In the year that I was married — my first, last, and only year as a wife — I made friends with a woman as though she had always been there. Having her in my life felt more natural than the time before it. I admired a lot about her. She was younger and smarter: more education, more experience, much longer and far better hair. She also was engaged to a man she had fallen in love with when they were teenagers, but their relationship, she told me in one of our many long conversations about the time before we knew each other, was open. They dated other people. This was incredible, I told her, and privately thought this only confirmed what I felt about her manner of being in the world. She was sophisticated and brave, novel and classic. She had fun because she was fun. I invited her to my wedding, even though I didn’t even know her at the time the original invites went out. Having her there felt exactly right.
One night, very soon after I was married, I hosted a small party at my house with a group of our friends, and we drank a lot of wine. Perched on the arm of my sofa, I leaned down to where she was sitting as she told a story about a new man she was seeing. “I want something like that,” I whispered. “A boyfriend.”
It wasn’t just the wine. I had never dated as an adult. I met my husband when we were sixteen. We never made a conscious decision to commit to each other so young. We just grew and changed with each other naturally enough that sometime — I’ll always wonder now when — it began to seem reasonable to assume we would continue to do so forever.
At first our parents and friends seemed to think it was cute, and we agreed. When my husband went to university, some people — gently at first — tried to suggest he “test the waters,” and when he resisted, they got a little more forceful in their recommendations. Our friends offered similar levels of perplexed, begrudging support. Don’t you want to fuck other people? the more direct among them would ask. Well, I don’t know. Sure. Does anyone ever get what they want when they want it? We did break up a few times — all those people, we thought, must’ve known something we didn’t — but we always returned to each other. We knew something they didn’t.
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Adapted from No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, by Haley Mlotek, to be published by Viking on February 18, 2025.
And yet, still, I really did want something like what my new friend had. All of my practice with flirting up until then was mostly contained to either my imagination or into developing an exceptionally friendly and sweetly persuasive demeanor in all my customer service jobs. Marriage could be, as everyone kept reminding me, anything we wanted. Why not this want?
I didn’t mean something as literal as wanting the man she was dating, but when she suggested it I thought the same thing. Why not her want?
The man in question was another new addition to my friends. He had also moved recently, and people seemed very excited to have him live in our city. Everyone liked him, one mutual friend promised me, and then suggested that maybe he should rent the apartment I was about to leave. This was right after my husband and I decided to move to the slightly bigger unit just one floor up, and the small building of renters had an informal policy of offering our friends first dibs; we had only gotten that apartment because the previous tenants spoke to us before our shared landlord.
And so I had already met this man late one winter afternoon, when I showed him around my home. I could see why everyone liked him. He was calm, quiet, and nice. He looked right at me as I spoke, and I could tell he kept looking even after I looked away. Something about feeling that gaze made me nervous, jittery, shaken.
I saw him around regularly after that — at bars, on the street, once in line at the bank, as a guest at the housewarming party for the apartment he ended up renting instead — and never felt the same way again about the way he looked at me, so decided to forget it. When I heard this new man was dating my new friend, I thought that was nice. She liked him too. These all seemed like good signs.
Her enthusiasm for matchmaking was well suited for my purposes: I was nervous about everything, but at least the person had been vetted by someone I trusted. With her blessing we started texting, an illicitness offset by the therapeutic languages I read about open relationships. I read The Ethical Slut. I learned so many new words. An entire vocabulary existed, and I believed that if you somehow used them correctly, any bad feeling could be made to evaporate. No one had to be jealous, I learned, and any hurt incurred could be healed. The rules that my husband and I had set for our open marriage were right, I thought at the time. They followed what I believed was the logic of what I had read. Disclosures and decorum, in equal measure — no lies, but also, no unnecessary details.
