Love Will Be the Death of Us
By: Ian Mackenzie
Tags: Death, Polyamory, Divorce, Love And Sex, Marriage

The dam has broken and the next few months are a blur. I begin using words like polyamorous (meaning ‘many loves’) and non-monogamy in conversation. I learn that you don’t make any important decisions during NRE (new relationship energy) and that compersion (taking joy in your partner’s joy) is the opposite of jealousy, but that both can exist simultaneously.

I explore a variety of connection with multiple women and have the first sexual experience outside of my marriage. After 10 years with the same partner, the scent and curves of a new woman feels at once odd and exhilarating. I keep going. I learn that while possibilities for connection are endless, time and energy are not.

Katherine and I practice regular communication, though mostly I don’t see her. She embraces the openness with a vigour I’d never seen. Suddenly, she is free to entertain the secret desires she’d never confessed, perhaps even to herself. She calls ex-boyfriends to catch up, partly out of curiosity for their lives, and partly to flaunt her newfound sexual prowess.

I grow closer to a particular woman, Mya. We speak in poetry and myth, and she whispers a willingness to explore my untapped sexual nature. She’s also engaged to another, and both of us remain secure in our existing relationships, happy to explore our connection without the pressure of core partnership.

Late spring, Katherine and I stand on a deserted beach, playing fetch with our much-loved dog Tobi. I toss the stick in the water and the conversation turns toward our latest erotic adventures. I ask if she’s ever thought of exploring with her business partner Cameron. For the past 4 years, they had co-operated a successful yoga studio in our suburban city.

“Would that bother you?” she asks hesitantly.

“It makes sense,” I respond, picking up the stick again. “You already work well together. Seems like it would happen eventually.”

“Are you saying I can explore with him?”

A hint of jealousy surfaces. He is an accomplished athlete, fit, and handy with tools. In many ways my complete opposite. I remind myself the purpose of our open relationship is to explore our boundaries.

“Sure,” I say. I throw the stick back into the water, and Tobi rushes after it.

7.2013 — The tower is burning

Early one summer day, without hormone therapy or warning, Katherine’s menstrual cycle returns. She informs me in bed, breathless. We’re awash in the mystery. No guarantee of fertility, but a promising sign nonetheless.

She spends most of her time with Cam. I begin hearing stories of her vibrant nature from mutual friends. “I barely recognize this woman,” says one who has known her for years.

I can’t shake the feeling that Katherine is drifting away from me. We continue with our weekly checkins, but her shares are mostly uneventful. No, our external relationships aren’t competing for our own. Yes, we’re still deeply committed to each other.

I opt to spend a weekend away at a local music festival with Mya. On my way out the door, I choose a Tarot card from the deck, standard practice for ongoing insight into our relationship. The Tower. The image is a large burning Buddha, illuminated by lightning, fires raging across his skin. A man and a woman plunge from the figure.

Unsettled, I depart for the festival.

The next few days are magic. A bevy of playful adventures with friends, sweet connections, and beach bonfires. On the final day, after most of the others have packed up, I look upon the last night fading from the snowcapped mountains overhead.

Mya puts her arms softly around my waist. I’m gripped once again by an unbidden ache of sorrow. “I don’t know why, but I feel like I will say goodbye to Katherine soon.”

A few days later, Cam is at my house for a backyard BBQ for the yoga studio members. He’s awkward in his small talk. I let them host and mostly stay out of the way. The next morning, Katherine is visibly shaken and asks me to accompany her outside on the grass.

We sit in the afternoon sun. I don’t realize I’m holding my breath.

Finally, she says: “I’m pregnant.”

My mind races. She and I hadn’t been intimate in weeks. There was only one other possibility.

“With Cam,” she finishes.

Cue: dagger plunge directly into my heart. Cue: An impossible mixture of utter devastation and shining joy at the possibility of her being a mother. Something she’s wanted for so long.

