How Our Open Relationship Became a Scary, Liberating Hot Mess

“I’m ready to give it a shot,” I told Jordan. We were standing in the kitchen. I looked at his hand holding the counter instead of looking him in the eye. He has knobby knuckles. I thought about how it’s a miracle humans survive with veins tracing so close under the skin.

I want to trust we’re strong enough to experiment, I thought.

Nah, you’re not strong—you’re just trying to be the cool girl, Radio K shot back.

Ah, Radio K. That’s my pet name for the stream of snide, cynical, egotistical thoughts that run loops in my head. Ann Patchett once described how we have competing narratives, like radio stations, running through our brains, and she calls the destructive, malicious one “Radio K-Fuck.” Radio K as a name for that voice stuck with me.

All week, since Jordan had told me he was attracted to a girl at the bar he frequented, Radio K had been a persistent buzz in my ear, reciting all the reasons Jordan would clearly want to ditch our eight-year relationship for his crush. She’s sexier and freer than you—look at those tattoos.

Jordan’s voice cut through my anxiety loop. “Give what a shot?” he asked.

“You dating Casey. I’m ready for us to try an open relationship.”

“Oh.” He seemed surprised, which I didn’t quite get. Hasn’t he been obsessing over this question for the last week, just like I have? Each night I’d been crawling in bed early to read Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity—on my Kindle, so Jordan couldn’t see the cover of what I was reading.

I wanted to make sense of Jordan’s desire without talking to him about it. I was too afraid to hear more about what he wanted with Casey.

“Okay, yeah,” he continued. “Um—should we set up some ground rules?”

“I’m not sure I want to know much of anything,” I said. “I think it’s good to know when you want to date someone, and who it is, but I don’t think I want to know what happens on dates or anything.”

After my week of spinning, this was the internal compromise I’d struck between my adventurous side and my anxious side. When Radio K wasn’t ruling my brain, an open relationship sounded exciting. It had been years since I’d paid attention to a stranger paying attention to me.

When I was honest with myself, I realized: I want to lock eyes with someone at a bar and watch them follow me around the room.

I want to be chosen. To be picked out of a crowd. To be adored again by someone who doesn’t know about the anxiety that claws my brain to shreds. Someone who doesn’t notice how much I hesitate. Someone who can pull me out of myself.

What I missed about dating was trying on different versions of myself. For one evening I could be bolder, bitchier, sexier—before my awkwardness and indecision came rushing back in.

I want to feel the energy of all the people I never let myself be.

And eight years on, opening our relationship seemed smart. Jordan and I were in it for the long haul; we both wanted to keep the ride fun. I just wasn’t sure I could handle the details about a hot girl he might make out with who didn’t also hover over the sink before bed rinsing her sinuses out with a Neti pot.

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I didn’t want to know about the people he could be with who were sexier and more well-adjusted than me.

Jordan reached across me for a mug to make his tea. “I think if you start dating someone, I’ll want to know everything. I’ll want to talk about it, to know how you’re feeling.”

“I think I can do that,” I said.

Famous last words, Radio K sniped. Radio K always recognizes when I say something vague to cover when I’m not ready to talk about some friction I feel. I didn’t know if I was going to date anyone. But you want to experiment. Who knows who you might become when you let yourself be anyone? Will you be willing to let people in then?

“So, I want you to feel free to date Casey,” I cut across Radio K. “I guess just let me know if you set up a date with her.”

“OK,” Jordan said, and I went to take a shower while he drank his tea.

A couple of weeks later, Jordan told me he was going to meet Casey at an Italian restaurant for pizza, on a night I was going to be teaching a yoga class. I told him that would be OK. Then he told me I was welcome to drop by before class if I wanted.

I felt a little flare of anger. I don’t want to sit there comparing myself with Casey while the food gets cold.

Then anxiety. I don’t want you to leave me for her.

Then denial. I don’t want to back out of our open relationship before we’ve even tried it. I don’t back out on things just because I’m scared.

“Sure,” I said.

When I walked into the pizza place, Jordan and Casey were mid-conversation over a zucchini-noodle antipasto. I hoped my yoga leggings made me look fit and my jacket and helmet made me look butch. Casey was underdressed and confident in a tissue-thin black tank and cutoff shorts.

Turns out, I liked Casey. We talked about her dogs. She laughed easily in this cute way that wrinkled her nose. As we chatted, the dark vixen fantasy of her that I’d built in my head started to dissolve. Her nails were bitten to the quick and she had crow’s feet around her eyes. She made a fart joke, and we both teased Jordan for scrunching his nose.

By the time I needed to leave for class, I found myself wishing I could stay. I left them to polish off the last of the pizza.

Partway to class, I started to feel a rush of optimism, even euphoria. An open relationship could be fun. I pulled my scooter over in a parking lot and pulled out my phone to send Jordan a text.

Casey is great. Whatever you want to do on your date, I’m comfortable with it.

As I put my phone in my pocket, I looked up and saw Jordan’s car passing by. They must have finished and left right after I did.

Still feeling comfortable? Radio K asked.

