With My African Informants...

The spring before last, Don, my partner of four years, invited Angela, a woman I didn't know very well, to become his secret lover. He told her that it would be fine with me in that I encourage him to have "special friends." I was royally pissed when I found out. The bottom line message that I felt was that I wasn't enough for him. I feared that I wasn't sexy, attractive, passionate, and loving enough. When I only sensed her presence as his lover, I attempted to amp up the passion. My gut instinct was that if I could fuck him like there was no tomorrow, that he'd refocus his attentions on me.

My intensification had no such effect. Instead she began to sense my anxiety about her place in his life and soon admitted to me that she'd been his lover for several months. Despite her uneasiness about the situation, she couldn't break it off because to her the connection they shared was extremely meaningful and powerful. What followed were months of pain, anger, passion, and exhaustion. While I liked Angela as a person, part of me was angry enough to want to wring her neck out. And while I never stopped loving Don, I was non-stop furious with him for breaking what I believed was a monogamous agreement.

Leanna and Don

Many of my friends advised me to leave Don. Honestly, I was tempted. Despite his efforts to prove that he loved me as always, Angela's presence made that extremely difficult. My body couldn't understand how he could love me and spend the night with her. I'd toss and fret all night and when morning came I'd be exhausted. Meanwhile, Angela secretly hoped I'd leave Don so the specialness that she felt about their connection could be better realized.

I didn't leave Don because I had an agenda. Being an anthropologist who had been studying polygamy for many years, I sought a more personal understanding of multiple partner relationships. And in that I had researched this stuff, I honestly wasn't a virgin. The piece that I didn't know was that of being the "first wife." I'd had dalliances with married men, I'd been in "open relationships" where I had an outside lover, and I'd attended swing parties. Up until Angela's arrival in my life, I'd never thought that multiple partnerings had anything to do with pain. While I'd studied the biological underpinnings of jealousy, I really didn't know it from the inside. I remember once being invited to give a lecture about my research and was astounded that many of the women had come to find out how to deal with their partner's infidelity. I couldn't relate to their anger-- it was totally out of my realm of personal knowledge.

I took what had arrived as an opportunity to better understand infidelity, jealousy, and myself. Initially, I presumed that Don and Angela would waltz off into the sunset together and that eventually I'd find a new partner and life would be good again. Meanwhile, Angela and I engaged in an angry battle for Don's time and attention. She claimed that because he professed equal love for her, she should have equal time with him. Despite that he lived with me, she wanted him to spend every other night with her. I was astounded. I presumed that being the primary (and public) partner, he should spend most of his time with me and that the only role open for her was that of a secondary lover.

I told her about what I considered to be the "benefits" of being the secondary. You never had to do laundry, deal with bills, housework, yard work, and that whenever your lover arrived he was excited to see you. I made it sound so good to myself that I secretly hoped to become such a mistress. I began to crave dancing into a special lover's arms, being smothered with kisses, wearing sexy lingerie under my blue jeans, and having him seduce me within five minutes of my arrival at his door. Meanwhile Angela stood fast to her desire not be Don's mistress. When he came to visit her she wanted to engage him in "normal" activities like watching videos, doing crossword puzzles, and eating TV dinners.

My research in polyamory and swinging had shown that when the women forge a connection, the tensions of sharing a man could be relieved. With hopes of lessening the pain that kept me awake whenever Don wasn't in my arms at night, I attempted to build a closeness to Angela. Initially, the attempt was extremely challenging. While Angela and I had certainly known of each other before she got involved with Don, we were never drawn to each other. There was no compelling reason for us to see more of each other and so we didn't. Now suddenly, we "needed" to connect and so we tried. While we did fine discussing our mutual pain, complaining how Don didn't give either of us enough focused attention and how difficult the "situation" was, we felt little good will towards each other. I was the woman keeping her from having full time access to the man she loved, while she was the woman who had so painfully disrupted my sweet and loving home life. If I witnessed a loving moment between her and Don, I cringed and then felt intensely jealous. I became convinced that he kissed her more passionately than he kissed me and that he was much more turned on to her sexually. I didn't want to see it and I didn't want to compete. I figured I needed to get my own life. Despite my academic curiosity about polygamy, my anger and jealousy were so intense I didn't feel I could be a candidate.

