Confessions of a wife in an open marriage
Amid the fallout over Prof Neil Ferguson, Tova Leigh describes what drove her to choose a non-monogamous relationship
Ishould start by saying that I’m not an expert on open marriages – but, thanks to the coronavirus, they’re headline news right now. This week, Prof Neil Ferguson, the leading epidemiologist who advised the public on the need for strict social distancing to reduce the spread of Covid-19, resigned from his role as a Government adviser after it was revealed he met with his lover during lockdown. The fact he met her despite them not sharing the same living space is what made headlines – but what has sparked the real controversy is the fact that the woman, who lives with her husband and their children in another house, is reportedly in an open marriage.
For my husband and I, such an arrangement was something that came up as part of a bigger picture.
When I hit 42, having been married to Mike for the best part of a decade, I went through a bit of midlife crisis. I say “midlife crisis”, because it’s a term that people understand. But, truth be told, it was more of an awakening – and it was a long time coming.
After having three kids in the space of two years, I had completely lost myself. I was a mother and everything else had sort of faded into the background. I think many women feel this way, but most never admit it because there is a lot of guilt involved in doing so.
But finding a little something on my left breast made me realise how life is short and how I needed to live it to the fullest now and not wait till the kids were older, or all those other things people tell us we should wait for before we do what we really want with our lives.
Following the health scare, I set out on a journey of rediscovery. I wanted to find the parts of me I had lost: my confidence, my sense of adventure – and my sexuality. And as part of that, I started questioning everything in my life.
I realised many things I was doing were never really a choice but rather something I felt I was expected to do: the type of mother I was, the type of wife, and even the type of woman… so many aspects of my life felt dictated and I wanted to break out of all the labels and boxes society places women in.
One of those areas was marriage. I asked myself why I had chosen monogamy as a way of living? Was it really what I thought a loving and committed relationship should look like, or perhaps there were other options I hadn’t even considered? When I looked into it, I found there were people who had different types of relationships, which I hardly knew anything about. It was intriguing. On top of that, as a fortysomething woman who, for the past few years had been covered in baby spit and used as a snot rag, my sexual appetite had suddenly been resurrected.
People don’t talk enough about how women feel after years of being hormonal. I’d been shoving hormones down my throat since the age of 17 – first, birth control pills, then others
It doesn’t surprise me how many women are interested in it – and wouldn’t rule it out
when I was trying to get pregnant – so after I’d had my family, my body was coursing with chemicals.
It’s a joke when people refer to women as the sex that wants sex less. How can you even start to measure women’s sexual needs when they are pumped with things that suppress their real, natural appetite?
So, after years of completely shutting down that part of me, I felt sexual again. And I wanted to share with my husband how I was feeling. I wanted to be honest with him about all of it, because what I discovered was that many women felt the same, but most of them felt like they couldn’t talk to their partners about it. Not surprisingly, the number one question I get asked by women is: how did you start the conversation about having an open marriage with your husband?
It doesn’t surprise me how many women are interested in the topic and wouldn’t rule it out. We are brought up to believe only men have needs, and that guys would love multiple partners, but women are these passive creatures that would never consider such a thing. Women are slut-shamed if they dare say they would happily sleep with someone other than their husband, while for men that approach is acceptable and expected simply because they are men. It’s absurd.
If men ever knew what women were really like, when no one is watching, they would be shocked.
For me, my asking for an open marriage had nothing to do with my partner and everything to do with me; it was never a way to “fix” something that wasn’t working between us. I don’t think that would have worked.
One night, while we were lying in bed watching Netflix, I just brought it up: “How would you feel about having an open marriage?”
Not the type of conversation you think you’ll be having on a random Tuesday night. But it also was not just one conversation. We had many, and we each said what appealed to us and what worried us about it. The bottom line was that we had no real idea of how it would work and how we would feel unless…
In the end, it was Mike who said: “We will only know once we try.”
Men are mostly interested in the technical side of how we make our marriage work. It makes me laugh. We don’t have a manual. We just figured out what works for us.
We don’t have “rules”. I know this is disappointing for people because, as humans, we feel the need to compartmentalise everything. I also think that even if we did have a set rules, they wouldn’t matter or apply to anyone else, because no two relationships are exactly the same. A lot of it is common sense.
For us, the only thing we agreed on was total honesty. This, by the way, does not mean full disclosure of details, because that’s actually not what’s interesting. I think a conversation about needs and how things make us feel is far more profound and certainly more interesting. And in terms of what has happened for us, the details of how many, how often and so on – which I get asked about a lot – are no one else’s business. It’s like expecting people who are in a monogamous relationship to share their sexual habits, favourite positions etc.
My choice to talk about this topic was because I wanted to open it up as a conversation and make it less taboo. I have no interest in sharing the ins and outs of our relationship.
People often ask how we deal with jealousy – this has not yet come up, but we are aware it may be something we’ll have to deal with. Quarantine hasn’t been an issue, either, for the simple fact that neither of us has a “lover” at the moment.
But all this has brought into our relationship a sense of playfulness and adventure – and, most of all, it’s made us much closer. Being able to talk about everything is something I’m grateful for and, tricky as it may have seemed to initially approach the topic, I am very glad I did.
I don’t think the arrangement is for everyone, but, then, a traditional monogamous marriage isn’t for everyone, either.
People change all the time – and so should relationships.