If I'm Going to Get Naked With Someone I Also Want to Respect Them

Amy’s Story

“Hands Together and Cubes with Eyes” by Vinur.

Listen to this episode.

A few weeks ago sitting in my driveway, I got an email from my submission form.

“Hi there! Soooooo I’m a non-monogamous mom” it began, and off the radio went. Terry Gross could wait.

“Since I’m divorced, it plays out differently for me,” she wrote. “Forgive me, but when I read about non-monogamy and non-monogamous moms it’s nearly always from the couple’s point of view.”

Truth! I thought. Somebody somewhere was listening to Billie Eilish chuckle with Terry. But alone in my car: the nuances of polyamory discourse. Like being at a bookstore with the hum of commerce and conversation, then someone’s voice breaks through and instantly, you agree with what they are saying. “Cats exist in all seven dimensions, you know that right?” I overheard recently, at a bookstore, and while not addressed to me — I nodded. Truth. It continued:

“This results in the non-Primary partners feeling resentful, and like we’re a vehicle for the Primary relationship to grow stronger- like we don’t have merit of our own.”

How fast can you hit reply to an email?

+

I started interviewing non-monogamous moms a year ago because I was curious about their lives, curious how it all started for them, curious about their conversations with their partners. I wanted to know things like: who broached it first, you or your partner? Did you tell your kid(s)? Was it scary, the first time you had sex with someone else? Awesome? How “out” are you? Do people judge? Do you care?

You can see even in the way I framed questions that I too was coming at this largely from a couples’ point of view. And indeed, that is who I attracted. I interviewed five non-monogamous mothers, all coupled, all having opened up their marriages. Here’s what I asked (watch this, Terry):

“When you opened, did you have someone in mind you wanted to date?” (Jen’s story)

“Was it an adjustment for your relationship for you to date other men, in addition to women?” (Tanya’s story)

“Do you interact with your husband's partners, and vice versa?” (Molly’s story)

I hadn’t gotten the opportunity (until now!) to talk to a single, non-coupled, non-monogamous mom. “Thanks for making space for these conversations. -Amy” her email ended.

Reply window, cursor blinking, “would you be up for an interview?”

+

Like all my interviews, Amy and I talked on Zoom, and the Q&A below echoes the stuff we were talking about. Speaking only for myself: this was such a cool conversation to have right now, at this very moment. It’s very moving to me when people find liberation inside their own minds, one place laws can never reach. And when I say “liberation,” I don’t mean being liberated from monogamy or from marriage (although in Amy’s case, she did both). I mean liberation from life scripts that seem so intractable you can’t imagine alternatives, they function as reliably as gravity or the sky, but then one day the sky tears open to reveal a completely different color and quality. You’re going, wait…hang on…is that — pink glitter??

Amy found her pink glitter sky after she divorced. She found non-monogamy yes, but she also found a huge love for her friends, refined discernment in who gets her time and attention, and – though I suspect she was already on her way here – an exit ramp off binary thinking.

“The future is fluidity” she said on our Zoom, and besides the fact that that would make a fucking great t-shirt, it’s a call to action for self-awareness. To slosh around in introspection. If relationship structures were truly fluid, gender truly fluid, and desire truly fluid (lol three good reasons to paywall this), that might feel destabilizing to you – or – it might feel kind of imaginative and neat.

For example. Desire. I truly used to think that the sole pleasure of sex, as a woman, was simply in being wanted. Wanted very badly. Being the object. I really thought this.

It wasn’t until I stumbled into more queer spaces frankly that my programming started to change. With the prey/predator dynamics of hetero dating in absentia, new vistas of desire started appearing inside me, surprising me. Watching other people kiss: hot. Watching shibari: hot. Watching my partner play drums, which he has always done, but lately I can’t get enough of it, a full-on erotic sound bath while he plays along to Doja Cat or whatever: super fucking hot.

“Watch” is the keyword here, and I don’t mean to imply that I suddenly became a voyeur (although not not saying that) or that I don’t enjoy being beheld by certain people (depends on the person, but yeah, of course). More that, about a decade ago, I started regaining command over my own eyeballs and imagination, after decades of seeing myself through the eyes of others. Feeling their eyeballs, assuming that as someone attracted to masculine energy this whole dance was kind of one-way, and that was that. Turns out — no — that’s absolutely not the case, and female pleasure = solely being desired was just a pill I swallowed without reading the label. Fuck being watched, I’m watching you! (Still workshopping this t-shirt.)

Enjoy this conversation with Amy and her endearing love of exclamation marks, and if you know a person who’d love this but can’t afford the paywall, DM me and we’ll make it work. The future is fluidity, cats exist in all seven dimensions, liberation starts in the mind. Let’s go:

1. Thanks so much for writing to my submission form first of all, and telling me your experience in non-monogamy. Let’s ground this conversation in a few biographical particulars. How did you enter the world of non-monogamy?