During a recent trip to London Deepa Paul saw the three-hander play Unicorn — the title slang for a person who is willing to be the third party in a polyamorous couple’s sex life. Afterwards, she got chatting to the play’s older, female lead, Nicola Walker. “I told her that I have been in the position of each of the characters in the play,” she says. “I have been the wife who wants more, the spouse who has messed up and the unicorn.”
Before we go on, let’s name our terms so no one’s left feeling like a sex dinosaur. A recent meta-analysis of scientific studies reported on in these pages defined a monogamous relationship as “exclusive romantic and sexual commitment to one partner”; an open relationship as one where the two members of a couple “maintain romantic but not sexual exclusivity”; and polyamory as “having several romantic relationships simultaneously”.
Paul’s forthcoming — in both senses of the word — memoir runs the gamut. When the personable Filipina-Indian writer relocated to Amsterdam from Singapore in her early thirties as a self-described “trailing spouse” to her company-man husband, their union fit squarely into the first category. “I had finally understood what the songs and movies, the romance novels and wedding sermons were all about,” she writes early on in Ask Me How It Works.
Still, her latent interest in a life less vanilla was piqued by kinky ads she happened upon while selling some furniture on Craigslist, and she put her curiosity into action during a trip to Germany. While her husband attended a work function, Paul booked a babysitter for her newborn daughter and secretly met up with “very handsome man looking for big belly”. A drink quickly leads to an al fresco assignation.
“I think it had been building up for a while,” Paul tells me now over sticky toffee pudding at a brasserie near her home in the west of the Dutch capital. “Moving to Amsterdam was a big hinge moment — the quick ramp up to that turning point because I found Dutch culture to be very open.”
But this wasn’t just a case of “good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to Amsterdam”, to quote the ubiquitous slogan T-shirt. Her first months of motherhood, Paul says, left her routine-bound, overwhelmed and hyper-focused. “You suddenly lose everything that you were the day before becoming a mother — and I think there’s part of your identity that wants to fight back to say, ‘Hey, I’m here and I still need to be seen.’”
There was another tryst with the handsome man, this time in Vienna, after which her husband discovered their correspondence and threw a laptop. So the couple engaged a local coach specialising in “non-violent communication”, who encouraged them to itemise their baseline needs. To flip to a musical analogy, his preoccupations were like the subject matter of an Adele album: “Respect, stability, security.” Paul’s were giving Prince in his pomp: “Exploration, sexual variety, adventure and discovery.”
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These stances are not only — on the face of it at least — inconveniently divergent; they are also atypical in terms of the male versus female propensity towards sociosexuality (what scientists call promiscuity). Their negotiations sound excruciating, with Paul concluding that she could no longer “forget, hide or cut off parts of me that didn’t seem to fit into the picture of an ideal life, mother or marriage”. In the book, she frames her need for sexual variety as a vision quest. “I felt a universe of promise calling me,” she writes, “worlds beyond and selves within I longed to explore.”
What follows is a sort of bildungsroman of bed-hopping, but not before her husband has acquiesced to opening the marriage, opting to choose a renegotiated union with the person he married over his long-held abstract ideal of what a marriage should look like. “The night we agreed to install Tinder on our phones, there was something new in the air,” Paul writes; as for having her husband’s permission to share her body with a stranger: “It felt electric.”
A trailing spouse no more, she is soon attending techno parties in Paris, taking ecstasy (“excellent for my libido”) and renting hotel rooms by the hour with an app designed for that very purpose. “Split it between two consenting adults and the price is the same as, like, five flat whites,” she tells me, very specifically. Those consenting adults included a social worker, a chief executive and a mob sidekick on the run. And, Paul tells me confidently, “The subplot of my sexual liberation is my husband unpacking toxic masculinity — the idea that his manhood is somehow proven by his possession and ownership of me. It’s something that has enabled him to be free in his way.”
Being free in his way involved dating a luminous 22-year-old Dutch woman — the couple were both 36 at the time.
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Despite feeling relieved that her husband was exploring the new boundaries of their relationship, this did require emotional stocktaking. (“Jealousy is a difficult teacher, but she has much wisdom to impart,” Paul opines.) Yet more than anything, she wanted her husband to be along for the ride, if not literally — “we were parents of a toddler, with no close family to help out and a 14-year-old babysitter who had to be home before midnight!” — then in terms of knowing each other’s whereabouts and providing moral support: “For us to be all in together, as we had been when we’d set out on every other adventure.” A shared Google calendar was established, with sex dates scheduled along with school holidays and birthday parties.
Paul is adamant that an open marriage of this sort needn’t be at odds with their responsibilities as parents. “We started out wanting casual connections with a clear hierarchy, protecting the marriage and the family,” she tells me. “Our daughter was three or four when we began, so that was the utmost priority.” At that age, she reasons, who is discussing their sex life with their child anyway?
