Have you ever wondered why we use the phrase ‘make love’? When I was a teenager, I thought how very odd that people should confuse love and sex. You love people you share a history with, that you care for. You fancy people for the slightest reason: the way they walk, their hair, a look in their eye. When I went to parties, what I wanted was that snog during the last slow dance with the sexiest man there.
My girlfriends didn’t agree, but my first boyfriend knew just what I meant and told me – because he knew about everything – that ‘making love’ was a phrase invented in the 1950’s, probably by the Americans, as a euphemism for having sex. Before that, to make love was to court, to woo.
I loved my boyfriend for telling me things I didn’t know, and that was why I went out with him in the first place, and that I was why I married him when I was 22. I reasoned that having good conversations all day and every day mattered much more in marriage than fancying your husband. I quite fancied him, but only quite. But that didn’t matter because we decided to model our marriage on that of his grandparents, who adored each other for the whole of their marriage, but were prone to fall passionately in love with other people along the way.
So, from the first day we went out, I started to learn the things you can only know by being in an open relationship:
It’s exciting to know you’re loved and safe, but still about to snog other friends guilt free.
We talked about this too: about how he found the moment between the first kiss and the first sex incredibly exciting; whereas I always preferred those moments leading up to the first kiss. Armed with his approval, I don’t think I ever went to the cinema with a male friend without kissing them for the duration of the film – and I didn’t have to feel guilty about it because we’d agreed it was part of our relationship. And my guy mates didn’t mind, the kissing was fun and exciting but didn’t change a thing about my marriage.
It’s easy to think you’ve hit upon the model of the perfect relationship
We talked about how love works like an economy – the more you give, the more you receive, and the more love you feel for everyone in your orbit, including those you fancy! There was no limit on love, we decided. It wasn’t like delivering goods from a warehouse: the more one customer receives, the less there is to distribute to others. We even romanticised about living in a large house with two private wings, one for each of us, where we would entertain our lovers, before meeting for meals where we would share all over a bottle of wine.
Jealousy is poison if you want to have an open relationship
I still don’t know what jealousy is really about. Of course I know what it’s like to feel hurt, betrayed and utterly wretched. But who are you supposed to feel jealous of, your partner for having a good time with someone else, or the woman he’s having the good time with? Who are you supposed to want to stick pins into?
I remember the first time he told me he had a lover. I was even thrilled, like we were living some outrageous bohemian life, not the dull conventional one of my parents. I don’t have the jealousy gene – if you do an open relationship will tear you apart.
Even the closest marriages can fall apart
My first husband and I were together for years and I never had a moment’s boredom with him. There was never a second when I took him for granted, and I didn’t think it was possible to be closer to another human being. We shared everything.
But my rival was different from the others: she said, ‘I’ll only sleep with you if you promise to leave your wife.’ And that was how my husband started to obsess about her. She said she would feel used as a third party to an open marriage. And I can see she was right: I never gave a moment’s thought the feelings of my husband’s lovers. I was the one who had him every day, wasn’t I? Well, she won my husband, and they’re married to this day.
But funnily enough, the worst day was not the day he packed his bags and left me. The worst day was when I realised we couldn’t look each other in the eye any more, that our intimacy was gone. I wanted to shake him out of his stupid and uncharacteristic obsession, and say, ‘What about all those promises we made to each other, about stopping an affair if it felt dangerous to us?’ But it was like he was on drugs, the man I married and loved couldn’t be reached.
Sex is important
In my first marriage, I viewed sex as a pastime, rather like tennis. I think when you know you can have it with everyone it becomes rather meaningless. The relationship I’m now in is ‘closed’, and it’s curious to see how sex has become more than a game and in a way that’s more thrilling than anything I had whilst I was in an open relationship. Come to think of it: it’s just possible that nowadays we ‘make love’.
*Olivia's book, The Conversations (Vintage), is out now.
Picture: Beth Hoeckel
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.