Building Up to ENM

15 Sep 2022

Our decision to become “Ethically Non-Monogamous” would be a huge shock to any of our friends who aren’t familiar with the backstory of how we came to make that giant leap.

Because we did make such an enormous transformation, I wanted to record and share the story of how this gradually came to be.

I’ve divided this tale into multiple posts. This first post is all about how I eventually arrived at a critical change in perspective that allowed me to overcome my feelings of jealousy enough to start on this adventure!

Kate’s Sex Ed Training

This all began with my wife’s decision to study to become a sex therapist (more technically, a certified sex educator).

Kate and I share a home office, so while she was studying for her certification, she would share about what she was learning, and sometimes even take off her headphones and let me hear the lectures.

Successful Swinging

In one of these lectures, I remember overhearing a surprising comment about “swingers”. I think most of the people in my community (including myself at the time), would say that any kind of open relationship like “swinging” would eventually end in disaster.

However, the presenter said that swinging can be done in a healthy, sustainable way, and that there is research showing that many people do exactly that.

That planted the seed for me–I became very curious to know how, exactly, that could be true!

ENM Requires Health & Growth

There are entire books dedicated to how to practice Ethical Non-Monogamy (ENM) successfully, and I expect that everything I share on this blog will be related to that in some way.

I think the central piece, though, is that word “Ethical”. To me, that means things like:

• We’re not going to lie to each other or do things in secret.
• We’re going to discuss and agree on boundaries that we’re comfortable with.
• We’re all going to be very open in talking about what we like, what we don’t like, how we’re feeling…

Doing it successfully seems to require you to have, and continue to develop, many strengths that I already value highly:

• The ability to recognize, share, and wrestle with difficult thoughts and feelings that you’re having.
• Assertiveness and the courage to speak up about what you want or need, and to communicate those desires well.

And all of those requirements apply not only to our own relationship, but to our relationship with our new partners as well!

In other words, the people who do it well aren’t just indulging their desires by making reckless and irresponsible choices. They’re doing it in a very intentional, thoughtful way and being very careful to ensure that their choices and behavior are consistent with their values.

Stories from First-Time Swingers

All of those things helped me to believe that it’s not an entirely crazy idea.

However, the biggest obstacle in my mind was how incredibly jealous I felt at the thought of Kate having sex with another guy!

There was a weekend where we had some good friends in town, and we got to share with them many of the surprising insights we were learning from Kate’s coursework.

I brought up the whole concept of “swinging can be done successfully”, but also shared how inconceivable it felt to me that I could handle the jealousy.

It was such a puzzle to me, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind that night. Somehow, that motivated me to Google something like “first time swinger experiences”.

Someone had posted this question on Quora, and I read through many of the stories people responded with.

I had two reactions to the stories–on one hand, there were definitely very sexy / arousing aspects to some of the stories. However, I was also deeply disturbed by them.

There were two things that I found really upsetting.

The first was reading about how many people described it feeling so hot to see their wife / husband having sex with another person!

How is that possible?! They must be really “messed up” or “strange” to have that reaction, right?

The second thing I had a hard time with was in how many of the stories it was actually the wife who wanted this the most. There was one story, in particular, where the wife wanted to have sex with another guy so badly that the husband agreed to “take one for the team” and have sex with the other woman even though he wasn’t attracted to her.

I had a hard time believing that any sane woman could sign up for this experience, let alone crave it and be the instigator!

Don’t women really just value relationship, not sex? The notion of a woman wanting sexual exploration, wanting multiple partners, was just not part of my perception of the world.

I remember thinking that some of these stories were probably just made up; that the guys writing them were just sharing fantasies and pretending that they actually happened. It’s certainly something people are prone to do on the internet!

(Looking back now, much further down the line, I actually believe every one of them!)

Jealousy as a form of Insecurity

So, at that point, it just felt like this totally bewildering idea that I had zero willingness to try, but it would still occasionally pop into my brain and make me feel uncomfortable.

