It doesn’t feel very enlightened to admit it, but I’m not anti the idea of codependence. I mean, it’s sort of romantic as a concept, really. One person can’t function without the other; one must run everything by the other; one finishes the other’s sentences. I used to relish this lack of distance in my relationship. I found it sort of miraculous that, if a thought came into my head, it would be out of my mouth and into my partner’s ear before it had been filtered. “A membrane thick” is how we used to describe the distance between us.
This distance, or lack of it, was something we lost when we opened up our relationship. And for a while that felt really complicated, really scary, perhaps too great a cost for the benefit of sex with others. Like a kind of end. Which, in a way, it was. You see, you realise that there are elements of your extramarital escapades that are just too painful to share with each other. Details that bring about totally irrational, unhelpful or unproductive responses in you or your partner.
Once, after I’d heard about something my husband had gotten up to, I had a weeklong jealous meltdown. Nothing that bad. Just some light paranoia and super-intense neediness. When I’d spent enough nights staring at the ceiling wondering if this was our last night sharing a bed together, we eventually discussed how and when we should speak about the things that happened outside of our relationship. And while we mutually agreed it was important never to lie, we realised we had to reconsider the ways in which we told the truth.
This took place after my second extramarital “relationship”. This one was short-lived but intense, and it had ended because of said intensity. I didn’t feel like I could provide what they were asking for, and they didn’t feel like I was able to provide it, even if I wanted to. Naturally, after any break-up, you feel a whole range of things. And in this case I felt a combination of anxious and sad – pining for a divergent path now growing over with grass. A path that, of course, I didn’t want to take – of that I am sure. It was more a question of mourning for all of the other versions of myself that could have been. (Ironically, I’ve found that it is these moments that make me feel more sure of my primary relationship, because I’m actively choosing it.)
Of course, I wanted to talk about feeling sad and anxious with my partner. And while we walked our dog – which is our usual “dump time” – I found myself tiptoeing towards mentioning these feelings in our conversation. But then I remembered how hard I’d found it to hear him describe something which was, frankly, much less emotionally significant. And so I stopped myself. I “self-managed”, as that famous book about codependence whose title I forget tells you to do.
Self-management sounds boring. And for me, it’s been one of the harder parts of entering an open relationship. It means active engagement with your own emotions, and real consideration of your partner’s feelings before your own. Is my need to say this more important than their need to be protected from it? I never used to think like this. As far as I was concerned, your partner’s feelings were yours, and yours were theirs. But here was a new task for me: self-soothing (sorry, annoying term), confronting my own emotions without believing they’ll be attended to or solved by someone else. And so I sat with them, I considered them, I worked through them. I asked whether they were real.
There have been times when I couldn’t do these things. Or when I got to the tail end of this process, and there were a few small niggles that I needed an external ear to help me understand. Sometimes I’ll go to my partner, and he will be receptive. Sometimes I’ll go to a friend (two in particular, who, just like me, love nothing more than sex- and love-related gossip). This new practice, which I’m still learning, has afforded me greater perspective on my own emotions. My therapist is very pleased.
One friend asked if you could describe self-management as a kind of lying. But when I thought about that more, I felt that the question seemed to point towards the fact that we have somehow decided that partnership means complete submergence into the internal life of another.
Self-management isn’t a constant state, and it isn’t totally easy. One of the wonderful things about monogamy is that there’s less of it required; if you’re monogamous, you don’t usually have to talk to your partner about how you’re feeling sad because someone you fucked ghosted you. (I mean, quite chic if so, but it’s not monogamy, sweetie.) As ever, we adapt these porous boundaries as we go.
