Open Up: Women With Two Husbands

Posted at 2:00 PM May 05, 2008

Long-time Village Voice sex columnist Tristan Taormino has a new book out this month called Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. Here on Naked City, she'll be publishing weekly posts about non-traditional relationships throughout the month of May. These stories won't be found in between the covers of her book, but they should whet your appetite for more.

Once you step out of the confines, expectations, and traditions of monogamy, it might as well be the Wild West. People are constructing relationships that are custom-built for them, and no two relationships are exactly the same. Even as I managed to name and define popular styles—partnered non-monogamy, swinging, polyamory, solo polyamory, polyfidelity, and mono/poly combos—within these categories is so much variation. Over the next month, I’ll be sharing some of my research and ideas about open relationships as well as excerpts from the book.

There are so few representations of loving, committed, non-monogamous relationships in the mainstream media. Let’s face it, we’ve basically got Girls Next Door and Big Love, and the two shows have one major element in common: the dudes get all the action. One man gets to have multiple girlfriends or wives, but the women are monogamous with him. We hardly ever hear of the flipside of this equation: women with two (or more!) husbands. Well I am here to tell you there are a lot more ladies out there with a double-dose of mister at home than we’ve all been lead to believe.

How do I know this? I conducted over one hundred interviews for my new book, Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships and several of my female interviewees had more than one husband. Leslie is a 36 year old housewife from Minneapolis. She married Colin, a computer programmer, twelve years ago. Six years ago, she became involved with Ed. The three now live together in a V triad (meaning that Colin and Ed don’t have a romantic or sexual relationship) and she considers both men her husbands: “We are lifemated. I am legally married to one and would be to the other if it was legal.” Women with two spouses (of any gender) can experience many benefits: they can get more emotional needs met, experience sexual diversity, and have another spouse to share household duties and resources.

One of the more fascinating elements of a two man/one woman triad is the relationship between two men who identify as straight. Guys like these don’t exactly have a ton of role models when it comes to intimate, committed, yet non-sexual relationships. Ed says, “In the past, I have described my relationship with Colin as like a relationship with a brother. We don’t tease each other like I see most brothers do, and we are much more comfortable being naked and expressing sexual thoughts about Leslie to each other. I expect that we would continue to live together for some time if we outlive Leslie, and I think the flavor of our relationship is something like family members that share the same ideology and outlook on life. Colin is like family I never had.”

--Tristan Taormino

Read more about Tristan Taormino’s new book Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships on OpeningUp.net

Be Social!

previous entry: Men in Kilts

next entry: Bondage Bed Design in Williamsburg

Name:	Email Address:
URL:	Remember Me? YesNo
Say It! (you may use HTML tags for style)