Many people going through the end of an open relationship have been unpleasantly surprised by the intense reactions of friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. Because monogamy is the culturally approved norm, most people live their polyamorous lives with a “siege mentality,” constantly having to justify themselves and their relationships to everyone around them.
As Bennie puts it, “Whether we like it or not, most people believe poly relationships can’t work, or that they shouldn’t work. So it feels like everyone is just waiting for us to fail so they can say, ‘See, I just knew that poly thing would blow up in your face!’” Janine had a similar experience with her friends and family. She says, “At the same time I was distraught over losing the love of my life, I had to do a ton of ‘damage control’ to manage a public relations disaster as well.”
Valerie says, “My mother told me over and over again that my husband would leave me because I was ‘sleeping around,’ as she put it. So when our marriage did end, even though our divorce had nothing to do with polyamory, she couldn’t wait to pounce on me and remind me that she had predicted this! She obviously felt vindicated.”
Justin says, “I had been married and divorced twice, and both relationships were strictly monogamous. No one ever blamed either of those breakups on monogamy. And everyone was so sympathetic when I was going through a divorce, asking me out to dinner, calling to see how I’m doing, and sending me friendly emails and cat videos to cheer me up. Some of my friends were even trying to set me up on dates with new women. Then I had a poly relationship that lasted twice as long as either of my marriages, and when we split up everyone blamed it on the fact that we weren’t monogamous. No one was supportive or caring, and a few people I had thought were my friends even told me I got what I deserved for trying to have two girlfriends. One female friend said she was ‘so glad that at least one of those women had enough self-respect to kick you to the curb.’”
Lack of data makes it impossible to hazard an educated guess about whether polyamorous relationships are any more likely to end than monogamous relationships. However, most people going through the demise of an open relationship find themselves and their relationships being vilified, even by their closest friends.
Catherine’s best friend sighed and said, “Well, I tried to be supportive because you claimed you were poly, but I knew all along that could never work! What were you thinking?” Catherine felt crushed by her friend’s judgment, right when she desperately needed support. “I was feeling so vulnerable, and suddenly I had to defend myself and my relationship orientation,” she says. “And my best friend and I are both lesbians, so I asked her, ‘How would you feel if a straight friend told you that a recent breakup was all because you was gay, and that you should marry a man instead!’ She was indignant and said it’s not the same thing at all, but I said that being poly is my sexual orientation just as much as being gay.”
Susan says, “I was even handed that old chestnut I used to hear from people 30 years ago when I came out as bisexual: ‘You just want to have your cake and eat it, too!’ I thought I would never hear that idiotic nonsense again, but after my girlfriend split up with me, a number of my straight friends resurrected that old line to let me know that they did not approve of polyamory, that I deserved to fail, and that, apparently, they were happy my relationship ended.”
When Geo told his sister that his girlfriend had left him because she and his wife did not get along very well, his sister responded with, “Thank goodness she came to her senses while she’s still young enough to find a husband and have children. You were ruining her life by stringing her along when you could never marry her.” Geo was shocked to hear his relationship being seen through such a distorted lens. “My girlfriend was polyamorous and had another long-term partner, and she certainly didn’t want to marry me. She didn’t leave me because we were polyamorous. People just jump to crazy conclusions based on their monogamous worldview, rather than the facts of the situation,” he says.
While no one enjoys facing hostile judgment from loved ones for their relationship choices, it is especially difficult during such a painful experience of loss and grief. Amber recalled previous breakups where her three “gal pals” closed ranks behind her as loyal supporters, talking trash about her exes and saying, “He’s not worth it, girlfriend!” and “He never deserved you, honey!” Then, she was in an open relationship for five years. Her boyfriend moved to another city with his live-in partner because the partner’s company transferred her to a different office. He and Amber eventually decided to break up due to the strain of trying to maintain a long-distance relationship. This time, all three of her friends defended the boyfriend. They said, “What did you expect? He was with her for a year longer than with you,” and, “You should have known better than to get involved with a guy who already had a girlfriend. He’s probably going to marry her, couldn’t you see he’s committed to her, not to you?” A few of Amber’s cousins heard about the breakup through a mutual friend’s Facebook post, and suddenly she was getting messages from distant relatives around the country chastising her for “dating a married man,” (which wasn’t even true) and offering ridiculous advice including, “You should stay out of the street and keep your nose clean.” This sent Amber into a spiral of humiliation and depression. “People who barely knew me were publicly shaming me without even really knowing anything about my relationship,” she says.
