He’d chosen to not wear a condom, he told me. I stared at my husband – now ex – in shock. We were scheduled to leave later that day for Chicago, in the middle of a blustery winter, and suddenly this was happening.
“This” was not him having sex with a woman outside our marriage; that part was fine. “This” was him choosing to ditch the condom, thereby breaking the fluid bond (our agreement to use protection with other partners) and my trust in him.
I was in an open marriage, and I’d been cheated on. I was devastated. This also wasn’t the first time.
During the drive to Chicago, I tried to explain why I was upset. I didn’t think of myself as the jealous type; since discovering ethical non-monogamy in my mid-twenties, I’d leaped in and never looked back. Sometimes called open relationships or polyamory, ethical non-monogamy encompasses a variety of kinds of relationships (from group marriages to swinging to long-term partners who have other partners too). The main idea is that everyone involved gets to decide what degree of sexual and romantic exclusivity they want from one another, which is a departure from mainstream Western culture’s default assumption that all sexual and romantic relationships must always be monogamous to be valid and functional. It generally takes a lot of frank and vulnerable conversations to work, but I felt like I’d overall had a good time of it, and I was confident that I’d found a life partner who was on the same page in terms of prioritizing sexual safety while being able to form connections with new people.
Why had he done it? I knew the other woman; we weren’t particularly close, but then, we didn’t need to be, since I trusted my partner to uphold our shared agreements.
He didn’t have a good answer as to why he’d decided to not wear a condom in the first place. “It just…felt right to do it,” he said.
I thought of the You had one job meme, and I turned my face against the cold glass of the car window. When we arrived, we got food, and I gave the talk I was supposed to give. There was a party. We crashed at someone’s house. I asked, in moments when it was just the two of us, for what I thought was a small consideration while I sorted through my feelings — that my husband not have sex with the same woman again just yet.
He refused to consider the request. I crumpled up inside, feeling violated.
The only rules in consensual non-monogamy are those that the people entering into relationships choose to make. Once you toss traditional notions of sexual monogamy out, you need to evaluate what’s actually important to you: if it’s okay to have sex and relationships with other people, well, what is off-limits? Is falling in love with other people okay? Is the sex fine as long as it doesn’t happen in your bed? Do you need to feel prioritized above others a certain degree? If so, how does that work, and how can you guarantee that you’ll feel a certain way?
Most people engaged in non-monogamy have some rules around sexual health and safety; after all, STIs come with a fair amount of stigma, and not all of them are curable or treatable. We use the term “fluid bond” to mean intentionally going through the process of getting tested and ensuring that birth control is taken care of before ditching barriers during sex acts. Though again, different folks will define these things differently. If your agreement means having penis-in-vagina intercourse with your fluid-bonded partner without a condom, but using condoms with other partners, what about oral sex, or same-sex partners, or even kissing?
I prefer to be fluid-bonded with one person at a time, regardless of how many relationships I’m in at the time. It feels emotionally intimate to me in ways that are deep and a bit unsettling, and I just don’t have the bandwidth for that most of the time.
Except.
Earlier in our marriage, we’d met a couple we liked and started dating. We formed what is referred to in non-monogamous circles as a quad: a four-person romantic unit, often two couples that have intermingled. For whatever reason, my husband and the woman in this couple had trouble keeping condoms on during sex (perhaps a warning sign I should’ve spotted), and it was suggested that since both parties in the other couple had been sterilized, we all go get tested and forgo condoms.
It worked well enough for a while. When there’s an aspect of your lives that makes you a social outlier and carries some fear of judgment if others were to know it about you, it can be fun to bond with people like you and be able to socialize without risk of being ostracized or judged. The four of us hung out, shared meals, went camping, had sex.
Then the guy in the other couple started dating some folks who were in a triad (non-monogamous lingo for a three-person relationship). That was fine, since our agreements didn’t put any restrictions on how many relationships anyone could be in, so long as they were meeting all their obligations to their existing partners.
For reasons I still don’t understand, that man stopped using condoms with his new partners. To his credit, he told the existing quad before having sexual contact with any of us, so none of us were at risk of contracting anything. The trust, however, was gone. Those relationships withered.
Six months later, my husband chose not to use a condom with his new-ish partner and my world fell apart…how could this be happening again?
