A dirty secret
About this time last year I blogged about the chaos that was life at the time (nothing has changed, for the record) and one of the things I mentioned in passing was that I had
nearly broke my marriage after fundamentally changing the very foundations of our commitment
For the astute amongst you, you may have noticed that some of my social media bios mention “poly” and put two and two together. In short, Gaz and I ‘officially’ opened up our relationship early last year and we have been engaged in … non-monogamous relations ever since. In the interests of brevity and privacy, I’m skipping forward approx. 18 months from The Opening to now.
I currently have a second partner who lives a short distance from me. This proximity brings advantages – yay, I only have to walk a few minutes up the road to see him! Yay, we can easily meet at short notice! Yay, we already share friend groups! It also brings one really rather large disadvantage: Every Fucker Knows.
Or rather… they think they know. They think they see.
We live in a small town. It’s impossible to spend any sort of time together as a couple without Someone seeing us. And the accusations, the questions, I can feel them coming. I wait, perpetually wait for the first quiet, sly message to Gaz: do you know your wife is cheating on you? Did you know she’s fucking around behind your back? I saw her kissing and holding hands you know…
I practice discretion for Gaz’s benefit, for the benefit of my children, but this just leads to the constant feeling that I’m someone else’s dirty little secret. That it’s only a matter of time before I’m outted as someone else’s whore.
I don’t care who knows I practice polyamory – I won’t put my life or my joy on hold in fear of someone else’s judgement of non-monogamy – but the idea that someone would see something so honest and open and pure and mistake it for anything else bothers me to my core.