Long Term

I wrote this almost a decade ago. Although I’m no longer married to the person I was with when I tried to articulate how ethical non-monogamy felt to me, I still stand by this explanation. I was wincing at first while reading it, prepared to eat my own words or roll my eyes at my younger less jaded self, but instead it warmed my heart. These things were true about my relationship at the time, and that’s why it was working.

One of the things that attracted me to polyamory and non-monogamy is the notion that it’s okay for relationships to end. The expectation that anything suit you your whole life long is ludicrous, and the notion that you should prioritize commitment to any relationship over what’s healthy and best for you is outdated and harmful. I’m grateful my almost-ex-husband and I both agreed with this concept, and that we were able to recognize when it wasn’t working anymore.

And we’re still family, still making our own magic and making our own rules for how that looks. And still choosing to build something together as we step forward into a different kind of connection (even if it isn’t the plan we started with).

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“There are many people you can love. There are not that many you can build a life with. Different program and different ingredients.”

-Esther Perel

It’s impossible to explain to strictly monogamous people how it changes once you have other partners. This leash, this gilded ownership you thought you had, the very line that separated you two from you and anyone else, disappears. It evaporates. It’s gone. 

And then

you still choose your partner.

And they still choose you.

You want them. It’s so powerful to learn that even if you have freedom and choice and other lovers who love, you still choose every day to build your life with them. You want them for all of the reasons they are sexy and wonderful and unique. You want them for the way they make you feel, the way they look at you, the way they love you. You want their sense of humour or their sarcastic grin or their passion. You were raised to think that once you shared your body or intimacy or life with someone else the magic spell would be broken, now you know you make your own magic (other people’s rules never fit you right anyway). You might want someone else, you might want many people, you might have many loves but you want this love in particular. You want them specifically, because of the way they kiss, or the way they smell or that thing they do with their tongue. Because of their laugh or their epic foot-rubs. 

You want them.

Still.

And you finally see, with empirical evidence, that it is not your fidelity that binds you, your pledged ownership over each other’s bodies. It’s not your lease or your marriage certificate or the address labels you had made with both of your names, it’s not the bed you share or the rings you wear or whatever label you’ve slapped on it. What connects you, what ties you, is so much bigger and so much deeper than that. It’s pheromones and muscle memory and shared history. It’s listening to their heartbeat with your head against their chest planning out your future, it’s watching them work just as hard as you do to make it a reality. It’s tears and sweat and blood. It’s thinking in generations and lifetimes, it’s daydreaming while your past daydreams are in your hands. It’s seeing the forest and seeing the trees and knowing, no matter what storm you’re weathering right now, that what you’re building is beautiful.

It’s choosing them. Every time. Still.