Chapter 3: All is Not Fair in Love and War (Always Ask Why)
By: Kayla Murphy
Tags: Relationships, Love, Sex, Self Improvement, Polyamory

Tom was much more comfortable with having friends than my ex, Travis, was. Most of my friends were men and most of his were women. He hugged and cuddled all of them just like I did. We had a similar mindset that everyone deserves love and affection, and while we fell for each other fast, we were still individual people.

One day he brought up something that he said had been on his mind for a while.

How do you feel about having an open relationship?

I stopped breathing.

Like… sleeping with other people?

Yeah.

My mind was racing. Didn’t I make him happy? We were already becoming “the power couple” at school, even though it had only been a few months. Our friends made jokes about us getting married someday.

So I’m not enough for you? I was starting to cry. My heart felt like stone.

Of course you’re enough for me.

This started the longest single conversation that I’ve ever had. It was interrupted by work, school, sleep, and living at our respective parents’ houses, but otherwise it lasted roughly three weeks. Those first few weeks were like chasing each other around in a circle. He brought it up, I cried, he shut down, I nagged, he distanced, I yelled, he repeated himself, I cried.

What if I said no? I said one day. I was exhausted. We were talking in circles again. I wanted to get up and leave, but we were driving around the city as we talked. The car was the only place we could get any privacy.

Then I would want to take a break.

That made my heart drop. I knew I couldn’t take a break. I was still heartbroken over Travis, and I knew I couldn’t wait around for Tom on top of that. I couldn’t watch him bang girls that I knew while I sat around and waited for him.

So I figured this was the end. It had been the deepest, most committed relationship I had experienced in my nineteen years. I couldn’t read his expression. He wouldn’t even look at me.

All this time, I had felt I wasn’t enough for him. I assumed I didn’t satisfy him. I must be too clingy, like Travis had been, because I liked to call him after work. I was confused why he didn’t just break up with me instead of putting me through this.

I knew there had to be a way to end this conversation, a way where we would both be happy. But I was so tired. It feels ironic that I only found the right question after I thought it was over.

Why?

This is a toddler’s favorite word, but it’s somehow lost in the mess of adulthood. Many of us decide somewhere that we know what someone is thinking. We’re usually wrong. We don’t know anyone as well as we think we do. We don’t normally know ourselves as well as we think we do.

The car jolted. He was taking an exit to the highway. Driving me home. The sound of the wind blowing over the car was deafening.

Because I’m going to marry you, he said. You’re the only girl I’ve slept with and I want to experience everything. If I spend the rest of my life with you I don’t want to resent you that I’ve missed out on anything. I can’t risk that.

Something clicked.

He wanted to experiment because I was his first. Not because I wasn’t enough; because he knew that I was.

I want to know my heart is committed, he said.

I thought back to my last relationship. I thought how he pushed me for sex, even though I told him it made me happier to wait for marriage. I thought about how he was still calling me over and over. Even after I told him that the relationship didn’t make me happy, he wouldn’t give me the space I needed.

I had wanted to wait until marriage. I resented him for that.

Would this make you happy? I asked him.

Yes, he said.

Part of the reason I loved Tom was because my happiness was important to him. He had told me if Travis made me happy, I should be with him. I saw the pain in his eyes when he told me that, and I felt how hard he squeezed me when I shook my head no.

You’ve made sacrifices for me, I thought.

The car rattled as he changed lanes. The tires vibrated underneath me. I took a deep breath.

There’s going to have to be some ground rules, I said.

The word “polyamory” defines as the practice of, or desire for, intimate relationships where individuals may have more than one partner, with the knowledge and consent of all partners. Now, I use this label to describe myself because it’s straightforward.

“Open relationship,” however, is subjective. It’s generally used to open the relationship to different sexual partners.

But how do you find the boundary lines?

How do you make sure that neither one of you begins to care for someone else emotionally, and if you do, is that technically cheating?

The first boundary rule would be that we would discuss any plans to follow through. The second rule was a common mistake. It’s also the most detrimental: we kept score. If beginning this journey was a step forward to avoid resentment, keeping score was five steps back.

I slept with a mutual friend first, because I couldn’t stand the thought of him making the first move. It was my first hookup. I hated it. It felt empty, awkward, and strange. The only two men I had slept with always made eye contact. He hardly looked at me at all.

The day after, Tom asked if I did it. When I told him I did, his silence made me wonder if he had been planning on changing his mind. But, as we said back then, it didn’t matter. Now he gets one.

My mind was wiped clean of everything except that damn scoreboard.

It was like the most hurtful competition in the world. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to catch up; he didn’t have someone specifically in mind, but he was pissed that I had. He was pissed that it was so easy for me. It made me feel guilty, and couldn’t figure out exactly what my boundaries were until he scored his goal.

Was I allowed to flirt with others, or did I have to wait?

Did it count as a second goal if it was the same person?

