A Landmark Year

I'm realizing that this has been a landmark year for polyamory in our lives. H and I are celebrating our 16th/13th anniversary in October. Sixteen years since we first dated and fell in love, and thirteen years married. We got engaged one year in. I wanted to behave responsibly for once and I liked calling him my fiance.

We always said we wanted a sexually open relationship but we fell into monogamy by default. We met and fell in love fast and deep. We were extremely busy getting to know one another, bonding, playing, working, raising kids, and having great sex, that we didn't have time for other lovers. But we talked a lot and knew that theoretically at least, we were not sexually exclusive with one another. And as the date of our actual marriage grew closer, we talked more about how we might handle our commitment to being sexually open.

So three years from when we met and fell in love we were married and then fast forward another 3 years to when we threw theory out the window and started practically applying polyamory. That was a little over 10 years ago and we had been together for almost 6 years. Fast forward another 10 years...

Besides a few, fun, loving, sexual encounters with friends here and there along the way, H. and I experienced a 5 year sexually loving relationship with one of my best friends. We were a happy little triad until we weren't. During this same time I fell in love with a young woman, a lesbian, who didn't know what to do with the fact that I had a husband. Our affair was brief and intense and never physically consummated. I had also fallen in-love with Lover Who is Not My Lover and had an on-going, complicated, sexually charged, but basically non physical relationship with him for a little over 4 years. After a long dry spell for both H. and myself, M. came along and she and H. have now been lovers for over a year and a half. I met Lover Who Is My Lover two years ago and we've been dating sexually for a year now come October.

This has been the first year of H.'s and my life together where we've both have had other significant lovers on a regular basis and from both of our perspectives, it's been good for us. It hasn't always been easy. Things aren't perfect--not exactly the way I, or he, would prefer them to be--but to quote myself once again, "We get in relationships, and fall in love with real people, not the made up persona's of our fantasies." I love my boyfriend. He is a good man and a good lover. And his wife is a gem. I love my husband. We've made a sweet life for ourselves. I like who I am, where I am going and what I am doing. I am happy--pretty much--most of the time. And nothing is keeping things from getting better. Lover Who Is Not My Lover is still in my life too and our relationship is sweet and evolving. I feel very blessed to actually be living a polyamorous life. Finally. It's what I've wanted for a very long time. I give thanks.