It wasn't always this tenuous. Our relationship started out with us both dating other people. During our first few dates Ryan comforted me about my other lover, with whom I had a fast-failing S/M relationship. One time I ran into Ryan in a supermarket parking lot: He was buying wine for his date for the evening, and I was purchasing candles for mine.

We were incredibly open and honest in the beginning: I would cry on his shoulder, and he would complain about complications with the other girls he was dating, who expected more from him than he was willing to give.

Gradually, after about three months, and probably because we were so open with each other, our mutual trust deepened into love -- mad, passionate love that tempted him, for the second time in his life, to tentatively offer up monogamy.

Knowing his true nature as I did, I countered with my own offer, which I considered to be more realistic and sustainable, at least for him: an open sexual relationship, at some point in the future, once our own relationship had been firmly established. And that's when our problems began.

One of the difficulties was that I'm not as drawn to this kind of arrangement as he is. In theory I am, because I love sex and my own freedom, but in actual practice I waver. I know that I could have other sexual partners quite easily; as Ryan says, he fears getting into any number-of-lovers kind of competition with me, because he's certain I would win. I'm not so sure, but I guess it is usually easier for an attractive woman to round up casual sexual partners than for an attractive man.

The problem is that I'm in love with Ryan, and when I'm in love, I get a bit of the I-only-have-eyes-for-you syndrome. It's inconvenient and old-fashioned, but true.

But it's also true that I'm often drawn to men like him. There seem to be certain personality traits likely to be coupled with a desire for an open sexual relationship: a voracious appetite for life, a sense of mischief and adventure, a realistic view of the world. I hate men who kiss my feet (outside the bedroom, that is), and so I find men like Ryan -- wild, intense and slightly controlling -- almost ridiculously alluring.

And I do get something out of the arrangement. While I'm less likely than he is to take advantage of the actual sexual freedom, I enjoy being able to flirt without guilt. I like hanging out with my male friends without having to worry that Ryan will fly into a jealous rage (as have some of my past lovers have), or to be able to kiss a beautiful stranger at a party. These things have no impact on my real relationship, and I am relieved to be in a situation where the other party understands that.

On the other side, Ryan had, with one exception, participated in open relationships exclusively up until he met me. A lot of his friends have unconventional relationships, including a successfully polyamorous married couple with whom Ryan once had a four-way. Thus he knows, from first- and second-hand experience, that sex and love are completely different things, or at least can be, so these kinds of arrangements come naturally to him.

I do wish I could be as open and practical as he is, and with him. At parties, clubs and raves -- due, I suppose, to our outrageous fashion sense and audacious displays of affection -- Ryan and I are regularly propositioned by other couples to swing or to have three- or foursomes. For the first several months of our monogamous relationship, Ryan's response to them was always the same: "I'm sorry -- she and I are really just into each other right now."

But I was haunted by the question: When would that change? When would I no longer be enough for him, and who or what would mark that terrible shift?

I know what these shifts are like. I was in a similar situation about two years ago with another longtime, on-again, off-again lover -- a much older man with whom I lived in Asia. I finally walked out on him when, following a period of dwindling sexual activity between the two of us, he brought home a woman his own age whose looks he had much denigrated to me, and proceeded to have sex with her in the next room. ("I just feel more comfortable with ugly women," he justified his actions, so hurtful to my at-the-time fragile sexual ego, when I came back to pick up my things.)

Though we're no longer lovers, this man and I are now close friends, and Ryan and I even spent part of this past summer with him, first in Tokyo and later on a remote island in Thailand. The two of them got along very well, partly due to the concordances in their personalities: a love of freedom, a need for control, a wicked sense of humor and an even fiercer sense of pride.

I was a little jealous of their easy camaraderie, fearing that it was a harbinger of doom for my relationship with Ryan: If my romance with this other man had ended so badly, and Ryan was so much like him, when would my new relationship blow up in my face?

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