Being left for a younger woman is a time-honored tradition in my family. When my mother was 2, her father began a string of extramarital adventures and ended his marriage to my grandmother, starting a feud that lasted decades and tore their family apart. But my grandfather and his second wife were married for 49 years, so perhaps it was for the best.
When I was 12, my father fell in love with a woman who worked in his office. It took another decade of secrecy and misery, but eventually my parents divorced. My father’s relationship with his partner has also stood the test of time; over 20 years later, they are still together, an undeniably positive outcome.
Recently my partner of 16 years told me over the phone that he was ending our relationship to pursue a life with a woman too young to remember Y2K. He had met her six weeks earlier on an 800-mile through-hike of the Arizona Trail. While he walked in the desert, I had temporarily located to The Hague to abuse the hospitality of my twin sister and her husband, an American diplomat.
Across the ocean, I sat in dazed silence as my partner cried and apologized and said things that I can’t remember but probably did not enjoy. Through my shock, a single clear thought emerged: how stunningly unoriginal.
But the truth is that my circumstances were different from my mother’s and grandmother’s. First, we never got married. We met when I was 19, tending bar at an on-campus performing arts center. I gave him a free drink, and he took out my recycling. He was so handsome that he should have been vain, but he wasn’t, and he liked animals more than people. We merged our lives and moved to a new state. We adopted a hound puppy and named him Mansfield, after the town where we fell in love.
Early on, my partner bought a ring and then returned it, correctly assuming that I wasn’t ready for marriage. He didn’t mention this until years later when he had three jalapeño margaritas on vacation and confessed, sputtering, “Did I never tell you that?”
By the time I was 30, most of our friends were married, but it had never felt like the right time for us. When people asked him why we hadn’t tied the knot, he would say that he was waiting for me to propose. I’d cite economics and feminism while harboring a feeling I admitted to no one: Things had gotten hard at times, and someday I might need an out. Our life was beautiful but not without its shadows, a fact that I hid behind a veneer of professional success and witty banter.
But it wasn’t just the absence of wedding rings that distinguished my situation from that of my foremothers. The special sauce on top of my story is that we had recently agreed to open our relationship. Like many couples, sex had been a source of tension between us. Intimacy requires competent communication, and years of burying dissatisfaction and pain had taken their toll. Our inability to talk about it was at the root of our discord.
After two years of couples therapy, we decided that opening our relationship seemed logical, and I was the one who suggested it. If we could sleep with other people, we figured, it might relieve some of the pressure that threatened to break us.
I felt grounded in the sound bites bouncing off the walls of my millennial echo chamber: We expect a completely unreasonable amount from our romantic partners. Monogamy and the nuclear family structure is far from perfect; it’s not even how humans have lived for most of our existence. I connected to the slightly subversive quality of opening our relationship, as I’d always had a nonconforming streak. In 1998, I categorically declared that Justin Timberlake was not cute. I am a renegade.
But despite my conviction that this could be a better way to live and my determination to make our relationship last, I was worried. We had never been able to have the kind of tough conversations that nonmonogamy demands. He never fully got comfortable with the idea of me being with someone else.
I had told him that my greatest fear was that he would fall in love with the first person he slept with. Although he ultimately did, their initial encounter, which he called to inform me of halfway through his hike, was certainly within the bounds of our arrangement.
As I processed this from abroad, he continued checking in, calling me weekly whenever he could find reception. But we found it impossible to navigate those difficult topics across time zones, so we reverted to avoidance and small talk. Naïvely, I continued to find comfort in the idea that we were still each other’s person.
After learning that my partner had slept with someone, my sister swung into action and began aggressively downloading dating apps onto my phone. I created a profile on Feeld, an app that celebrates nontraditional relationship structures and, as it turns out, sexual tastes.
On my first day on the platform, I saw a photo of a man doing a headstand, naked, with a sea gull perched jauntily atop his bum. I took a stabilizing breath and put the phone down. My sister took over from there, happily impersonating me, and showing me pictures men sent only after confirming the presence of pants.
Once given a task, I execute it with gusto no matter how distasteful, a habit honed by spending a decade working for unreasonable tech C.E.O.s. I went on seven first dates in two weeks. I met a genocide researcher, a criminal court judge, a Ukrainian materials scientist and a British pizza chef. A heavily tattooed project manager regaled me charmingly about his years of swinging and orgies.
I eventually found myself regularly seeing a lanky software engineer with giant hands. He made me breakfast and grinned as I mispronounced every Dutch word he attempted to teach me. It was more than a fling but less than a relationship. I’m still struggling to define it, but maybe that’s the point.
Now that I’m home in Montana, heartbreak and grief have rushed in with full force. I have experienced loss before, and I know that if you put one foot in front of the other, you eventually climb out of the canyon. But alongside grief and heartbreak is their pesky cousin: confusion.
What part of what my partner did was OK? He walked through doors we hadn’t agreed to, but I had opened them for him. We had verbalized a commitment to stay together, but now I wonder if he had one eye on the exit. I’m angry, and yet I don’t feel entitled to my anger. How can it be infidelity when I told him he could sleep with her? Is it cheating to accidentally fall in love with someone? Like my parents’ and grandparents’ splits, was this all for the best?
And if I’m unclear about who to blame for our demise, I’m even more confused about monogamy. How could I pursue an open relationship in the future when my singular fear was realized in the first moments of this one? Yet when I think about climbing back into the tidy box of a monogamous forever, even with a hypothetical Mr. Right, sparks of warning flare in my gut.
My foray into nonmonogamy was like a semester abroad in a foreign land. Things are human and messy there too, but people have found a way to live without pretending everything is fine. The natives are creating their own lives and stories that are unique to them, their partners and their desires. I didn’t meet or speak to two people who were working from the same model or arrangement.
At times, I do resent being the next number in my family’s Fibonacci sequence of male betrayal. However, it seems that with each generation, it gets a little easier. My grandparents’ divorce in the 1950s sent a shock wave through their community. My parents managed to split with considerably less drama and consequence. And while I wrestle with a messy end that resembles but does not exactly mimic history, the world around me is slowly understanding that the traditional way is not the only way.
I am realizing I have a menu of options before me that I can delight in choosing from, rather than the classic heterosexual binary of being married or alone. I have possibilities that the last two generations of women before me did not have.
Are there orgies in my future? Perhaps not. But I’m beginning to think I might have the courage to pursue a road less traveled. I dared to dislike Justin Timberlake. Who knows what else I’m capable of.
