You may be a bit surprised and/or confused as you read Sexpressed and see me at times refer to having a girlfriend and also having sex with other girls. “Is Scott broadcasting online that he’s a cheating scumbag?” you’ll ask yourself. The answer is definitely no…let me explain.
I am a “polyamorous” person. Polyamory literally translates as “many loves” and is used to describe relationships that differ from the traditional form of monogamy (i.e. one person being exclusively sexual with one other person). These relationships are sometimes called “open relationships” or “non-monogamous” relationships.
There are countless other sites dedicated to the dissection, definition, and explanation of polyamory so I won’t kid myself by trying to cram it all into one blog post. If this is your first time hearing about polyamory or you aren’t too familiar with the term I highly recommend breezing through the Wikipedia page on it, reading Tristan Taormino’s site OpeningUp.net, or if you’re feeling industrious, picking up a copy of The Ethical Slut.
Now that you’re familiar with the term, let me tell you about MY non-monogamy story. This may seem like superfluous information but this will give you a great idea of where I’m coming from with my approach to relationships. It will also help you with other blog posts that will inevitably make reference to my past relationships…think of this as a primer.
I first had sex when I was 14 years old and spent the next two years awkwardly exploring sexuality with the lovely girls who were willing to be sexual with a guy who couldn’t even drive yet. I had come a long way by 16 and learned quite a bit but there was one thing that was eluding me. At age 16 I finally figured it out…I was attractive. Up until that point I really hadn’t grasped the reasoning behind why anyone would want to have sex with me in the first place other than the fact that I was willing and able to do so. Once I realized that I was, physically anyway, the kind of guy that attracts women fairly easily I took that info and ran with it.
At that point in my life monogamy wasn’t exactly my #1 desire. I had had plenty of girlfriends by that point, which were monogamous, but they were all silly little high school things that lasted a handful of months or sometimes even weeks before fizzling out for any number of stupid reasons. Once I knew that girls wanted to have sex with me my desire for monogamous girlfriends worked its way from “kind of important” to “not at all important” fairly quickly. I still was in love with girls…a few specific ones come to mind who I definitely felt a strong physical AND emotional desire for…but my primary motivation was the physical aspect.
Around the time I turned 18 I met a girl named Jessica at a show my band played. Jessica quickly became infatuated with me…she would call me, email me, instant message me, etc., incessantly. Time and time again she would propose we become an item. She was too young for me (15 at the time, and acted it) and I didn’t want a relationship anyway. Every time I pushed her away though, it made her press for it that much harder. Soon we were having sex, which wasn’t at all terrible because she was totally cute with an amazing body. But of course that just opened the floodgates even more for her to try and rope me into monogamy.
Eventually I told her in a very irate tone that I didn’t want to be in a relationship with her at all and that if she was going to keep pressing it I would just cease communication with her entirely. I don’t know if it was out of desperation or genuine desire on her part but she presented the idea to me that we could be a boyfriend/girlfriend team but still be able to have sex with other people. Her main motivation was to be able to label herself as “Scott’s Girlfriend”, and whatever that entailed was fine by her. This seemed totally ridiculous to me at the time but I went with it because it seemed to be a win-win…I can do what I want, I still get to have sex with Jessica, and she stops badgering me into doing things I don’t really want to.
This arrangement lasted on-and-off for quite a while, nearly 3 years. I had plenty of secondary girlfriends during this time (Jessica is what’s called a “primary” and anyone else she or I had a relationship with, sexual or otherwise, are called “secondaries”) and she had a handful of secondary boyfriends too. At one point we moved in together (a huge mistake that lasted a few months). For the year prior to us moving in together I was seeing a girl named Sarah who quickly moved up the ladder as my favorite secondary. Jessica made it very clear that she didn’t like Sarah at all and saw her as a threat to our relationship…Sarah quickly became a scapegoat for all the problems our relationship was having eventhough 90% of them were there before Sarah showed up on the scene anyway. In my and Jessica’s apartment one nite (Jessica wasn’t there) Sarah poured out her emotions to me and told me she was in love with me. I realized very quickly that I was in love with her too, and thus started a war.
