She also dates a young married couple and occasionally sleeps with another married couple. Once, both married couples and Andy went camping together, children in tow.
She considers herself non-monogamous. MN Poly, a St. Paul-based meetup group, boasts more than 1, members. No two non-monogamous arrangements are exactly alike. People seek additional partners not just for sex but for affection, companionship, love, co-parenting, and socializing. These configurations require ongoing negotiations about appropriate partners, parameters of sex and dating, STD protection, and birth control. Even the language non-monogamists use is carefully curated.
Non-monogamy is an umbrella term; beneath it are myriad variations on the theme. Polyamory involves loving more than one person, with all the inherent emotional involvement and time investment. Non-monogamy subtypes unfold from there. Open marriage allows one or both spouses to have sex with other people, often in a friends-with-benefits-style arrangement. Cuckolding is a fetish, one in which a husband takes pleasure in his wife sleeping with other men; voyeurism is often involved.
Swinging is a limited-time opportunity for couples to have sex with other people; post-coital contact is discouraged. A survivor of childhood sexual trauma and sexual assault, Andy met her ex-husband at Following a series of affairs, one of which turned violent, Andy moved out of her marital home. She immersed herself in therapy and joined a rape survivors support group, where she first saw the book The Ethical Slut a. She read it and wept at the realization that she could love more than one person at a time.
All this time, she had been wrestling with the restraints of monogamy; now she saw a way to feel anything for anyone, as long as it was all out in the open. But in practice, that level of transparency has been more elusive than she expected. While there have been several failures on the boyfriend front, Andy is happily dating a married couple, the wife a fashionable bookworm, the husband a beer enthusiast.
