If you're one of us – that is, you're poly, involved with someone who is poly, or your relationships generally don't fit into the one-size-fits-all container available at Couples-R-Us – there's a good chance you're still “in the closet” about it.
Why come out? Especially when we all know that normal people don't take kindly to having freaks in their midst?
This was one of the (rhetorical) questions I got from my parents when I finally came out to them. Okay, they didn't actually call me a freak, but it was certainly implied by the horrified tone in which they talked about my fringe lifestyle.
My reasons for coming out (to most people I know) and for staying in the closet (when it comes to a more public forum, such as facebook) may not be the same as other people's reasons for choosing whether to disclose or keep it close; but for what it's worth, I thought I'd share a timeline of my own experiences, both in and out of the closet.
1993-1998: The fact that my marriage was theoretically open was something I didn't discuss with anyone except my husband – with three exceptions. My motive for spilling the secret, in each of those three cases, was the same: I was attracted to someone, and I wanted him to know that I wasn't as out-of-bounds as I might appear to be. (These confessions were extremely effective, by the way.)
1999-2000: During the first year of my affair with Scott, I told almost no one about it. There were many reasons for secrecy, not the least of which was that Scott was cheating on his significant other, and we didn't want her to find out. I was also still shell-shocked from the reaction Parker had gotten from the one friend he told: after writing his closest male friend a long email about the fact that his wife was sleeping with another guy, Parker got an immediate and impassioned response, in which this normally gentle soul wrote, “If it were me, I'd feel like killing someone. In fact, I'm considering homicide on your behalf.” Whoa.
Still, I made a few confessions. I spilled the whole story to my brother, because it was starting to weigh on me that my family wasn't seeing “the real me,” and I knew that my brother, as a fellow black sheep (partying, body-piercing), would go easy on the judgment.
In the summer of 1999, I attended a Writers at Work conference. In my nonfiction workshop, Lucy Grealy (whose highly-charged erotic essay I'd just read in Nerve magazine) said something about a woman she knew who had a tattoo on each cheek, “One for her husband, and one for her lover.” Unable to resist this opportunity to be the provocateur, I piped up, “I have a husband and a lover. And I highly recommend it.” It was like a little bomb had gone off, destroying the flow of the conversation and sending sparks of curiosity and animosity zinging around the room. The subject was immediately changed.
At that same conference, I had a more in-depth conversation with Mark Doty, a former professor of mine (whose very moving memoir about his partner's death from AIDS I had also recently read), about the fact that I was currently in two romantic relationships, and about how my partners knew about and accepted each other. He seemed to think this was a novel concept: “In my world, no one really expects sexual exclusivity,” he mused, “but being in love with more than one person at a time is a totally different thing....aren't your partners jealous of each other?”
2000-2003: After Scott and Monique got divorced, there was no longer any pressing need to keep my relationship with him a secret. Still, we were initially cautious, fearing some kind of bad reaction. As time went on, however, it became increasingly awkward to keep our friends in the dark. Parker might take our son Denali on an outing with friends of ours on a weekend when I was staying with Scott, for example, and, naturally, someone would invariably ask, “Where's Viny?” At first, Parker would just say, “Oh, it's one of her wandering days.” No one pressed him for details, but we could tell they were beginning to wonder. So eventually, we came out to all of our close friends. Social events were a lot easier to navigate after that – Scott even came to parties with us on occasion, and our friends simply accepted him as one of us.
There was one other new motivation for going semi-public with our open marriage: in 2001, Parker became obsessed with a friend of ours. I found myself in the position of confessing something in order to inform this woman that he was more available than it might seem. (This confession was not so effective – more on this “poly women have it easier than poly men” topic in a future post.)
May 2003: We came out to Parker's mother – not entirely by choice. I'll tell that story separately.
2004-2006: After Parker and I moved to a different state, my relationship with Scott became a much more occasional thing. It wasn't actually necessary to “explain” anything to new friends and neighbors. Nevertheless, I found myself opening up to them anyway. My open marriage, my poly identity – I wanted to share these facts about myself with the people I was getting to know. By that point, I figured that if knowing the truth about me made someone decide not to like me, then it was better to lose his or her friendship sooner rather than later.
2006-2007: In January of 2006, our whole relationship landscape changed. We had recently met Lilianna and Rick, another couple in an open marriage. They were new to poly, and were still dealing with a lot of raw emotions. We were quickly entangled in each others' lives in all sorts of ways. Lilianna and Parker began a relationship, then Rick and I began our own relationship – and in the midst of our mutual jealousy (partly despite it, and no doubt partly because of it) Lilianna and I became the best of friends. Everyone in our social circle soon knew the scoop.
Around this time, I began appearing occasionally as a guest lecturer at the local University. Two of our friends taught in the Sociology Department, and they'd ask me to appear whenever they were teaching a unit on a topic such as “alternative family structures.” Several times, someone from the class came up to me afterward and thanked me for being brave enough to share my story. Some of these students confessed to being in non-traditional relationships themselves, and they expressed gratitude for the chance to participate in a real, thought-provoking discussion on a topic they were used to keeping to themselves.
January 2007: I came out to the remainder of my immediate family – my parents and my sister. That was a pretty harrowing experience, and will be discussed in its own entry.
2008-present: I rarely have a reason for lounging around in the poly closet these days. I'm pretty much out, and the fresh air is a joy. Still, as I've indicated, I do exercise some discretion about whom I choose to tell my not-so-secret secrets. Or, in the case of this blog, I am choosing to share personal details with you, no matter who you are, but I'm keeping my real name hidden. It's about having some measure of control over my information, or some way to protect myself, given that I can't control people's reactions to what they find out about me. In some cases, being discreet is also my way of supporting and protecting friends or lovers who don't wish to come out of the closet, for whatever reason.
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