Why I Will Never Be Monogamous Again

The love lesson my breakup taught me.

I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here. 

This is Beastly Reviews, where I write about films that made me feel something.

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My breakup with Jose did not start with this blog—we both saw it coming for months—but, I’ll be honest, that post about Folsom was the final straw for him.

He struggled with it. He did not like reading about a wild sex night I had. I realised, hearing him talk about it, listening to him voice his jealousies and frustrations, that I was not sorry for the night I had—it was beautiful for me. Important, even.

For him, it was only pain, only something to fire up his jealousy—as if we lived in some old-fashioned world of infidelity and scandal and were not, in fact, a modern gay couple. But I guess we weren’t a modern gay couple. Not really.

While we had some permissions for certain sex outside the relationship, they shifted constantly with his comfort and mood, and that post about Folsom fell past his limit. I was tired of interpreting what was permitted and what wasn't. That night in San Francisco, I felt free.

I tried throughout our relationship to open us up and get him more comfortable with non-monogamy, but recently, it was time for me to accept that he is as he is, and I am as I am. And I am not monogamous.

This breakup really hurts, so it has to count for something. It has to signal a shift, a change in the way I do things. Our relationship was, in many ways, beautiful and necessary, but our underlying incompatibility—his preference for monogamy and my inability to deliver it—was known and discussed well over a year ago. If we had peacefully ended things then, we might have spared each other months of pain and bitter arguing.

The fact is, neither of us did anything wrong. We just wanted different things, and both of us pretended we could be happy with someone who didn't suit our needs. Because we loved each other and we wanted it to work.

Now that I'm single and living in L.A., where I know no one, I feel incredibly alone. What an awful city to be sad in. L.A. is all dizzying glamour. It seems to demand round-the-clock happiness. But I am not happy. I feel guilty and heartbroken over a relationship that I knew had no future, but I still wanted it—us—to last.

I left him on the East Coast when I moved here a few months ago for a career opportunity. I am a thousand miles away from him, but if I could somehow fold America over like a map, I could drop into our old backyard in Savannah, walk into the bedroom where we slept, and tell him I'm sorry and that I'm ready to fix things.