What a difference a day makes.

One day almost spelled the end of my marriage.

One day not only saved it but reawakened the passion and increased the potential of the relationship.

My wife and I have had some bad patches at times, usually resulting from monetary woes in some shape or form, and certainly there have been times I’ve feared that she might say “We should call it quits.” Always, though, once common sense and perspective kicked it, or we had one of our rare big arguments and cool-off periods, things would rebalance. She’d be reminded that we’re a good match, and that breaking up wouldn’t solve our problems—only increase them.

Earlier this year, though, in early Spring I think, my wife suggested very strongly that we should probably split up. She didn’t ask me for a divorce, but her demeanor was about as close as I could imagine to her saying, “We need a trial separation, and my bags are already packed. See you.” It was clear to me that the feelings she was wrestling with were deeper than any that had plagued her before. It wasn’t life circumstances that were eating at her, but rather our actual life together. The marriage didn’t seem to be hitting on all the cylinders it needed to. I was still her best friend. I was still the honored father of her child. But as lover and as husband—she wasn’t feeling that.

It wasn’t for lack of affection on my part, or lack of attention to her. I listen. I’ve never been an overbearing person. I share my feelings, and I respect hers. I’m an attentive lover. I have plenty of faults, but they’re mostly minor ones, so even added all together, they don’t come close to making me a slacker, asshole or loser.

But the passion was gone, at least for my wife. Her desire for me was at the lowest ebb ever, and apparently had been low for quite some time, and she didn’t see any way to spark it back up. To her, it seemed we had become really affectionate roommates with a Kindergartener. Sure, we had sex periodically, and had orgasms (sometimes even simultaneous), but there was, for her, no more heat. She knew that love couldn’t always be a blaze like in the early days, but what we had—to her—seemed like something warmed over and left on the counter too long. We were friends with benefits, but that was a dead-end in her mind.

She didn’t say it in that way, but I can read between the lines.

It was a terrifying thing for me to think we would split up over something like that—something over which I had no control. I can’t change a person’s feelings, and there was nothing she could think of that I could change in terms of intimate or affectionate activities that I wasn’t already doing. Mind you, I was willing to do just about anything—and frankly, I always have been, even when not faced with the specter of divorce—but there was nothing she wanted that I could give.

Or so it seemed.

I don’t recall how long we hovered in that horrible Limbo of our marriage running headlong toward divorce court. It couldn’t have been more than a week, and probably less, from the time the shit really hit the fan, and my wife was ready to call it quits, until the time things turned around. I know that might seem anticlimactic—No, I didn’t suffer weeks or months like this.

It’s just felt that way. Let’s face it, any looming death sentence is a stark and horrible thing, no matter how long or short the threat of it lingers.

But whether it was two days or three or five or seven, there was a day that followed the day my wife said she was ready to declare our marriage dead, and it was a day that was even more powerful.

Because isn’t a miraculous deathbed recovery so much better than a terminal diagnosis? It was the day things turned around. The day everything changed. The day our marriage prepared for a gut-rehab. The day we embarked on a mission to not only change what our relationship meant to us, but a mission to discover new passions and new interests.

I don’t remember how the conversation started. Even a few days after the fact, my wife, who has the much better memory for these things, couldn’t recall how or exactly why she broached the subject. But she did. She didn’t set out to create a solution for our problem. What she did was more selfish—and I don’t mean in a bad way. She had a need, and she told me flat out what that need was, knowing full well I might react very negatively and do the honors of driving a stake through the heart of our marriage and begin divorce proceedings myself. She took a huge personal and emotional risk.

But when she asserted herself and told me what was wrong for her personally—what was missing—I didn’t freak out. Oh, it made me uncomfortable, at first. I had concerns. But I didn’t panic or cast dispersions. I listened. Closely. I heard my wife.

I heard her clearly and did my best to understand when she told me I wasn’t enough. She loved me, and I meant more to her than anyone but her children. But I wasn’t enough for her.

My wife has had a three-way in her past, before my tenure with her (during her first marriage). No need to rehash details here; you can go to the blog she and I launched recently to read about that. Certainly, being a guy, I wouldn’t turn down a chance to have a second woman in the bed, though we’ve never had the chance or the pleasure yet.

Also, she’s mentioned to me a desire to see me with another man while she either watches or joins in. Although I don’t consider myself bisexual, I see the possibility for some heteroflexible activity. I doubt a man or men regularly would make me happy at all; but making her happy, by letting that fantasy of hers actually occur now and again, and giving her pleasure would make me ecstatic. We haven’t had a chance for that, either, though the desire was stated by her a few years ago. Trying to discreetly locate a guy for a three-way, whom you can trust, isn’t the easiest thing when you live in a fairly small community and have a small child but no reliable babysitting for her. So that hadn’t happened either.