To me Don and Angela's relationship was filled with hot, passionate, incredibly intense "new relationship energy." My older more settled relationship with Don was filled with daily squabbles, deeper power struggles, and underhanded (but really funny) jokes. In my mind, it couldn't compete. Pretty soon I created a long list of things that I was convinced Angela did better than me. In addition to being a better lover (whatever that means), she was a better cook (she faithfully follows every recipe detail, while I'd just do what I feel like). She also kept her house cleaner (she has a housekeeper tidy up every week), and ultimately was a better companion for Don (having recently met him she could better find most everything he has to say interesting).
This began to remind me of being about 12 years old and having my Mom point out girls who were better than me at things like tidiness, violin playing, and doing their homework on time. I was encouraged to try to emulate their shining examples. Instead, I became a rebel. Either I found realms (art and writing) that couldn't as easily be measured or I wallowed in displeasing my parents and being an uncooperative slob. Quickly Angela became one of the "goody-goody-girls" that I was not going to bother competing with. I was convinced she'd win and that there was no reason to even try.

My rebellion began by proclaiming I was going to go to Africa for at least a year and then by getting involved with Dash, a man Don considered his total antithesis. I had a blast with Dash. Immediately substances I had been reluctant to ingest, I imbibed with glee. With Don I'd get sleepy at 10:30 or 11:00 at night, while with Dash I'd stay up until 4:00 in the morning. I did sexual things with Dash I believed Don had no appetite for. In my mind Dash danced and Don didn't. And when I was with Dash all I wanted to do was dance. Moreover, I made no effort to keep my involvement with Dash a secret. I flaunted it everywhere. I rubbed Don's face in it and caused our whole community of friends to see it as well.

Meanwhile, Dash didn't have an easy time of it. While the connection he and I shared was tender as well as lots of fun, Don did his best to dismiss him. While I had attempted to reach out to Angela, Don failed to respond to Dash's efforts to forge a connection. Ultimately, the only person who might have gained something from this act of rebellion was Angela. Don would get so angry with me that he'd spend every night with her, while shunning me as being polluted-by-the-enemy.
With Don's disregard for Dash so thick, I spun off further and further into a lost and disconnected state. I couldn't please anyone. If I dallied at Dash's, trying to bask in the feeling of being footless and free, I'd arrive home to Don's stormy anger over my irresponsibility. If doing something with Don caused me to show up late for a date with Dash, I felt I wasn't really available for the commitment and connection that Dash sought. Being that the last thing Dash wanted was to be the cause of my leaving Don, I was in a lose-lose situation. Dash wouldn't accept me if I left Don for him and yet at the same time he wanted to have a committed primary relationship with me. While I proposed he could be my co-primary (in that Angela had become Don's co-primary), Don's disdain for him tormented the possibility.

Sometimes I fantasized about leaving Don on my own accord, but I just couldn't get myself to budge. We were so joined at the hip and through our hearts, I couldn't find my way out. Even when Don called me the most vicious of names and told me to pack up and leave, I couldn't. I didn't know Dash well enough to move in with him, though he sweetly offered. At the same time, I had little interest in finding my own place and "starting over." Whatever was in store had so much drama, intrigue, and energy, that I couldn't gather my things together and tell everyone good-bye.

We barely weathered the winter holidays. Angela absented herself for Thanksgiving and Christmas, requesting that she get these with Don the following year. I was aghast. My fantasies about polyamory were far from this reality. I thought by adding another person to an already standing relationship, a family would be expanded, not divided. In her mind the only way Thanksgiving could be good would be if he were seated at her family's table as her life partner. And I guess I would just disappear in midair, realizing I'd already had four Thanksgivings with him and now it was time to share!

Angela came by for an early Christmas Eve and showered us with gifts. I felt uneasy that I had gotten her so little compared to what she'd gotten me...and also that she'd spent more on her gifts to Don that one Christmas than I'd spent cumulatively over the four years we'd been together! I felt so cheap in her presence. Clearly she was the "goody-goody" and I wasn't. I was stingy, a careless cook, a sloppy housekeeper, and moreover I found much of what Don had to say repetitive, if not boring. I imagined she might hand me a check for $50,000 and if I agreed to cash it, she could "have" him for the rest of the holidays and the coming year as well...

