March 21, 2023 • 31 mins
More and more women are seeing multiple partners outside of their marriage without lying to their spouses. While an open marriage may not be an affair in the traditional sense, it is another way for women to explore what they want and need from a partner without the lying and subterfuge.
This week's guest "Alice" craved new bodies, new excitement, new experiences, and like many of the women we've talked to in previous episodes, she decided to step out on her husband to find what she wanted. But after Alice had her first sexual encounter outside of her marriage, she chose to tell her husband the truth – and ask him if she could do it again. Now, Alice and her husband are in an open marriage. So, can open marriages be the answer for some women who are considering having an affair? Jo is also joined by Dr. Ashley Thompson and Dr. Lori Gottlieb to weigh in on the positive impact that communication can have on a relationship.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Sex outside my marriage is maybe more playful. It has
new relationship energy with it. It's kind of like buyer
worky and crazy and like tickley and exciting. That's Alice
and she loves sex. Alice isn't her real name, but
(00:24):
everything else she told me is true. I generated a
lot of energy and a lot of joy from interacting
with other people, and that includes romantic land sexually. And
she loves to play and try new things. My sexual
needs and desires and my body is kind of like
this scavenger hunt because it keeps changing and there's dead
ends and you have to like find different things. But
(00:45):
she also very much loves her husband. He knows me
so well that he follows that map and it's amazing
and we can try anything together because we have so
much trust and so much safety in our relationship. Despite
how great things were with her husband, Alice just wasn't
getting everything she wanted sexually from him. She craved new bodies,
(01:07):
new excitement, new experiences, and like many of the women
we've talked to in previous episodes, she decided to have
an affair to find what she wanted. But here's what's different.
After Alice had her first sexual encounter outside of her marriage.
She chose to tell her husband the truth, and then
she asked him if he'd be open to her doing
(01:29):
it again. I'm Joe Piazza and you're listening to She
Wants More, the podcast where real women talk openly and
honestly about the extra marital affairs that have completely changed
their lives. Open marriages have been coming up in a
lot of our recent conversations, and at first we debated
(01:50):
even talking about it. This is a podcast about affairs.
It sex outside your marriage an affair If it isn't
a secret, is it secret part that makes the affair?
I don't actually know the answer to that. Actually. In
last week's episode, our expert Alexandra Fine, the sexologist and
(02:11):
founder of sex toy brand Dame, even shared that she's
in an open marriage. I'm in more of an open marriage.
You form patterns and habits for a reason, and having
a new space to get to explore, to be different.
I think that's how we're constantly refinding ourselves. Many of
our guests, including Wednesday Martin and doctor Ashley Thompson, have
(02:33):
even suggested that consensual non monogamy open marriages could be
a healthier way for women who are considering affairs to
get their sexual needs met without betraying someone. In recent years,
the stigma around open marriages seems to be lessening. Google
searches for terms like polyamory and non monogamy have increased
(02:54):
substantially since twenty sixteen, and I'm pretty sure that all
the ex positivity flooding our social media feeds is also
contributing to more curiosity on the subject. Younger people in particular,
seemed to be especially receptive to the idea of it.
A recent Tender study revealed that one fifth of gen
(03:15):
z users said that they would be open to considering polyamory. So,
could open marriages be the answer for some women who
are considering having an affair who are already having one?
Could open marriages be the answer for women who are
in a position of authority or privilege to be able
to ask for one. That is what I wanted to
(03:36):
find out. Before she met her husband, Alice never thought
that she'd get married or have a traditional monogamous relationship.
Leading up to dating my husband. I really wasn't in
any long term monogamous relationships. I saw a lot of
relationships that had one partner. That was quite controlling. Saw
(04:01):
especially parents losing their identities to just be parents, and
like you didn't know who they were beyond being a parent.
They had no hobbies, they had nothing that they seemed
to be interested in, and so I just grew up
being these I basically felt like I saw the same
(04:22):
relationship over and over and over with my friends parents,
and seeing my friends and how they were dating, it
all just seemed not very much fun. It seemed like
people were losing themselves. I just knew that. The way
I understood it is I don't ever want to get married.
That doesn't make sense. But then Alice did meet her husband.
(04:46):
We met through doing yoga together, and they just were
in the same circle of friends for a few months,
and one day we in our circle of friends ended
up ending the whole day out together. And it was
interesting because it wasn't this like flare of oh, I'm
(05:08):
so attracted to this person and I need to have
them or I wonder what will happen. It was just
like friendship with like an peak of interest. And a
couple weeks later, we ended up in another event together
and we ended up staying out all night and because
we are having so much fun. We just kept going out.
And then the next day I was riding my bike
and talking to a friend and I said, I met
(05:30):
the person I'm going to marry, and I'm freaked out
because I don't believe in marriage and I am too
young for this, and I don't feel like this makes
sense at all, and yet I know I want to
and I'm going to marry this person. So you did it.
You're just like, this is the person. It was just
really clear to me, and again was confusing because I
truly didn't believe in marriage. I'd never seen a super
(05:52):
successful marriage, at least not the way I wanted to
live my life. I didn't have a model of what
I thought I be as a wife. I'm also queer,
and so like the idea of like committing to this
one person, of this one gender felt like a lot
for me. And I had never been in a monogamous relationship,
(06:15):
and I had an assumption that if I was with
this person, that's what that would mean as well. So
we dated and we felt very quickly for each other.
He felt similarly. He had been in a lot of
long term relationships, but just didn't feel the same as
this one for him. Within three months, we were already
talking about our future together. We were engaged within eight months,
(06:37):
and we were married within a year and a half
of our first date. Prior to getting married, had the
two of you discussed non monogamy. Not really, So within
a couple weeks of dating each other, I was traveling
and was visiting friends and I got this cryptic phone
(06:57):
call at like the middle of the night. That call
was from Alice's future husband, and he very urgently wanted
to know if she was sleeping with anyone else. He's like,
I just need to know if we're monogamous. I was like,
I don't care, or do you want to be monogamous?
