Both of Them

I have been trying to write this for six months.

Not because it is difficult to remember — I remember everything, in the specific, textured way you remember experiences that rearrange something inside you. I have been trying to write it because I want to describe it accurately, and accuracy requires admitting things about myself that I spent a long time not admitting.

So let me start with the honest version.

I have wanted this since before I knew what to call it. Since before I had the language for it, or the context, or any frame of reference beyond the private interior of my own imagination. I am a Chinese-American woman who grew up in a family where desire was not discussed, where the body was a practical object rather than a source of information, where wanting things — especially wanting things that did not fit the expected shape of a good daughter's life — was something you managed quietly and alone.

I managed this quietly and alone for a long time.

What I wanted was to be with my husband and another man at the same time. Not instead of my husband. Not in spite of him. With him. I wanted to be the center of both of them simultaneously — not as an object, not as a performance, but as a woman who was so completely attended to that there was no part of her that was not held.

I did not know how to say this to my husband. I did not say it for four years.

My husband is a patient man. He had known, in the general way that people who love each other know things, that I was carrying something I had not shared with him. He had asked, in the careful way he asks things — not pressing, not demanding, just leaving a door open — and I had said I'm fine enough times that he had stopped asking and simply waited.

He waited four years.

When I finally told him, we were in the kitchen on a Saturday morning. I had been building up to it for three weeks, and then I just said it, quickly, the way you pull off a bandage — before I could think about it long enough to stop myself.

I told him I had a fantasy I had never shared with anyone. I told him it involved him. I told him I wanted to be with him and another man at the same time, and that I had wanted this for years, and that I had been afraid to say it because I did not know what it would mean about me or about us.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: Tell me more about what that looks like for you.

Not why do you want that. Not are you unhappy. Not what does that say about our marriage. He said: Tell me more about what that looks like for you.

I married the right person.

We talked about it for months. Not every day, but regularly — returning to it, examining it from different angles, being honest about what excited us and what made us uncertain. My husband had fears I had not anticipated: he was worried about feeling displaced, about being present for something and finding that his presence made it worse rather than better. I had fears he had not anticipated: I was worried that the reality would not match what I had imagined, and that the gap between the two would be something I could not explain or recover from.

We named all of it. That was the work — not the finding of the right person, not the logistics, but the naming of every fear and every desire until there was nothing left unspoken between us.

By the time we were ready to actually do anything, the conversation had been so thorough that the experience itself felt almost inevitable. Not in a diminished way — in the way that something you have been walking toward for a long time finally arrives and you recognize it.

I am not going to describe the physical details of what happened. That is not what this story is about, and it is not what I want you to take from it.

What I want to describe is the feeling.

There is a specific quality to being the center of two people's complete attention that I do not have adequate words for. It is not about the physical sensation, though the physical sensation was extraordinary. It is about the psychological experience of being, for a sustained period of time, the only thing that matters to two people simultaneously.

I have spent most of my life being good at attending to others. At being present for my parents, my husband, my colleagues, my friends. At reading the room and adjusting myself to what was needed. At making myself smaller or larger or quieter or more available depending on what the situation required.

For the first time in my adult life, I was not attending to anyone. Two people were attending to me. Completely. Without reservation. Without anything else in the room competing for their attention.

My husband was there. His presence was not diminished by the other man's presence — it was amplified by it. I could feel him watching me, and I could feel what he felt watching me, and what he felt was not jealousy or anxiety or displacement. What he felt was something I recognized from the best moments of our marriage: pride. Tenderness. The specific pleasure of watching someone you love be fully, completely themselves.

I cried afterward. Not from sadness — from the particular relief of having finally arrived somewhere you have been trying to get to for a very long time.

My husband held me while I cried. He did not ask me to explain it. He already knew.

We lay there for a long time, not talking. At some point he said: I'm glad you finally told me.

I said: I'm sorry it took so long.

He said: It took as long as it needed to.

I am writing this because I know there are women reading it who have been carrying something similar. Who have a desire they have not named, a fantasy that has been present for years, a conversation they have been postponing because they do not know how it will land.

I cannot tell you how your conversation will land. I can only tell you that mine landed better than I had imagined, and that the four years I spent not having it were four years of carrying something alone that I did not need to carry alone.

You do not need to carry it alone either.

— Mei-Xing, 38 · the city