Five years and counting

It’s my five year wedding anniversary today. Normally Steph and I don’t really bother with our wedding anniversary but this year is different. We’ve realized that there’s a lot of really great people in our lives – some who have been in our bed, and some who haven’t – that we didn’t know at the time of our wedding, or weren’t that close with. Now that we’ve lived in Toronto for almost 10 years, we have a great group of friends, old and new and we decided to throw an anniversary party kind of for them.

Aww, we were so cute and young once.

So we’ve hired a bartender. We’ve made favors. We’re nerding out. We’re using things from our wedding mainly – I’m a bit of a decorations pack rat! Saturday we’re having about 25 of our nearest and dearest over to celebrate their presence in our lives, along with our marriage to each other.

And what a marriage it has been. When we first tied the knot I was 24. We were living very much in the present, briefly discussing the future but really just thinking of the day to day. We’d heard nothing of polyamory, open relationships or the like. We were talking a little bit about kids, but that was as far as we’d branched out into “different things for us”.

And now we’re 5 years in, and 3 years into an open marriage. I’m not sure if we would have gotten divorced had we not opened up – we used to say getting married actually improved our relationship – but something happened when we opened our marriage’s legs; we found ourselves again. And now being married AND open we’re great together. We have hurdles to cross all the time (oh BOY do we have hurdles) but most of them once broken down to their core, come from standard relationship troubles, accelerated by being poly-ish, but generally not caused by it.

I’ll never say that I’m against monogamy. I was monogamous for a really long time and very happy. I became more happy after opening up, but my experiences aren’t going to change how someone else’s relationship works. It’s been a tough few years with plenty of heartbreaks, fights, insecurities, jealousy and general tough shit to deal with, but I know for a fact that I love my husband today more than I did 5 years ago because I see him daily as his own person – something that definitely came to light when we opened up – in addition to him being my other half.

So happy anniversary baby. You often drive me crazy and inspire occasional rage, but I loves ya’. And a couple of other people as well.