Angela, however, feared I was uneasy because I didn't want her in my home for the holidays. That was hardly my reality! By then, I believed she was here to stay and that rather than carving Don's time up into pieces that she could pack up and take home with her, she ought to sit by the fire and join our family. By late December Angela let it be known that since she had absented herself for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, it was only fair that Don spend New Years Eve with her. While in my wildest polyamorous dreams I might have fantasized that we would all pass into the New Year together, it didn't feel right to her. With the tensions between us thickening by the hour, I determined that the right thing for me to do was to get out of town. Don balked that he felt so bad that I wouldn't be with him at that special hour and the next day as well. I, too, felt horrible, but with the competition so intense, I figured he should sleep in the bed he'd made.
Truthfully, Don enjoyed having two separate lives. At Angela's he'd step away from all the chaos of leaky roofs, over grown trees, dead computers, broken down cars, destructive cats, and piles of unsorted magazines and mail, and bask in white sheets and pick from a zillion satellite TV channels. As far as he was concerned, if we were to all live together, he'd have no place to escape. And being that Angela's only relationship model was heterosexual monogamy, she at least wanted access to the semblance of that by having Don to herself as often as possible. The more she grew attached to Don, the less she liked sharing him. And the more attached I imagined he was to her, the less I cared for either of them.

Angela's presence in our life scrambled all of the issues that Don and I had struggled over. For years I had pleaded with him to father a child with me and just in the last year he had relented and we began to try. Every time my period arrived, I'd feel deeply sad. For him it seemed like it was enough to just try. Engaging him into discussions over my sadness, or seeking outside help was way too much to ask of him. And now with Angela's demands on his time (and his body), my wishes for a child went to the farthest back burner. Angela even surmised that it was likely that one reason he forged a connection with her was his uneasiness over the agreement he had made with me.

Another area Don and I had struggled over was his need for more focused attention than I could deliver. I'm someone who wallows in the attention of large audiences and who enjoys parties where I can engage in short intense chats with lots of people. Upon meeting a new person, I can be inspired to many spend hours talking, but generally my appetite for sustained intimacy isn't as high as Don says his is. He'd complain I'd fall asleep in the middle of conversations and believed that I had grown tired of him and his stories. With Angela demanding equal time with him and professing a deep love for just about everything about him, suddenly he became a prize. Suddenly this man that I had so taken for granted became intensely desirable. Suddenly every moment together mattered.

Meanwhile, Don was getting exhausted by having to be "on" so much of the time. He couldn't just be---he constantly had to prove his love to me and then to Angela and then again to me... While Angela and I felt like we had far too much time alone, Don barely had a moment to just stare into space or read a magazine. Upon reflection this was really odd that two attractive 40-something women with lots to say and lots to offer were spending so much time alone while a 50-something man who was no more desirable than they, was in such high demand. Soon all Don did when he arrived anywhere was to visit ever so briefly and then collapse onto couches, floors and into bed.
Mid-January arrived and as I had announced four months earlier, I left for East Africa. I left because I needed a break from the competition, the chaos, and the constant interpersonal dramas. I figured that Don and Angela needed time alone to get to know each other--to find out if what they felt they had was more than projection and fantasy. I needed for them to get through some of that new-relationship-compulsivity. I needed for Angela to feel like she was on more equal footing with me. The only adjustment I'd made to my plans was to stay away for two long months rather than a full year. Beyond being 11 time zones away, Africa afforded me just the adventure I needed.

The Africa I visited was filled with people who had an intimate understanding of polygamy, either from being witness to their parents' polygynous unions, partaking in one themselves, or knowing many details about those of their siblings or friends. I presented myself to them as a "first wife" who needed help in understanding how to live with my new "co-wife." For once I was in a place where my dilemma was treated with consideration and respect rather than feeling like a fool for tolerating my husband's dalliance. One first wife advised me that it would take about two years to adjustand that for her, too, it was very difficult to suddenly be expected to share all that had been hers. Now sharing in the hinterland village that I visited in East Africa was quite different from sharing in urban America. There, tensions arose when a husband unfairly divided food and other material resources between his wives. To alleviate suspicions, husbands would divide new acquisitions out in the open. Any deviation from an equitable division would have to be explained (e.g. a wife who had houseguests, more children, etc.).

