I became single again at 49 after being married for what seemed like decades.
As a midlife woman in London I had a bonanza; Millennials were begging to be educated between the sheets and my equally aged male counterparts were eager to talk about how love and wedlock went sour. I sowed the kind of oats I’d never known in my youth and had illuminating relationships with men I continue to call friends.
After several years, the novelty of exuberant dating waned and I wanted to practise loving someone again.
Because we fell in love, we considered ourselves “primary” partners, and we had all the fun of a lust-charged beginning, and took the pledge to make any other lover secondary as we grew into the relationship
The limerence of lust is nice, but it only gets you to the next orgasm. I was ready for the challenging journey of a partnership.
I was a convert to the idea that real love takes practice. Lots of it. And this was best achieved if you practised with the same person for more than a few months.
However, I wasn’t so sure about sexual monogamy.
Early in my midlife dating life, I didn’t see the point of monogamy. I’d reproduced, I was economically secure. My ex was a great co-parent.
A long-term relationship for this second half of life could be about companionship, cooking, conversations — and, yes, sex.
But with one person for the next several decades? That felt to me like saying I could only drink wine with a single friend for the rest of my life.
Love is a choice and requires effort and commitment. Part of that is to sexual exclusivity, right? That’s what my culture told me. It is the ideal we hold up for ourselves every time we walk down the aisle, no matter how many times we take those vows.
I’d been monogamous for 23 years with my husband. I felt I could do it again.
But might there be a middle ground?
One of my fears about monogamy was the experience I had with men who told me their partners had gone off sex during marriage.
That had been so painful and shameful to them that these men were also questioning their ability to accept sexual monogamy.
So I committed to learning how to love in a new way: I decided to have an open relationship.
When I met my non-monogamous man on OKCupid, both of us had the occasional other lover who we wanted to continue seeing, very occasionally.
Because we fell in love, we considered ourselves “primary” partners, and we had all the fun of a lust-charged beginning, and took the pledge to make any other lover secondary as we grew into the relationship.
Saying you’re “open” can come across as a justification for sleeping around, imply you don’t have the emotional skills to commit to a “real” relationship, or that you’re so bent on living a life less ordinary that you’re willing to suffer through the heart-stomping emotion of knowing your partner is naked with someone else.
Why did we choose to be open instead of just discreet? I never wanted to be in the position of lying to the person I loved deeply.
We wouldn’t tolerate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. We would “Ask If You Want to Know. But Know That I Love You”.
Non-monogamy pushed our jealousy buttons. I was all over the map with emotion. After puzzling over it, I realised jealousy was simply an expression of fear. Fear that he would fall in love with someone else, fear that he would leave, my child would be hurt by his absence. It was simply fear of loss.
When I accepted that monogamy does not remove the possibility of loss, I gradually got less jealous.
As we continued to succeed at loving, supporting and encouraging each other, I felt exhilarated by the freedom we gave each other.
That felt the opposite of selfish. And isn’t selfishness the death of love? I believed love would grow when it felt free and the freedom would bring us closer together.
It wasn’t easy. But eventually, it wasn’t hard either. I enjoyed my other lovers, but I didn’t love them.
We were simply friends who slept together because one was in Oxford and one in Brixton and who wants to board the train at midnight after an evening of dinner and laughter?
Often, I didn’t even have sex with these friends. But it was liberating to feel my partner wasn’t insecure about the time I spent with them. We always spoke on the phone or texted before bed.
We had a routine that reminded us each day that we were each other’s number one fan.
Having an open relationship was a challenge mostly because it tested the concept of our fidelity to each other.
What we were able to do over time was create a fidelity that felt unassailable. I never doubted my partner loved me.
And that was oodles more important than his drive to have sex with other women or my desire to sleep naked with a friend.
We had freedom and we had trust and, ironically, we slept with others less the longer we were together.
I chose to love my partner by giving up my need that he “love” only me. And in return, I got devotion free from fear. And there’s no better feeling than living fearless in love.
Karin Jones is the relationships editor of Erotic Review magazine