Chapter 28: What Else Might Love Be?

These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

In the months that followed, the questions that had begun to stir in me about love and freedom grew louder. If love wasn’t about possession or safety, what was it about? Could intimacy be something wider, more fluid—something that didn’t need to be contained within a single relationship? Those questions led me, almost inevitably, toward the idea of non-monogamy.

I now know that I wanted to explore non-monogamy for all the wrong reasons. I was at my wit’s end. I couldn’t imagine the rest of my life without the kind of intimacy I was longing for. I felt like I was stagnating in my marriage. The alternative, in my mind, was divorce. But I didn’t want divorce. I loved my husband and the life we’d built. I just felt like I was suffocating inside it.

Even though we’d talked about non-monogamy before, it had always been theoretical. This time, I was serious. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but I think he knew it was the only way to keep me, so he agreed to explore it. Looking back, I know that non-monogamy doesn’t work unless both partners aren’t a full-bodied yes. And knowing what I know now—that I would eventually leave the marriage without us even opening it—I can now see that ending it sooner may have been kinder.

Still, I’m grateful for those months of reading, reflecting, and talking. They opened my mind and softened my ideas of what love and marriage are supposed to look like. For the first time in a long time, I felt that I could be honest about what I was desiring.

It was fascinating to learn about the history of marriage—how so many of our cultural “norms” come from religious frameworks most of us have long since stopped questioning. It helped me understand that what I wanted wasn’t another person so much as a new way to relate: intimacy and connection that were sustained by mutual desire, not obligation. I didn’t want the structure of marriage itself to be the thing that was sustaining our relationship. I wanted intention, aliveness, curiosity.

Yes, we had built a life together, but I didn’t actually feel like it was one in which either of us was really thriving. I often felt like we were just going through the motions of life together, to get through another day.

When I read about the “relationship escalator”—the assumed path of dating, marriage, children, often followed by quiet resignation—I recognized myself on it. I began to see how often the status of a relationship becomes the thing that keeps people together, rather than fulfillment or even genuine connection.

It occurred to me that I’d never realized there was an option other than monogamy. Love had always felt like a choice between one person or another. It never occurred to me that honesty itself—about desire, attraction, longing—could be part of the relationship, rather than a threat to it.

But what if there were no escalator?
No destination?
No end goal?

What if love could exist as something living and responsive—something that required us to keep choosing each other, not because we had promised to, but because we wanted to? It was so simple and basic, even, but somehow… new.

I admit that I was idealistic about it all. But exploring polyamory made me look directly at the places where jealousy, not-enoughness, and rivalry lived inside me—and where they had been shaping my understanding of love.

The exploration of polyamory, for me, wasn’t ultimately about wanting multiple partners. It was about wanting more truth. It made me confront the roots of jealousy, scarcity, and comparison. It exposed how deeply I’d been conditioned to view other women as rivals, and love as a limited resource.

For most of my life, I’d been jealous. I’d always believed that another woman would inevitably be prettier, funnier, cooler, smarter—more. My jealousy had less to do with anyone else and more to do with not knowing what was truly valuable about me. But I also saw how this conditioning was collective: womanhood under patriarchy had never been built on sisterhood.

I never trusted other women. I only knew myself in comparison to other women, so had to look for all the ways one of us was better. It was me or her. Her or me. Other women had been my mirrors of competition, potential threats rather than sisters.

As I began sitting in women’s circles, that started to shift. When I let myself be witnessed by other women—raw, grieving, joyful—I began to see the beauty and strength that live in vulnerability. I saw how our radiance, together, doesn’t compete. It amplifies.

In circle, I could feel another woman’s strength in her vulnerability, her bravery in her expression of fear, her beauty in her joy. If another woman could be powerful and magnetic, it didn’t take anything from me—it added to the field.

In her reflection, I could love another woman as my sister. And in that love, I could see and love more of myself. I didn’t need to be perfect or have it all together. I’d always felt that if I showed my vulnerability to women, I’d be torn down for it. But in these circles, showing my vulnerability allowed them to hold me up—and it allowed me to see how much of my strength actually lived in my capacity to be seen and loved.

I began to recognize that another woman’s success didn’t mean my failure; another woman’s beauty might just be different from mine. Reflected in these women’s eyes, I began to know myself. I began to feel what was beautiful about me, what was special, what was unique—not just worthy of love, but love itself. I began to experience myself as love—my exact, unique frequency of it—and to trust that that frequency would magnetize what was meant for me.

I thought of how love expands with children. When my second son was born, my love for my first didn’t lessen—it grew. My capacity stretched. I wondered why we’ve been taught that romantic love should be any different.

Even though non-monogamy wasn’t ultimately meant for us, it shifted something profound in me. It asked me to expand my definition of love, to let go of ownership and control and open to truth and reciprocity.

Ending my marriage never had to do with love fading. I still love my ex-husband with all of my being. Letting him go, I believe, is what let me love him without the condition of my needs being met. Finally, I could see him and love him and not need him to be anything other than who he is. I actually believe that ending our marriage was one of my greatest acts of love.

I’ve come to believe that relationships don’t have to last forever to be wildly successful. Their value isn’t measured in longevity, but in how deeply they grow us. Our marriage had already done its sacred work. It brought me to the edge of myself.

I had been desperately trying to avoid ending my marriage because, at least a part of me believed that its ending would signify failure. And I knew that my marriage was not a failure. There was no part of me that ever felt I’d married the “wrong guy.” I married the right guy, the perfect guy, for the woman I was at the time that I’d married him.

We had two amazing children, and I’d never have wanted a different father for them. We’d moved across the country together, created a new life in a new place together. We’d experienced twenty beautiful years together. And even the hard parts showed me all the places where I wanted to grow and heal.

The narrative about divorce that I’d been raised believing was that a marriage ending negates all of that—but what felt more true was that nothing could negate that. Our love, our relationship, our family, our story was a wildly successful one. Trying to hang on to it at all costs, even at the expense of both of our happiness, is what would make it a failure. But honoring it, having gratitude for it, appreciating the scope of the love story—that even if it ends, it was a massive success.

That perspective shift is what helped me loosen my grip a bit on “needing it to work.” It had already worked. It had walked me to the edge of a cliff where there was nowhere else to go but to untether myself and leap.

Upcoming: Chapter 29: Becoming My Own Anchor

There’s a dark comfort in victimhood; it lets us stay safe in what’s familiar. But the more accountable I became for my life, the more that story felt like a betrayal of who I was becoming. Maybe I had accepted that dynamic a decade ago, when I loved myself less. But the more I fell in love with myself, the more I recognized that staying in victimhood or resentment no longer felt like the kind of love I wanted for myself.

What did this bring up for you about jealousy or not-enoughness?
Where do you feel that in your body?
What shifts when you imagine being seen, valued, and loved without comparison?

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