And he said yes, and I was like, all right,
(07:17):
so we are. And so we had a discussion that
we should be monogamous. That was sort of our commitment moment,
I guess. So before they even got married, Alice had
to set some boundaries. She is this naturally affectionate person,
the kind of person who likes to cuddle and hug
and be touchy with her friends. So it was very
(07:37):
important to her that she makes sure that her soon
to be husband was okay with her craving touch from
other people, and he was I could never have chosen
a partner who wasn't comfortable with that. I would have
never dated him if he wasn't comfortable with that. I
could never be in any sort of sustained relationship with
one person who didn't support touch outside of the relationship.
(08:02):
But then a few years later, after they were married,
something very different happened, something that definitely crossed the line
of what they'd agreed to when they first got married.
Alice had sex with someone else and she knew that
it crossed the boundary. Instead of hiding it, Alice decided
(08:23):
to tell her husband what happened. After all, they had
already communicated in the past about touch and being affectionate
with others outside of their marriage, and that conversation had
gone okay. I told him pretty much the second after
it happened, like within you know, twelve hours have been happened,
and he just noticed. He checked in with his feelings
(08:45):
and he said that he just didn't he didn't care,
like he didn't feel threatened by it. He knew it
wasn't about him. He felt like our relationship was strong,
and he didn't feel lied too, because I told him
pretty much the second after it happened. I really didn't
know what to expect when Alice said she told her
husband what happened twelve hours after she had sex with
someone else, anything could happened. But he was okay with it.
(09:09):
He was okay with it because Alice didn't lie to him,
and so he and I then really had our first
conversation about what non monogamy is for me and for him.
We had a conversation around limits and boundaries of what
feels safe for us, Like he personally wanted anogamy for himself,
(09:34):
and he understands that what I need to feel fulfilled
is to be connecting to other people. I'm an extreme extrovert,
like I'm beyond the boundaries extroversion, and I generated a
lot of energy and a lot of joy from interacting
with other people, and that includes romantically and sexually. My
(09:56):
husband's more of an introvert. He likes a lot of
alone time, and so this actually balances our relationship better
because it fills this need that I have for a
lot of engagement, a lot of energy, a lot of attention,
a lot of touch. Like he really understood that, and
so it's been really important for me not to keep
(10:20):
things and not be in the shadows at any point
about my sexuality and my non monogamy, and he's been
really amazing and receptive through the years about it. Everybody
has different definitions of what are the boundaries in our relationship?
What does it mean to us to feel that we
(10:40):
can trust each other. That's doctor Laurie Gottlieb, psychotherapist and
New York Times bestselling author. If you remember we talked
to her in our episode about loneliness, We called her
up again to ask a few questions about boundaries, communication
and marriage. One of the things I really wanted to
know was whether doctor Gottlieb pop partners needed to talk
(11:02):
about their boundaries before they even got married. This is
why people come before marriage. People think, oh, they must
be having problems before they even got married because they're
going to therapy. No, people come all the time for
premarital therapy to talk about these kinds of things so
that they are on the same page about them, so
that they can at least open up the conversations and understand.
(11:26):
How do we talk about these things that can be
really challenging to talk about. I asked doctor Gottlieb if
it can be challenging for couples to talk to each
other because we don't always know what our boundaries are.
In fact, we might not even realize that a boundary
exists until it's been crossed, right. We don't until we
feel like one of them has been violated, and then
(11:49):
we say, oh, look what you did, and the other
person says, wait a minute, I didn't think I was
doing anything. Now, Sometimes they know they're doing something, so
sometimes it's a clear boundary violation, But there are many
times when two people have very different ideas about what
it means to be faithful to the other person. If
two people can have very different ideas about what it
(12:11):
means to be faithful, then does that mean that the
definition of an affair could be different for everyone. And
how do we define a betrayal in a marriage anyway?
Is it when something is a secret, when it's a lie,
or is it as simple as when there's a lack
of communication between partners. We'll be talking about all of
(12:33):
this as we learn even more about Alice's experience, as
well as how being intimate with other people actually ended
up helping her sex life with her husband. We're back,
(12:53):
So talk to me a little bit about when you
first opened up the marriage on your end, what did
the two of you have to work through for this
to work, What boundaries had to be put in place,
and what kinds of communication had to be put in place. Surprisingly,
we didn't really have to work through much at all.
I am an incredibly busy person, and so it limits
(13:14):
how much time I have for anything outside of the
marriage anyway, which creates a boundary in and of itself.
I tend to have either very spontaneous random experiences like
at a play party or like a one night stand,
or sort of in depth long relationships with people that
(13:37):
I don't see that often and who are like maybe friendly,
who I also have a sexual relationship with. And so
it has never been threatening to the marriage because there
hasn't been a lot of like the in between where
I'm like dating somebody actively and needing to prioritize a
lot of time with that person. And the agreement that
my husband and I have is that if it takes
(14:00):
energy and time away from our family, or at any
point he doesn't feel like a priority, than it has
to end. We also have an agreement that if we're
not in a good place in our marriage, and we're
not connecting emotionally, physically really in any way. Like if
we feel estranged in some way, then we do not
explore outside the marriage at all. It's just like immediate lockdown.
(14:24):
So a good example of that is like after I
gave birth, it was a really hard moment for me.
I was working, going to school, breastfeeding, like momming, it
was so full on, and so just everything shut down
our marriage and our family sure quite a while. More recently,
(14:46):
we've been in conversation that involves more limits and boundaries
now that my kid is older and I have more time.
And I use this word super lovingly, but I just
feel sluttier in the best of ways, and I feel
super embodied and like really high sex drive right now.