Surprisingly, I was.

Jordan looked up and gave an exasperated sigh. “I don’t know what to write back.”

“Let me see.”

He handed me his phone. Pulled up on the screen was a text conversation he’d been having with Casey. She’d written something about it being a hot night.

I had an idea, and I stifled a shameless giggle. I pulled up a browser and found an image of a pat of butter melting into a puddle. I pasted it into his text and typed, I know some things that are hot.

“Send that,” I said, handing his phone back. I watched the smile I’d hoped I’d get spread across his face.

“You’re so much better at flirting than me,” he said.

It would only occur to me later how weird it must have been to be in Casey’s shoes. Did she wonder whether Jordan was sharing her text messages with me? Would she care?

We were so new to the open-relationship thing that these weren’t questions I thought to ask. We talked about texts with potential lovers in the same way best friends help each other problem-solve their text threads with their boyfriends and girlfriends—basically, without a second thought to whether someone else’s permission or consent might be needed.

When we opened our relationship, we suddenly each became more self-conscious about our phones. For a while, we each kept our message alerts on, until we realized we were interrupting our own dates and movie times with constant dings from back-and-forth texts to other people. Sometimes it was only mildly annoying. Other times it became fuel for jealousy.

Sometimes I’d hear Jordan’s phone dinging and reflexively start bashing myself. Casey is sexier than you, isn’t she? She’s more confident too. You pretty much suck, you know that? It didn’t take long before we silenced our phones.

Still, texts from other people would light up the screens, distracting our conversations. We started flipping our phones screen-side down.

One night, when Jordan was out on a date with Casey, I went out dancing with some of my married girlfriends and another guy—Rob. Rob, who held my gaze a quarter-second longer than usual when we greeted each other. A trill of electricity ran up the side of my neck.

Halfway through the night, by the time the DJ had switched from nineties rap to bachata, my feet were tired. I made my way to a table where Rob was sitting alone, watching our friends dance.

“Not feeling like dancing?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’m just thinking.”

“About Kimberly?”

He looked at me, stunned. Kimberly was one of the married friends; her husband had been away for months on military duty. I’d seen Rob’s eyes follow her around the patio all night. She’d kept reaching for his hand when we were dancing, and only held it for a second before she let go and turned to someone else.

It had just been a hunch, and I surprised myself by blurting it out. Rob raised his eyebrows, opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. Then he gave me that lingering look again.

“I need to hang out with women who aren’t married,” he said.

“Jordan and I just opened our relationship,” I said. The words came out before I’d really thought about them. I immediately felt nervous and tossed back the last half of my drink. I willed my face not to pucker at the influx of well gin. “So I guess you never know what’s possible until you ask,” I said.

Alarm bells went off in my head. You’re telling him too much. He’s into Kimberly, not you. You’re only embarrassing yourself. But then, I didn’t really care if I was a consolation prize to him. It felt exciting to be bold.

I winked, set my empty glass down, and walked away toward the dancers.

Ugh, a wink, really? Radio K chided. You have terrible game.

Most of the friends in our group lost steam somewhere around midnight and went home. The DJ had settled on a long string of overworn early-2000s hits. Rob, Kimberly, and I agreed none of us was ready to sleep. We decided to walk to Rob’s house, a few blocks away.

His roommates were awake. We all drank Knob Creek and chitchatted for a half hour in their living room until Kimberly started yawning. She curled up on one half of the couch. I decided to head out. And Rob, surprisingly, said he wanted to walk me out to my bike.

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“You’re right; this empty street looks pretty shady,” I said when we got to the sidewalk. “Good thing you came out to protect me.”

He stood close as I unlocked my bike from the rack, just close enough that I not-so-much-by-accident brushed his shoulder as I stood up and shoved my lock into my bag. We stood there, silence extending for just a quarter second too long.

Until I put my hand behind his neck and pulled his head down to mine. I gave him a quick kiss at first, in case it was an overstep, but he immediately returned the kiss with a much longer one. His hands grazed my hips, and on their way up to my shoulders he brushed the backs of his fingers against my nipple, which immediately hardened under my thin cotton dress.

“You should go back inside. Kimberly is waiting for you,” I said.

“But you’re so much more interesting.”

To which my mind replied with two possibilities: For now, or You’re lying.

I didn’t care.

I kissed him again, and he held the back of my head. No thoughts, just the feeling of his skin and his lips. It felt blissful to have a blank mind and so many sensations.

Then I came back to myself. I put my palm in the middle of his chest and shoved him away.

“Don’t be rude. Go back in.” I straddled my bike and started to roll down the sidewalk. I looked back over my shoulder. “I’ll text you tomorrow; let’s meet up.”

As I rode away, I was glad he couldn’t see my face. I shrieked silently. My heart was pounding. When I turned around the corner, out of sight of his front door, I sat back on the seat and raised my hands in the air to feel the rush of wind around my arms. I suddenly felt like staying up all night, just to get a few more hours of feeling so alive.

I want first kisses over and over again. They always feel so scary and so brave.