“FUCK!” I scream, louder than I’ve ever been. I can’t look at her, I stare at the grass, as if I could stare hard enough so she would take back her words. I don’t believe it. It’s not possible. And yet.

The Tower is burning.

San Francisco — self portrait.

8.2013 — Myth of the One

In the days that follow, I’m not ready to collapse into existing expectations about what is to come. I ask her: what do you actually want? Was this an accident? Do you still want to be with me? Do you want the three of us to co-parent?

Amid ongoing tears and the wreckage of our old life, she confesses her terrible dilemma: I don’t think I can love more than one man. Therefore, I choose him.

Soon we are sitting across the table from my parents, married 30+ years, who look to us with cautious optimism. I’d already warned the news wasn’t what they might be expecting. In truth, to them and most of our friends, Katherine and I were the perfect couple. Loving, productive and stable, we never quarreled. Ever.

I break the news. “Katherine and I are separating.” My mother immediately bursts into tears. My father leaps into fix-it mode, suggesting the merits of marriage counselling. “We’re certain,” I confirm. They did not know about our open relationship, and I feel it is too much to reveal the pregnancy now.

Plus, I can’t admit the secret shame that I had screwed things up. I had ruined my marriage.

“I’m sorry,” my mother wept. “I’m sorry your marriage didn’t work.”

I spent the rest of the month on the road, returning only to pack my share of the belongings. No battle. No lawyers. Katherine finds the paperwork online and we fill it out on the kitchen table. We agree to split the mortgage equity. I will take the vehicle, the blender, and the Nintendo Wii. She will retain “the rest of the household contents.”

I spend the afternoon carrying my things out the front door and packing them in the car. It’s both freeing and sorrowful when I realize my life now fits into a 2002 Subaru hatchback. My plan is to catch a ferry to Victoria, where my friend has already set up a desk in her office. I had found a temporary apartment just outside downtown, close to Mya, whose long-term partnership had also ended for reasons that remain their own.

For one last time, I sit alone on the backyard patio of the house that no longer bears my name. I light the cigarette I had taken from Katherine’s secret stash (I rarely smoke) and watch it curl into the amber dusk.

A few hours before, she had revealed how she had begun drifting from our marriage the first time I’d confessed about kissing the other women, almost a year earlier. “You never told me,” I pleaded. “How could I have saved us?”

I believed wholeheartedly the myth of the One. The belief that human happiness means finding your other half, pledging them your heart and soul, and committing until death do you part.

She was my One. Yet I struggled for years to reconcile my desire for others with the inherited story of traditional monogamous marriage. The hidden cost of monogamy, when culturally reinforced as the only acceptable ideal, is the unquestioned coupling of sexual fidelity with “real” partnership. Anything falling outside these norms is, at best, labelled an unwillingness to commit, at worst, condemned for hedonistic promiscuity.

Herein lies the scorpion’s tale of the myth of the One:

You are only the One if you are the ONLY One. If your partner desires others, then you are not worthy of being the One. You are not enough.

Charles Eisenstein, author of The Ascent of Humanity, believes modern culture rests upon a foundational Story of Separation. The product of post-modernity and callous economic theory, the story goes thus: “What you are is an independent being in an indifferent universe, driven to maximize your own self-interest.” From this perspective, it’s get what you can, while you can, baby.

Finding a life partner to navigate these treacherous seas becomes not just a romantic ideal, but a necessity. Without that, a precarious and lonely future awaits. Behind the staggering divorce rates and bitter arguments that often follow suit, a conditioned betrayal lies unspoken: you promised you were my One. You lied.

Make no mistake — one person can never be another’s everything. It’s too much for them to bear. But that doesn’t stop many of us from trying and blaming ourselves for the almost certainty of failure.

For Katherine, I had vowed to keep our course steady. When I had decided to rock the boat, she had wisely fled to the nearest, safest ship.

I stubbed out my cigarette before it burned my fingers and headed toward the car.