And so I want to be going out more and
meeting more people. And a lot of my friends are
in like Polly relationships, and so I am feeling much
(15:09):
more like amped up about going out. And so we
have had to have those conversations that you're talking about
that we didn't before. So limits and boundaries on like
what he feels comfortable with is regarding time some as
regarding sexual acts that he prefers I do or do
not share with other people. Most recently it's about kink
(15:29):
play with impact with people. I was playing with a
friend of mine and he bit my leg and I
had like a pretty gnarly bruise from it, and my
husband was upset because then he had to look at
it and it made him unhappy to look at a
bruise on my body. And I didn't mind. It was
playful and fun of the moment, and so I asked him.
(15:51):
I was like, do you want that to be a limit?
And he said, well, if you need it and it
turns you on, I don't want to tell, you know.
And so we got into a little bit of this
like loop of me asking him, him saying, but I
don't want to restrict you. And it was like we
played around this thing for a little while until finally
he's like, yeah, I don't want you to be bruised,
and I'm like, well, that is no problem. That was
like a recent boundary. The other thing, and this has
(16:13):
been since the very beginning, is it has to be
safe sex with anyone. You know, condoms and STI checks
and just really considerate of sexual health. And that's like
a hard, incredibly hard line that's been there since the
very beginning. Alice's husband wasn't very interested in physical non monogamy.
(16:36):
He wasn't regularly searching or something outside the marriage, but
he was allowed to if he wanted to, and because
of that, Alice had to consider what her boundaries were
for him. Buying gifts was my boundary because like, money
is such a complicated thing in a marriage anyway. Yeah,
there's something about that that I felt time upon and
(16:58):
not making gifts. He wanted to make somebody something for
someone that would be fine, like taking someone out is fine.
It was like the physical act of giving a gift.
I think it's so interesting. I think the thing that
would make all of us uncomfortable is different. I'm trying
to think what would really piss me off if I
was setting boundaries with my husband, Long emotional conversations might
(17:21):
or even gift giving. I never thought about that before,
or frankly, acts of service him doing the dishes or
taking the garbage out in some other woman's house would
really get under my fucking skin. Yeah, and a lot
of the women that I speak to have similar boundaries.
In heterosexual relationships, like if their male partners are doing
like gift giving or acts of service. That is a
trigger for a lot of the women. I know. Your
(17:44):
sex dribe has increased. Now, do you think it's because
you're emerging from that phase of our lives that I
don't think it's talked about enough of motherhood of a
child of a certain age, and you're feeling more comfortable
in your body. Again, what do you think is the
reason I always felt good about my body. I've had
really great body image my whole life. And what actually
(18:07):
changed was I'm like the primary breadwinner in our house,
and I work a lot, and I run a business,
and I also try to be like an incredibly present
mother and be a good wife, to be a good daughter,
and be a good sister and a good friend. And
so I think the pressures of early motherhood. I think
(18:30):
all of that dampened my sex drive quite a bit.
I'm in a care position with my family and my
friends a lot, and so caring for other people all
the time, I think to dampened my sex drive. And
then COVID obliterated it with anxiety and sort of the
world feeling more scary, more intense, So I feel like
(18:55):
I'm coming out of this phase of having to do
a lot of care externally, giving away a lot of
my energy all the time, and I actually have some
reserves left. I also feel really healthy in my body.
And my husband after he got of a sect to me,
(19:15):
that really helped because we weren't worried about getting pregnant,
and so that helped because when we're having more sex
at home and better sex and feeling more connected at
home than that turns out my sex drive too. Being
non monogamous has definitely impacted the sex aalysis had with
their husband. For the better sex inside. My marriage is
(19:38):
one more frequent, which is great. It's more intimate. It's
been building for a decade and a half, and so
we know each other's bodies so well. I joke that
my sexual needs and desires and my body is kind
of like a scavenger hunt because it keeps changing and
there's dead ends and you have to like find different things.
(19:58):
So my husband has to do extra work because my
taste changed kind of frequently, like a shape shifter a bit.
But he knows me so well that he follows that
map and it's amazing and we can try anything together
because we have so much trust and so much safety
in our relationship that we want to try feel safe
with him, and our bodies just fit together right, Like
(20:19):
our kiss is perfect and it's different and better and
sects outside My marriage is maybe more playful. It has
new relationship energy with it, which I think most people
know what that feels like. It's kind of like buyerworky
and crazy and like tickling and exciting, and it's very
(20:42):
exploratory because it's new people and you're getting to know
somebody knew, whether it's a single serving interaction or like
multiple engagements with that person. And I like the balance
of having both. The one that I need is the
one in my marriage. The one that I also to
add in and want is this stuff outside in the marriage.
(21:03):
I also asked Alice if she thought that sex with
partners outside of her marriage has made her marriage stronger
in a way, or even if it's made her a
better mother. I think, like a thousand percent. We have
had stretches in our marriage where we're monogamous, and that
works for me too, but there again, it's chosen. But
(21:27):
I am definitely happier, and I bring that happiness home
with me when I get to be with other people
and it lightens me up. I have a lot of
anxiety from life, but it lowers my anxiety. It makes
me just a nicer person to be around, truly. And
then I bring that home and I am lighthearted at home,
(21:48):
and I'm more compassionate at home. It's just it's actually
better for all of us. We live in a society
the defaults to monogamy for better or worse, and anything
outside of that norm often gets judged. But more and
more women are questioning those norms these days. And I
(22:09):
have to say, after doing all these interviews, I think
that there's a lot that monogamous couples, couples who would
never consider an open marriage, can actually learn from open relationships.
When we decided to be monogamous right in the beginning,
when he asked me, are we monogamous and we asked
if we could be, I meant yes, And it felt
(22:32):
good to say yes. It felt good to put attention
to what we were building in that moment. And also
I think there was just a part of me that
knew that it was going to be okay and we
weren't going to stay in that place, But it felt
really good to put one hundred percent of my energy
and attention into building this and cultivating this relationship, and
so it never felt contained by it because it was chosen.
