Meet My Sister Wife

What do you wear to meet your boyfriend's wife?

“She wants to meet you,” he says.

It’s six weeks into a dreamy new romance with a tall, dark and handsome New York-born Italian man. He’s a good father, a good boyfriend, a good lover.

And as fate would have it, a good husband, too.

He reads the look on my face. I’ve seen soap operas. I know what comes next.

“She’s nice,” he promises. So I agree.

My first instinct is to google, “What to wear to meet your boyfriend’s wife” — but don’t expect that will yield many good search results. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. Only tips on what to wear to meet the boyfriend’s parents and how to upstage his ex.)

Thanks for nothing, Google.

The day comes and I pull into the driveway of their home in the posh part of Albuquerque, fitting for an engineer and his family. She calls out a friendly greeting and hugs me like we’ve been friends for years. All warmth. Not an ounce of jealousy.

She spells her name Sarah, like me, and she’s with her boyfriend, Tim. It’s an eery coincidence since my husband, who I was separated from, is also named Tim.

It turns out we share a lot.

Unbeknownst to me, I learn that on our first date, she and her boyfriend were sitting at the bar across the room. She was admiring my style from afar: I was wearing a striped off the shoulder top tucked into black skinny jeans. Very French.

As I process this, I recall walking past a thin blonde wearing a low back top on my way to the ladies room. As it turns out, this was Sarah. I had registered her, too.

“You remember what she was wearing?!”

He can’t believe it. But I can. A woman can spot another stylish woman a mile away.

It’s official. I adore Sarah.

Sarah and her husband were in a season of polyamory.

They were living under the same roof, co-parenting their daughter, and sleeping in separate beds. This arrangement worked. For a while.

There’s a term that you’ll hear in poly circles: compersion. In essence, it’s the opposite of jealousy; when you can see your partner with someone else and experience joy at their happiness.

Sarah embodies compersion.

“I always feel like it’s important to befriend women,” she told me early on. She never had sisters. I have two and developed a jealous streak as a child (“That’s MY Mom!”). I’m fairly certain she doesn’t have a jealous bone in her body.

When I came over to see him, she would write me sweet post-it notes and let me borrow her clothes, her bike… cough, her husband.

As I got to know her better, I learned that she had grown up in a cult (“Wait, you too?!”). She’s a great storyteller. We laughed a lot. Plus, I could go to her for relationship advice — who would know better than her?

Then it was like she prophesied it one day:

“If things ever end between you two, I’m keeping you.”

Maybe she saw the writing on the wall.

The romance with him went up in flames a few weeks later. My anxious attachment flared. His avoidant attachment cooled considerably. I felt him slipping away and nothing I did could stop it.

In retrospect, I’d been love bombed, hard. It was a glorious bubble. Until it ruptured.

Sarah called it. She kept me. Through birthdays, breakups, divorces, moves, job changes, scary health diagnoses — we’ve been here for each other.

When he fell in love with someone new, she bemoaned that she wished it was me, so we could sister wife and raise their daughter together. Then she bought a loft on the same block as my loft and we’re a regular part of each other’s lives.

If you find us out on a weekend, we love telling the story of how we met. There’s always a knowing look, a check-in, ‘how much do we share’, before we dish.

Even though our romantic relationships changed, she’s still my sister wife.

Just not the way you’d expect from a [former] Mormon girl.

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