I guess you could say from the time I could comprehend adult relationships, I was set up for failure. I grew up with false expectations for what a relationship, and eventually, marriage should look like. I settled for the first guy that came along who wanted the same things as I did - get married, buy a house, have babies.
Part of the reason I settled for this man is that my world around me had shattered. My parents announced that after 29 years of marriage, they were getting divorced. I was 23. I had not lived at home in quite some time and from the outside everything looked perfect. Everything always seems perfect from the outside. I was looking for normalcy and needed to prove to myself that "love" existed and that there was really a happily ever after. I wanted my happily ever after.
So, I settled. I got married, bought a house, and had 2 babies. And then I got divorced. It wasn't that the relationship or the marriage was always bad. I did love him, but the last 2 years or so of our marriage were rough. He thought I cheated on him (which I never did), we had an "oops" baby, we didn't see eye to eye on parenting, housekeeping, or how to maintain our relationship. We fell out of love and I wanted to move on. Early on we talked about counseling, but I think we both knew it was over. So we went our separate ways, filed for divorce and now I'm starting over.
It is in starting over that I began to question what a relationship truly was. I started the online dating thing because being a single mom and working as much as I do, I certainly did not have time to go out and meet people. I met a few guys, but I just didn't click with any of them right away. And I certainly didn't want to just "settle" for someone again. The though of exclusively dating someone scared me...what if I was seeing someone and then Mr. Right came along and I wouldn't give him the time of day because I was seeing this other guy?
That's when I met Nick - the man that took my previous definition of a relationship and turned it on its head. He initially contacted me through a dating site and we talked for a few days. I wasn't really sure about him at first, but he asked me to lunch and I reluctantly went. Any doubts that I had about him immediately went out the door after we met. We were crazy attracted to one another and we connected on a level that I hadn't connected on with anyone in a long time. But there was still something I wasn't sure of...you see, Nick is happily married and has been for over a decade. Nick and his wife have an open relationship - no, the aren't swingers, and it's not a fuck-whoever-you-want kind of relationship - it's called Polyamory. Polyamory is the practice of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved.
Polyamory was also an entirely new concept to me and I spent a lot of time researching what this meant to me and what it would mean to be in this kind of relationship. I had decided early on that I wanted Nick in my life even if it wasn't going to be on an intimate relationship kind of level. Neither of us knew if or how I would work in the dynamics of his marriage, but we knew that the only way to find out would be to try. So try we did...and I have to say, that so far it's working beautifully.
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