Why I Will Never Be Monogamous Again

My name is Alexander Cheves, but lovers call me Beastly. I write about sex for magazines. 

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My breakup with Jose did not start with this blog — we both saw it coming for months — but that post about Folsom was the last straw. He struggled with it. He did not like reading about a wild sex night I had. I realised, hearing him talk, hearing him voice his jealousies and frustrations, that I was not sorry. The night was beautiful for me. Important, even. For him, it was only pain, only something to fire up his jealousy — as if we lived in some Victorian world of infidelity scandal and were not, in fact, a modern gay couple.

But we were not a modern gay couple. Not really.

While we had some permissions for certain sex outside the relationship, they shifted constantly with his comfort and mood, and Folsom fell past his limit. I was tired of interpreting what was permitted and what wasn’t. That night, I felt free.

I tried throughout our relationship to open us up and get him more comfortable with non-monogamy, but it is now time for me to accept that he is as he is, and that I am how I am. I am not monogamous.

This breakup really hurts, so it has to mean something. It has to signal a shift, a change. Our relationship was, in so many ways, beautiful and necessary, but our underlying incompatibility — his preference for monogamy and my inability to deliver it — was known and talked about well over a year ago. If we had peacefully ended things then, we would have spared ourselves many months of pain.

The fact is, neither of us did anything wrong. We simply wanted different relationships and both of us pretended we could be happy with someone that didn’t suit our needs. Because we loved each other and wanted it to work.

Now I’m single in L.A. where I know no one, and I feel incredibly alone. What an awful city to be sad in. L.A. is all dizzying glamour. It seems to demand round-the-clock happiness from its denizens. But I’m not happy. I feel guilty and heartbroken over a relationship that I knew had no real future, but I still wanted it — us — to make it.

I left him on the East Coast when I moved here a few months ago for a career opportunity. I am a thousand miles away from him, but if I could somehow fold America over like a map, I could drop into our old backyard behind the apartment we shared in Savannah. I could walk into the bedroom where we slept together. I could tell him I’m sorry and that I’m ready to fix things.

And it would be a lie. I’m not ready to fix things.

I thought I could be monogamous at the beginning of our relationship, and I was. And in the beginning, monogamy was not our biggest issue. When we met, I was graduating from college soon and he would be a student for another two years. We knew our relationship would probably not survive, simply because I would move away and he would have to stay. The promise of those first wonderful weeks and months was that this setup was temporary. That was understood. But that’s not what happened. I graduated and found a job in town. We moved in together.

And he was good to me. He was easy to love. He was sensitive and a good listener. I never realized what a valuable trait that is — I’ve never dated someone who waits for me to finish speaking and really listens to what I say. Now I want to be that person for future lovers. Everyone should date someone like Jose. The next man he loves will be lucky.

In time, I realized I needed more sexual freedom, the same realization I’ve come to in every relationship. So we started making compromises. We agreed to only play together with occasional guys we found at the bar. We were what Dan Savage calls “monogamish.” And that was fine. It was enough. Until it wasn’t.

I don’t know when it stopped being enough — I don’t think any specific event happened. I simply wanted more and felt guilty for wanting more. I wanted to fuck people without his approval, without him present. I wanted to go home with guys, then come back to him. I made promises: I would tell him beforehand. I wouldn’t stay overnight with anyone. I would always shower after sleeping with them. But he couldn’t bear the thought of me fucking someone without him present, and that, in the end, is what did us in. I started badgering, complaining, and starting fights over what I called his “restrictions.” My job in L.A. came almost as a relief — it would stop the bickering. Then the Folsom post. Then, a few days ago, he called me. As soon as I answered the phone, he said, “Alex, I want us to break up.” No hesitation. He had practised this. He was ready. So, here I am.

And I’ll be frank: I’m not doing so well. I was looking forward to going home, kissing him, and telling him I was ready to stay. But I know in my heart those words would have been promises I would never be able to keep. He did the right thing. I would become dissatisfied again, start complaining again, and we would be back in that same toxic cycle I’ve shared too often with too many good men. And I feel broken, like some part of me is deficient. Why can’t I do what everyone else does? Why can’t I be monogamous?

But I don’t think everyone else does it. I don’t being faithful in the traditional sense comes easily to anyone. And I think people like Jose find more danger and disappointment in love than they do freedom and trust, because their standard, their ideal, is not what people can really do. I do not think monogamy is natural. I think it goes against every basic instinct we have as animals. And I believe that, in most cases, it fails, either through cheating, dissatisfaction, bitterness, or just a sad withering of one’s natural sex drive. That, I realised, is what he wanted: for me to kill my sex drive, or rewrite it so that it only fired for him and only him. What an absurd thing to demand of someone. What egoism must it take to ask someone to find you and only you attractive, forever and ever?

I think many gay men find themselves in relationships like this, and I think either their connections grow toxic or they successfully open up. I want to be clear: the man I loved was never inadequate — he was amazing in bed, a great lover — but that’s not really the point. My sex drive for other people is not a commentary on his ability to please me. It’s not even really about him. I am an animal who is wired to be attracted to many animals — that’s it. Most animals are.

Our boundaries were just inadequate for me, and my efforts to change them amounted to an effort to change him. And you can’t do that — you can’t change someone’s deep feelings, someone’s nature. I was trying to do away with a deep insecurity he had, and he was not ready to face it. His only way to deal with it was to lay down a law.

I don’t want laws. I want love.

Non-monogamy was a concept I knew about when we started dating, but it wasn’t something I seriously researched until we started having problems. The term “non-monogamy” defines a range of relationships that exist on a spectrum between completely monogamous and completely open. I learned that fully open relationships are ones in which both partners are free to have sex with whoever they want, whenever they want, with or without each other’s knowledge or permission, and that kind of setup isn’t scary to me — I think my next relationship will be fully open. But many people consider open relationships too much, too scary. Most gay men I’ve talked to fall somewhere between the two — “monogamish” — and have rules like the one Jose pushed for: they fuck others together.

In our relationship, I realized I wanted something closer to the “open” end and he wanted something closer to the “closed” end, and we argued over the details. This means we were incompatible over slightly different versions of non-monogamy. That’s all it took.

Let this be a lesson for everyone: if you want a non-monogamous relationship, both you and your partner must want the same kind of non-monogamous relationship and agree on boundaries, should you have any. You both must desire the same freedoms equally — one can’t push the other to a place they’re not comfortable with.

All my relationships in the past were monogamous because I didn’t have the language of this stuff, didn’t know about non-monogamy — I didn’t really know it was an option. I think most people who struggle to date faithfully are in similar places as that. It’s powerful to learn the term “non-monogamous,” which leads to other exciting terms like “polyamorous” and “relationship anarchy.” These words are empowering, not because they are new, but because, when learned, they give someone a way to say what they need. Before these words, I just felt defective. Now I have terms for me, and in learning them, I realised my relationship with Jose was never going to work out.

As a member of the queer community, I participate in a culture that has always rejected heterosexual constructs and pioneered new approaches to love. I want to be part of that. After talking to non-monogamous couples, I know their relationships are not without struggle, but non-monogamy still feels like the better and more honest way. And besides, if humans were really made for monogamy, we’d have an easier time doing it. I don’t think we are supposed to date the way tradition demands. I don’t think we’re wired that way.

I miss Jose. I will keep missing him. I will hurt. I will miss how it feels to hold him. But we had to break up. There are more people like me out there, and I need to find them.

Love, Beastly