My Husband’s Girlfriend Moved in with Us During the Pandemic
By: Nataliedavis Adventures
Tags: Pandemic, Polyamory, Relationships, Open Relationships, Marriage

Molly, almost ten years my junior, lived a few miles away with her college-aged children. Her eldest attended a local college and her youngest was away at a state university until she boomeranged home when classes went virtual. While Molly was mostly following stay-at-home orders, her children’s routines included working at a hospital, going to the gym, visiting boyfriends, and eating at restaurants.

The lifestyle of Molly’s household was inconsistent with the tighter lockdown practiced at our house. In the spring, I was getting the shakes each time I was in the supermarket for more than ten minutes. I gasped, then growled, at mask-less runners who surprised me from behind on a shared sidewalk while I took walks to escape my home office, which felt more like a prison each day. On the rare occasions when Eric and I ordered take-out food, we kept the containers outside and transferred the food to our own dishes before bringing dinner inside. We are not so obsessive now, but up until July, we were.

Molly and Eric had been dating for two years before we all bubbled up with those in our households, and viewed anyone outside our pod as a potential disease monger.

Not too far into the lockdown, Molly was having a rough go if it, primarily because without a live-in partner, she was lonely for actual adult companionship and sex. In the times before COVID-19 shrank our contact list to our immediate household, the grocery store clerk, and whichever colleagues we were forced to interact with on virtual platforms, Molly was a happily divorced programmer, with a cat and a 401k. She had plenty of sex drive, dates, happy hours, and scores of intimate connections she meticulously entered on a spread sheet on her phone. The last three came to screeching halt on March 16, 2020. Cue, Eric.

Molly and Eric had been dating for two years before we all bubbled up with those in our households, and viewed anyone outside our pod as a potential disease monger. Their relationship had steadily increased in intensity. Molly had been to our house for dance parties, and we had all gone out to clubs and shows a few times. She was fun and extroverted with an infectious laugh, dimples, and delightful corkscrew curls. I liked her fine.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

As Eric saw it, he and Molly had four options.

He could accept the risks her household posed as the cost of polyamory, and they could see each other with no physical barriers, other than condoms. This would necessitate consultation with, and agreement by, the rest of our bubbled-in polycule,* whose members had lower risk profiles — and no kids. He could wait until the pandemic was over to see her at all. They could continue with the socially distanced visits — wine on the porch or a masked walk in the neighborhood. Or… they could devise a plan that included coronavirus testing and quarantining, and could lead to Molly bubbling in with us.

In post-lock down April, Eric and Molly engaged Option 3 with visits on our deck, at a social distance. Most visits included tears. No, that’s not right — they all included tears. Molly cries. It’s just a thing she does. She really is a very high functioning, multi-tasking, tool-using, programming-proficient, cook, carpenter, and all around together chick. She is also prone to face leaking and has been since childhood. She told me that her dad used to tease her by saying, “Molly keeps a tear at the ready in the corner of her eye, in case she needs it.”

Deploying Option 4 seemed like a huge step, an unusual step; but these were unusual times.

So, when Molly tearfully choked out last spring, “Eric, I need you to be my person. I do not have anyone else because of the freaking lockdown. Can you do that?” — Eric, man that he is, protector, hero, problem-solver, and co-owner — with me — of a relatively large house, was game. But was I? I had never seriously considered one of our partners living with us. Deploying Option 4 seemed like a huge step, an unusual step; but these were unusual times. Eric and I talked about it at length. How exactly would this work?