Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage by Jenny Block

Author:Jenny Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“you’re crazy,” Christopher said.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t want to sleep with other people, and I don’t want you to sleep with other people.”

We were lying side by side in our bed, and I immediately felt my body stiffen. Instinctively, I pulled away from him. “You don’t want me to sleep with other people, or you don’t want me to want to sleep with other people?”

He paused. “Both.”

“But you can’t stop me from wanting what I want. What if I want to sleep with women?”

I thought that bringing up the prospect of my sleeping with another woman, or even bringing a woman into our bed, would be the easiest way to broach the subject. I missed sleeping with women, and I thought that if Christopher were included, we might be able to test the waters of this whole open-relationship thing, to figure out if it was going to work for both of us.

“You mean like Grace?” he asked, without missing a beat.

“Yes, like Grace. But also, not like Grace.” Of course, that situation had ended badly, and maybe he had brought it up to be hurtful, but I stopped myself from taking the bait. Instead, I asked, “Weren’t things better around here during the six months she and I were sleeping together?

Again, he paused. “Yes,” he admitted.

It was a clear opening. I decided that this had to be the moment, and so I told him the things I had been scared to say for three years because I was afraid they would be too hurtful—and because I was afraid that he might leave. But it was becoming impossible for me to live this way, and I couldn’t not talk about it anymore. I wanted him to understand and I wanted, desperately, to be happy. I decided that if telling him the truth meant he would leave, that was a risk I was finally going to have to take. Clinging to a relationship that left me feeling unhappy—because I was afraid I would be unhappy when it was gone—suddenly struck me as beyond ridiculous.

I delicately explained to Christopher that I’d felt happy and satisfied when I was seeing Grace, because I finally wasn’t looking to him to fulfill something that he either couldn’t or didn’t want to give me. I told him that it had felt like a relief because it alleviated the pressure on him and on me. Because of my relationship with Grace, I was able to be with him without feeling guilty about my needs or resentful about not having them met.

He told me that the sex with Grace hadn’t bothered him as much as my lying about it. I knew this already. It wasn’t the first time we’d discussed it. This foray into open marriage was no short jaunt, after all; it was a long haul getting from point A to point B, from closed to open. And it inevitably involved rehashing a lot of conversations again and again. But bit by bit, we were reaching a point

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