Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage

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O P E N M A R R I A G E

J E N N Y B L O C K

open

LOVE, SEX,
and
LIFE
in an
OPEN MARRIAGE

Copyright © 2008 Jenny Block

Published by Seal Press

A Member of Perseus Books Group 1700 Fourth Street

Berkeley, CA 94710

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Block, Jenny.

Open : love, sex, and life in an open marriage / by Jenny Block. -- 2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-1-58005-275-7

ISBN-10: 1-58005-275-4

1. Open marriage. 2. Marriage. 3. Communication in marriage. I. Title.

HQ536.B595 2009 306.84--dc22

2008040700

The author has changed some names, places, and recognizable details to protect the privacy of friends and family members mentioned in the book.

Interior design by Tabitha Lahr Printed in the United States of America Distributed by Publishers Group West

For J

c o n t e n t s

Chapter 1

what’s a girl to do?

1

Chapter 2

my orgasm, my self 23

Chapter 3

just pick someone already 59

Chapter 4

everyone else manages to do it, why can’t i?

93

Chapter 5

this is a test 125

Chapter 6

having our cake and eating it, too 147

Chapter 7

you can’t run out of love 171

Chapter 8

it’s not necessarily what you think 193

C h a p t e r 9

the four (not-so easy) steps 223

Chapter 10

our very own happily ever after 237

christopher’s afterword 251

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prologue

this is a story about a girl who grew up

believing what many girls believe—that one day she would fall in love with the man of her dreams, marry him, have kids, and live happily ever after. Yet as she grew older, all she felt was confused. The messages she was getting—from her parents, her friends, her school, the media—about looks and love and sex and relationships all seemed to be pointing in different directions.

When she was seventeen, she lost her
virginity to a guy who told her that she was responsible for her own orgasms. She set off for college feeling confident about her sexuality; she had several relationships and many lovers, and she was happy.

Then she met a nice guy whom she thought she could love. He was what she imagined she had always wanted—someone kind

vii

viii open: love, sex,
and
life
in an
open marriage

and smart, who would love her and take care of her. The summer they started dating, she slept with another woman, but then decided she was ready to settle down. He said “I do” and she said “I do,” and for a while they were happy. Then they had a baby and their sex life plummeted, and she soon realized that her sex drive was far greater than his. And so she had an affair. She told him about it, and they decided they’d work on their marriage. After all, what else was there to do?

She made a pact with herself to try to be what was expected of her. They moved to a planned community, and she baked brownies and volunteered at her daughter’s school. She hosted happy hours and wore sundresses. But she couldn’t keep it up. Her marriage couldn’t last the way it was. She thought maybe she had married the wrong guy, or that maybe she was a lesbian. She thought perhaps she just needed to have lovers outside of her marriage. Talking to her husband about what she needed was the only way to figure it out. It was the hardest thing she’d ever have to do, but she had to try.

When they talked about it, she realized that she wanted to show him how they could still be together and love each other and be married—even if they slept with other people. Figuring a threesome would be a good place to start, she invited her best friend to sleep with them. The three of them were together for a while, until it turned out that the friend wanted to sleep only with the husband. And so she asked whether she could sleep with other people, too, and her husband said yes—but a few ground rules needed to be laid out. And so their open marriage began.

prologue ix

Figuring it all out took a lot of talking, but the couple was happy. She experimented here and there when she was out of town. She slept with other people and felt more connected to her husband. She slowly began to accept that she was okay, that her choices were right for her, and that her husband was onboard. And that was all that mattered.

Soon she decided that she wanted to date only women outside her marriage. And it wasn’t long before she met a young woman who became her friend, and then her lover. They fell in love and she wondered what that meant, or if it had to mean anything. Was she polyamorous? Was she a lesbian? Was she staying in her marriage for the wrong reasons—for comfort and convenience? In time, though, she realized that having an exclusive girlfriend was part of her larger journey.

It became increasingly clear that open marriage was not what most people think. People thought she was promiscuous, or that she hosted orgies, or that her daughter saw her with other people. Some people thought she and her husband were immoral, and that the only way to live was in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Some people thought she was selfish and a bad mother. But she and her husband knew that their marriage looked like most people’s marriages—except that they were honest with each other, and they were happier than they’d ever been.

As time went on, she realized that several key elements make a successful open marriage, and though those factors involved the community of people she surrounded herself with, it was mostly about how she chose to act and react, and how to be in her

relationship and her own skin. Having come this far, she more than realized that it was never going to be easy. She was always going to need to protect her daughter. Things couldn’t always be exactly as she wanted them to be. But she was doing it, and she knew she wasn’t alone in her journey.

She finally decided that she didn’t need to know what it all meant or where it was all going. What she did know was that everyone is different, so it made sense to her that every marriage might be different. For now, her marriage was working. She had a husband and a girlfriend who loved her, and a daughter who was doing just fine. Why shouldn’t they keep on doing what they were doing, she reasoned, and see if they couldn’t define for themselves their own happily ever after?

Chapter 1

what’s a girl to do?

This is a story about a girl who grew up believing what many girls believe—that one day she would fall in love with the man of her dreams, marry him, have kids, and live happily ever after. Yet as she grew older, all she felt was confused. The messages she was getting—from her parents, her friends, her school, the media—about looks and love and sex and relationships all seemed to be pointing in different directions.

i blame Cinderella. And Barbie, for that

matter. Ever since I was a little girl, even though my parents were hippies who pushed the Sunshine Family over Barbie and public television over Disney, I grew up with visions of

1

Prince Charming and Ken dancing in my head. That vision involved meeting a man, falling in love, knowing he was The One, and then having children. I grew up believing that sex happened within that very specific and societally prescribed realm. And despite not knowing exactly what sex was, I knew it was something that two grownups did
in private
when they loved each other
very much.

I clung to that ideal, like a lot of young girls do. I played bride and wedding and happily ever after, and I assumed that one day, my perfect man and I would ride off into the sunset and go do that sex thing. The ongoing themes of love and sex and marriage were all included in the same brew, no one idea mutually exclusive from the others.

As I got older and outgrew my princess obsession, like many girls entering adolescence, I simply moved on to other media visions of love and sex and marriage. But they all communicated the same happily ever after message about falling in love and having sex. Occasionally, something would slip out about having sex before marriage, but it was generally assumed that marriage was in your future. Your
near
future. Unless, of course, you were a slut. And no one I knew was striving for that.

I grew up in a liberal household with parents who told me I could do anything I set my mind to, and be anyone I wanted to be. So when my own vision strayed from the clichéd one I was surrounded with, my parents were able to roll with the punches. When I was about eight or nine, I told

them, “When I grow up, I’m going to live in a penthouse in New York City, and I’m going to have lots of boyfriends. But I’m never going to get married and I’m never going to have any children and I’m going to be the first woman president of the United States.”

“You can be anything you like and live however you like,” my mom responded. “But you don’t have to make any of those decisions yet. You can change your mind a hundred times before you head out into the world—and even once you do.” So you see, I was groomed to think for myself, to be able to dissect the messages I encountered. Perhaps because of this training (or in spite of it), as early as high school, things just didn’t seem quite right to me. Every cultural standard that confronted me told me that sex before marriage was bad, that “nice” girls waited until marriage, that virginity was something your future husband expected of you.