My flirtation with Rob lasted all of two weeks. I sexted him a couple of pics in my underwear that he didn’t respond to for three days. I kept my cool on day one; I’m a slow texter too. On day two I thought he might be playing coy, and I felt angry and embarrassed. By day three I hoped he’d broken his phone or broken a bone—nothing too serious, just a forearm or something that made it hard to text back. Why the fuck hasn’t someone built in a “delete” feature on text messages?

Then he texted back saying he’d been on a road trip away from reception. “What a wonderful sight to come back to,” he wrote. Thank god.

A few days later I invited him out for drinks because I was going to be in his neighborhood for a work function. He said he’d try to make it. I got out of work and wandered around his neighborhood for twenty minutes before he texted to cancel.

In the background of all of that, Jordan and I were gabbing like a couple of giddy schoolgirls. Casey had been texting him erratically and cryptically. Over pizza and pints at a bar, Jordan and I shared our frustrations with flirting and rejection. The bartender kept his eyes averted but he kept polishing the same glass.

“What does it mean?” Jordan asked, showing me the latest text that had come in, while triangulating the time since his last text to plan the best time to respond.

“I have no idea.” I smiled a little. There was something cute about his nervousness, like I was peeking inside his head at the beginning of our relationship. I liked imagining he obsessed like this over me.

Things fizzled out with Rob when I tried my next experiment: I decided I wasn’t going to text first. It naturally ended without fanfare when it turned out he wasn’t going to text first either. Everything just stopped. The next time I went out dancing with my married friends, neither Rob nor Kimberly came.

Jordan’s flirtation with Casey fizzled out, too. After a few dates that Jordan described as starting great and ending awkwardly, Casey started ghosting him. She stopped showing up at the bar where she’d been a regular.

And without a word, we all moved on with our lives.

Jordan and I got on dating apps because, first of all, they didn’t exist when we first got together, so they were a new, exciting way to check out the dating pool, and second, it’s thrilling to get attention from strangers.

I didn’t even care that the premise of dating apps is objectifying; I liked them because they were objectifying. I liked that strangers would only see the parts of me I wanted them to see. I could show them my playfulness and wit, but I could hold back my neuroses.

But for the very reasons I liked the idea of a dating profile, I felt wildly uncertain while I was writing it. It felt like a big effort to hide the parts of myself I was sure would poke through: my awkwardness, my insecurity, my gullibility. I tried to smooth it all over with a veneer of cool.

In the “About me” section, I wrote: Professional word wrestler who likes old fashioneds and blues singers who belt their hearts out.

Translation: Insecure poser who may or may not actually make a living as a writer.

To cut my profile off at the neck, I wrote at the bottom, under the “Who are you seeking?” section: I’m looking primarily to build close friendships. If they go somewhere else, cool.

That was bullshit. But the next line was slightly more honest: I’m interested in pursuing a relationship with a woman if things click.

And the last line was bolder: My boyfriend and I are open to seeing someone together if the fit is right.

Everyone you think is cool will be turned off by that last line, Radio K snarked.

But he was wrong. Hours after posting my profile, my phone dinged with a message from a woman who wanted to know more.

My stomach leapt, and a different, silky voice whispered in my ear.

This is the power of knowing what you want and asking for it.

Radio K kept nagging me as my relationships snowballed. In the handful of years Jordan and I ran our open relationship experiment, I formed a series of impulsive, thrilling, chaotic partnerships, and the same core problem kept surfacing: I didn’t always understand how I felt or what I wanted.

Which made it hard to be honest with myself, let alone the people in my life that I loved.

I hid details of my relationships with my partners. I hid my partners from my family. Ultimately I made such a mess of things that one day I sat down and started writing, trying to understand the turmoil I’d tangled myself up in.

After hundreds of writing sessions at midnight and five in the morning, I had an entire book. I called it Please Make Me Love Me. That’s what I’d been searching for all along: someone to help me love all the parts of myself I kept hiding.

When I published, a friend congratulated me and then gave me a puzzled look. “So…” he said, “you went from not being able to talk about any of this to sharing it with the whole world?”

I shrugged. “It’s an insurance policy,” I told him. “I can’t hide anymore.”

By the time this book came out, I knew no one could make me love myself. No one could pull Radio K and all the anxiety out of my head. But after spending so many hours writing in the dark, I started seeing myself more fully on the page. In fact, I grew to like the girl who materialized there. Flawed as she was.

In the end, Jordan and I closed our relationship again. But it wasn’t a failed experiment. The challenges of juggling multiple relationships forced both of us to pay attention to our own feelings, to talk about experiences we were ashamed of, to bring up desires that felt taboo or scary. We learned how to be braver with each other, and how to rebound from hurt.

And as I unpacked my first box of books, I pictured a copy finding its way into the hands of someone else who was lying on the floor at midnight, trying to figure out who they were, what they wanted, and how to love it all—even as their own K-Fuck radio station blared in their ears.

Excerpted and adapted from Please Make Me Love Me by Emily Grindlesparger, copyright 2022 by Emily Grindlesparger, and reprinted with permission.

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