1 - Sorry, Monogamy – It’s Not You, It’s Me

Imagine this: You’ve found the love of your life. You’ve earned your degree, gotten married, moved abroad, started a family, bought a home, and launched your own business—in whatever order it happened. You have everything you ever wanted. You feel settled. Content. Genuinely happy.

At least—as long as you don’t think too far beyond the present.

The moment your mind drifts to the future, your breath catches. Sometimes it even stops altogether. After fifteen years in a relationship shaped by all of these milestones, I often find myself thinking of a line from a Snow Patrol song:

“I don’t know where, confused about how as well

Just know that these things will never change for us at all

If I lay here, if I just lay here

Would you lie with me and just forget the world?”

If you can picture all that, you’ve got a pretty good sense of how I felt just before I turned forty. I know—it’s a cliché. But what can I say? Clichés are clichés for a reason: they happen to more of us than we’d like to admit. Myself included.

I didn’t just fall into that cliché—I also bought into the belief that growing up meant being monogamous. I didn’t fully admit that to myself until I tied the knot and said, “I do.” The truth? I’d known since I was a teenager that monogamy and I were something of a toxic match. But I stuck it out. I tried to make it work. After all, everyone else seemed to manage somehow.

My husband and I had countless conversations about how I regretted never having had the chance to explore an open relationship—without risking everything. But it always stayed hypothetical. The stakes were simply too high.Who in their right mind would risk their carefully built life for a restless heart?

I wouldn’t.

On red wine–fueled nights, my never-fully-lived-out pull toward polyamory would bubble to the surface. But as the buzz faded, so did the courage.So I stayed just a little bit unhappy—but not unhappy enough to be truly brave.

We dabbled in a few things here and there: visited swinger clubs together, signed up for couples’ dating apps. Sure, it was fun. But it never truly fulfilled me. The belief that married couples should only ever have sex together was more ingrained than we liked to admit.

Over time, monogamy began to feel like the enemy—something that tried to press me into a mold I simply didn’t fit. But blowing it all up? Burning it down just to feel free? I couldn’t do that either. How do you push back against a system you’re part of—a system that gave you the very life you love?

So we decided to start an experiment—something bold, something shared.

An adventure where we’d face our fears and desires side by side,

trusting that our love would be strong enough to hold it all.