Sarah and Jessica quickly became two horses trying to draw-and-quarter me. I’d break up with one to go for the other and then a few months later break up with that one to go back to the first. It was a nitemare of epic proportions that was terrible for me but I’m sure doubly worse for the two of them, not knowing which girl I was going to eventually stay with, if any. At one point I was so confused that the only thing I could think to do was to push one completely out of my life to devote all my focus to the other and see if that worked. If it did then I’d be all set…if it didn’t then the war would be over because clearly the spurned girl would not take me back after being shut out like that. I chose to be with Jessica and shut Sarah out of my life.
It was a little less than a year before I realized that was a really big fucking mistake. I swallowed my pride and came back to Sarah with my tail between my legs begging for forgiveness and was absolutely thrilled when I got it. Right away we had a hardcore discussion about what needed to change in order for the relationship to work.
What would surprise many people is that “monogamy” was not one of the things that needed to be implemented. Sarah was the first to admit that me seeing other girls was not an issue, it was me seeing JESSICA, or seeing some other girl who could potentially cause me to throw my relationship with Sarah into problem territory, that was feared. We made ourselves a basic list of rules of who could do what with who and set off on our relationship adventure.
And it was a total success…within months we had an apartment together. We were absolutely crazy about eachother in every possible way. We couldn’t keep our hands off one another and practically every second we were in eachother’s presence we were smiling from ear to ear. Our families got along great, my band was starting to make some progress, and Sarah was making waves at her small art college she was attending. And, to top that all off, I had a steady group of secondaries that were all lovely in their own ways, and Sarah had some too.
Sarah and I were together like that for just under 6 years, over half of our 20′s. During that time we were confronted countless times by friends, family, sometimes even total strangers, about our relationship. We had no idea that what we were doing had a name or that anyone else was doing it the way we were…we just knew we liked it and liked eachother and it made us happy. At one point we even were asked to come to a college sexuality class by a mutual friend and do a presentation about how we operated. It was like we were revolutionaries, eventhough now we know and understand that we were in well-worn territory, albeit one that stays under the radar.
Sarah and I successfully navigated through a lot of the pratfalls that occur in a non-monogamous partnership. The rules were constantly changing and we were keeping up, albeit with some amount of arguing and fighting. But we were astonished even ourselves to see that our unique relationship was outlasting all our friends’ monogamous relationships at an alarming rate. In a way we were looked up to by a lot of our peers as being the “rock” couple…we were the couple that everyone knew they could depend on being a couple.
Unfortunately that was not to be. In the fall of 2009 Sarah and I broke up. It was totally devastating for me because I was the one being broken up with, but it was definitely devastating for her as well. Our breakup had to do with many factors but non-monogamy was surprisingly not one of them. It took me a while to get back on my feet emotionally again but when I did I realized that monogamy was not something I could ever do after Sarah. She and I proved that non-monogamy can work…not many of my friends in their 20’s can boast of a successful 6 year-long relationship, monogamous or not. Monogamy, to me, seemed like training wheels on a bike: necessary to get used to things, but meant to be discarded when they are no longer necessary.
I knew then that I would never be in another relationship again unless it was non-monogamous, especially considering that I had now been in non-monogamous relationships more than monogamous ones. It’s just the way I am.
After the breakup with Sarah I met my next primary girlfriend Nicole online at a site called OkCupid. We entered into a primary relationship after a few months of dating. This was her very first non-monogamous relationship so it was a big learning experience for her. We were together for 2 years and some change before the idea of having children came up and broke it apart in early 2012. She wanted to have them and I don’t and won’t ever, which obviously meant the partnership had to end. A lot of the early stories here at Sexpressed take place during the latter half of this relationship.
After Nicole and I ended I made it my goal to be single for a while but unfortunately (or fortunately, rather) I met Eloise in April 2012 and that all changed. I fell head over heels for her in no time and we are now in a primary relationship. The stories you read here are based under these pretenses!