It’s weird to realize that you’ve been cheated on (twice) when you thought your relationships were cheat-proof. Want to have a one-night stand? Go for it! Want to have regular sex dates with someone else? Great, have fun, just use a condom! Things that are normally evidence of cheating are often fine in open relationships, not that I claim to understand what counts as cheating to “normal” people since apparently some people get upset if their partners watch porn or form close emotional bonds with others, or whatever.
The feeling of betrayal, though, that’s what I assume being cheated on feels like. The knowledge that we entered into an agreement together, and part of the reason for its existence was to keep everyone safe and healthy, and then the agreement was violated – that stings.
When the man in the quad cheated on us, it definitely hurt, but it was more of a distant anger and sadness, a betrayal tempered by the knowledge that this was not my life partner, this was a slightly more detached partner, albeit someone I cared for and trusted enough to be in a fluid bond with at that time.
When my husband cheated on me (and so soon after the quad fell apart), it felt like an extremely intimate violation. The aftermath just made things worse, with our strained conversations in between moments of socializing in a chilly Chicago winter. He didn’t want to cut off sexual contact with this woman because he worried it would hurt her. She thought she might be leaving town soon, so he wanted to act as emotional support (somehow better accomplished with a penis involved?) to her while she prepared for that. The more we hashed it over, the worse it became, and she actually apologized to me for the whole thing, even though he had initiated sex without a condom without her knowledge. She’d assumed he’d donned protection as usual, only to find out later that he had not and had thus violated her boundaries as well (another red flag that I allowed to pass by, but which later informed my decision to divorce).
The whole thing was agonizing as I grieved the way my trust had been violated; I cried a lot and lost an unhealthy amount of weight. Feeling like he had acted in such a way to needlessly destroy the trust between us, when maintaining that trust was as simple as putting on a condom, was devastating. Therapy – both couples and solo – helped to some degree, but my partner always seemed unhappy that I hadn’t forgiven him quickly enough, that I was slow to return to trusting him (as though there’s a metric for these things?).
After some time, with me counting weeks for the appropriate incubation periods for all the STIs, he got tested and we resumed our fluid bond. We continued to form relationships with other people. We were happy sometimes, until we weren’t, and then we divorced.
Why am I writing all this now? That marriage is long over, though some of the pain remains. I was only able to lean on close friends for support at the time, since as a lifelong educator I was unable to be out as ethically non-monogamous.
That changed when the university I’d taught at for seven years declined to give me a new contract in the midst of the pandemic. In the time since I finished my PhD there have been fewer and fewer full-time jobs in my field, such that I don’t know if there will be a place for me in academia anymore. I don’t see much point in specifically staying silent about my experiences with non-monogamy; anyone who thinks partaking in this relationship style makes me a worse scholar or teacher is relying on outdated and uninformed stereotypes, and the unemployment office surely doesn’t care.
I’ll admit that I’m writing about this in part for the catharsis, though it also feels sickeningly vulnerable to open up about this stuff. And I write so that people can learn a little bit about how others live and can learn that even though sexual exclusivity does not guarantee fidelity, neither does its opposite. People who want to pursue their own pleasure at the expense of violating others’ trust can and will find a way to do so, regardless of the relationship structures they are in.
But by the same token, people who want to navigate relationships – open or monogamous – with integrity will find ways to do so as well. Even after all the anguish of being cheated on twice in open relationships, I still am drawn to them. I love the freedom of being able to pursue multiple partners, even if I don’t always find myself with the time or energy to do so.
I guard my independence fiercely, and value being able to make my own decisions about my sexuality. Yet I’ve also learned firsthand how much it hurts when someone ruthlessly chases the most independent option while neglecting its impact on others.
The revelations and ensuing conversations that happened five years ago that winter changed me, making it harder for me to trust but easier for me to assert my boundaries and values. I also became better at spotting telltale signs of gaslighting – as when someone tries to convince you that your emotional response to something is disproportionate or does not matter. I wish that I had a less insidious takeaway point than “gaslighting is awful and happens in intimate relationships a lot,” but at least I’ve learned to insist that my partner(s) take my emotions seriously and not give me shit for taking too long to “get over” my feelings about a violation. I wish a lot of things had gone differently in those relationships, but here we are, and I’m doing my best to learn from the past while looking forward with a sense of optimism and adventure.