In their 2014 book, More Than Two, Eve Rickert and Franklin Veaux remind us, “Most of us have deeply internalized messages about what’s okay in relationships. Polyamory requires us to uproot and discard many of those messages. This becomes a lot harder if the people we turn to for support reinforce those messages whenever we confide in them.”
On the topic of breakups they say, “If the members of the couple are primarily tapped into monogamous culture, the story that will get traction will be the standard cheating narrative. That will be doubly true if it appears that one person left their partner for someone else…The shaming this can entail can be extremely destructive if you have even a trace of those monogamous scripts left in your own internal self-evaluation process.”
Rickert and Veaux stress the importance of having polyamorous friends and being part of an organized poly community, including discussion groups, poly social events, and staying connected to online poly networks. This helps to counteract the negative reactions of monogamously oriented friends and family members who may not understand your relationships and the pain and loss you are experiencing.
Managing the public relations aspect of a poly breakup can be challenging and draining. Carl says, “It’s almost like you’re speaking a different language than everyone else. So no matter what you say, they assume the breakup is your own fault because you were crazy enough to try this open relationship thing.” So how can you cope with this backlash and effectively communicate with loved ones and others in your life?
Mark and Tricia crafted a carefully worded email, which they sent out to their close friends and family members, saying that they had decided to separate. They explained that they had enjoyed 25 years of happiness together, and raised two great kids who were now in college. They had been growing apart for the past few years, and while they still loved each other, they both believed that they would be happier living separately, and eventually divorcing. They made a point of stating clearly that they had been polyamorous through their entire marriage, and that this had not been a factor in their decision to separate. They also said that they intended to continue to be close friends and to both be there for their children. They ended with, “We ask all of you to be understanding and compassionate, and to be there for both of us as we take the next steps. We need your love and support at this challenging time of our lives.” Many people who received the email did not respond at all. However, those that did reply responded with kindness and care, sending emails or calling with reassurance that they would stand by them.
One friend later apologized to Tricia for not responding to her email. She said, “I felt awkward and did not know what to say. A lot of other couples I knew that have divorced hated each other and spent years in divorce court fighting over the house, the bank accounts, and custody of the kids. That seemed normal! I actually didn’t know how to respond to a couple who were divorcing and being so civilized about it; you were presenting yourselves as friends and not trashing each other.” Tricia suspects that many others did not respond to their email for similar reasons. “Most people are simply stymied for an appropriate response when two people are separating, but there is no villain to blame and no victim to rally behind,” she says.
Mark adds, “I feel convinced that if we had not sent out that email, we would have gotten a lot of calls from people assuming that one of our other partners had caused the divorce, or that our being polyamorous was to blame. My other girlfriend, Wenda, jokingly called it ‘your pre-emptive strike,’ and Tricia’s boyfriend referred to it as ‘your divorce press release.’ They both agreed that putting the facts out there right away prevented any rumors from flying around and helped people understand and respond in a caring manner. Wenda says she had been worried that everyone would somehow blame her for breaking up a family, when in fact I’m in a committed partnership with someone else and our relationship is very secondary.” Wenda adds, “Mark was surprised I would even be concerned about that, but people are so eager to jump on ‘the other woman’ when a divorce happens, they just assume it must be your fault. So I was so relieved that he and Tricia were setting the record straight before anyone could start spinning these imaginary soap-opera scenarios, and trashing me on social media.”
David and Jenna decided to divorce after 25 years together. They were members of a progressive synagogue in New York, and asked the rabbi (now retired) who had presided over their wedding to facilitate an “uncoupling” ritual. They had been monogamous for many years and had struggled for several years after Jenna started a relationship with another man. Despite much effort, David was not able to accept this significant change in their marriage, saying, “This is not what I want, and it’s completely different than what I signed up for.” The rabbi helped them create an appropriate ritual that honored their decades-long partnership. Their friends and some of their family members attended the ceremony to support them. The last part of the ritual involved them each expressing their love and acknowledging that they were not compatible to continue together. They thanked each other for the “20 great years” they had together before issues arose. David told Jenna that he accepted that she was polyamorous, and she told him that she accepted that he needed an exclusive relationship. As a result, they agreed to let go of each other and their marriage. They both turned to their friends and family members and asked for their support through the coming months of grieving and finding their footing in their new lives. The rabbi said a prayer, and declared them “unmarried.”
