My Monogamous Friends Don’t Understand Why I Signed Up to Endure This

Lelia’s Story

“duo” by Luciana Urtiga

I’ve always had a knack for gauging people’s innate level of curiosity.

Not just curiosity about me (although that is nice) – but rather, curiosity in a more generalized, disperse sense. Curiosity that sounds like:

Why have we set things up this way?

What if the people in charge are wrong? What if I’m wrong?

Stanley water bottles: why?

These questions don’t have to be asked aloud, to the void. (Except for Stanleys: ask away.) But someone’s capacity to think these kinds of questions at all — I appreciate this quality.

And I tend to make friends with people who possess this quality. People who at the very least can step outside normalized cultural or social structures and look back at them, asking themselves or perhaps asking me, either as a direct question or possibly as a meme in my Instagram DM’s: “hey dudes, is this stuff actually working?”

People like Lelia Gowland.

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I met Lelia in January, after she found my first non-monogamous moms Q&A. (Forever shoutout to Tanya MacRae, my subject for that one – she set the tone for these Q&A’s and gave some language to folks looking for lived examples.)

Lelia commented that she was developing a memoir about her journey into non-monogamy, and said something that struck me as very honest – very, “I’m not sure about these structures but questioning them feels scary.” She said:

I wrote her and suggested an interview.

We’ve been talking for six months.

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Like me, Lelia grew up in the South (Louisiana), which is a stark geographical difference from my other non-monogamous mom subjects. They’ve come from a couple different parts of Australia, the East Coast, and the Midwest. And while the internet does flatten regionalism it does so only to a certain extent; it’s still the case that non-monogamy raises fewer eyebrows in Brooklyn than in Louisiana. Another way of putting it is that Lelia has felt scared before, to be open about her openness.

When she talked about her fears of the vitriol and personal and professional risks of going public with her non-monogamy, I got it. There’s pressure to conform no matter where you live, but threat levels do feel different. Louisiana just mandated the 10 Commandments be posted in every public school classroom, which would be hilarious if it didn’t also feel threatening in a vaguely Handmaids Tale-esque way.

So talking to Lelia (through our computer screens) has taken on a sacred quality; it’s gone beyond me interviewing her into two women breaking imaginary bread. Safe with each other. We’re both writers and moms, we’re annoyed and sometimes terrified of our own states, we both have only children, we each have a frankness about sex that took years to develop after sloughing off enough religious-inflected shame, hers beginning in Louisiana, mine a few hours away in Texas. We’ve swum in the same ideological soup but we also live in cities that pride themselves on being not-that, me in Austin, Lelia in New Orleans. 

There’s a shorthand to our new friendship, an intimacy in the knowing nods and the times we’ve said to each other, “oh yeah, fuck. I totally get it.” 

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You’ve heard me say it a thousand times before, but I’m always fascinated by the selfless/selfish marriage inside a non-monogamous mom, the way she combines these assumptions in ways no other cultural figure can. There’s a LOT of pressure as a mom to dissolve your inner self, or maybe to take on Jung’s provisional self, cloaking your questions (“why have we set up things this way?”) under something more socially acceptable.

But one of the most interesting things about talking to Lelia has been getting to watch her non-monogamy story shape-shift in real time, provisional self be damned. The questions I posed here give you a snapshot of her journey, and focus on how she entered non-monogamy (with a highlighted copy of The Ethical Slut), how she and her partner decided to tell her child, then, how she decided to tell the world. She ends things on a note of change and if you’re interested, I’ll do a follow-up Q&A with her again. Would you like that?

Here’s Lelia Gowland, who you can read at her own heartfelt Substack, Is It Just Me? As always, feel free to leave a comment below and chat with us. 

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Let’s start with your origin story, Lelia. Where did your non-monogamy identity come from? Did you always know this about yourself? Also, did you always know you wanted to be a mom? 

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve known I wanted kids, but I wasn’t so sure about marriage. Long-term monogamy had never appealed to me — just the thought felt inconceivable, stifling. 

At 26, I was in the season of life where many of the people closest to me were getting married, and while I was thrilled for my friends, each wedding I attended left me more apprehensive about the entire enterprise. I wondered what my path would be since “forsaking all others'' didn't seem realistic or desirable. But shortly before I attended a friend’s wedding, another friend gifted me The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love. It was a revelation. 

