This revelation didn’t come as any huge surprise to either of us. I’d had my misgivings about the
relationship—especially the monogamous part of it—from the beginning.
I’d been happily single for four years when I met my then-boyfriend, casually dating away my early 20s with
various men, minimal commitment, and little desire to change that situation.
I wasn’t sure if I identified as non-monogamous, per se—but I did suspect that if I ever were looking for a
relationship, it probably wouldn’t be a monogamous one.
And yet, within two months of the kind of whirlwind courtship that I might now call textbook love-bombing had
that term not been TikToked to death, I somehow found myself locked into a monogamous relationship with a man
who was dead set on keeping it that way.
That didn’t stop me from bringing up the idea of non-monogamy, however—something I did multiple times to
predictably negative results.
In the meantime, while I tried to talk my boyfriend into an open relationship, I tried to talk myself into
believing maybe monogamy was the right fit for me after all.
I’ve been thinking about this recently in light of the discourse surrounding Lindy West’s new memoir, Adult
Braces. In the book, West details how she came to embrace an open marriage after her devoutly non-monogamous
husband began a relationship with another woman.
By the end, all three parties are in a supposedly happy polyamorous partnership—but the internet’s response
suggests many readers remain unconvinced by West’s happily-ever-after ending.
Much of the Adult Braces discourse that’s reached a fever pitch online in recent weeks centers on the belief
that West seems to have been coerced into an open marriage by a husband she should have simply divorced. In
other words: This polyamorous throuple could’ve been a breakup.
As the partner pushing for non-monogamy in my own former relationship, I was ostensibly in the opposite
position
from the one in which this narrative envisions West.
But as a woman who tried to convince myself I was happy in a relationship I’d gone along with to please a man,
I
know a thing or two about deluding yourself into believing you had agency in choices that were made for you.
Ultimately, it’s not my place to doubt West at her own published word, nor to presume I know better than she
does re: her own marriage.
What I do know, however, is that the relationship I once thought I wanted to open was one that very much
should’ve ended instead. Fortunately, it did.
I didn’t actually want an open relationship. What I wanted was to be
single.
Just under a year into that monogamous union I couldn’t quite remember agreeing to, I found I’d officially
maxed out my capacity for one-man-womanhood.
I’d missed the idea of fucking other people from the beginning, sure. But now, suddenly, like a switch had
been
flipped, I missed the actual fucking other people of fucking other people.
It was everyone at once and no one in particular—hot strangers on the train and un-hot ones who hit on me in
bars and the shocking number of old flames I started randomly running into on
the street and in my DMs like some kind of sign from the universe that it was time to return to myself.