Almost a decade later, she now finds herself the unofficial queen of a circle of fellow “poly mums”. “When I started becoming more open about my marriage on Instagram, people started coming out of the woodwork and saying, ‘I’m also in an open marriage but we don’t talk about it.’ This small group of mums started gravitating towards me and now we have wine at my house every six weeks.”
I ask what they talk about. Usually, it’s how busy and exhausted they are. “It’s a very specific set of concerns if you’re polyamorous and you’re a mother: how do I talk about this with my child?” The answer, she says, is in an age-appropriate manner that honours the child’s capacity for understanding. Of her daughter, now 12, Paul says, she talks in terms of “sleepovers”. “I think we’re quite lucky in that she’s a very steady and calm child.”
The title of the book and its chapter titles reflect the queries from men Paul encountered on dating apps, where she sought to be upfront about the set-up at home. “I kept getting the same ten questions: Who started it? Whose idea was it? What about jealousy?… The book started as an attempt to answer these ten questions.”
Whether or not polyamory is actually a widespread pursuit (a 2023 survey suggested that only 1 per cent of Britons were in a polyamorous relationship, although 10 per cent said they were open to considering it), Paul acknowledges that the concept seems to be “having a moment” in popular culture. In the US, last year’s memoir of an open marriage, More by Molly Roden Winter — aka the “Park Slope mom” — became a bestseller. When Paul’s agent circulated her book, it resulted in a six-way tussle between some of London’s most esteemed publishers. The auction was surreal, she says. “Just yesterday I was banging on the gate, now all these marketing teams are pitching me with the campaigns they have crafted, and by the end of the week all the bids came in.”
Her eventual publisher provided the actress Gillian Anderson with an advance copy of the book, who duly supplied a blurb declaring Paul “the epitome of a woman living in her power”.
For all the glossy cheerleading and tasteful packaging, Paul could not be accused of sugarcoating her subject matter with this book. The very first sex partner she meets with her husband’s knowledge is “Daddy Dom” (not short for Dominic) who, with his menacing attempts at transgressing the boundaries Paul and her husband have scrupulously established, reveals himself not to be an empathic listener.
Even worse is the “creep” she met at the annual King’s Day festivities who removed his condom without her consent — a practice known as “stealthing” that has been successfully prosecuted as rape in the UK but never in the Netherlands. On her decision to include this episode in the book, Paul tells me: “This person is still out there and there are still many men who think that this is fine, so I hope that in writing this chapter that people will understand this is wrong.”
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She doesn’t want the episode to be misinterpreted as penance for her own choices. “Since I’ve written the book, I’ve met women who told me that this had happened to them in monogamous relationships. It wasn’t because I was in an open marriage that I slipped into this situation — it happens to women everywhere.” Still, there’s a note of disenchantment in what she tells me next: “The downside of casual connections is that while they can feel liberating, they can be quite transactional, as I think anybody who’s been through a slutty phase can attest — it’s not fulfilling any more and it led me to places and situations where I felt unsafe.”
Of the dark parts of the memoir, she says: “I stand by these experiences. For the whole book, my intention has always been to process my experience and express myself.”
You may remember that, during the early stages of the Covid pandemic, the ever-pragmatic Dutch government made international headlines for suggesting that single citizens find themselves a stable seksbuddy. Paul took this advice, spending more and more time with a younger Irish photographer about town with great eyebrows. In the book, she credits this release as beneficial to her marriage. “If one of us could bring energy back into our bubble, ultimately it would benefit our relationship and our family.”
Now Paul has a beloved husband and a beloved boyfriend — a scenario she is very happy with, albeit one that was outside the bounds of the original agreement she had made with her husband. She describes herself as in the “old married” stage of polyamory. “My boyfriend started out as a casual partner but now we’ve been together for five years and counting. You know it can’t be fireworks every single time. Sometimes when we have our night together we just fire up my family’s Disney+ account and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Plans to market the book stalled last year, when Paul was diagnosed with an early breast cancer called DCIS on March 8. “Happy International Women’s Day!” she says now, with mock vim. The subsequent raft of appointments (“surgery, reconstruction …”) was, she jokes, “a two-man job”. Consequently, the two men are now on very good terms and Paul is cancer-free.
It’s her husband who has brought her to the restaurant today. “He often jokes that he’s going to write a book called No, ask ME how it works and that my boyfriend will write a third book called Why does no one ask ME how it works? and then we will have the whole trilogy.”
We meet in peak tulip season, and Paul’s Instagram feed brims with photogenic dispatches from her daily life, all accompanied by “you go girl” type comments and emojis from the poly mums and other admirers. She is sanguine when I ask if she is ready for a proliferation of opinions from outside her Amsterdam bubble.
“I’ve come to a point where as long as everyone in my life that I care about and who matters to me are on board with what I’m doing — if they feel that they’re taken care of, that they’re loved and they’re growing — it doesn’t really matter to me what voices on the internet are saying,” she says. “I can close my laptop, I can put away my phone and return to real life, where everything is fine. More than fine.”
Ask Me How It Works: Love in an Open Marriage by Deepa Paul (Penguin £18.99 pp400). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
