My teacher Simone Seol asked the other day, “Why does it matter to YOU to do what you do?”
Here’s what I responded:
It matters to me because I actually want to be free.
As Fannie Lou Hamer says, “Nobody is free until everybody is free.” Even if I am “free” from the construct of monogamy at the independent level, I am not actually free at the interdependent level because it is still unsafe to be non-monogamous in a monogamous world.
And, I want non-monogamy to be so fucking common that I can hit on every single human I find attractive on my path. That is approximately 30 people per day.
I want to be able to tell people the truth of how I feel about them without being persecuted.
And finally, more sex.
I want to elaborate and share a bit more with you.
I grew up believing in my bones that I was objectively ugly and unattractive and unlikeable. I was always off beat the way I am right now. Very outspoken and forward, including when I had a crush. In high school, I would just go around holding hands with the people I had a crush on. They did not like it. It may have even qualified as harassment. I was quite the nuisance.
So nobody liked me.
Not only that, my mom and my relatives would side with them.
“Of course they’re not gonna like you. You’re too much.”
I started to accept the fact that no one was going to like me for the rest of my life.
It just didn’t stop me from being too much. It’s not that I didn’t care about what other people thought. It’s just that I couldn’t control being myself.
Some people have told me it’s autism or some sort of disorder. Well, great. I happen to believe that autism is just a pathological term for humans who are great at being themselves instead of boxing themselves into any construct.
Whatever the case, the belief that I was simply unacceptable was lodged so deeply into my brain that I never really even tried being liked by people. Not because I didn’t want it but because I thought it was impossible.
So even when people told me that they liked me, I would shrug it off as some sort of delusion on their part. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Maybe it was my disbelief. Maybe it was my unskillful enthusiasm. Either way, I did not know how to respond to anyone’s advances in a way that sustained any relationships with those people that liked me.
More evidence that I was going to be alone for the rest of my life.
When Dan came around and started loving me, again I thought it was not going to last. And for the entirety of our marriage, I was certain that his eyes were broken and that he had no understanding of what “attractive” meant.
Throughout the whole time, though, my subconscious was screaming somewhere that she wanted to be loved. She wanted to feel attractive. She wanted to feel validated. But she didn’t know how to even start going after something like that when my consciousness was already sure that it was not going to happen.
So the incongruence drove me to make unsustainable decisions. Decisions that would satisfy nobody because I had no idea what I really wanted and what I was doing. One thing I did was that I followed outside superficial standards around what attractiveness meant and looked for the fastest possible way to get there.
That meant that I was bulimic for almost a decade. It meant I obsessively checked my weight. Focused on the blemishes on my face every time I looked at the mirror.
Some people call it body dysmorphia. Whatever the case, I was constantly tugging at the two conflicting thoughts of “I am so unlovable” and “I want to be loved.”
Looking back, I am so angry that I never had the tools to actually examine these beliefs and reconcile them in a way that didn’t feel so incongruent.
When we opened up our marriage, I had sex with the most gorgeous people I did not even fathom in my wildest dreams would ever want to have sex with me. And some of them, I actually like as human beings at the intellectual and emotional level.
I had to sit down for a second.
I was like, “So, you’re telling me that I am actually likable? People actually want to come after me? People don’t find me disgusting?”
I can’t change my past. I can’t change people’s decisions in the past in telling me how unlikable I was.
But I am still fuming at the fact that compulsory monogamy kept me from really seeing how much I am actually in demand. I was required to be loved by just one person for my entire fucking life and be satisfied with that.
It was only after opening up my marriage that my 33-year-old belief of “I am unlovable” that drove most of my self-hating decisions were wrong.
Sure, I could do the fucking “self-work” of loving myself and seeing my inherent value for myself and all that shit. But the reality that people won’t tell you is that most times, self-love is such a gigantic project that it requires community care.
Sometimes, a big hug at the right time is more medicinal than a solo meditation.
Sometimes, a conversation with an elder is more medicinal than journaling on my own.
Sometimes, exquisite and mind blowing sex is more medicinal than fucking chanting to myself that I am lovable.
Not only that, requiring myself to stay in compulsory monogamy kept me squarely focused on a goal that was never mine: “Be happy with one person for the rest of your life.”
I required myself to be happy.
Which meant I required Dan to be happy, too.
So my happiness almost depended on Dan’s happiness.
That is how our entanglement began: requiring each other to feel certain feelings in each other’s presence so we can feel like we are doing a good job with life.
We were obsessed with those proverbial fucking gold stars.
And fortunately, we were happy for the most part. Which is why we were so reluctant and ignorant of the possibility of a sustainable open marriage. Because we were trained to be fine with “good enough.”
That’s the other thing I am upset with. Being told that I should be grateful and happy with no conditions attached if things are “good enough.”
What a shit rule that I no longer have any interest in following.