(22:53):
And I think that's the difference of like going into
default monogamy, where women, especially women feel repressed or owned
or contained, versus choosing monogamy, which which I just want
to be with my partner and I'm saying that, and
I own that and it's mine, and that feels totally
different to me. And so in the beginning of our relationship,
we had chosen a monogamy which felt amazing, and then
(23:14):
when it didn't feel so amazing because I wanted to
do other things, I did them and he said it
was okay. And then we continued to open and open
from that point and we still talk about it. I
don't just go out and not tell him what I'm doing.
I don't keep him in the dark of anything. I
want to make sure that it feels okay if I'm
going to go out and have a date with someone else.
(23:36):
I think that there's this stereotype of marriage, and I
mean we hear it all the time of like, oh,
like if in a hetero marriage, like men complaining about
their wives, for example, and like wives nagging their husbands,
and like all of those like stereotypes. That's what I
was really fed as a child, Like that's what I
heard all over. There wasn't even any like queer couples
(23:58):
that I was exposed to and new, and so it
was all this heteronormative, patriarchal bullshit that totally didn't make
sense to me. As early as I could remember, I
didn't know that you could construct a whole type of
relationship that you wanted and that you can co create
with somebody else's relationship you actually want, friendship or as
a sexual or romantic partner. As we mentioned, Alice and
(24:20):
her husband share a daughter. She's young, too young to
talk about these things, but that won't always be the case,
and kids also pick up on everything. I really wanted
to know how Alice and her husband might need to
broach their open marriage at some point. I don't think
she knows what monogamy is. She just I think has
(24:43):
an assumption that she's heard me and her dad say,
like people don't own each other, They don't own each
lenge bodies Like Mom could go do what she wants,
Dad could go do what he wants. And it's not
sexual right because she doesn't even she's not even old
enough to understand what that is yet. But it's about
like releasing this idea of ownership and so she can
actually choose. She might choose to be monogamous at some point,
(25:05):
but I don't want anyone to tell her what to
do with herself, you know. I want her to choose
it if she wants to choose it. And so the
way we framed it so far far is just about
like engaging in the world, like Mom goes and does
this thing. Mom stays out all night sometimes Dad does
this thing, and Dad goes on vacation by himself sometimes,
like it's part of that conversation. So it feels very
(25:26):
like it's happening organically that she's knowing about this. It
doesn't feel like something I have to like come out
about because it's just something I do. Like coming out
and being queer and having people know that feels important
because that's an identity. But like I don't identify as polyamorous.
It's just like it's what I do. It's in my
life and it fulfills this thing because I'm just a
(25:47):
really highly sexual person, and I specifically am like I
like to engage with other people in a sexual way.
We'll be back after a short break. We're back. For
some people, it's easy to keep things completely physical. We've
(26:09):
heard from plenty of women on the show who've managed
to do just that. But for every one of those women,
we've talked to someone who's crossed an emotional line and
fallen deeper than they expected. I asked Alice if that
had ever happened to her. I've had a few people
like tell me they love me, and I'm like, so,
I think this might be the end of that relationship
(26:31):
because I don't want to get more complicated than that.
So you know, it's just I try to feel out
each relationship and see what feels the safe is, because truly,
the thing I like about them is a sexual piece.
Like I don't need a bunch of other partners. I
had a long term connection with one person and it
developed into something else, and that happened sort of organically
(26:52):
and maybe accidentally, and it was complicated for us. That
was when we had more talking involved, and then it
ended because things in and it didn't work in our
lives anymore. But the way we navigated it was the
same way as we navigate all the rest of the
stuff is like does my husband feel like a priority?
Is my time being spent mostly at home? How communicative
(27:13):
and honest story being about everything? And so we just
followed all the rules and it worked out fine. What
we know in the literature is yes, by and large,
open relationships. So these pessentially non monogamous relationships are beneficial,
caveat being that they need to be communicated. That's doctor
(27:35):
Ashley Thompson again. Remember her, she's the sex professor, an
expert that we talked to in episode three. Doctor Thompson
has done a lot of research in open marriages, consensual
non monogamy, and here's what she's found. So when you
see people really strategically introduced polyamory or open relationships into
(27:58):
maybe what was once a monogamous relationship, if they talk
about it with their partner, figure out what's acceptable and
what's not, it overwhelmingly is a positive experience. And so
consensual no monogamy can help out there where you know what,
maybe your primary relationship is fantastic, but you're missing a
few things here, and you can get those things there
without breaching trust in a way that everyone is accepting
(28:21):
of it just seems to me like a win win.
Why not if everyone's cool with it, let's get all
our needs met in whatever ways we need. Maybe this
is a win win. Your sexual needs get met and
no one gets lied to, no one's betrayed. The stigma
of extramarital relationships can be eroded. But that in itself
(28:43):
kind of feels like a world that a lot of
people in our society still won't be able to accept.
But what I hope you take from this is that
by talking about it, by having these real and honest
conversations about different models of being partnered with another human being,
those conversations might help us start being more comfortable figuring
out what does make us happy and to start asking
(29:05):
for it. If this podcast has made you wonder whether
everyone is having an affair right now, whether it's just
completely pervasive and you're the only one who's left out,
you're not alone. But I also don't think that's true.
I believe monogamy still works for a lot of people.
But I gotta tell you that through my reporting, I
found that having an affair, that finding someone to do
(29:28):
it with seems to be easier than ever, and that,
like many things in our life, from getting groceries to
call in a cab, is mostly due to changes in technology.
Technology has made it easier than ever to have extramarital affairs,
and it has also really shifted our understanding of what
(29:49):
exactly a boundary is. Could an affair mean casual flirting
on Facebook message? Could an affair means someone activate a
remote vibrator from MC content and away. That's the thing,
by the way it is, and we are diving into
all of it next week. We're talking about why affairs
(30:10):
are easier than ever before, how women use technology to
get away with them, and how they juggle multiple affairs
while working, taking care of kids and everything else that
women do. This is She Wants More. I'm your host
Joe Piazza. She Wants More was inspired by the book
(30:32):
A Passion for More by Susan Shapiro Bearish. It was
adapted for audio by executive producers Merrill Poster, Karat Pfeiffer,
and Susan Shapiro Bearish. She Wants More is hosted and
reported by me Joe Piazza. Jennifer Bassett is our lead producer.
