My name is June. I’m from Houston, Texas.

At the beginning of 2018, I was in a relationship. It was a longer term relationship than I had ever been in. And he and I learned a lot of things together. And he and I were in an open relationship.

I’d always mention to him that if he was going to be sleeping with somebody else, that I would actually prefer for it to be somebody that I knew rather than somebody that I didn’t know, because if they’re a friend of mine, they would understand the boundaries of that relationship and be familiar with who I am as a person already.

I was also living with this woman who was somebody that I knew from high school. We had a typical roommate relationship in some aspects. Like she wanted the dishes to be clean and I did not – I was not good about doing the dishes. At the same time, like, we also did things that were definitely not a typical roommate – that was not part of a typical roommate relationship. We would sleep in each other’s beds, we would – like three nights out of the week. We would wake up in the morning together and read poetry to each other and we would make breakfast together. And it was, like, an incredibly beautiful creative partnership that I had just never experienced before.

In March of – late March of 2018, she – I took a trip up to New York because I was deciding on moving here. I found out around the middle of my week-long trip that she and my partner had slept together. Which is something that I asked for, right, in varying capacities. I’d asked him – I told him that I would want him to sleep with somebody like Anastasia because she already knows and respects the boundaries of our relationship. And I told her that I wanted to share a sexual partner with her. And I said both of these things to both of these people multiple times, but then suddenly it happened and I was totally unprepared for the reaction that I had.

I thought that I was angry at her and jealous of her for sleeping with him, but I realized over the course of this vacation that there was a part of me that was also really – there was a part of me that was also really jealous of him, So at that point, I decided that I really wanted to see what a different dynamic would look like with her and to experiment and try on what a different dynamic look like with her. We’ve tried on a polyamorous triad, which we did during the last month of both of us were living in Austin, Texas. And then we also have tried long distance.

During the summer of 2018, she was in Europe. I was fresh in New York and I just moved into my first New York apartment. And she and I – I was just, like, going through – experiencing obstacle after obstacle, just really, like, getting used to all this change. And she and I were on the phone all the time. She was eleven hours ahead of me, so she would call me right before she went to bed when I was waking up in the morning and then I would call her before I went to bed as she was waking up in the morning. We’d talk for an hour each time and it was just like such a fantastic experience because we’re still missing each other and it was so intense.

And in one of those conversations, I had mentioned to her that I was, like, absolutely in love with her and she told me that she was absolutely in love with me. And one of those conversations she told me that she wanted to get married, which is something that I had wanted for a really, really long time. And she finally said yes.

This past December, she made a trip up to New York. And we originally were going to make it a big ceremony with all the people that we loved. And then we realized most of the people that we loved were still back in Texas. So she came to New York and it was me and her and the officiant and photographer. It was a really, really beautiful ceremony. It was at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

We said our vows to each other, which ended up being mostly the same vows because it contained a lot of the – it was inspired by a lot of the same literature. And in this ritual, essentially she and I were wrapped in Saran wrap and then cut each other out of the wrap – out of the wrapping and emerged out of the cocoon.

She’s since moved back to Houston and I’ve moved to New York. And we’re still polyamorous. She has a partner in Houston. I have a partner here. I continue to talk to her every day. And we continue to just like try on so many different new structures for what our relationship can look like.

Sometimes you really think you know what you want. And sometimes it is very easy for us to go throughout our day saying, “I want to accomplish x, y, and z.” And then we get something else. Along the way, we have created everything that we have. And I think for me, there was a really, really wise part of me that made it so everything that happened leading up to our marriage happened – or everything that happened, period, happened because it needed to happen.