Eventually, though, there was another lecture that I overheard in Kate’s course where the presenter suggested that jealousy comes from feeling insecure about your worth…

I struggle with depression, and have spent years working on the negative thoughts and attitudes that lead me to feel bad about myself.

Part of that work is to recognize areas where I am feeling insecure, and to uncover why, and then to try and address them. In my experience, the more of these insecurities I can address, the healthier and happier I become overall. So I’m honestly eager to discover these issues, because I know that if I can tackle them then a better life awaits me on the other side.

Recognizing that the thought of Kate being with someone else created intense jealousy for me, and learning that this is tied to insecurity, fired up my “let’s untangle this and fix it!” mentality.

Being Fulfilled by Someone Else

For a while, I was at a total loss as to how to address my jealousy.

Digging into it, I realized that one of the hardest aspects for me was the thought of Kate being with another guy who provided something for her that I can’t.

I think there were a couple specific scenarios that I would visualize in my mind and start to feel sick.

One has to do with our different builds. I have a more slender frame than my wife, and based on our culture’s beauty standards, we would look better together, (and Kate could feel more self-confident) if I was more proportional to her–maybe a few inches taller, and a bigger build. What if Kate was so much happier, and it was such a better fit, for her to be with someone who better matched her proportions?

Another picture I had, that I think was even more painful to imagine, was another guy doing a better job pleasing her. What if she were with another guy who showed her an amazing time–that they went on this amazing date together, and she had the hottest, most intensely pleasurable sex of her life.

In conjuring up these situations, I could feel my emotional response to them. They made me feel inadequate and pathetic.

The Principle of Acceptance

The solution I found to these issues had to do with a concept that I had learned from my therapist and was working to apply to my life and my marriage in particular.

There are many hard truths in my life which I so badly wish that I could change, and that I can feel so resentful and bitter over.

My therapist helped me realize that you have two choices when it comes to the things that you cannot change:

1. You can continue to dwell on the injustice, and allow your (circular?) thoughts to make you increasingly bitter and resentful, or…
2. You can accept the reality, that it is what it is, and:
   • Stop being entangled by these thoughts,
   • Do your best to be grateful for what you do have,
   • And, most importantly, know what your own values and goals are, and redirect your energy towards something that you can do to further them.

Neither of these answers (wallowing or accepting) is as appealing as the fantasy of changing your reality and fixing the injustice, but in many cases these are truly the only options you have. So you could say that “acceptance” is kind of the lesser of two evils.

So how does this tie into jealousy?

Acceptance & Jealousy

A few weeks after I first read those swinger stories and started grappling with this jealousy issue, Kate and I were out at dinner on our anniversary.

I brought up the topic of jealousy, and tried to get her help thinking through how it’s possible that I could not feel jealous in the situations I described.

Side note: That was a terrible idea, by the way! Never try to tackle jealousy over a date night dinner–let alone your anniversary! Jealousy puts me in an anxious and depressed state where I lose affection and interest in sex. Not at all what you want during an evening that’s supposed to be about connection. 😒

I really put a damper on our evening by digging into the topic, but I did come away with a key insight.

I realized that it is just a cold hard reality that the right guy and the right set of circumstances could absolutely lead to Kate having the most pleasurable night of her life.

There’s a simple truth that I had been trying to hide from, which is that I can’t fulfill every one of Kate’s desires. I can’t be the best of everything to her.

It was such a blow to my pride, and so painful, to turn and face this difficult truth and acknowledge it as real.

Gradual Acceptance

Acknowledging that reality didn’t mean that I instantly felt ok with it. It stung, badly.

But, it was the first step in helping myself become comfortable with the idea, and the key insight that allowed me to start genuinely opening myself to the possibility of swinging.

As I continued to sit with it, and reflect on it over time, I became more and more at peace with it. Alongside that growth, Kate and I were able to toy with the idea, in a mostly hypothetical way, which turned out to be incredibly hot, and had a great impact on our sex life!

Those insights were by no means the end of my struggles with jealousy, but they were enough to prepare me to pursue our first actual swinging experience…