are “absolutely
not interested”
in
sharing the kind of relationship you have with your husband with anyone else, and that you “can’t
understand”
why
he would want to share that kind of relationship with anyone other
than you. I have a couple of reactions to these claims of yours. First of all, I am suspicious
of how emphatically you state your disinterest. Are you so sure? Is
there no
circumstance
under which you might feel differently than you do now? But even
putting that objection aside, and assuming that you are 100% correct
(not only about your present self, but also your future self), I
smell a two-faced rat. On one face, the sneer of smug superiority (“I
would never
consider the
horrible thing you are considering; I am so much more loyal and
loving than you are!”).
On the other face, eyes squinched shut (“I
refuse to look at your reasons for wanting to share love and sex with
anyone else, because I’m
terrified of what I’ll
see. What if you don’t
love me anymore? What if it's because there’s
something wrong with me?!”)
Faithful,
it’s
obvious to me from your letter that you are smart, sassy, and
supportive — which
is a truly kickass combo of womanly virtues, in my opinion. Your
husband is one lucky guy. And guess what? He probably knows it. I
can’t
tell you his reasons for dropping the polybomb, as you put it, but I
have a hunch they’re
mostly
about him. Have
you ever tried asking him why he wants to be intimate with other
people? I mean, really
asking him, and
really
listening —
curiously,
compassionately, without judgement or self-defensiveness —
to what he has to say in
response? Perhaps if the two of you could approach each other in a
spirit of open communication, you would be able to explain yourself,
and he would be able to explain himself, without either of you having
to make the other person wrong. You’re
monogamous; he’s
polyamorous. You love the shade; he loves the sun. To-may-to;
to-mah-to.You get the idea. Can you love each other the way you are?
Thanks
for writing. I admire your courage, and I wish you the best of luck.
Panache and Penuche,
Viny
