Is it possible to love more than one person? It’s one of the big questions outsiders often ask of polyamory. The story of one true love propagated in fairytales and rom-com movies paints marriage as the ultimate romantic goal. What happens to people who get there and decide it’s not enough?
Rochelle Siemienowicz’s debut memoir, Fallen, follows the author’s evolution from teenage idealist to a wife with a string of lovers. A film journalist and former staffer at the Big Issue, Siemienowicz grew up in a prominent Seventh Day Adventist family in Perth. Her father wrote sermons and led prayers and her mother played piano and sang hymns for the congregation. It was a sheltered childhood; rock music was banned and Dolly magazines confiscated.
But Siemienowicz’s upbringing instilled her with a deep-seated sense of right and wrong. “Like a lot of religions,” she tells me, “they believe that sex outside marriage is a sin. That affected me as a child and a lot of my decisions as a young woman.”
This true story of a religious girl gone wild centres round the mid-90s, when Siemienowicz was 24. In the memoir, she renames herself Eve, alligning her younger self with the biblical figure who ate the fruit and followed her own desire. We first meet Eve in a memory: she is touching herself in her childhood bedroom. She hears the muffled singing of a prayer meeting in the lounge room, and while her parents’ friends sing about wanting Jesus, she yearns for a husband who will one day make her “breathless and hot”.
From early adolescence, Eve feels greedy: for affection, for experiences, for pleasure. “I’d always suspected my appetites might be huge and freakish,” says the character, “that I was too much, too desiring.”
In the religious context of her childhood, says Siemienowicz, desire was always attached to shame. “Mum was really sad that I hadn’t saved myself for my wedding night. Even when the rest of the world thinks what you’re doing is ethical, if your parents are disappointed, that hits hard.” This sense of shame manifests throughout Fallen. There are regular references to the dichotomy of clean and dirty, as when Eve remembers her first boyfriend at 17: “I’d been trying so very hard to be good and pure. And here I was in bed with this boy.”
At 20, Eve marries Isaac, a fellow Seventh Day Adventist, fuelled by his youthful declaration of love and her eagerness for rule-abiding sex. They move in together in a modest flat in Melbourne, exploring and stripping each other of their chains of piety. “We ran and we played and we drank,” Siemienowicz tells me. “It felt like we were really naughty and breaking the rules. It was like being set free.”
But after two years of hedonism, the couple’s sexual energy faded, overtaken by a curiosity for wider experience. They considered alternative arrangements to save the relationship. “We embarked on an open marriage because we were committed to each other,” explains Siemienowicz. “If you’re a 22-year-old whose sexual relationship is an important life goal and you realise you can’t have it with the person you’ve vowed to commit to, what are you going to do?”
In contrast to their “united as one flesh” upbringing, Isaac and Eve begin to see other people. Like most polyamorists, their central relationship is guarded by clear boundaries that emphasise knowledge, consent and emotional literacy. Eve details the rules guarding their hearts: “Complete disclosure and mutual decision-making. If one of us said ‘stop’, we’d stop; if one of us said ‘no’, we wouldn’t.”
The couple experiment with playmates and affairs. Isaac sleeps with Eve’s best friend, and Eve acquires a long-term lover, Jay, who Isaac meets for the occasional beer. For a while, they are fulfilled – until Eve visits her hometown and break the rules. This is the 90s, before the word “polyamory” entered common conversation, before articles and podcasts and TedX talks discussed it, before organisations such as Poly Vic were vocal in the media. Eve and Isaac’s only guide is Nena and George O’Neill’s 1972 book, Open Marriage.
With a laugh, Siemienowicz says she was a bit of a pioneer. But polyamory is not a radical concept, she adds. “Historically, there have been many people who don’t agree with the monogamous ideal. Once you start researching it, you realise how much this idea is tied to religious values.” In the west, certainly. The notion of our “other half” has its roots in the Adam and Eve story, and the normalisation of monogamy, institutionalised by Christianity in the Middle Ages, continues despite the separation of church and state.
“It’s a sentiment that survives in most popular love songs, poems and films and certainly in almost all romantic comedies,” says the film fan. “Those movies often end with a wedding, or a declaration of commitment.”
Siemienowicz cites Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, who were lovers in 1930s Paris during Nin’s marriage to her first husband. The film of their life, Henry & June, played on a projector at the launch of Fallen. She first saw the film when she was in her 20s. “Coming from a sheltered background, only just discovering cinema, I’d never seen a woman protagonist who was so sexually adventurous and hungry for experience while still delicate and sensitive and loving. She experiments, but there’s never any question that she loves her husband.”
Siemienowicz’s own story is one of messy personal growth. “I write about an open marriage that falls apart because the two people in the marriage are no longer on the same journey,” she says, “but there is no lack of love between them.” Among the regretful trysts, the boundaries crossed, the confusion and angry sorrow, Eve learns which of her desires are worth pursuing.
In an open relationship, the heart expands, growing in its capacity for romance, says Siemienowicz. “Instead of falling in love with a new person and abandoning the past love, there is more for both, and your emotional world grows larger – and yes, more complicated.”
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Fallen by Rochelle Siemienowicz is published by Affirm Press