Fairness and compassion are worthwhile goals in any relationship, but that doesn’t mean life is fair. It’s not logical to expect that he’ll have the same amount of free time that I did, or that he’ll find the exact same amount of people interested in him at the same time that I did. I socialized more and had classes with a more diverse group of people, and it made sense I would have more options at my disposal.

It was quite a while before he got his first goal, and the waiting was the worst part. I wasn’t attached to my first experiment. Or my second. Or my third. I had found that sex was an easy way to keep my anxiety under control, so I was able to easily separate it from my emotions. But I hadn’t seen proof that he could do that too.

I never knew jealousy could be so possessive. It made me hate myself and hate our situation, but the more jealous I felt, the more I knew I cared about him, and the more I wanted to pull through. I didn’t want him to resent me either. Every time he talked to a girl, I wanted to pull him away. Every time he I saw him check someone out — something that had never bothered me before — I asked if he was going to try and sleep with her.

It didn’t happen until college. He came home and held me, told me that he had slept with her.

I moved to see his expression. He wouldn’t look at me at first. He kept his arms around me firmly until I stopped struggling and relaxed. Finally, when he moved away and looked down at me, he looked at me with more love than I knew he was capable of.

Something shifted when that happened. I knew we were going to make it.

Do you still love me? I asked.

Yes. Even more.

Soon after, we wiped the scoreboard clean together. It had become apparent that over-communication was possible. If one of us went out of our way to tell the other our sexual plans, the other would go crazy until it happened. There was no reason to revolve our situation around our individual motives. Either it happened, or it didn’t.

I told him we needed to stop keeping tally; I was beginning to see the benefits of sleeping with other people, and it made the relationship more fulfilling for me. But it wasn’t fair that he still worked thirty hours a week. He literally had no time to see other people when he was unavailable for fifteen hours a day. We loved each other madly, but I was getting lonely; between classes and our work schedules, I couldn’t see him more than a few hours a week. Even then he was exhausted and normally fell asleep. Sometimes it felt like I wasn’t even in a relationship. The anxiety that runs in my family caught me off guard when I moved to the dorms and started college, and the easiest way to keep it under control was drinking and sex.

Both of which I craved constantly.

By now, I welcomed any intimacy I could get. I was good at turning my emotions off, and the sex would relax me and made me feel wanted until I was able to spend time with him. College was sprinkled with experiments: drunken makeouts, getting the confidence to explore a few girls, and occasional hookups with people that I partied with and cared for.

Tom and I still hung out with a small group of friends who carried over from high school. Rather, I did on the weekends while he was at work. We all dealt with our anxiety in the same way, and he usually only saw them while picking up a trashed Kayla on his way home from work.

This was the circle of friends who had watched us grow up together and saw how much we loved each other. They saw how much we went through our first few years and knew how hard we struggled to stay together. There was no judgment of our situation in that group, and many of them were even involved. A mixture of pot, alcohol, and a few discussions of alternative lifestyle conversations even brought many of them into our situation in one way or another.

By now, Tom and I knew that we were committed. We were more settled into the idea of an open relationship because we were both affectionate and sexual people, and knew if it was to tear us apart, it would have happened by now.

A lot of friends came and went during my college career. At first, only my group from high school knew about our relationship. But after a while it felt important to come out to new friends. I didn’t want to keep secrets from someone who thought they were getting to know me, and it was becoming a large part of who I was. It also cleared up a lot of confusion because I was such an affectionate person. To this day, I still can’t fathom being in a relationship where I am not permitted to kiss an old friend as a greeting.

A few friends faded out when I told them, and it hurt a little. But I understood my lifestyle choice wasn’t for everyone. I understood that when I answered the question can you date other people? and I said no, they wondered exactly how many people I had slept with.

By the time college drew to a close, we were much better about our jealousy. It was far and few between. He would feel it sometimes if I found someone new — he was always nervous I would find someone who was able to spend more time with me than he was, and forget about him. Even though the more time he put into his job, the more I loved him.

Fairness operates globally, not situationally. If you’re in a relationship with two separate girls, it wouldn’t be fair for one of them to say, “you took her out to dinner last friday. Now you have to take me!” or “you spent a hundred dollars on her birthday. I must be worth the same amount.”

What was important, as long as we were both consenting to the situation of having an open relationship, was that we were both emotionally supporting each other’s happiness.

At the time, my emotional needs drove me to seek out sex more often than he needed it. It helped my general well-being, and unless we kept score, it wasn’t detrimental to our relationship.

We shouldn’t be asking if we’re getting the same thing as our partner, or the same thing as our partner’s other partner. Besides, half the time, we don’t realize we want something until we notice someone else has it first.

Your own happiness comes first. Instead of seeing what the other partner has, focus on yourself and ask, am I getting what I need? Instead of assuming that we know what our partner needs or wants, we need to ask them why.

If I had never asked that question, I might not have found the love of my life.