OpeningUp.net

Never is the word “polyamory” mentioned, but this extremely touching article from The Washington Post chronicles a unique situation that has echoes of non-monogamy. Page and Robert Melton had been married for eight years when, in 2003, Robert suffered from a heart attack and collapse that left him with a serious brain injury. Robert, who had previously worked as an editor and reporter for The Washington Post, suffered from profound cognitive loss.

Robert eventually came to understand who his family was, but he was moved into an assisted living facility. In the years that followed, Page busied herself with her full-time job as a government-affairs consultant and her work as an advocate for brain-injury and caregiver groups. Page had never considered entering a new relationship, but that changed in 2008 when she reconnected with an old classmate, Allan D. Ivie IV. From the start, this was not a traditional relationship.

[Allan] realized that the only way their relationship could develop was if it included Robert. As he started falling in love with Page, he said to her: “I see this responsibility that you have, and I want to help you with it. I understand this is a package deal.”

“That’s what triggered the relationship,” Page says. “He understood that Robert was central to our lives, that we needed to take care of him.”

Allan proposed to Page in June of 2010. When Page nervously brought the news to Robert, he replied, “You should marry him. He’s a good guy.” Allan and Page decided that they would move the family to Allan’s home city of St. Louis — and Robert would come with them.

Page formally divorced Robert while remaining his legal guardian. Then she married Allan in a heartfelt ceremony:

As Allan held Page’s hands, he promised to always love her and her daughters. He turned to Hope and Nell, who were their mom’s attendants, and smiled. Then he looked back at Page: “And I promise to always help you provide compassionate care for Robert.”

Today, Robert is settled into an assisted living facility in St. Louis, where Page visits him several times a week. Allan writes him daily emails and takes him to breakfast every Wednesday.

“In a way, I feel married to Robert forever,” [Page] said . . . “It’s not a traditional marriage. It’s not the marriage we signed up for. But I feel like there’s a connection there that never ends.”

. . . Robert has grasped the essence of their relationship better than any of them. He understands, she says, “that it’s not the legal arrangement, it’s the emotional arrangement, that emotional commitment.”

Read the full story on The Washington Post.

Samantha Fraser, blogger at Not Your Mother’s Playground, was interviewed for an article on non-monogamy in The Grid, an online city magazine run by the Toronto Star. The piece is decent, but the author spends a lot of time stressing how complicated, confusing, and exhausting non-monogamy seems.

Fraser wasn’t too bothered by the coverage, but she did take the opportunity to clear up some things that the article left murky. In the process, she wrote a blog post more useful than the original article.

To be honest, the only issue that I have with it is that it seems to focus on the fact that — a few months into non-monogamy I struggled extra with the little details — like the visual cue of my husband’s date’s wine glass being left behind in my kitchen. When we were relatively fresh other people fuckers, silly shit like that was hard to handle. So I share those stories with other people because those are the things that threw me for a loop back in the day. A few commenters on the article have latched onto the wine glass story, suggesting that if I’m not comfortable with that then I must not really be happy with non-monogamy at all.

And this is a mild challenge I always see that, for the most part, I ignore. There are a lot of assumptions out there about open relationships. First of all, people will often react strongly when they hear someone is in one. “Isn’t that hard? What about jealousy? What if you fall in love?”. On the flip side however, if I suggest mySELF that non-monogamy is hard and that sometimes those questions can have really tough answers, then I obviously must not be happy with it.

. . . I find this attitude so ridiculous which is why I will constantly strive to be honest when discussing open relationships . . . However in the interest of clarity, I will list a few points here that maybe I haven’t said in some time.

Read Fraser’s list of things she has personally learned from practicing non-monogamy.