Back at home, neither Angela or I was dependent on Don's earnings or wealth. Both of us had been self-supporting all of our adult lives and moreover gained much satisfaction from our respective careers. The commodities that we struggled over were Don's time, energy, and affection. In East Africa traditional polygynous husbands visit their wives on a three-day-rotation. I had no idea where this practice came from, but I know it would have driven Angela and I crazy to only be able to see Don in three-day spurts. Meanwhile Don was so focused on proving his love to each of us that all that seemed emotionally feasible was to do a nightly-rotation.
African co-wives had so many social obligations both to their children and to their extended families, that a husband's absence had little emotional impact. Back home, Angela and I felt virtually abandoned if Don wasn't visiting. When I shared how different the social and emotional parameters of polygyny are for rural East Africans when compared to us professional urban Americans, we endeavored to spend our weekends all together. Sometimes it seemed like my nearly forgotten polyamorous fantasies would truly see the light of day and then other times, it seemed like we were still on ground zero.

Don saw more of Angela than I did, would make agreements with her and neglect to inform me. Suddenly out of the blue he would announce that he was spending Saturday night and Sunday with her and was convinced he had told me. I'd sense that if I objected, she would be angry for weeks to come. So to keep some semblance of peace, I'd say nothing, but then Don would see this abandoned-puppy-look in my eyes and ask if I was okay. When my voice would crack and tears would start to well, he'd feel powerless.

In East Africa, the older, wealthier, and more powerful men are expected to take on the responsibility of additional wives (and their children). In fact a man is looked at askance when its clear that he could marry a widowed sister-in-law and hadn't. Moreover, many young women marry men 15 or more years their senior because their abilities to provide are well established. Meanwhile, back at home, Don often gets little more than grief for being polygynous. Attempting to meet the social, emotional, and sexual needs of two professional American women, while no easy task, is not something that our society commends. While men who donate to charities, adopt unwanted children, and otherwise dispense their wealth and services to the unfortunate are admired in America; men with multiple women are seen as greedy, selfish, and deceptive. While some men may envy "the task" of satisfying two (or more) women, the emotional-time-energy reality is hardly any man's fantasy.

When I first learned of Don's interest in Angela, it was clear to me that I was no longer his favorite woman. Being new, I was convinced she was clearly more exciting. While he would bend over backwards and do the splits to get together with her, I felt pretty easy to dismiss. In America, a wife knows that all is well when her husband assures her that she is his "one and only." Any time that unique specialness is challenged, she fears the total dissolution of the marriage. If another woman is absorbing her husband's time and energy, there is no way her place in his life is secure. Being an American, I sensed Angela would soon replace me.

The Africans had so much to teach me about the dynamics of favoritism! While African men say they do everything they can to make each wife be an equal, the wives clearly sense who the favorite is. But unlike in America, favorites have no more rights or resources than the others do. Women who knew they were the favorites didn't flaunt it in front of the others, while the non-favorites, simply shrugged it off. Being a favorite might be analogous to being Miss America: you could be it for a year, but then the next year you are surely replaced. It's not a permanent status and ultimately it has little meaning or value in terms of marital security. In Africa, a co-wife is typically "the favorite" until a subsequent one is added. So the first wife would be the favorite until a second wife was added and the second wife would be the favorite until a third wife was added, and so forth. During the heat of competition with Angela, I prayed that Don would find a third woman. Part of me wanted to put an end to Angela's "favorite woman" status, hoping also that finally she and I would become allies, shattering the tensions between us.
When I attempted to raise my anxieties about favoritism with Don, he told me that of course I was still his favorite. I didn't believe him for a second. Nonetheless I knew that he was doing what every African polygynist does--keep the peace by telling each wife just what she wants to hear. While I didn't dare ask him such questions in front of Angela, my presumption was that with both of us present, he'd say we were both his favorites. Moreover, I was certain that if she asked him in private, she'd be told that she was the favorite.

