Whenever someone finds out I am in an open marriage, they invariably ask me three questions.
- What about jealousy?
- Why bother getting married?
- Isn’t that cheating?
It’s almost become a rehearsed speech that I give when I answer these questions, so I will share this speech with you. There will be more elaboration on all of these questions in the book, especially jealousy. This is just a summary.
What about jealousy?
Jealousy is a “blanket statement” emotion. What does it truly mean to be jealous? It can be an easy, and dangerous word to throw around and rarely do we break it down to get at the real issues. When we understand it, we are powerful, but when we don’t, it can make us weak. It can be the mask for many personal insecurities, miscommunication, envy and a heap of other emotions, some good, mostly bad.
Am I jealous when my husband goes out with other people? Certainly I might be envious if I have no prior plans and feel like going out myself, but really, that’s up to me to organize. Am I jealous of him touching and sharing with another person? To be honest, absolutely to a point. Do I sometimes wish that he wouldn’t, but that I still could? Definitely. Is that fair of me? Not at all.
So I deal with it. It’s not the easiest cup of tea to swallow, but at the end of the day, I want him to be happy, and he wants me to be happy. Once you learn to dissect your jealousy, break it down and deal with it’s smaller parts, it’s a much gentler beast to deal with.
Why bother getting married?
This question is just silly to me. When we did get married, we weren’t yet open, but now that we are, we’re no less “married” than we were before. We might visit Home Depot a little less than before, but we’ll still paint the deck when we need to.
To us, being married means being a team, being committed to love and respect each other as long as we are able. We wrote our own vows because the idea of reciting someone else’s wedding plans didn’t fly with us. And to this day, I’d say we’re a great example of a happily married couple. We have our issues, but they don’t stem from our openness. Any couple could have the same little squabbles. By being in an open marriage, our relationship has strengthened and our communication level is higher than many couples we’ve met along the way.
Isn’t that cheating?
This one’s easy. If the other person’s ok with it, it’s not cheating. If the other person wouldn’t be ok with it, it is cheating. So if we’re ok with it? You get the picture.
Cheating as we know it isn’t as black and white as you might think. At a later date, I will touch upon the many gray areas of extra-marital / relationship affairs. You might be surprised by what I’ve learned. I know I have been.
And there are the answers to your big three questions. Have another question that you think is bigger than one of those? Post it above on the “Your Thoughts” page and I’ll try to get to it as soon as I can.
