I awoke this morning around 11am having slept in to avert the effects of another life shortening night shift. While our little part of the world was sleeping, I was rushing through the night, one of two souls constituting the centre of a busy little cocoon surrounded by silent blue strobes. The flashing patterns of shadows amongst trees and houses and open ground are exhilarating, tiring, mesmerising and somehow otherworldly…
On the radio a programme about polyamorous relationships plays. I lay in bed day dreaming.
I wonder what the natural course of my wife’s bisexuality will be. Does it mean that she might ultimately find someone to bring into our lives, to live and share each day with us as equals?
I am happily married. God knows as the shifts and fools drain the energy from my lean body I can barely make enough time or desire to keep my wife happy, let alone cater for two. And yet I find myself day dreaming of being the centre of a tiny ménage a tois. But it is not a lustful one in the conventional sense. I day dream of sharing gardening, tea in the gazebo, winter evenings by the fire and TV. Only very occasionally do I imagine something sexual.
It seems too good to be true. Is it really possible that double the number of good women in my life could double my happiness? Could it really be that we would all be satisfied and happy with such an arrangement? Clearly it would mean we no longer kept all our eggs in one basket, negating that frightening leap of faith, and blind trust in commitment whose true nature we will not know until we reach our deathbed.
The day dream is one of strength and happiness in numbers. Of acceptance and contentment and living the life that looks and feels right. No affairs. No lies. Just openness and spice…
Would another help us believe? Would we each have emotional security, never fully alone when the black clouds of argument roll in to burst asunder our normally close and happy life? And what of the one caught between the two, or left out. Is the reality of polyamorous life more likely to be one of jealousy and disappointment for everyone on a rolling rota?
i went through a phase of wishing for a polyamorous life, but that was so that I could have sexual fulfillment with another without the guilt. But I think in hindsight, it would not have worked. There will always be problems in a relationship, and having more than one relationship increases the scope for problems, plus there is the jealousy that is bound to surface, and the comparing of partners etc.
That said, lots of people manage it, but maybe it takes a very secure sort of person to live like that.