Now, I could wallow in jealous anxiety over how passionately he holds her, sensing deep inside that she's really the favorite or I like the African co-wives advised, I could put it aside and realize I still had my place in the relationship and not fret about being displaced. A man I met in Nairobi told me a story that gave me hope for finding specialness in being the first wife. His brother grew close to a female co-worker and felt compelled to add her as his second wife. Initially his connection to her was very strong, though after several years, he realized that he really loved his first wife much more than the second. Now in retrospect he wishes that he'd never married the second-and if he hadn't already had a child with her, he'd readily dissolve their union!
Despite the latter wives' indifference to favoritism, co-wife competition can be a serious problem amongst polygynous Africans. A regional newspaper in Kenya ran a story about two co-wives who had gotten into such a bad fight that they both ended up in the hospital. Apparently one had so dominated their husband's time that they other one hadn't seen him for four nights. In retribution she attacked her co-wife with kitchen pots. The fight escalated when the other wife attacked with a poultry knife, causing both to need medical attention!

Ideally, a woman wants her co-wife to help with domestic chores and to be a loving mother to her children. Often co-wives provide "mothering insurance" for each other in that if one were to die, the other(s) would take responsibility for raising her children. When co-wives don't have a positive relationship with each other, there is much anxiety about the fate of their children. One woman I was told about had refused to marry one of her deceased husband's brothers (a typical practice in Africa which anthropologist's refer to as the levirate), but instead became the second wife to a man of her choosing. This man's first wife was so angry her husband had expanded their marriage that in retribution refused to recognize her co-wife. As a result, if anything were to happen to this second wife, her children would be doomed in that their mother had both severed relations with their father's family plus had failed to develop a positive relationship with her co-wife!

While many rural co-wives (and their husband) live cooperatively in the same compound and share everything from child raising, to tasks related to cooking, farming and fishing, many urban co-wives don't. For them marriage may be more a status than an experience. Their fellow co-wives may live in distant cities and they may visit with their husbands very intermittently. While they may find value in the status of being a married woman, in terms of being a recipient of their husband's wealth and being a member of his family, they may also enjoy the freedom of having a social life apart from his.

Initially, this was very difficult for me to understand in that so much of being in a relationship for me involves relating to my partner. If we can't talk, share, cuddle, and adventure through life together, why call it a relationship? My African friends, meanwhile, could not understand our American need for such constant reassurance of love, commitment and intimacy. They would see it as odd that American husbands and wives show affection in public; in Africa a wife would be feel disrespected if her husband kissed or hugged her outside of their home!

When I left Africa, I burst into tears when my plane landed in Amsterdam and I saw a couple embracing in the airport. It was the first time in months that I had seen such a public display of affection and suddenly I felt very alone. While in Africa I had very much taken on the status of being a co-wife in a polygynous marriage who happened to be apart from her husband. Now in the West, I was quickly triggered into a powerful need to feel a "real" connection to my partner.
When I returned home, much of what I had absorbed from the African co-wives, made life with Don and Angela smoother. I no longer needed to be with Don to feel connected to him. When he was with Angela, my status as his partner was not diminished. Upon my return, Angela accessed some of what I had felt as a first wife whose husband brings in another wife. All the time she had come to expect with Don now was to be divided with me. I became new and special and for a short while she feared displacement. My deep awareness of her pain caused us to find an empathy we had never before shared. Gradually we've forged a sister/close friend bond. Sometimes we have the best "girl talk" as we discuss our mutual challenges in relating to Don. She's the one woman who truly knows

Being an American, I've had to face that what matters most to me is the experience of relationship. Here at home, life isn't good, rich, or real, if I don't have the toss, tumble, and intimacy that I've grown to consider "real" relating. Adding a co-wife has afforded me emotional growth and reflection that I have very much come to value. I know the anger and torment of jealousy; and no longer feel so overwhelmed by its power. And I no longer require the reflection of a man who considers me his "one and only" to feel like a very special and beautiful woman. Having added a co-wife, I now have time and space to be "single" and explore connections with new people, to put more attention and value on my strong, deep, and loving partnership with Don and best of all to be part of a dynamic, supportive and ever-interesting triad.