While a number of their friends and family members still did not fully understand or approve, some said that the ritual helped them to accept the new reality and to support both David and Jenna through this painful time. One of David’s sisters refused to come to the ritual as she was very angry at Jenna and was attacking her repeatedly on Facebook for “cheating on her husband and then abandoning him.” David tried to deflect this hostility by making numerous posts explaining that there was no cheating, reiterating that he and Jenna were fully in agreement about their decision to divorce, and stating that they intended to remain lifelong friends.
Victor and Aurora experienced a slightly different set of public relations problems. Victor says, “We both knew from the start that we should not get married, but we gave in to pressure from our families. Partly, we didn’t want to get married because we were poly, and hoped to create a triad or foursome eventually. But we also knew we shouldn’t get married because our relationship was too new, and we both suspected that we would not be ideal partners in the long run. Both sets of parents are immigrants from Eastern Europe and very traditional. Aurora accidentally got pregnant about one year into our dating relationship, and both sets of parents insisted that we immediately get married and move in together. We were not ready for that level of commitment, and yet we both knew we wanted children, so it seemed to make sense to go along with this program. We loved each other very much, we came from similar backgrounds, and we each felt that no one else had ever ‘gotten’ us the way the other did. However, even though we had some good sexual chemistry at the beginning, suddenly we were having sleepless nights with a new baby, and for me, the stresses of being the breadwinner that first year while Aurora was breastfeeding definitely took its toll on sex and romance.
“Things were just getting back to normal when we met Alia, who fell madly in love with Aurora and was also attracted to me. We went way too fast and had her move in with us within six months of meeting her, because she was in a bad housing situation and she was helping out a lot with our daughter, Fiona. It seemed practical, but was a disastrous mistake. Ironically, our parents were okay with this because ‘back in the old country’ all the men have ‘mistresses’ and the women have very low legal and financial status there, and apparently accept their husbands having a lover, so this looked fairly normal to them.
“By this time, Aurora had gone back to work part-time, but she and Alia were home together a lot while I was at work, and they really bonded and began to shut me out. Our parents absolutely refused to believe that Alia and Aurora were in a relationship. In fact, I was rapidly becoming a sidepiece in their world. The families distorted everything because they had no context for a lesbian relationship. After about a year, Alia demanded a monogamous relationship with Aurora, and was barely speaking to me. Aurora did not want to split up with me, but we both had to admit that we were no longer in love, and that the situation was untenable.
“Aurora somehow felt compelled to go along with Alia’s demands, so we announced to our families that we were filing for divorce. They hit the roof, because it was fine with them to have ‘my mistress’ living with us, but divorce was against their beliefs and their culture, and no one else in either of our families had ever divorced. We spent years trying to explain this to our families and they were completely unable to comprehend. Aurora’s parents still refuse to believe that she is in a lesbian relationship and insist that Alia is just a friend and live-in nanny. My father sat me down numerous times to ask me how on Earth I could divorce my wife when she was so compliant in allowing my ‘concubine’ to live with us. He just won’t believe that she divorced me, it’s so totally outside his life experience for a woman to divorce her husband, so I can’t get through to him.”
Victor has one family member who was very supportive. “One of my sisters was the only one who had a clue, because she is a nurse and has coworkers who are lesbians, so she totally gets that. But otherwise I felt very alone, very judged, and very misunderstood and ostracized by my family. And my in-laws viciously attacked me over and over again on social media, calling me an evil bastard who abandoned his wife and child, portraying Aurora as the injured party, when the reality is that Aurora divorced me to appease Alia.”
Many poly people have described feeling similarly alone and isolated from family and friends, right when they need them the most. Because most people around them have never seen an open relationship before, it can be very challenging to explain these relationships even when everything is going great, and even more difficult to talk about the demise of a relationship.
George says, “At least my family responded with a mixture of confusion and relief when our triad broke up, rather than outright hostility. The whole situation was probably doomed from the start, because my partners, Gabriella and Marjorie, were both vilified by their whole families both during the relationship and afterwards.
