Julia DeSpain / Little Village
THE SEX ISSUE!
Three’s Good Company A Cedar Rapids couple keeps their bond strong by bringing in other partners. BY EMMA MCCLATCHEY
W
hen Cinna Lewis’s husband gets home from a date, she’s the first one to ask how it went. It bolsters the friendship side of their marriage, she says, a marriage that has flourished for 10 years, this May. Cinna had no intention of ever getting married until, at 32, she reconnected with an old Cedar Rapids Washington High classmate, Beau Lewis. “I have some complex views on relationships, but with him it was the cliché,” she said. “I just knew, he’s somebody I want to build a life with.” Beau and Cinna got hitched with no playbook, she said. They’ve been figuring out what being married means to them as they go along. And for the
Lewises, polyamory—opening their marriage to other partners— has been the secret sauce. “I’m very stubborn; I don’t want to be told what to do. I don’t want to tell somebody else what to do,” Cinna said. “I think being in love is the most amazing feeling in the whole world, I really do. The rush we get or the pleasure we get from being a part of a partnership—whatever that looks like, there’s nothing like it.” If there’s a gene that makes the average person prone to romantic or sexual jealousy, Cinna thinks she was born without it. Growing up, if she sensed a boyfriend had a crush on another girl, she’d encourage him to flirt with her. “It just didn’t bother me, where my friends were like,
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‘you’re insane.’ I was always far more injured by dishonesty, secrecy, things like that. I’d rather know what you’re thinking and feeling.” “That’s how I discovered the concept of polyamory, because it does tend to attack a lot of those kinds of issues. It’s about growing into yourself as a person,
Still, neither Cinna nor Beau had really been in poly relationships before. When they decided to introduce it into their marriage, it wasn’t because monogamy wasn’t working out for them, Cinna said, but because it was working. With such a strong foundation, why not build on it? “We like to think outside the
“I’d say there was three or four months of just talking about it before we kind of slowly got on OkCupid and put ourselves out there.” figuring out where your insecurities come from.” Cinna is pansexual, but believes polyamory, beyond being a lifestyle choice, occupies some portion of her sexual identity. “I think it’s a part of how I’m wired,” she said. “My husband really identifies as polyamorous. He can just feel that in his bones.”
box. That binds us together as a couple. We don’t want to have lordship over one another,” she said. “With polyamory, it was just—I don’t want to call it a realization, because that’s kind of corny. It was just this thought. It started from an idea that I wanted each of us to have as much autonomy as possible.” “I approached him out of
