Being Ethical is Key in Non-Monogamy
By way of an introduction if you’re reading us for the first time……Kate and I are a married couple in our 50’s whose relationship is Ethically Non-Monogamous (ENM). We’re swingers, our marriage is open; we have sex with other people. We’re in a committed relationship, and somewhere on the polyamorous spectrum; Kate has a boyfriend and is a Hotwife. It’s neither of our first marriages. We met at a 12 step meeting; we’re each more than a decade sober now. If you’re curious about how this all works, we talk about our relationship in varying degrees of depth in other posts. We have an email address listed in our “about” page if you would like to contact us.
I remember a couple of things from my very first meeting.
First 12 step meetings are among the scariest things in life. There’s an unbelievable amount of angst and anxiety. You’re likely either hung over or in some stage of withdrawal. You’re convinced the entire world has nothing better to do and is 100% focused on your every move. Hands down, walking into that room was my biggest deer in the headlight’s moment ever.
First thing I remember is sitting down next to the guy who would become my sponsor. He greeted me and despite never having seen each other before, he talked to me like an old friend; his humanity took away some of the sting I felt. He knew exactly where I was; he remembered his first meeting too. Ten years down the road and he’s still my sponsor. He’s completely aware of our lifestyle chicanery, as is Kates sponsor.
Next memory was my first taste of down-home common-sense 12 step wisdom. This wisdom resonated with me, and I share regularly now with newcomers at their first meetings. An old timer with 24 or 25 years shared “Trying to use your willpower to stop drinking is like eating a box of X-Lax and willing yourself not to shit.” Yup, that burned thru the newcomer angst and anxiety and made sense.
I happened across another line of wisdom recently that also landed well with me: “Biology kicks virtues ass in my experience”.
This was from “The West Wing”, I think episode 11 or 12 in season 7. A character by the name of Kate (go figure) delivered the line referring to a guy having an affair; it really stood out to me as I was finishing up a re-watch. Well, seems I only made it thru the first couple seasons, events after season 4 were new to me.
Kate’s (my wife, not the West Wing character) biology is what it is and no amount of willpower can change that. So is mine, and all of ours. Prior to getting sober, this came out sideways, and she did a good bit of running around. Of course, none of this running around was above board.
There was a several year period between when she got sober and her and I became a thing. She tried conventional virtue culture. This was a very calm and church going period for her. She needed this as part of her getting sober process. Her husband at the time was a good guy, vanilla as he could be, and again, what Kate needed.
Eventually, her being the non-monogamous person that she is, started to poke out from behind the curtain. Come to find out, me giving her my phone number (we were officers in our group at the same time) kind of opened an early crack; this was years before we started dating. She actually has a handwritten annotation in her copy of the Big Book talking about it.
The conditioning and social pressure for being monogamous is so strong that when her biology woke back up, she thought she was headed for a relapse. Kate thought that the reason she cheated was because she was drinking and drugging. When the non monogamous part woke back up after several years of sobriety, it didn’t initially occur to her that they were separate things. There’s a case to be made that the lack of the ethical part, the lying cheating running around part, gave fuel to the drinking and drugging.
Pretty close to half of Kate’s lifetime “body count” has happened in our ethical / open era. Her sobriety (as well as mine) is solid. Clearly the ethical part of ethical non-monogamy is a positive thing.
Amatonormativity is a new to me word that I learned about in a story by Vicki Larson; that post is linked beneath this paragraph. Essentially (I think I’m getting this right) amatonormativity is to relationships what heteronormativity is to sexual orientation; IE a heterosexual pair bond is the be all and end all, that which is aspired to by all. It gives voice to the prevailing social conditioning to be one way above all others. Put another way, it’s the process of society feeding someone like Kate monogamy ExLax and then shit posting her as her true nature comes out.
Our friend Chris turned us on to a book called “Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity is Wrong And How The New Science Can Set Us Free” written by Wednesday Martin. I’m only a couple hours in (Audible is your friend) and it strikes me as a much more accessible telling of the story told in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s “Sex at Dawn”, itself and excellent read.
In the Hotwife 2.0 post I mention Kate struggled dealing with her non monogamous nature in part because she didn’t know anyone else like her. Wednesday Martin’s book is full of women similar to Kate.
The books both posit the demur, keep your ankles and knees closed versions of womanhood that we’ve all been sold, is nothing more than a bill of goods. A story created in the most recent 5% or so of our species existence. Further, they each make a compelling case this is not natural and is an unfortunate side effect of the advent of agriculture. Yeah, I get that’s a reach when ya first see it, but it rings true.
The basic gist is before agriculture, in the hunter gatherer days, when there wasn’t any private property, life was very egalitarian. With the rise of agriculture and private property, came the need to protect farms and crops as well as the need to pass down property from generation to generation.
Paternity certainty became a thing, as did patriarchy and the idea of women being property. The myth women have a lesser sex drive than men was born. The myth of the woman wanting nothing more than a single mate for life was born. The myth of pair bonded monogamy was created. Men fearing the loss of what they had worked for came out sideways and over centuries women went from being equal to subservient.
Next thing ya know, words like amatonormativity exist to describe the way things are.
It really is more involved than, and both books are excellent reads / listens. The authors paint a compelling picture that makes sense of the dichotomy of what we’re told women should be and are supposed to be, and what the reality is. Reality being Kate, and women like her, not having a monogamous bone in their bodies, is natural, and how we evolved for hundreds of millennia. You see it everywhere and all the time, women beating themselves up (or spouses beating them up figuratively or literally) for “wandering” “straying” “being unfaithful”. Women are still put to death in some parts of the world for the “crime” of adultery.
This isn’t to say there’s a problem with monogamy; the problem is the stories that are told around and about it. Someone being monogamously married for life should be valued or treated no differently than someone who’s not monogamous.
Kate and I were talking a little bit ago before she went out to do someones hair. We’ve decided we’re not sure what label fits us best at this point. Swinger doesn’t cut it anymore than Hotwife or Cuckold does; polyamorous seems to be the best albeit not perfect fit. I think it’s all the above.
Kate’s all over the place, and I’m just happy to be here. We also talked (for at least the millionth time) about if it’s “weird” that I’m not interested in pursuing other women outside of traditional swinging. The answer we keep coming back to is nope.
The Hotwife 3.0 post is coming. We’ve decided to hold it off for a couple weeks. I’m going out of town at the beginning of August for a long weekend (to see the Foo Fighters in Denver!!!!) Kate is off that weekend as well….whatever will she get into…..
Thanks for reading!! Be kind to yourself and others!!
Sam & Kate
Sam and Kate 
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