Gabriella and I had been together for three years when we met Marjorie, and when she moved in with us, Gabriella’s family showed up at our home and tried to stage an intervention. They literally thought she had lost her mind to ‘let that homewrecker into your house!’ Marjorie’s family was irate that she was ‘settling for a man who doesn’t even respect you enough to leave his girlfriend and marry you.’ They were convinced she must be on drugs, and her father even accused me of being a pimp! We had no idea how hard it would be to conduct a triad relationship with such intense disapproval from our families, because both my family and Gabriella’s had always showered us with acceptance, love, and gifts, taking us on expensive vacations and giving us a loan to buy our house, until we got involved with Marjorie.”
George’s coworker Jason, an older gay man, was the only person in his life who understood what he was going through, and was very supportive. When George expressed shock and bewilderment about the family dramas, Jason gently explained, “You didn’t realize that you were enjoying all that heterosexual privilege of being ‘normal,’ and doing the societally expected thing of settling down in a monogamous, heteronormative relationship. Your family’s unconditional love and approval really props up a relationship, and when they suddenly withdraw it and ostracize you, it really puts a lot of strain on any relationship.”
George acknowledges, “You’re not really aware of your privilege until you lose it. It was quite humbling to see how dependent we were on the support of our families, because we are political activists who considered ourselves unconventional hipsters. Clearly we were more traditional than we thought, at least in our relationships with our families and our desire for their acceptance and approval.”
Ironically, the triad’s relationship ended largely because they weren’t really compatible to live together. They had very different attitudes about housework, cooking, careers, and money. Marjorie was a lawyer who worked a lot of hours and made more money than George and Gabriella combined. Marjorie started to lose respect for both George and Gabriella because they barely made enough money to make their house payments, and their car got repossessed when they bounced a check for the payment. Marjorie’s criticisms made George realize that he had allowed Gabriella’s bad habits around money to push them to the brink of bankruptcy. Trying to talk about these financial issues highlighted glaring communication problems between George and Gabriella. And they were both unhappy with Marjorie because she didn’t cook or do housework. She wanted to order takeout every night and hired a cleaner to take care of the chores.
Despite their differences, the three separated amicably, and were able to remain friends. Gabriella says, “Because all three families were attacking us, we clung together through the breakup and presented a united front. The reality was that we did really love each other. We had just asked Marjorie to move in when we were all in the pink glow of NRE, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault that we didn’t live happily ever together.” Marjorie had a lot of savings, so she helped them all financially during the transition. This allowed George to keep the house and pay back his parents for the down payment, and he found a roommate to help pay the mortgage. Marjorie bought a condo and invited Gabriella to temporarily move in with her while she got on her feet financially. They developed a closer friendship without what Marjorie called “the distraction and background noise” of trying to make the triad work. They confided to each other that they both wanted to continue some kind of romantic and sexual relationship with George, but Gabriella said, “I just don’t want to live with any partner right now!” George was pleasantly surprised that both women eventually resumed what he described as a “dating” relationship with him, each of them seeing him about once a week for sex and companionship. He says, “And now our families are even more confused by the new arrangement! You should have seen the look on my mother’s face when I told her that I have relationships with both Gabriella and Marjorie again. I thought her head was going to explode! And now our families disapprove even more, but we no longer care what they think.”
Being in an open relationship is likely to provoke some disapproval by others. Since many people around you will not understand or accept your poly relationships while they are thriving, they are likely to have even more judgments about a relationship’s demise. Some poly people minimize this by keeping their relationships private, so there is less conflict with friends, family members, coworkers, and neighbors over this issue.
However, this can be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, if you have kept your poly lifestyle secret from everyone else in your life, they can’t criticize or ridicule you when your relationship ends. On the other hand, if they never even knew about that relationship, you will not have the option of asking them to be there for you during a breakup.
Margo says, “Miller and I presented ourselves to the world as a monogamous, heterosexual, married couple, mainly because Miller’s long-time girlfriend, Hannah, was a minister and she felt she might lose her job if the truth came out. We also felt our kids were too young to understand and it was easy to be discreet. He could go on dates after the kids went to sleep at 8 PM.
“However, eventually Hannah’s husband insisted that they go back to monogamy, and she had to split up with Miller. They were both devastated, but because no one else knew about the relationship, they had no one to turn to for support except me. I was practically becoming their therapist, fielding daily calls from Hannah crying on the phone for hours, and spending my evenings taking care of Miller because he was so sad and angry about the breakup.”