This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.
The year before I met my husband, my parents got a divorce. They were typical immigrant Indian parents who’d always told me and my brother that we should marry somebody responsible and within our culture. I never wanted that; I thought I was so rebellious. But then my father left my mother for someone who worked in his office. It was deeply unsettling.
I’d moved to San Francisco after college, where I had explored messily with non-monogamy—that is to say, I usually ended up cheating on the person I was dating. I was always pushing against the confines of monogamy. By the time I graduated, I was like, “I’m not having a partner ever again.” I had three people I was exploring with, not using any proper rules of polyamory, and those relationships imploded all at once. So I was really single for the first time and my parents were breaking up—all in the mood of post-9/11 America. I was feeling very out of sorts.
Then I met Raj, and we had so much in common. We were both creative people, we both came from Indian families. After just six weeks, I wanted to take him home to my mom. I was 26, and I had never taken a partner home before.
Six months into dating, he moved to L.A. for graduate school, and I let him know, “I don’t know if I believe in monogamy. I’m so happy to be in this relationship, but this is who I am.” He responded by saying, “I don’t know what I think about that, but I just love you.” So we put it to the side. I continued seeing other people on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis. But two years later, we reached a crossroads of whether we wanted to move forward. We decided to live together in San Francisco, and I decided to try monogamy. For real.
A couple of years passed. We got engaged. We had a fun, artist-driven wedding that we got to plan. It was exciting to be together and start building a life, and it also made my mother happy. She was so depressed after the divorce, but at least her daughter was marrying a good Indian boy.
Still, those years felt uncomfortable and not great. The wedding rituals were beautiful, but I felt a little distant from it. And I felt dissatisfied sexually. Our sexual backgrounds are hugely different: When we met, Raj had had sex with just one other person. He lost his virginity when he was 23. He had trouble lasting during sex. The first few years of our relationship, I was cheating a lot and it was easier to not focus on it. But once we moved in together and got married, I felt this disconnect in our sexualities.
I was turning 40 and I said to myself, I deserve pleasure.
Eventually, I got to a place where I had been monogamous for five years, feeling so frustrated and really ravenous. I was 33 or 34, learning more about female anatomy. I was starting to wonder whether I could have a vaginal orgasm. I was a very sexual person, whereas there was so much shame around sexuality in Raj’s family. I would bring it up, and he would say, “I don’t really have any answers.” He was kind of frozen around it.
Then, without trying, I got pregnant, and then had a miscarriage that took a while to clear up. Going through that is when I felt sure I wanted to have a kid. So a year later, we got pregnant again on purpose. After many years of anxiety about not knowing how I would fit a child into my life and creative practices, I had an incredible natural birth and spent two years nursing my son. I was actually enjoying being a mother of a young child, something I had never heard any cool feminist say. My conception of early motherhood was that it was going to be onerous and terrible, but I found it really empowering. I went back to work and found that I was able to balance it all. It was challenging, but doable.
During that time, I wasn’t interested in having sex outside of my marriage. But when I finally weaned my baby, I felt my libido coming back. I’d believed all the myths that you have to change yourself when you have kids, but not only was I still the same person, I felt super-powerful in my sexuality and strong in my body. And yet Raj and I were still really not connecting. By that time we had started trying for a second kid. Raj was working full-time, and it was just not fun trying to have sex at 11:30pm on a Wednesday, worried that our three-year-old would barge in with middle-of-the-night waking. It felt painful to me, and lonely.
At this point, I was turning 40 and I said to myself, I deserve pleasure. I just need something for myself. I had tried to ask Raj for what I needed, and he shut me down every time. He said he just wasn’t interested in investing so much time and energy in his sexuality. I didn’t know about the apps at the time, so I just made a list of people I knew who I had felt connections with. I reached out to Sam, someone I saw occasionally at writing conferences. I could tell we had an energy between us. He was also married, and his wife was disabled, so at first he hesitated. But then he reconsidered because he figured he also owed it to himself to have some space just for him. And so, around 2018, we started a relationship.
Pretty quickly, we started falling in love and having this long-distance affair. Honestly, it was amazing. I felt like all those questions I had about my sexuality and my pleasure were answered, and I was having the best sex of my life. I was finally having multiple vaginal orgasms. Because his wife is disabled, Sam spent a lot of time doing exactly what I always told Raj to do, like edging and learning about his body and figuring things out on his own. We had so much chemistry and I felt so turned on all the time. I also was able to be present with Raj. It felt like the affair drilled a hole in the roof of my marriage and let out all this pressure.
A year into it, I finally got pregnant again with Raj. Sam and I both wondered, What does this mean? Is this going to change everything?
When we saw each other for the first time after I got pregnant, I realized that my emotions and ideas and physical feelings were not going to change because I have this zygote inside me. It’s still just me. We continued seeing each other throughout my early pregnancy and it was so, so amazing. I was hormonal and the sex was so good. I felt really cared for. Even when I didn’t see him at the end of my pregnancy, we would talk on Skype.
The affair was just for me—not work, not child stuff, not connecting with family.
In September, I had the baby. Those first few days, I felt an intense emotional love for my family, and I felt guilty—almost for the first time. I was coming out of this spell of nearly two years of love and hormones. I didn’t have the mental space to talk to Sam those first four months.
But then at that same yearly conference, I saw him again. We had dinner, and then we had sex. At first I was kind of forcing myself to have sex postpartum, but one of the last nights at the conference, I told him to come over. This hotel room I was staying at had this weird, long hallway that almost separated the room into two. I made this little floor bed on it, and we made out and he went down on me so tenderly and slowly.
That was March 2020, right before COVID. Suddenly I was marooned at home with a baby and a kid. And Sam was my lifeline. I was sleeping alone at night with the baby, and we started chatting again, and it was so erotic. We would talk once or twice or three nights a week. It felt like such a refuge from the isolation of COVID. It was this thing that was just for me—not work, not child stuff, not trying to connect with family. Sam referred to it as our “pocket universe.”
Our relationship ended shortly after that because of the distance and because both of us wanted to recommit to our marriages. I never talked to anyone about us being together when I was pregnant and postpartum, not even friends I’ve talked to about my affairs. It feels really taboo. But I was so grateful for all of it. It was so important to my survival during that time.
Eventually, years later, I told Raj all about Sam. The secrecy started to feel toxic, but I was so afraid of coming down off Raj’s pedestal and reminding him of who I always said I was. It was bumpy: At first it was a relief, but then Raj was really hurt, and we did a bunch of therapy, and then I needed space from therapy.
Then, finally, for the first time, Raj said he would be interested in exploring non-monogamy and also dating other people alongside me. It has been amazing. Raj, with the help of some awesome women he is dating, is finally exploring his sexuality and we’re having the best sex of our whole relationship. I am proud that we got here after so much hardship. And even though we are no longer seeing each other, I know I owe a lot of this to Sam.