And story editor. Our sound design is by Jessica Crinchich.
(30:53):
Our theme was composed by Anna Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthouser.
Our executive producers for iHeart are Ali Ry and Nikki Etour.
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Sex outside my marriage is maybe more playful. It has
new relationship energy with it. It's kind of like buyer
worky and crazy and like tickley and exciting. That's Alice
and she loves sex. Alice isn't her real name, but
(00:24):
everything else she told me is true. I generated a
lot of energy and a lot of joy from interacting
with other people, and that includes romantic land sexually. And
she loves to play and try new things. My sexual
needs and desires and my body is kind of like
this scavenger hunt because it keeps changing and there's dead
ends and you have to like find different things. But
(00:45):
she also very much loves her husband. He knows me
so well that he follows that map and it's amazing
and we can try anything together because we have so
much trust and so much safety in our relationship. Despite
how great things were with her husband, Alice just wasn't
getting everything she wanted sexually from him. She craved new bodies,
(01:07):
new excitement, new experiences, and like many of the women
we've talked to in previous episodes, she decided to have
an affair to find what she wanted. But here's what's different.
After Alice had her first sexual encounter outside of her marriage.
She chose to tell her husband the truth, and then
she asked him if he'd be open to her doing
(01:29):
it again. I'm Joe Piazza and you're listening to She
Wants More, the podcast where real women talk openly and
honestly about the extra marital affairs that have completely changed
their lives. Open marriages have been coming up in a
lot of our recent conversations, and at first we debated
(01:50):
even talking about it. This is a podcast about affairs.
It sex outside your marriage an affair If it isn't
a secret, is it secret part that makes the affair?
I don't actually know the answer to that. Actually. In
last week's episode, our expert Alexandra Fine, the sexologist and
(02:11):
founder of sex toy brand Dame, even shared that she's
in an open marriage. I'm in more of an open marriage.
You form patterns and habits for a reason, and having
a new space to get to explore, to be different.
I think that's how we're constantly refinding ourselves. Many of
our guests, including Wednesday Martin and doctor Ashley Thompson, have
(02:33):
even suggested that consensual non monogamy open marriages could be
a healthier way for women who are considering affairs to
get their sexual needs met without betraying someone. In recent years,
the stigma around open marriages seems to be lessening. Google
searches for terms like polyamory and non monogamy have increased
(02:54):
substantially since twenty sixteen, and I'm pretty sure that all
the ex positivity flooding our social media feeds is also
contributing to more curiosity on the subject. Younger people in particular,
seemed to be especially receptive to the idea of it.
A recent Tender study revealed that one fifth of gen
(03:15):
z users said that they would be open to considering polyamory. So,
could open marriages be the answer for some women who
are considering having an affair who are already having one?
Could open marriages be the answer for women who are
in a position of authority or privilege to be able
to ask for one. That is what I wanted to
(03:36):
find out. Before she met her husband, Alice never thought
that she'd get married or have a traditional monogamous relationship.
Leading up to dating my husband. I really wasn't in
any long term monogamous relationships. I saw a lot of
relationships that had one partner. That was quite controlling. Saw
(04:01):
especially parents losing their identities to just be parents, and
like you didn't know who they were beyond being a parent.
They had no hobbies, they had nothing that they seemed
to be interested in, and so I just grew up
being these I basically felt like I saw the same
(04:22):
relationship over and over and over with my friends parents,
and seeing my friends and how they were dating, it
all just seemed not very much fun. It seemed like
people were losing themselves. I just knew that. The way
I understood it is I don't ever want to get married.
That doesn't make sense. But then Alice did meet her husband.
(04:46):
We met through doing yoga together, and they just were
in the same circle of friends for a few months,
and one day we in our circle of friends ended
up ending the whole day out together. And it was
interesting because it wasn't this like flare of oh, I'm
(05:08):
so attracted to this person and I need to have
them or I wonder what will happen. It was just
like friendship with like an peak of interest. And a
couple weeks later, we ended up in another event together
and we ended up staying out all night and because
we are having so much fun. We just kept going out.
And then the next day I was riding my bike
and talking to a friend and I said, I met
(05:30):
the person I'm going to marry, and I'm freaked out
because I don't believe in marriage and I am too
young for this, and I don't feel like this makes
sense at all, and yet I know I want to
and I'm going to marry this person. So you did it.
You're just like, this is the person. It was just
really clear to me, and again was confusing because I
truly didn't believe in marriage. I'd never seen a super
(05:52):
successful marriage, at least not the way I wanted to
live my life. I didn't have a model of what
I thought I be as a wife. I'm also queer,
and so like the idea of like committing to this
one person, of this one gender felt like a lot
for me. And I had never been in a monogamous relationship,
(06:15):
and I had an assumption that if I was with
this person, that's what that would mean as well. So
we dated and we felt very quickly for each other.
He felt similarly. He had been in a lot of
long term relationships, but just didn't feel the same as
this one for him. Within three months, we were already
talking about our future together. We were engaged within eight months,
(06:37):
and we were married within a year and a half
of our first date. Prior to getting married, had the
two of you discussed non monogamy. Not really, So within
a couple weeks of dating each other, I was traveling
and was visiting friends and I got this cryptic phone
(06:57):
call at like the middle of the night. That call
was from Alice's future husband, and he very urgently wanted
to know if she was sleeping with anyone else. He's like,
I just need to know if we're monogamous. I was like,
I don't care, or do you want to be monogamous?
And he said yes, and I was like, all right,
(07:17):
so we are. And so we had a discussion that
we should be monogamous. That was sort of our commitment moment,
I guess. So before they even got married, Alice had
to set some boundaries. She is this naturally affectionate person,
the kind of person who likes to cuddle and hug
and be touchy with her friends. So it was very
(07:37):
important to her that she makes sure that her soon
to be husband was okay with her craving touch from
other people, and he was I could never have chosen
a partner who wasn't comfortable with that. I would have
never dated him if he wasn't comfortable with that. I
could never be in any sort of sustained relationship with
one person who didn't support touch outside of the relationship.
