Normalizing Polyamory in Conversations with my Husband
Saturday, May 29, 2021
The other night, my husband had come home from work and I had just finished preparing dinner. He placed his phone on the coffee table and as I was putting our dinner on the table, I accidentally saw his phone light up and he received a message from someone saying, “Get a room?”
I didn’t look any further, but as we were having dinner, I asked my husband if he had any weekend plans. He said that he didn’t have any at the moment and cut the conversation there. I realized he didn’t want to talk about it, but one of the things that we’re trying to transition into is having him communicate his plans better with me. His dates tend to happen very last minute and it causes me a little anxiety when plans suddenly change, so I thought it would have been nice for him to at least mention that something *might* happen this weekend, so that I could mentally prepare for it.
I decided to mention to him that I accidentally saw him receive that message on his phone and I tried my best to communicate with him, “It‘s okay if you have a date planned or are planning a date, I just would like to know in advance so that I can prepare myself.”
He took it pretty well and told me about his “maybe plans” but the reason he was a little weird when talking about the text he received is because the lady he received it from is someone he wasn’t sure he should continue attempting to have a relationship with.
I wanted to know more and ended up prying, but he got a little defensive.
We later talked about him being defensive, and he just explained that he’s still not sure what the proper etiquette is in terms of what he should and should not communicate with me since this polyamory stuff is still relatively new to both of us. He doesn’t know what will make him jealous, he doesn’t know what will make me jealous, so this results in him doing weird stuff like hiding certain details and not being sure what he can share or not share even though he knows we are both consenting to a polyamorous relationship.
I later chatted with another poly friend about this (she’s in a poly relationship with her boyfriend) and she explained that her boyfriend was similar in the beginning. She thinks the reason why her boyfriend and my husband try to hide things (despite knowing there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing) is because there’s this huge stigma and sense of shame associated with being a polyamorous man. There’s a lot of people who *assume* poly men are just cheating on their spouses or that the man was the one that asked to open up the relationship and the woman was just forced to go along with it. However, in both my friend and my relationships, we (the women) were the ones that had asked to open up our monogamous relationships.
In the end, my friend just suggested to be patient with my husband and understand that he might be more insecure identifying as poly than I am because of the stigma associated with a poly man versus a poly woman. It’s going to be a bit of a learning curve, but at least I’m aware and I’m able to communicate this with my husband as well so that he’s aware of his own feelings and reactions.