The Ethical Slut IS the OG poly bible. That book (like Sex At Dawn) tends to be a real scales-falling-from-the-eyes event for people. For anyone who hasn’t read it, can you describe it for readers, Lelia? Personally, I love both the substance – how it lays out the basic philosophy and principles of consensual non-monogamy – but there’s also something about the vibe of the book that feels radical. Written by these two offbeat, queer ladies in a more offbeat, queer San Francisco, reading it felt (for me) like a hug from your long-lost aunties in the Castro. Did it feel that way to you? 

Radical is such a great way to describe The Ethical Slut. While it felt like an absolute revelation, it honestly felt a little too “out there” for me at the time. I saw myself as far more “normy” than authors Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy. (They included the word “slut” in the title of their book in the 90s! Scandalous.) 

They were advocating for a radical reimagining of relational structures, and their book gave voice to something I’d always felt but hadn’t had language for. It was beautiful and life-altering. 

It was also scary as hell. 

I skipped the chapter on childrearing entirely, the thought far too daunting to consider. I was uncertain enough about how to navigate life in the Deep South in a quietly non-monogamous relationship. The thought of how we’d support a child through having non-monogamous parents filled me with abject terror. Fortunately, we were years away from having to consider it.

Despite my fears, The Ethical Slut became foundational to my worldview. 

It left me wondering What if I could have a long-term relationship and keep dating? Maybe I didn’t have to accept the constriction of monogamy to pursue the relationships I desired.

I get that long-term monogamy never appealed to you, but you – like me – grew up in the South. Neither of us got tons of modeling for relationship structures other than straight and married; I remember it was a huge deal when Ellen came out (“Yep, I’m Gay” on the cover of TIME), My So-Called Life was considered so groundbreaking for having a gay character. So, given all that, what WAS it like for you reading The Ethical Slut? 

The Ethical Slut laid out a path of healthy consensual non-monogamy (CNM) that had never occurred to me, but I’d nonetheless craved deeply. The book became “required reading” to date me, and I gave Cole – the man I’d recently married – my highlighted copy with notes in the margins. 

That copy was in Cole’s beat-up station wagon when it flooded in one of our epic New Orleans rainstorms. I was devastated. The book had taken on a symbolic quality for me, a physical resource that offered a glimmer of the life I hoped to create. Cole bought me a new copy, and once the original dried out in the freezer, moving my notes over left me feeling comforted and reassured.

I’d highlighted the chapter entitled “Roadmaps through Jealousy” extensively, adding a little yellow highlighter heart next to the sentence, “It is okay to cover pages of your journal with FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK I HATE THIS! In bright red ink; if this feels good to you.” The book offered permission to deeply feel the biggest, scariest emotions—to embrace them as a healthy and even necessary part of exploring non-monogamy, rather than a sign that I was failing. The Ethical Slut created a sense of safety and normalcy about the intimidating emotions that were coming in hot. The jealousy, uncertainty, and isolation were the most difficult part of the process for me—the very emotions that my monogamous friends couldn’t understand why I’d signed up to endure. 

In addition to offering shared language to Cole and me for the endless conversations this new relationship structure required, The Ethical Slut offered a vital foundation on which to understand my own experience.

Getting back to you and Cole, you’ve told me that the easy part of having an open relationship was agreeing to do it together. But defining what each of you meant by an open relationship was the hard part! Did the two of you want different things? 

Yes! As my affection for Cole grew, so did my stress about our open relationship. We started to have big scary conversations. What are our boundaries? I told him I just wanted no-strings-attached, recreational sex in a Marriott every three months when my ex-boyfriend came to town. Annoyingly, Cole gently suggested that this might not be realistic outside of that one very specific scenario. 

We also lamented that we didn’t have any examples of healthy open relationships in real life.

On our first date with another couple, I described one of my biggest fears: people I went to high school with, my parents, and my extended Catholic family in the Deep South finding out about our relationship model.

“You two should be out,” one person in the couple insisted. “We need more people who are willing to be visible. Polyamory is the next frontier after we pass marriage equality.” 