Okay, so great. I am now free of monogamy, and Dan and I are having the time of our lives.
But that doesn’t mean that we are actually fully free.
As I quoted Fannie Lou Hamer at the top, “Nobody is free until everybody is free.”
When we are unwilling to examine our own paradigms, our first instinct is to turn to judgment of others.
Jealousy. Envy. Resentment. Rebuke.
I have been on the receiving end of all of that by people who have no interest in going after their own freedom and instead have all the interest in going after mine.
When I feel like I need to be vigilant of my own freedom, I don’t have actual freedom.
Even when people are not outright pouring judgment right onto my face, there are limitations around how I get to interact with people.
I find human beings beautiful. I absolutely love telling people how stunning they are inside and out. I love telling people the truth of how I experience them.
It is something I had a dearth of growing up. Something I did not fully experience myself until I opened up my marriage.
Sure, I can do the “mindset work” and just tell people how beautiful they are without regard to the consequences. That doesn’t mean that the consequences don’t exist.
That is why, while I am “free” from monogamy at the independent level, I am not free at the interdependent level because my independence freedom is not celebrated and honored for what it is.
I consider this a tragedy given how short our lives are.
As a privileged person with all my basic needs, my biggest goal in life is to laugh and entertain and feel alive in my body as much as I humanly can.
Any construct that gets in the way of that can go fuck itself.
Unfortunately, not everybody agrees.
We are so Serious because we are Serious Adults who needs to do Serious Things and have Serious Conversations and overall just take things Very Seriously.
It’s like, I’m trying to find places where I belong. I have gotten good at that. But it has taken a lot of time and energy to find places where I actually feel like I belong. It still does.
And I don’t like that it feels so exhausting for people like me to fucking exist in this world.
Simply because it’s not “acceptable.”
Acceptable to whom?
The biggest mistake I made was believing that acceptability was a universal thing. If I am not acceptable to one Very Important Group of People, then I must be unacceptable to the rest of the world.
But I found the opposite to be true: The more unacceptable I am to Important People, the more acceptable I am to people who don’t give a fuck about being important.
I advocate for each person to feel free in their bones, in their homes, and in their communities.
With the very short life I have, making it easier for us to love on our own terms is what I find to really important. I envision a world where judgment is not as interesting as the freedom we get to each experience for ourselves.
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Want to join me in building sustainable open marriages?
Opening up your marriage sustainably looks like:
❤️
Facilitating your spouse’s “Hell no, I would rather eat dirt than become non-monogamous” to “Holy shit, where was non-monogamy my entire life?”
Not because you are “persuasive” but because they start remembering who they really are underneath the surface level familiarity and comfort of compulsory monogamy.
❤️
No longer fighting about sex or the massive libido differentials because:
(1) Each of you get to have sex on your own terms at the intensity and frequency of your choice with whomever you want; and
(2) You know how to experience jealousy and envy in a way that is generative, not destructive. Even if you’re thinking right now, “I could never get over jealousy or envy. It would destroy me.”
❤️
No longer finding the need to avoid, attack, or defend because you know how to listen to what they are actually saying underneath the words that appear hurtful at first glance.
And knowing how to get closer to each conflict because you are hearing what they are saying, not trying to be right.
❤️
Not scrambling through Reddit anonymously for urgent support on nuanced and complex relational issues only to find that all they have to tell you is to “just break up and move on because you deserve better”
Without regard to the history and context of the relationship and the tenderness of what you are really feeling.
❤️
Saving the hours of having ruptures that end up nowhere and preventing the exhaustion that follows.
No more watching yourself dissociate or lash out at work as a result of having nowhere else to blow off steam for relational conflicts that even your closest allies don’t seem to understand.
❤️
Watching yourself enjoy your family even more by:
Feeling more present with the kids because you are taking care of yourself as much as you are taking care of the kids.
Feeling much less resentment towards your parents and siblings because you no longer feel entitled to being loved by them competently when you’re already being loved in so many different ways from your community and connections.
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Finding a community where you can be yourself instead of continuing to find yourself in places you don’t belong and feeling the need to hide yourself.
Building an ecosystem of support where you don’t have to feel like a criminal for having different desires.
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Finally recognizing what love really means to you by:
(1) Loving your spouse so much that you honor each of their decisions, including the potential decision that they might leave you;
(2) And then finding that that kind of love is exactly what makes the marriage safer for both people to partner and grow together through the practice of non-monogamy. Not because non-monogamy is better, but because it’s the right fit.
❤️
Opening up your marriage can feel hard, but it doesn’t have to feel impossible.
The Opener is a community where we arrive at sustainable open marriages instead of feeling like separation is the only option for resolving differences.
I wish I had this community a year ago when I felt so alone in opening up our marriage.
Join us here or send me a message if you are interested in joining.