(08:02):
But then a few years later, after they were married,
something very different happened, something that definitely crossed the line
of what they'd agreed to when they first got married.
Alice had sex with someone else and she knew that
it crossed the boundary. Instead of hiding it, Alice decided
(08:23):
to tell her husband what happened. After all, they had
already communicated in the past about touch and being affectionate
with others outside of their marriage, and that conversation had
gone okay. I told him pretty much the second after
it happened, like within you know, twelve hours have been happened,
and he just noticed. He checked in with his feelings
(08:45):
and he said that he just didn't he didn't care,
like he didn't feel threatened by it. He knew it
wasn't about him. He felt like our relationship was strong,
and he didn't feel lied too, because I told him
pretty much the second after it happened. I really didn't
know what to expect when Alice said she told her
husband what happened twelve hours after she had sex with
someone else, anything could happened. But he was okay with it.
(09:09):
He was okay with it because Alice didn't lie to him,
and so he and I then really had our first
conversation about what non monogamy is for me and for him.
We had a conversation around limits and boundaries of what
feels safe for us, Like he personally wanted anogamy for himself,
(09:34):
and he understands that what I need to feel fulfilled
is to be connecting to other people. I'm an extreme extrovert,
like I'm beyond the boundaries extroversion, and I generated a
lot of energy and a lot of joy from interacting
with other people, and that includes romantically and sexually. My
(09:56):
husband's more of an introvert. He likes a lot of
alone time, and so this actually balances our relationship better
because it fills this need that I have for a
lot of engagement, a lot of energy, a lot of attention,
a lot of touch. Like he really understood that, and
so it's been really important for me not to keep
(10:20):
things and not be in the shadows at any point
about my sexuality and my non monogamy, and he's been
really amazing and receptive through the years about it. Everybody
has different definitions of what are the boundaries in our relationship?
What does it mean to us to feel that we
(10:40):
can trust each other. That's doctor Laurie Gottlieb, psychotherapist and
New York Times bestselling author. If you remember we talked
to her in our episode about loneliness, We called her
up again to ask a few questions about boundaries, communication
and marriage. One of the things I really wanted to
know was whether doctor Gottlieb pop partners needed to talk
(11:02):
about their boundaries before they even got married. This is
why people come before marriage. People think, oh, they must
be having problems before they even got married because they're
going to therapy. No, people come all the time for
premarital therapy to talk about these kinds of things so
that they are on the same page about them, so
that they can at least open up the conversations and understand.
(11:26):
How do we talk about these things that can be
really challenging to talk about. I asked doctor Gottlieb if
it can be challenging for couples to talk to each
other because we don't always know what our boundaries are.
In fact, we might not even realize that a boundary
exists until it's been crossed, right. We don't until we
feel like one of them has been violated, and then
(11:49):
we say, oh, look what you did, and the other
person says, wait a minute, I didn't think I was
doing anything. Now, Sometimes they know they're doing something, so
sometimes it's a clear boundary violation, But there are many
times when two people have very different ideas about what
it means to be faithful to the other person. If
two people can have very different ideas about what it
(12:11):
means to be faithful, then does that mean that the
definition of an affair could be different for everyone. And
how do we define a betrayal in a marriage anyway?
Is it when something is a secret, when it's a lie,
or is it as simple as when there's a lack
of communication between partners. We'll be talking about all of
(12:33):
this as we learn even more about Alice's experience, as
well as how being intimate with other people actually ended
up helping her sex life with her husband. We're back,
(12:53):
So talk to me a little bit about when you
first opened up the marriage on your end, what did
the two of you have to work through for this
to work, What boundaries had to be put in place,
and what kinds of communication had to be put in place. Surprisingly,
we didn't really have to work through much at all.
I am an incredibly busy person, and so it limits
(13:14):
how much time I have for anything outside of the
marriage anyway, which creates a boundary in and of itself.
I tend to have either very spontaneous random experiences like
at a play party or like a one night stand,
or sort of in depth long relationships with people that
(13:37):
I don't see that often and who are like maybe friendly,
who I also have a sexual relationship with. And so
it has never been threatening to the marriage because there
hasn't been a lot of like the in between where
I'm like dating somebody actively and needing to prioritize a
lot of time with that person. And the agreement that
my husband and I have is that if it takes
(14:00):
energy and time away from our family, or at any
point he doesn't feel like a priority, than it has
to end. We also have an agreement that if we're
not in a good place in our marriage, and we're
not connecting emotionally, physically really in any way. Like if
we feel estranged in some way, then we do not
explore outside the marriage at all. It's just like immediate lockdown.
(14:24):
So a good example of that is like after I
gave birth, it was a really hard moment for me.
I was working, going to school, breastfeeding, like momming, it
was so full on, and so just everything shut down
our marriage and our family sure quite a while. More recently,
(14:46):
we've been in conversation that involves more limits and boundaries
now that my kid is older and I have more time.
And I use this word super lovingly, but I just
feel sluttier in the best of ways, and I feel
super embodied and like really high sex drive right now.
And so I want to be going out more and
meeting more people. And a lot of my friends are
in like Polly relationships, and so I am feeling much
(15:09):
more like amped up about going out. And so we
have had to have those conversations that you're talking about
that we didn't before. So limits and boundaries on like
what he feels comfortable with is regarding time some as
regarding sexual acts that he prefers I do or do
not share with other people. Most recently it's about kink
(15:29):
play with impact with people. I was playing with a
friend of mine and he bit my leg and I
had like a pretty gnarly bruise from it, and my
husband was upset because then he had to look at
it and it made him unhappy to look at a
bruise on my body. And I didn't mind. It was
playful and fun of the moment, and so I asked him.
(15:51):
I was like, do you want that to be a limit?
