jeffkooblog

I fell in love with my first wife, Doris, as an Army lieutenant serving in Germany. She’s a German who spoke fluent English when I met her. I still spoke some German, having lived in Vienna  for four years, when I was in middle school. Doris was my first lover, still living with her parents; but we soon found an apartment and moved in together. Believing that we were destined to grow old together, we got married – much to the relief of her parents. I had a Top Secret security clearance and had to get permission from the Army to marry a foreign national.

We had an unconventional marriage. Although we were in love, we discovered that neither of us was reflexively jealous, or a conventional thinker. We read the popular book Open Marriage, by Nena and George O’Neill to one another, and discussed the option of having other lovers. Some open marriages are monogamous. Only one chapter of the book is about the option of having other lovers, and the O’Neills  expressed their dismay at the wide perception that open marriage automatically meant polyamory. Open marriage is a concept much larger. It’s a concept – radical for its day – of the marriage bond as an ongoing choice to be together in a loving, committed relationship, as equals. We wrote our own wedding vows, pledging to be together “as long as we both shall love.”

During the six years of our marriage, Doris and I each had other lovers, and jealousy wasn’t a problem for either of us. We usually got to know and like one another’s lovers, and there was never any secrecy or deception. We never considered ourselves “swingers,” and we didn’t seek out strangers to have sex with. It’s just that we had the option to become lovers with some of our opposite-sex friends. When we divorced, amicably, it wasn’t due to our polyamory. We remained friends and, for several years, lovers. Even after the divorce, my parents still treated Doris as a family member. She lives in Germany now, and we remain close friends to this day.  My wife Maria and I visited her two years ago.

Doris came to visit me in Beaufort, SC after our divorce and, to my delight, she and Maria hit it off right away. Maria and I were lovers, but at that point we were seeing other people, too. Years later, Doris told me that she’d regretted our divorce, and had hoped to “win me back.” But when she saw how Maria and I were together, she knew that we were meant for each other. Despite this discovery, she was never jealous of Maria, and over the years they’ve come to be like sisters. They have three things in common: each is a lovely woman, they are among the most honest people I’ve ever known, and neither of them has a mean bone in her body.

I knew from early-on in our relationship that I wanted to marry Maria. She had just divorced her husband of seventeen years, and I knew that she needed to “play the field” before she might decide that she wanted to spend her life with me. (I feared that I might turn out to be her “transitional man.”) She knew that Doris and I had had a polyamorous open marriage but she knew, once she decided to marry me, that she wanted our marriage to be monogamous. We’ve both been faithful to one another since the day we agreed to marry, and I’ve never regretted giving up a polyamorous lifestyle. I consider our marriage to be an open marriage because we’re autonomous equals, neither of us tries to control or dominate the other, and we’ve been together in a committed relationship for thirty years out of loving choice, not momentum or a sense of obligation.

For a polyamorous open marriage to work, both partners have to want it, to trust one another and be trustworthy, and to always remember that theirs is the primary relationship in both lives. I have friends who have had a polyamorous open marriage for over forty years. It’s my belief that polyamory can be a valid choice in a loving marriage. While most marriages probably need to be grounded on a pledge of marital fidelity, I don’t consider monogamy to be morally superior to polyamory. It’s just a choice that some loving couples can make.

I don’t miss having other lovers because I’m happily married to the love of my life, who isn’t polyamorously inclined. But I can still tell Doris that I love her, over the phone or in person, and Maria isn’t jealous. Doris and I get along better as brother and sister than we did as a married couple. I have the good fortune of still being a close friend to my first lover, and one of the great joys of my life is to see and hear Doris and Maria talking and laughing together. Even if they’re laughing about me.