As a word, polyamory made my throat constrict like I was on the verge of vomiting. That was not what we were doing. We had an open relationship. We weren’t trying to fall in love with other people. While Cole accepted this possibility comfortably, I was actively opposed to it. I saw falling in love with other people as a potential threat — a calculated risk, not something to be celebrated. 

Cole often said, “The person with the lowest risk tolerance determines the pace.” This proved to be a very healthy approach, which we now hear described in the CNM community as, “Go as fast as the slowest person.” But even though Cole was unwaveringly supportive, I felt like I was always the one who was no fun, ruining Cole’s good time. But as we’d hoped, the safety of dating together allowed Cole and I to ease into our open relationship.

How long were you all in an open relationship before getting pregnant? Did you stay open while you were going through pregnancy and post-partum? 

We were together and open/poly for 8 years before we got pregnant. Getting and staying pregnant proved difficult, and polyamory actually helped me navigate my miscarriage (which I wrote about for Business Insider). 

Once I was finally pregnant, Cole and I decided to close the relationship to focus on one another and our growing family. Grant, the guy who I’d been dating on and off for nearly a decade by then, was unfazed. After our child was born, everyone from the kid’s pediatrician to the checkout person at CVS described him as a “chill baby.” Cole and I considered ourselves very fortunate and re-opened the relationship a few months later.

Dating Grant postpartum helped me come back to my body and feel like an autonomous being rather than just a milk machine. It reminded me of a subject description I read by researcher Melissa Manley, who did a study on non-monogamous mothers: “Her open relationship expanded her identity beyond the mother role and provided opportunities to feel refreshed as a parent.” 

Cole went back to seeing a woman he’d been dating for a few years. She was exceedingly thoughtful and tender, hiring a masseuse to come to the house to give me a postpartum massage and gifting us one of my favorite children’s books.

Have you told your child yet that you and Cole are open?

We have. Our kiddo was three and a half when I came out publicly in HuffPo. We started talking openly in front of him and normalizing it. To quote Tanya MacRae from one of your first interviews, “I expect there will come a time when I have to explain that monogamy is actually the dominant relationship structure in our society!”

This was not the path I’d expected as a parent, though. 

I was burned at the stake as a witch in my 5th grade play. My Catholic grandmother was thrilled because the role meant I had to learn the Lord’s Prayer. This became (and remains) the only prayer I know. But while my parents had left the church before I was born, certain cultural elements of my family’s faith lingered. Coming from a long line of Catholics in the Deep South, it feels like avoidance and denial are in our family crest, fundamental to how we move through the world. Avoidance and denial are precisely what made my queer and poly identities easy to suppress and disregard. 

One night when our child was two, I reminded Cole and my friend about an upcoming date. Then I whispered that we should be careful talking about polyamory around our child, now that he was developing language. My friend looked surprised and asked what the plan was as our kiddo got older. I answered with a shrug, “Hide it, pretend it’s not happening, and never talk about it?” 

I stopped abruptly. This was avoidance and denial in action. I’d gotten so used to hiding my identity, it hadn’t occurred to me how I’d be modeling secrecy and shame for my kiddo. Besides, from a logistical perspective, I wondered, What was to happen when my child’s friends’ parents inevitably saw Cole or I out on a date? Was my plan to just let them think we were cheating? 

This exchange and my recognition of hiding’s potential impact on our child was a key factor in my decision to come out publicly and be fully open with our kiddo.

Things have changed dramatically since then, as Cole and I have each found life-partners who are fully integrated into our family. Our holiday card last year included all 5 of us sporting matching flannels in front of the Christmas tree. 

When we talked about Cole’s partner and mine as “step-parents,” our child pushed back saying, “No, they’re my ‘extra’ parents because they’re extra special.”

The story of our poly family is rapidly evolving, and I’m elated about this next phase. Can’t wait to share it with your newsletter community in the future.

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Thanks so much for talking with me, Lelia! It’s been genuinely wonderful getting to know you, and I look forward to our next Google Meet.

COMING UP on Submit Here (forgive me! I’ve been teasing this forever)--

My Q&A with Brian Gibney, professional surrogate partner. Whenever I figure out how to create special tabs on this Substack I’ll put all the non-monogamous moms interviews there to organize them, and I’m sure I’ll talk to more moms down the road – but for now, I’m excited to jump into this topic, partner surrogacy, which I find endlessly fascinating.

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