On Falling Ass-Backwards into the Zeitgeist

MORE’s first week

Wow. It has been a WEEK. A week since my book, MORE: A Memoir of Open Marriage, entered the world. A week in which I was interviewed for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review podcast, and the Sunday Times of London. A week that saw my name on an Amazon best-seller list of new memoirs, right under Britney Spears, Liz Cheney, and Barbra Streisand. What on earth is going on????

I didn’t write my book in hopes of becoming the “face of polyamory” (as the London Times article claims I am). I only wanted to tell my story. Because of this, I wrote a memoir, not a polyamory “how-to” manual. I realize, however, that despite my intentions, I’m now being asked (by some) to speak for others. This makes me a bit uncomfortable, especially because open marriage is only one way that polyamory can be expressed. (For another great read, and a poly perspective that differs in key ways from my own, I recommend Alex Alberto’s Entwined.)

But I do take solace in the messages I’ve received as DMs on Instagram—people from all over the country as well as abroad—telling me that my story resonates with their own experience. (**See the bottom of this post for a few of their voices.) And so, I will do my best to be a worthy ambassador for polyamory.  (On a FaceTime call with my parents the other day, my dad said he’d trust me to be the ambassador for almost anything. Aw shucks, Dad. And thanks.)

But what do I want to say?

First and foremost, polyamory is about more than sex. Much more. It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that sex isn’t part of it, or that sex didn’t have a role in my decision to open my marriage in the first place. But the sex angle is being well covered in the media. I want to use this space to talk about four other values of polyamory that I’ve come to appreciate in the living and writing of my experience.

1)    Honesty. There is an obvious application to open marriage here—the “open” part speaks to the honest communication that consensual non-monogamy requires. But there is another, deeper layer of inner truthfulness that has awakened in me and that I wanted to share in my memoir. In the words of Mr. Rogers, “The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self.”

2)    Freedom. Another thing people associate with polyamory is freedom, but the phrase “free love” is often paired with an eyeroll. However, as I wrote in a recent essay for TIME magazine, freedom within marriage can take many forms. Replacing the word freedom with space might help: “The idea that people need space—space to breathe, space to move, space to grow—makes sense to most of us in the abstract. We are like all living things in this way…. And yet, the phrase ‘I need space’ is synonymous with break-ups, with endings rather than beginnings…. Why can’t we see the need for spaciousness in love as well?”

3)    Presence. Eckhart Tolle writes, “The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens.” (If you haven’t yet discovered the work of Eckhart Tolle, I implore you to check him out.) One of the lovely byproducts of my open marriage journey was a growing curiosity about myself. I began to mine the present moment for clues, to pay closer attention to my life as I was living it.

Regardless of the particulars of your life, it is out of this awareness in the present that self-discovery happens. As my mother tells me in MORE, “Everything that happens in life is an opportunity to learn about yourself. Marriage. Motherhood. Relationships. Even anger and illness. Nothing that happens is good or bad in and of itself. It’s all just an opportunity to learn and grow.”

4)    Love. When we opened our marriage, I didn’t set out to be polyamorous. To the contrary, early on, I was adamant about the rule “No falling in love.” I wanted to ensure that love would never enter the equation. Silly me. These days, the expansion of love in my life is perhaps my favorite thing about having an open marriage. Not only do I love other people, but I love Stewart—and myself—more fully than ever before. (Again, Eckhart Tolle: “To love is to recognize yourself in another.”)

But it was a long hard road from there to here, and I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. All I can do is share my story of how it happened for me.

**From my Instagram DM’s:

Molly! I am reading your book and it is the first thing that I have come across that has really resonated for me and validates my experience of being in an open relationship….Thank you so much for being brave enough to put your experience into words, for sharing with the world what so many of us feel somewhat ashamed to talk about (even when we know that’s ridiculous) and for normalizing what many people are either already experiencing or contemplating.

Hello! I have been waiting for a book like yours for so long…. My husband and I went through such similar experiences in the 2010s, and I often felt so alone because no one I knew could relate to what I was going through. I just wanted to thank you for writing this and for making another 40ish mom of 2 boys feel seen!

Thank you for sharing your experience, despite knowing some people wouldn’t take it well.  My situation is similar…. The fact that some think women can’t be good moms and wives (and workers and volunteers and everything else), while embracing their sexuality, in whatever form that takes, is incredibly off-base and tiresome. Thank you for adding to the small minority brave enough to say it out loud.

My husband and I opened our marriage about five years ago. So many of the feelings and thoughts you describe are what I have been thinking and feeling. I thought I was crazy for having such a mixed bag of emotions about it all…. I don’t have anyone to talk to about my forays into nonmonogamy…so reading your story is helping me feel less alone.

THANK YOU ALL FOR SHARING YOUR EXPERIENCES WITH ME!