Open marriage reportedly invigorates some relationships. But what’s in it for the women who are so-called secondary partners?
Elle
BY WHITNEY JOINER
When Ivy*, a 35-year-old activist, lived in New York, her relationships never seemed to work out. She dated the way a lot of people date in the city, juggling multiple partners without any real forward movement. If she did end up in a monogamous relationship, the same thing would happen when she hit the six- or eight-month mark: she’d cheat.
Then she moved to San Francisco. There she met a man at a conference who was “super polyamorous,” she says. Her new partner’s version of “super polyamory” was different from the secretive multiple-partner dating she’d been doing back in New York: this was all out in the open, with lots of discussions about boundaries and agreements; what was okay between them, and what was not. She became his polyamory protégé, and has since had four open relationships.
In her second open relationship, her boyfriend already had a serious girlfriend. Ivy was, for all intents and purposes, the “secondary.” She was more curious than turned off: “I’ve always been one to question relationship paradigms, and I thought, well, the only way for me to really understand this is to try it,” she says. For a period of six months, she decided, she’d date both her boyfriend and his girlfriend. “It was very clear what the hierarchy was, but he called us both his ‘girlfriends,'” she says. The expiration date on this experiment was crucial: “I didn’t want to be obsessing every day whether it worked for me, because that’s a recipe for unhappiness.” At the end of the six months, she’d assess.
The threesome eventually split up—the duo wanted to return to a monogamous arrangement—but she’s still close with them both, and she’s still nonmonogamous. But she’s not out about it. “I’m planning on coming out of the poly closet,” she says. “I just haven’t yet.”
Back in March, the New York Times Sunday Styles section published a story about the open marriage of the actress Mo’Nique and her husband Sidney Hicks that created such reader interest that, two days later, the paper ran a comment-filled companion piece online. A few days after the Mo’Nique story ran, DirecTV debuted a new show called You Me Her, about a married couple in Portland who start seeing a woman; it was quickly renewed for two more seasons. The rise in interest in open relationships has been chronicled in countless print and online outlets over the past five-plus years (Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Slate, Salon, The Guardian). In 2012, Showtime debuted the reality series Polyamory: Married & Dating, which involved a handful of Californians endlessly processing their feelings about their partners’ outside sex lives; it aired for two seasons. Last July, a Times article asked, “Is There Such a Thing as ‘Ethical Cheating’?,” featuring the dating site OpenMinded.com. (For a paper that famously lags on spotting social trends, the Times is really into this nonmonogamy thing.)
How Does a Polyamorous Marriage Go the Distance?
The recent media glut notwithstanding, an important voice has gone missing: that of the extracurricular partner, the lover, the girlfriend or boyfriend—people like Ivy. The focus is always on the couple—how their adventures in nonmonogamy fuel their partnership and heighten their sex lives; how they’re able to navigate sleeping with others without breaking their sacred union. Maybe Ivy isn’t “out of the poly closet” not because she’s ashamed or embarrassed to be part of a poly arrangement, but because of her particular position within that arrangement.
In the open-relationship world, there’s a term for this: “couple privilege.” It was introduced to the lexicon by Franklin Veaux, coauthor, with Eve Rickert, of 2014’s More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory. They define it as “external social structures or internal assumptions that consciously or unconsciously place a couple at the center of a relationship hierarchy or grant special advantages to a couple.” You can imagine how this plays out in practical terms. “You’re telling her that she’s good enough to fuck but not good enough to be seen in public with. You’re telling her that you love her—but not as much as you love the social privileges of seeming to be monogamous,” Veaux writes on MoreThanTwo.com. While “couple privilege” is a concept meant to be resisted by people trying to ethically navigate nonmonogamy, I also saw it as the larger macro lens through which the media reports on these relationships: always through the eyes of the couple, with a tinge of titillation (ethical cheating, sexy!) as well as anxiety (but what about the dying institution of marriage?). It’s an angle that only serves to reaffirm the preeminence of coupledom in American culture, not disrupt it.
So who are the mysterious people these nonmonogamous couples are sleeping with? What would it mean to be in someone else’s open relationship as a single woman? Would it always seem like the dreaded settling, a lesser version of what one should truly want? Does it always mean wasting a limited amount of emotional and psychological bandwidth? Is it possible to be happy as a “secondary,” as wince-inducing as the word is?
Beth*, a 37-year-old therapist in San Francisco who’s currently dating a couple (sexual with the man, “romantic” but not sexual with the woman), is of two minds about the settling question. She worries that she isn’t leaving herself open for the primary relationship she’d eventually like to have because other men will be turned off by what she’s doing. On the other hand, “when my sexual and intimacy needs are being met, I feel whole, like I’m not approaching [new] men from a place of need or desperation,” she says. …