I’m Only Having Sex With One Man Right Now

Forgive me, Father, for I have barely sinned.

It occurs to me that I’ve spent a lot of my life hiding from myself in other people’s relationships. You can’t really date someone who’s already dating someone else—I reasoned, bouncing between various subgenres of Married or Otherwise Unavailable Men—therefore he can’t break your heart.

For the first half of my 20s, I clung to this fallacy as I dabbled in romantically ambiguous affairs and unlabeled half-romances and paid encounters with various pseudo-suitors, pretending to feel fulfilled the same way I pretended to feel full off Diet Coke and gum as a college anorexic, as scared of what real food would do to my reflection as I became of what real love—or, rather, the loss of it—would do to my heart.

I was always reluctantly aware, of course, that my logic didn’t quite hold up—that a man can still break your heart no matter how many wives, girlfriends, fiancées, and side pieces he happens to be juggling. That an ever-illicit but newly engaged lover can still leave you crying on a hotel room floor after he sheepishly delivers a private engagement announcement and slinks off to a woman who will pretend not to know why he’s late.

But more recently, it’s come to my attention not only that the faulty conclusion of my avoidant little thesis is full of holes I’ve fallen through, but that the premise itself is flawed. I am, in fact, dating someone who’s already dating someone else—an ethically non-monogamous lover in a long-term open relationship with his primary partner. I have been for over two years. But this time—openly, ethically fucking instead of secretly fornicating—I’m not hiding from anyone, camped out on the outskirts of someone else’s relationship. Not even myself.

Or I don’t think I am, anyway. Then again, no one lies to me like I do.