One night, after this man and I had both admitted that we wanted each other, I went to see him at a bar. I wore red lipstick. I leaned against the wall with the glass bottle I was drinking from in my hand, my winter coat held between my knees, worried I would let one or both drop from my grip when he leaned down to hear what I had said better. When we were finally alone together I was so nervous, and so certain of what would happen. I sat on the couch in a way that ended up being at odds with how he leaned toward me, his long legs crunched between the coffee table and the couch, and to compensate I found myself almost falling onto the floor, my arms holding on to the cushions like they could be an anchor, and I kind of laughed a little to acknowledge how very, very silly my position was.
“What’s funny?” he asked, his mouth still on mine. His tone was very, very serious. Suddenly, so was I.
“Nothing,” I said.
Only later did I realize this matchmaking setup had been perhaps well-intentioned but not a good idea. The suspicion creeped in as I watched, like an outsider, five lives fold into each other with too much intensity too soon. My new friend and I; my husband and hers; our boyfriend. We delighted in our evolved approach as to who we were to each other. By the time I realized this was a bad idea it felt too late to stop. When I realized why it was a bad idea, it came with a clarity that felt worse for being so delayed. Almost better to have never known than to know so long after I needed to understand.
This man and I had been seeing each other about once a week for a few months when he offered to be my date for a work event we were both invited to. I packed a small purse with contact lens solution so that I could spend the night with him. I sat beside my friend, who’d packed her small purse with a flask we shared. Even though it was the kind of event with a dress code and caterers it was not the kind with an open bar. Somehow I forgot to bring a cell phone charger.
The whole night felt wrong. My nervous feeling returned. We had been supposed to meet our friends first at a bar nearby, and he didn’t show. Not wanting to waste my cell battery, I only texted once. Once he arrived he was distant. His jacket sleeves were sloping off his arms. He didn’t want to talk. When the official part of the night ended he didn’t want to come with me to the after-party, walking away when it was time to get in the cab.
At the bar I texted, again and again, until my phone died at the same rate as my dignity. The bartender offered to charge it for me. I considered the contact lens solution in my purse. I couldn’t go home; not after telling my husband not to expect me. My friend with the flask had a couch, she reminded me gently. The feeling in my ribs had a hand on my throat and everyone could see it in my face. I smoked cigarettes outside and decided to wait five more minutes.
He did show up when I went back inside to collect my cell phone. I was standing in the corner, not wanting to join the small crowd of people desperate for the bartender’s attention for such a silly reason as my phone. He saw me and approached.
“Are you having a good time?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
He kissed me then in a way he never had in public. He hurt me in a way he never had in private. My arms bent behind my back at the wrong angle, my elbows held up like they didn’t come attached to my shoulders. “We’re leaving,” he said.
In the car he took my ankle in his lap and ran his finger over and over the place where a silver strap was buckled. At his house he stopped me in the hallway. He handed me a glass or a bottle of whiskey, I don’t remember which. “I don’t want it,” I told him. He made me drink it anyway. Most of it spilled on my dress. Wait, I said. Wait, wait, wait. We didn’t wait. Afterwards he said things he shouldn’t, either because I didn’t believe he meant them or because I didn’t want to admit how badly I wanted to hear him.
“You’ll leave me,” he said. “You’ll go away and forget me.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. I’ll leave. No. I won’t forget.”
“I guess now I’ve broken up with someone,” I said to my husband as we walked home together one night a few weeks later. “I guess you have,” he said.
I do have regrets about my marriage. More than regrets I certainly have wondered about decisions made, or compromises reached, or conclusions drawn. I am aware of the questions this experience invites. An open marriage is an easy place to start an innocent interrogation that insidiously spirals: surely one must regret an open marriage, if the marriage ultimately ended in divorce? Presumably one must accept that the open marriage was inextricably linked to the decision to divorce?
The story I’ve told here is one I’ve shared with people I trust, who have been, for the most part, very kind; they’ve heard the version I can speak now, in which I admit to much more pain and heartbreak than I would have allowed myself to acknowledge in the days when it was actually happening. Some people I love have also been, let’s say, critical. This is where I’ve heard some of the assumptions that teeter into judgemental before falling straight into condemnatory. That’s ok. I understand the impulse. Sometimes I share it, even. In my very deep hurt I developed a joke I still like telling very much: don’t open your relationship, I’ve quipped. Grow up and have an affair.