And he said, well, if you need it and it
turns you on, I don't want to tell, you know.
And so we got into a little bit of this
like loop of me asking him, him saying, but I
don't want to restrict you. And it was like we
played around this thing for a little while until finally
he's like, yeah, I don't want you to be bruised,
and I'm like, well, that is no problem. That was
like a recent boundary. The other thing, and this has
(16:13):
been since the very beginning, is it has to be
safe sex with anyone. You know, condoms and STI checks
and just really considerate of sexual health. And that's like
a hard, incredibly hard line that's been there since the
very beginning. Alice's husband wasn't very interested in physical non monogamy.
(16:36):
He wasn't regularly searching or something outside the marriage, but
he was allowed to if he wanted to, and because
of that, Alice had to consider what her boundaries were
for him. Buying gifts was my boundary because like, money
is such a complicated thing in a marriage anyway. Yeah,
there's something about that that I felt time upon and
(16:58):
not making gifts. He wanted to make somebody something for
someone that would be fine, like taking someone out is fine.
It was like the physical act of giving a gift.
I think it's so interesting. I think the thing that
would make all of us uncomfortable is different. I'm trying
to think what would really piss me off if I
was setting boundaries with my husband, Long emotional conversations might
(17:21):
or even gift giving. I never thought about that before,
or frankly, acts of service him doing the dishes or
taking the garbage out in some other woman's house would
really get under my fucking skin. Yeah, and a lot
of the women that I speak to have similar boundaries.
In heterosexual relationships, like if their male partners are doing
like gift giving or acts of service. That is a
trigger for a lot of the women. I know. Your
(17:44):
sex dribe has increased. Now, do you think it's because
you're emerging from that phase of our lives that I
don't think it's talked about enough of motherhood of a
child of a certain age, and you're feeling more comfortable
in your body. Again, what do you think is the
reason I always felt good about my body. I've had
really great body image my whole life. And what actually
(18:07):
changed was I'm like the primary breadwinner in our house,
and I work a lot, and I run a business,
and I also try to be like an incredibly present
mother and be a good wife, to be a good daughter,
and be a good sister and a good friend. And
so I think the pressures of early motherhood. I think
(18:30):
all of that dampened my sex drive quite a bit.
I'm in a care position with my family and my
friends a lot, and so caring for other people all
the time, I think to dampened my sex drive. And
then COVID obliterated it with anxiety and sort of the
world feeling more scary, more intense, So I feel like
(18:55):
I'm coming out of this phase of having to do
a lot of care externally, giving away a lot of
my energy all the time, and I actually have some
reserves left. I also feel really healthy in my body.
And my husband after he got of a sect to me,
(19:15):
that really helped because we weren't worried about getting pregnant,
and so that helped because when we're having more sex
at home and better sex and feeling more connected at
home than that turns out my sex drive too. Being
non monogamous has definitely impacted the sex aalysis had with
their husband. For the better sex inside. My marriage is
(19:38):
one more frequent, which is great. It's more intimate. It's
been building for a decade and a half, and so
we know each other's bodies so well. I joke that
my sexual needs and desires and my body is kind
of like a scavenger hunt because it keeps changing and
there's dead ends and you have to like find different things.
(19:58):
So my husband has to do extra work because my
taste changed kind of frequently, like a shape shifter a bit.
But he knows me so well that he follows that
map and it's amazing and we can try anything together
because we have so much trust and so much safety
in our relationship that we want to try feel safe
with him, and our bodies just fit together right, Like
(20:19):
our kiss is perfect and it's different and better and
sects outside My marriage is maybe more playful. It has
new relationship energy with it, which I think most people
know what that feels like. It's kind of like buyerworky
and crazy and like tickling and exciting, and it's very
(20:42):
exploratory because it's new people and you're getting to know
somebody knew, whether it's a single serving interaction or like
multiple engagements with that person. And I like the balance
of having both. The one that I need is the
one in my marriage. The one that I also to
add in and want is this stuff outside in the marriage.
(21:03):
I also asked Alice if she thought that sex with
partners outside of her marriage has made her marriage stronger
in a way, or even if it's made her a
better mother. I think, like a thousand percent. We have
had stretches in our marriage where we're monogamous, and that
works for me too, but there again, it's chosen. But
(21:27):
I am definitely happier, and I bring that happiness home
with me when I get to be with other people
and it lightens me up. I have a lot of
anxiety from life, but it lowers my anxiety. It makes
me just a nicer person to be around, truly. And
then I bring that home and I am lighthearted at home,
(21:48):
and I'm more compassionate at home. It's just it's actually
better for all of us. We live in a society
the defaults to monogamy for better or worse, and anything
outside of that norm often gets judged. But more and
more women are questioning those norms these days. And I
(22:09):
have to say, after doing all these interviews, I think
that there's a lot that monogamous couples, couples who would
never consider an open marriage, can actually learn from open relationships.
When we decided to be monogamous right in the beginning,
when he asked me, are we monogamous and we asked
if we could be, I meant yes, And it felt
(22:32):
good to say yes. It felt good to put attention
to what we were building in that moment. And also
I think there was just a part of me that
knew that it was going to be okay and we
weren't going to stay in that place, But it felt
really good to put one hundred percent of my energy
and attention into building this and cultivating this relationship, and
so it never felt contained by it because it was chosen.
(22:53):
And I think that's the difference of like going into
default monogamy, where women, especially women feel repressed or owned
or contained, versus choosing monogamy, which which I just want
to be with my partner and I'm saying that, and
I own that and it's mine, and that feels totally
different to me. And so in the beginning of our relationship,
we had chosen a monogamy which felt amazing, and then
(23:14):
when it didn't feel so amazing because I wanted to
do other things, I did them and he said it
was okay. And then we continued to open and open
from that point and we still talk about it. I
don't just go out and not tell him what I'm doing.
I don't keep him in the dark of anything. I
want to make sure that it feels okay if I'm
going to go out and have a date with someone else.
