Make your relationship intentional

A story of alternative values, infidelity, and conscious monogamy

All stories in Sexual Empowerment in Midlife are anonymized and published with the explicit approval of their subjects, who are wholly separate from my coaching clients. For more on how this publication was created, check out my intro post.

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“Never have sex you don’t want to have.”

Astrid says that her parents did a lot of things wrong, but one thing they did right was to teach her that lesson. It’s the best advice, because it’s so clear. It has guided many of her decisions.

Astrid grew up in Scandinavia, where societal values around sex were very different from the United States. Nudity was embraced, and she had no shame about her body or what she chose to do with it. She is grateful for that because if you don’t like your body, she says, you are unlikely to take care of it.

Astrid was also taught that sex is part of your physical health. Today, at age 55, she regularly talks with her mother about the robustness of their sex lives. If she hasn’t had sex within a week, her mother worries.

Infidelity in nonmonogamy

In her 30s, Astrid moved to the US, where she was briefly married to Julian. Every time she turned down sex, Julian felt unloved. Although Astrid’s libido was strong, his desire for sex twice a day felt too time consuming for her. Meanwhile he would never touch her romantically, always aiming to turn her on. She gradually started avoiding all physical contact, even a hug, because she didn’t want it to lead to sex she didn’t want to have. Eventually they stopped having intercourse altogether.

Since sex is part of health, Astrid immediately turned elsewhere. She talked to Julian about her intention, and believed they established a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. However, when he learned of her activities, he confronted her. Angered that he disagreed with her understanding of their agreement, she obstinately decided to continue without his knowledge. She sought out a range of partners where “sex was just sex.”

Julian and Astrid are now good friends, but they didn’t work as a couple.

After her divorce, Astrid entered an open relationship with a man named Mateo. Nonmonogamy felt natural to Astrid, who in fact had never maintained a fully exclusive partnership. But Mateo used the structure as a shield for sneaking around, avoiding full disclosure about what he had been doing. This broke Astrid’s trust. As she puts it, “infidelity is when you do something you know would make your partner uncomfortable, and you choose to conceal it.” She ended the relationship feeling excluded and betrayed.

Grappling with intimacy

Astrid drifted among various relationships after Mateo. But when she met Darryl, the connection was instantaneous.

She was accustomed to keeping things unstructured, so when Darryl asked on their second date whether he should stop seeing other people, she casually told him they could do whatever they wanted.

Then she went home and panicked, still fearful after Mateo. She wasn’t sure she could handle another open relationship, but she felt trapped by what she had already said. She called a friend, who urged her to tell Darryl how she felt. “What?!” she replied, “that’s not a good idea!” She had never disclosed her true feelings to a partner before. To Astrid, telling someone what you need was equivalent to saying they can’t give you want you want so they should leave.

However, Astrid knew that Darryl was too important for that behavior, and she decided to try to improve her capacity for intimacy. With her friend’s advice in mind, she wrote Darryl a long email explaining that she needed to be his sole focus. All the while, voices in her head screamed that saying this would be the death knell of their blossoming bond.

To her surprise, Darryl called as soon as he received the email. Horrified that she might have to be vulnerable in real time, she ignored the call and rang her friend back instead. “What do I do?!” she cried. When her friend calmly suggested she answer Darryl’s call, Astrid insisted that was insanity.

And yet, when she finally talked to Darryl, he honored her feelings.

Conscious monogamy

Over time, Astrid allowed herself to be in touch with her emotions and share them with Darryl. This has allowed her to develop a deeper connection than she had imagined possible.

Astrid and Darryl have remained monogamous. But Astrid has brought lessons from her previous, less exclusive relationships. Because nonmonogamy has no societal definition, making it work depends on honest conversations about boundaries, desires, and anxieties. In the same way, Astrid and Darryl have intentional discussions about what their version of monogamy includes, and what it doesn’t. They never assume an activity is on or off the table at any point in time, and the topics have evolved over their decade together. They discuss everything from whether they want to have a threesome to whether they fantasize during sex to how they feel about traveling on vacation separately. As a result, Astrid has a clear understanding of what would upset Darryl, and thus the boundaries of infidelity as they define it.

Astrid has found strength from building a foundation of trust in each other, and in herself not to betray it. The continual conversation keeps them connected, passionate, and intimate.