It started online, like all modern tragedies do. A woman in Scottsdale asked me if I was interested. “No strings,” she said. “I have a husband, but we’re… open.”
The concept is interesting, in a clinical, watching-a-rat-in-a-maze sort of way. Basically, I borrow you, I return you, and you go home to the poor bastard who pays the mortgage. She wanted to go slow. Wanted to be gentle. “Water the garden,” or some such bullshit.
I agreed. Because I’m a man, and a man rarely says no to a free meal, even if he suspects the meat is spoiled.
We went to dinner. And that’s when I learned the lay of the land. Her husband, apparently, was currently balls-deep in his own “poly” adventure with some Russian girl up in Payson. And he liked to call his wife—my date—to brag about it.
We’re sitting there, having a light dinner, and her phone rings. She puts it on speaker. And there he is. “Oh my god, honey, the sex is incredible. She did this, we did that, we did it in the back of the pickup truck…” He’s boasting. Like a fisherman talking about a marlin.
And I’m sitting there, chewing a piece of bread, thinking, Christ. This is just… weirdness.
“Doesn’t that bother you?” I asked her after she hung up.
“No,” she said, her eyes glazing over a little. “It turns me on. That’s what he does.”
Okay. Whatever floats your goddamn bubble.
We went back to my place. The plan was “slow.” But plans are for architects and cowards. The reality was, she was hungry. She was submissive. And I wanted to leave a mark. I wanted to be the stain on the carpet that they could never quite scrub out.
It was a two-hour session. A marathon. Every rule they had established—the “intimacy boundaries,” the “save that for your primary partner” bullshit—we broke them all. We shattered them. No protection. Certain “forbidden” areas were violated with enthusiasm. By the time we were done, we weren’t just having sex; we were rewriting her goddamn constitution.
And then, the phone rang again.
We’re in bed. Naked. Sweating. The smell of sex thick in the air. And it’s him. The husband.
“Hey, hon,” he says, his voice full of that manic, new-relationship energy. “Just letting you know, we’re not coming home tonight. We got a hotel room. Going for round two. Hope your date went well.”
And she looked at me. And she smiled. A beautiful, ugly, and completely vindictive smile.
“Yes,” she said into the phone. “I’m probably going to spend the night at his house.”
There was a pause. “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t think it would go that fast.”
“Yes,” she said. “Things advanced very quickly. He’s an incredible lover. He went over two hours.”
And I heard it. The shift. The quiet, sickening drop in his stomach. The “interlude,” as they call it in the music business. His voice changed. It went from boasting to… concern. To fear. He called back three times that night. But the damage was done. She was flashing back at him, holding up a mirror, and he didn’t like the reflection.
We kept it going. Ten, maybe fifteen times. And we started extracting a husband-and-wife dynamic out of it. We were building intimacy in the one place you’re not supposed to have it: the side piece.
The poly community, they have these codes. These beautiful, intricate, and completely bullshit rules to keep the jealousy at bay. Don’t kiss here. Don’t touch there. Save the “I love yous” for the mortgage holder. But we’re animals. Primates. You can’t tell a monkey not to stick his finger in the jar when the lid is off. We were lying to him by omission, building a secret world right under his nose.
And then, I got in trouble.
I couldn’t see her on a Saturday. I had another date. A real one. And she got upset.
“You have a husband,” I reminded her. “I’m the side dish. You don’t get to be mad that the side dish is being served at another table.”
It became a hot discussion. A philosophical debate on the nature of “fairness” in a game that was rigged from the start.
And that’s when I realized the truth. The beautiful, ugly, and completely honest moral of the story.
Her husband wasn’t “polly.” He was just a guy having a mid-life crisis with a Russian girl in Payson. And she wasn’t “polly.” She was a woman whose husband was drifting away, and she was using me as a life raft. Or maybe a weapon. Probably both.
They all say they’re not jealous. They say it’s their “strength.” It “turns them on.”
Bullshit.
Every “poly” relationship I’ve ever seen is just a long, slow, and complicated divorce with a better soundtrack. It’s a misunderstanding of the inevitable. You invite other people into your bed because the thing you have is already dead. You’re just trying to jump-start the heart with a little bit of strange electricity. But it never lasts.
I sat there, wondering if I was the broken one. Was I just jealous? Insecure? Judgmental?
No. I was just honest.
I’m a pervert. I admit it. I like sex. I like the act. But I don’t like the strings. And the poly crowd? They love the strings. They weave a whole goddamn web of them, and then they act surprised when they get tangled up and eaten by the spider.
Being a pervert who doesn’t like strings works perfectly for me.
Being a “swinger” who pretends it’s about “love” and “compersion”? That’s just a lot of paperwork for a fuck you could have had for free if you were just honest about being unhappy.
They eventually got divorced. Of course they did.
Because you can share a pizza. You can share a cab.
But you can’t share a soul. Not without ripping it in half.