But the thing is, that wasn’t what my wife wanted—just occasional flings once in a blue moon, that is. I mean, when she’s felt hemmed in by being married, or had disheartening thoughts about sex with the same guy (me) for the rest of her life, I’ve told her she can step out if she wanted to. I’ve told her I can take her doing that from time to time, as long as she doesn’t do it in our bed. As long as I don’t have to know details.

Without realizing it—and without her realizing it at the time, either—I had over the years given her permission to put out a big fire, but told her she had to make do with a few small bottles of water for the job. I had given her freedoms within strict constraints.

I hadn’t intended to be an ass; I thought I was being open-minded. But the blame isn’t all mine. My wife had never truly examined herself before and realized that monogamy wasn’t her speed.

I don’t need to go into a huge discussion of polyamory—whether the kind where you seek to make long-term unions of more than two people, or the more free-wheeling swinger style of moving from partner to partner for fun; or anything in between those two extremes. Other people have done that here at EdenCafe before, (just do a search for polyamory and/or swinging) and there are great blogs and websites out there on polyamory and swinging, and why it works best for some people—and why it’s society’s fault that we’ve been forced to see monogamy alone as the “right” way.

Well, I admit I didn’t fully embrace her idea initially. But, as I said, I listened and didn’t judge her. I let her explain why she felt this way. I let her explain why it didn’t have to mean less love for me if we opened our marriage. I let her express herself, as I had so many times before. Except that this time was a biggie. This time she was proposing that we completely change the way we viewed and pursued our marriage.

I saw the potential for lots of complications. I was worried about a lot of things. But I also became intrigued.

Yeah, I know, you’re thinking that I was just fiending for some of that three-way action with two women. Nope.

As we discussed our mutual desires and concerns in restructuring the marriage and possibly opening it up to other people on a short-term or long-term basis, I began to rethink why I thought monogamy was the proper way. And the more I considered it, the less reason I had to defend it as a sacred institution. Oh, I don’t mean that I think monogamy is bad. It does work for many people. But we also see so many people cheat, and relationships are destroyed because of such actions—or at least relationships harmed. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that if people said they needed another partner sexually, either to scratch an itch or for something more substantive—and if their partners would listen to that and give it serious consideration—so many relationships wouldn’t have to suffer. Having sex with someone other than your first partner (or primary, or however you want to categorize it) is only cheating—it’s only betrayal—if it’s NONconsensual. It’s when the secrecy and guilt and lies enter in that you have huge and sometimes insurmountable problems.

Certainly, not everyone is willing or able to embrace polyamory or swinging. And many people, even if they hear out their partner on the topic, will say “No.”

But as we talked out the pros and cons of an open relationship, I realized something. I realized that not only would my wife’s deeply felt needs be met by allowing this—so would some of mine. I have various kinks that my wife isn’t all that into. But being the fair person she is, she realized quickly that if the relationship were opened up for her, it had to be open for me as well. Neither one of us wanted to replace each other, but rather to find people who would complement what we already had, regardless of whether we all had sex or other activities together or in pairs separately.

Because we still loved each other, and because I listened, and because my wife didn’t make it all about her satisfaction, we realized we had a solution to several of our relationship problems. Not a problem, but an answer to it.

Now, we didn’t take anything for granted. We talked about implications and potential rules and boundaries we might need to have in place. We talked about worst-case scenarios and best-case ones. We stayed realistic. And realism also slapped us in the face at first when we realized actually finding other humans to broaden our sexual experience wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. We had a lot of disappointments and roadblocks in that regard. (I should note that recently, thanks to attending one swinging event, one fetish forum lunch gathering, and finding out some of our local Twitter friends were as kinky as us, we’re actually pretty sure our dance card might be filled, perhaps to overflowing, in the coming months.)

But even in the lack of ability to find people at first, there wasn’t a sense of failure. Because in deciding to open our marriage, even if we hadn’t actually done it yet, my wife no longer felt trapped. She knew she didn’t have to be limited just to me, and so her anxiety and dissatisfaction declined markedly almost right away. To almost undetectable levels.

Moreover, by taking away the impediment to her happiness in our relationship, her libido rose. No longer was I the guy she was stuck with, but rather the guy she was moving forward with on a great adventure and a remarkable marriage rehab project. She quickly discovered she was kinkier than she thought (I mean, within days of us agreeing to open the marriage, the kink flood raged forth), and we’ve both explored areas of fetish and pleasure that neither of us had before—in a very short span of time.

The thing is, we hadn’t realized that our nearly 14 years of marriage had been constraining us. Not that it was a prison, mind you.

No, it was a cocoon. A chrysalis.

It’s just that we had never emerged from it to discover, that for us, we still had a more mature shape to morph into (no, I’m not saying monogamous people are immature sexually—we all have to find our own path and speed). We went from caterpillar to something else. A butterfly—a pair of them, actually.

Very kinky butterflies, mind you. But something new and beautiful and more mature nonetheless.

Here’s hoping our flights will be wondrous and bring us to better places than we could have hoped otherwise.