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The eternal cost of living your best life is that you get to answer to the insecurities of those who cannot. Divorce your sexless spouse, and the rest of the sexless spouses you know get antsy. Come out as bisexual, and the other gender worries that they have more competition while your own worries that they might be missing out. Non-monogamy brings out a Greek chorus of advice and commentary, especially since I have two children. An entire sub-industry in lifestyle journalism is dedicated to ferreting out the weirdest non-monogamists for general amusement and judgment.
I cannot afford an especially strange lifestyle; I live in west Humboldt Park, not Williamsburg. Far from the New York Times’ prized twenty-person polycule using project management software, I just have a boyfriend and a girlfriend, and Google Calendars works just fine for both. My most ambitious plan to date was to have both over for my birthday party, but one is going to be out of town so the other is just going to have to hold down the fort.
But I do face one recurring comment in particular from the monogamists in my life, whether straight or queer, single or married:
“That sounds like too much work for me.”
I have to admit, out of all of the monogamous clap backs, I didn’t expect an appeal to sexual laziness to be the most prolific. I did face moralistic judgment when I first left my second wife, but that turned out to be the result of a narcissistic smear campaign on X2’s part, with a side of conservative Catholicism from my mother. There’s nothing to do with the notion that homophobia and abuse are “just strong feelings” but walk away and burn the bridge.
But too much work? That’s just confusing.
I can only answer for the labor intensity of my own life, and the twenty-person clickbait arrangement does sound exhausting. But after a year in the libertine slut column, the work I’ve put into my relationships is far from the biggest demand on my time. That would be parenting, where I share custody of my two sons with my abusive first ex-wife. The older is special needs, non-verbal, and only half toilet trained at the age of twelve. He is a lot of work to love and care for. It’s a lot of work being present for my younger son as well: his brother crowds him out much of the time in my attention and resources. Even sitting down to watch a movie with Thing 2 can be fraught when Thing 1 feels overwhelmed and lacks the words to communicate it.
The next biggest drain on my labor is my basic economic situation. While I recently landed semi-stable employment, that’s been the exception far more than the rule for most of my adult life. Regardless of what I make on paper, the halting, seasonal nature of professional politics has left me with long periods of low or no income. Doing laundry in the bathtub because I can’t afford the laundromat is a lot of work, literally and figuratively, as is cooking everything from the cheapest staples I can manage, and dozens of other costs of being situationally poor. Remembering to text two people a day? Not so much.
This is nothing unusual. Parenting and employment are the biggest work in life, bear bites man. But even relative to my two decades of monogamy and marriage, the polyamorous life still is no great labor of love.
To start with, I’m not constantly dating new people. I’m in two committed relationships, each with their own routines. I see each of my partners once a week, and Marie on the weekends I don’t have my kids. After my immense slut run of last summer, my casual dating settled into about the same rate: I saw one or two partners a week, and sometimes went on an additional date with someone new. Granted, two date nights a week does seem like more work than the average married couple can bear, but it’s not that far off of what any couples therapist would recommend anyway.
Do the different experiences with two different people of different genders cause headaches? Nope. With Pagan I usually watch Marvel shows and discuss religious upbringings; with Marie I usually listen to podcasts and talk about literature and higher education. With both I cook, tell political war stories, and have screaming hot sex.
Do the feelings of seeing two different people cause headaches? Not at all. Marie is non-monogamous like me, and we discuss that all the time. Pagan generally sees one man and a time, and we talk about that too. When I have feelings…wait for it…I talk about them. It’s a lot of things, but too much work is not one of them.
In contrast to this bisexual life I’ve set up for myself, my straight, monogamous marriages were exhausting. Both featured my spouses taking up every part of our mutual lives, while I assumed ever-more responsibilities. X1 left her job to become a stay at home mother. But we shared parenting tasks, and I rapidly took on more of them, until I was doing all of the feeding, diapering, bathing, and wrestling with naps and bedtimes that make up early childhood. It got so extreme that after I left, X1 demanded that I come back and do her grocery shopping, claiming she couldn’t do it with our children, which I had done for almost a year.
My second marriage wasn’t much better. We didn’t have children, and thank godlessness for that. The emotional drain still became excruciating over time. “I don’t get to take up any space in this marriage,” X2 would say, in our bedroom, in front of couples therapists, with my children. But by the time I left her, in her own words I was doing everything in the relationship, and not just the cooking and domestic maintenance. We only did what she wanted to do, and my interests were minimized, erased and mocked. When X2 took off and never returned, it made no difference in my daily life: I was already taking care of everything anyway.
More than my bisexuality, my sheer exhaustion with monogamy led to my current non-monogamous lifestyle. Kids or no, monogamy was too much work for me. Parenting is less work now than it was in either of my marriages. When I’m parenting my children,
I'm just parenting them, and not worrying about the insecurities or runaway rage of either of my exes. I can’t control what my co-parent says or does, and I don’t pretend to my kids that I can (or that I approve of a lot of her choices).
Managing my feelings is less work as well. Being present with my partners is near-effortless now, after two decades of avoiding my spouses with my phone and video games. When I talk about my feelings, they listen, and I don’t worry that I’m handing them a loaded gun. When they talk about their feelings, I listen, and I don’t worry about having to fix everything, or walk on emotional eggshells. I have a beginning and end, so do my partners, and we care for each other all the more.
This is the point where I’m supposed to say that I recognize that I’m not representative of monogamy; #notallmarriages, and so forth. Am I not, though? Many people who have informed me non-monogamy is too much work also have said that (monogamous) marriage is itself hard work, and that the answer to marriage going badly is to work even harder. And for all of the weird polycules the New York Times can dig up, most monogamous marriages still end in divorce.
Maybe I did monogamy spectacularly wrong before, and now I’m doing non-monogamy spectacularly right. Maybe there’s one simple trick I missed for two decades that would have done away with most of the work. Or maybe my life experiences were so much work to surmount that non-monogamy just seems easier by contrast. All I can say in summary is I hope some enterprising individual comes along and proves me wrong by showing me how easy monogamy is with X1.
Seriously, better them than me.
Emotional abuse is the wrost and it doesn't even leave evidence. I think you must be a super dad and a super patient human.
Last line is a punchline for the ages