The experience of having an open marriage hurt me very deeply. Breaking up with another man was painful, not because I didn’t want to but because the decision came only after being forced to see clearly just how badly we had treated each other. He was cruel; I was callous. That damage radiated outwards during the relationship and in its long aftermath to other people in our lives too. I have clear memories of entirely foggy months, stumbling over my feet because my mind was occupied by endless monologues of what I wish I had said or apologized for or, worst of all, words I should’ve kept to myself.
For all the truth to some of the clichés about open relationships — they can definitely be corny, they definitely rely on an embarrassing lexicon, and are certainly a frequent mess — I still get why it’s worth trying. For all the heartbreak of my own marriage and relationships, and the many reasons to avoid it — absolutely outdated, absolutely limiting, and certainly a frequent mess — I don’t regret trying that either. No one relationship type is better than another. When I find myself getting too judgemental, I remind myself that non-monogamy works about as well as monogamy does, which is to say: not very.
I was divorced on a cold day in the fall. The divorce lawyer was expensive. No matter how many times I explained it was a simple, uncontested divorce, she spoke like she expected us to produce some complication. Some asset we had forgotten. But we had our years and nothing else. “No property,” she said when my husband and I went to her office for our first meeting, a question in her voice that seemed like a test. Her file folders were open, the long papers lit up under office bulbs. “No shared bank accounts?” We shook our heads. “No shared debts, no health insurance, no pets?” Nothing. Just time. Just years. My husband said, perhaps to make the conversation easier, “Just the Picasso.” The divorce lawyer stopped and looked up, confused. “He’s making a joke,” I said. “We don’t own any art.” “Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe you named your cat ‘the Picasso.’”
I went home with forms to fill out, questions as mundane as they were invasive: How much was our rent when we lived together? How much did we spend on groceries? Who bought what, and why? The answers existed, but to think of them meant considering my marriage with more closeness than I had when we were together. The lawyer wanted to know about our life — all life, not just what we needed to keep ourselves alive. How much would I have remembered, these forms wanted to know, if we had stayed together? They wouldn’t have been memories but routines; now it was over, and I was remembering a ritual I didn’t have the rights to anymore. I don’t remember, I told the lawyer. That’s fine, she said. We just need a ballpark anyway.
We signed as the lawyer timed us to see how quickly she could finish paperwork for a divorce this clean. We were done in twenty minutes; it would’ve been less if we hadn’t paused to staple a few pages together. We had a full hour booked. “What else?” the lawyer asked. “What’s next?”
I waited. I thought she would be the one to tell us.
Is it infidelity to have a flicker of desire for another person, or to foster an unexpected crush? Did I want the right to act on every impulse, or did I only want to retain the right to a realm of feeling that remained my own? When we reach for something new or different, or retreat to something safe and familiar, are we doing that because we want to believe it will save us from ourselves? If what we need is a secret, then there is no form of communication that will help. If what we need is freedom, then there is no form of forever we can trust.
There was a real desire at the beginning of my attempts at an open marriage — lust for this man that I now know was very true, and also too much for what I could handle then. That desire fit perfectly over what I was too afraid to admit: that I wanted a feeling more than I wanted anything else. That I wanted to be the kind of person who could chase that lust without first negotiating the terms. That I wanted it so badly but somehow not badly enough to do anything smart or kind for everyone involved and leave my marriage. To leave my marriage and put down what had happened as before that choice as my time of not knowing any better. To know when it was time to say goodbye, and to trust that we would have the chance to try again with other people. I did everything but that. I do have one regret about the end of my marriage that I will share. I regret that I spent the last months of it saying I’m sorry more than I said I love you.
From NO FAULT by Haley Mlotek, to be published on February 18, 2025, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Haley Mlotek.