(23:36):
I think that there's this stereotype of marriage, and I
mean we hear it all the time of like, oh,
like if in a hetero marriage, like men complaining about
their wives, for example, and like wives nagging their husbands,
and like all of those like stereotypes. That's what I
was really fed as a child, Like that's what I
heard all over. There wasn't even any like queer couples
(23:58):
that I was exposed to and new, and so it
was all this heteronormative, patriarchal bullshit that totally didn't make
sense to me. As early as I could remember, I
didn't know that you could construct a whole type of
relationship that you wanted and that you can co create
with somebody else's relationship you actually want, friendship or as
a sexual or romantic partner. As we mentioned, Alice and
(24:20):
her husband share a daughter. She's young, too young to
talk about these things, but that won't always be the case,
and kids also pick up on everything. I really wanted
to know how Alice and her husband might need to
broach their open marriage at some point. I don't think
she knows what monogamy is. She just I think has
(24:43):
an assumption that she's heard me and her dad say,
like people don't own each other, They don't own each
lenge bodies Like Mom could go do what she wants,
Dad could go do what he wants. And it's not
sexual right because she doesn't even she's not even old
enough to understand what that is yet. But it's about
like releasing this idea of ownership and so she can
actually choose. She might choose to be monogamous at some point,
(25:05):
but I don't want anyone to tell her what to
do with herself, you know. I want her to choose
it if she wants to choose it. And so the
way we framed it so far far is just about
like engaging in the world, like Mom goes and does
this thing. Mom stays out all night sometimes Dad does
this thing, and Dad goes on vacation by himself sometimes,
like it's part of that conversation. So it feels very
(25:26):
like it's happening organically that she's knowing about this. It
doesn't feel like something I have to like come out
about because it's just something I do. Like coming out
and being queer and having people know that feels important
because that's an identity. But like I don't identify as polyamorous.
It's just like it's what I do. It's in my
life and it fulfills this thing because I'm just a
(25:47):
really highly sexual person, and I specifically am like I
like to engage with other people in a sexual way.
We'll be back after a short break. We're back. For
some people, it's easy to keep things completely physical. We've
(26:09):
heard from plenty of women on the show who've managed
to do just that. But for every one of those women,
we've talked to someone who's crossed an emotional line and
fallen deeper than they expected. I asked Alice if that
had ever happened to her. I've had a few people
like tell me they love me, and I'm like, so,
I think this might be the end of that relationship
(26:31):
because I don't want to get more complicated than that.
So you know, it's just I try to feel out
each relationship and see what feels the safe is, because truly,
the thing I like about them is a sexual piece.
Like I don't need a bunch of other partners. I
had a long term connection with one person and it
developed into something else, and that happened sort of organically
(26:52):
and maybe accidentally, and it was complicated for us. That
was when we had more talking involved, and then it
ended because things in and it didn't work in our
lives anymore. But the way we navigated it was the
same way as we navigate all the rest of the
stuff is like does my husband feel like a priority?
Is my time being spent mostly at home? How communicative
(27:13):
and honest story being about everything? And so we just
followed all the rules and it worked out fine. What
we know in the literature is yes, by and large,
open relationships. So these pessentially non monogamous relationships are beneficial,
caveat being that they need to be communicated. That's doctor
(27:35):
Ashley Thompson again. Remember her, she's the sex professor, an
expert that we talked to in episode three. Doctor Thompson
has done a lot of research in open marriages, consensual
non monogamy, and here's what she's found. So when you
see people really strategically introduced polyamory or open relationships into
(27:58):
maybe what was once a monogamous relationship, if they talk
about it with their partner, figure out what's acceptable and
what's not, it overwhelmingly is a positive experience. And so
consensual no monogamy can help out there where you know what,
maybe your primary relationship is fantastic, but you're missing a
few things here, and you can get those things there
without breaching trust in a way that everyone is accepting
(28:21):
of it just seems to me like a win win.
Why not if everyone's cool with it, let's get all
our needs met in whatever ways we need. Maybe this
is a win win. Your sexual needs get met and
no one gets lied to, no one's betrayed. The stigma
of extramarital relationships can be eroded. But that in itself
(28:43):
kind of feels like a world that a lot of
people in our society still won't be able to accept.
But what I hope you take from this is that
by talking about it, by having these real and honest
conversations about different models of being partnered with another human being,
those conversations might help us start being more comfortable figuring
out what does make us happy and to start asking
(29:05):
for it. If this podcast has made you wonder whether
everyone is having an affair right now, whether it's just
completely pervasive and you're the only one who's left out,
you're not alone. But I also don't think that's true.
I believe monogamy still works for a lot of people.
But I gotta tell you that through my reporting, I
found that having an affair, that finding someone to do
(29:28):
it with seems to be easier than ever, and that,
like many things in our life, from getting groceries to
call in a cab, is mostly due to changes in technology.
Technology has made it easier than ever to have extramarital affairs,
and it has also really shifted our understanding of what
(29:49):
exactly a boundary is. Could an affair mean casual flirting
on Facebook message? Could an affair means someone activate a
remote vibrator from MC content and away. That's the thing,
by the way it is, and we are diving into
all of it next week. We're talking about why affairs
(30:10):
are easier than ever before, how women use technology to
get away with them, and how they juggle multiple affairs
while working, taking care of kids and everything else that
women do. This is She Wants More. I'm your host
Joe Piazza. She Wants More was inspired by the book
(30:32):
A Passion for More by Susan Shapiro Bearish. It was
adapted for audio by executive producers Merrill Poster, Karat Pfeiffer,
and Susan Shapiro Bearish. She Wants More is hosted and
reported by me Joe Piazza. Jennifer Bassett is our lead producer.
And story editor. Our sound design is by Jessica Crinchich.
(30:53):
Our theme was composed by Anna Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthouser.
Our executive producers for iHeart are Ali Ry and Nikki Etour.
She Wants More as a production of iHeart Podcasts. For
more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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