The Pandemic Ruined My Poly Relationship—But Saved My Marriage

I should have expected my relationship with my boyfriend to crumble during quarantine. More surprising is that I fell back in love with my husband.

Illustrations by Kailey Whitman | Edited by Naomi Zeveloff

My boyfriend, Max, continued to needle me. “I just think it’s a little, you know, pampered of you and your friends, that you can afford to be so … paranoid.”

I bristled, but I let the writer in me reply first. “I think you mean ‘privileged,’ not ‘pampered’ — I’d hardly call this a romp at the spa — but, like, seriously?”

As we talked, I paced the same four gently sloping blocks, the only zone with both reception and relative privacy near the house I shared with my husband and our 5-year-old son — ours an untamed plot of land nestled among the manicured lawns of a tidy and tony neighborhood in Long Island’s eastern North Shore.

I didn’t need to talk out of earshot of my husband, whom I’ll call Ethan (like Max, his name is a pseudonym). Ours was an open marriage; my boyfriend of three years wasn’t a secret. But still, I wanted privacy. Especially now, under the Covid-19 lockdown, when ears and bodies and endless, sprawling projects …