Part 1: My Foray Into Polyamory: The Italian Lover Who Sparked My Blog (A Cautionary Tale)

Dating in your 40s is a wild ride. It’s part comedy, part tragedy, part anthropology experiment. If you’re lucky, you get a decent story out of it, and if you’re me, you start a whole blog.

This is my origin story. The messy, passionate, intoxicating, and ultimately exhausting relationship that pushed me to write publicly about dating, love, and the absurdities of modern romance.

Because before I was “Forty & Flirty in Tassie,” before the readers, before the cheeky nicknames and cautionary tales, there was Marco. My Italian lover. My first (and last) foray into polyamory. And my first big lesson that sometimes, what looks like progressive freedom is actually chaos dressed up in a nice theory.

Marco is the reason I now tell people that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. What began with flowers, gothic romance, and passionate kisses ended with banshee wails, mushroom-fuelled Sunday lunches, and one very absent lasagna.

Swiping Right on Marco

May 2023. I wasn’t looking for “The One.” I’d just ended an eight-month relationship and was in the “let’s see what happens” phase of Tinder.

Then along came Marco. Italian. Intelligent. Brown eyes so deep they could have been UNESCO-protected. Where Tasmanian men tended toward “yeah, nah, we’ll see,” Marco was romantic, attentive, and articulate. He treated me like I was the plot, not just background scenery.

There was one complication: he was married.

First Dates and Gothic Passion

Our first date was low-key: steaming bowls of pho at a little Vietnamese place. Harmless, casual, coriander stuck to the chopsticks. But our second date, cocktails at Mary Mary, changed everything.

That’s where Marco kissed me. Not the limp, conservative kisses I’d endured from Tasmanian men, but a kiss with heat and intent. Passionate. Italian. The kind of kiss that makes you remember your lips are for more than ordering Almond lattes.

From then on, it felt like I’d stepped into an art-house European film.

“We Don’t Do Hierarchy”

From day one, Marco was clear about his situation. He and his wife had been married for twenty years, and several years earlier she had opened their marriage.

A couple of weeks in, she messaged me directly a kind of “welcome note”, and soon after we met for coffee. I’ll admit, I liked her. She was smart, articulate, progressive. Over cappuccinos she explained their philosophy: she was a relationship anarchist. They didn’t do “hierarchical polyamory,” she told me. No primaries or secondaries. Each relationship was meant to stand on its own, free and equal.

It sounded progressive. Conscious. Liberating.

Exactly the kind of modern love story people like to write think-pieces about.

She even snapped a photo of the two of us together and sent it to Marco, like proof of onboarding. Then she set up a group chat for the three of us, a neat little triangle where “issues” could be discussed openly. It felt civilised, maybe even revolutionary.

For a while, I bought it.

But here’s the truth: in practice, there was nothing anarchic or non-hierarchical about it. For all the talk of freedom, she was the one setting the rules. Marco? He just followed.

Cabaret Costumes and Manufactured Crises

Things even tipped into the absurdly friendly. She once borrowed one of my costumes for a sex party. I handed it over, amused. If this was polyamory, it was certainly eclectic.

But then came the cracks. Marco had to fly to New Zealand for work and wanted to spend 24 hours with me before he left. Perfectly reasonable, I thought. She, however, declared it outrageous. Why? No explanation, just a veto.

Later, when Marco and I escaped for a weekend, she rang in a panic: their bikes had been stolen. He scrambled to fix it, only for their daughter to discover the bikes safely in the shed.

This became the pattern. Every time Marco and I carved out space for each other, some crisis would erupt. It was as if her motto was: if he’s happy with someone else, manufacture a catastrophe.

So much for “no hierarchy.”

Torn Between Two Worlds

Marco was always trying to fix things. One part of him wanted to be with me, the other was constantly rushing back to soothe her crises. He played mediator, firefighter, husband, boyfriend but rarely just himself.

And then came the tattoos. I’m heavily tattooed. She wasn’t. Until one day, she got both arms done in a single session, full sleeves. By my tattoo artist.

Was it flattery? Competition? Creepy? Maybe all three. But it was clear: I wasn’t just dating Marco. I was competing in their marriage’s theatre.

Flowers, Dracula, and Falling in Love

Despite it all, Marco gave me the kind of romance I’d longed for. He greeted me with flowers. He read me chapters of Dracula in his Italian lilt, making Stoker’s prose sound like poetry. He cooked for me weekly, nourishing not just my stomach but my longing for care.

We fell in love. And for a while, I convinced myself the chaos was worth it.

The Farm Lunch Horror Show

Then came the day they decided it was time to “integrate” me. To introduce me to their eldest daughter and their circle of friends.

On paper, it was meant to be intimate: a family lunch on their farm, just a couple of friends. In reality? It was a gathering. A crowd. And suddenly, I was on display.

I felt judged. Reduced. A whore. A marriage wrecker. Something that needed to be managed, not welcomed. To make it worse, most of them were off their tits on magic mushrooms. I gritted my teeth, smiled, and played along, but inside, I was unravelling.

That day planted the seed of doubt I could no longer ignore.

The Beginning of the End

The final act came before Marco’s trip to Italy. His mother was unwell, and he was taking his eldest daughter to see her. Before he left, he promised to spend a full day with me, to cook a tray of lasagna that would last me while he was gone.

The night before, we were on the phone when I heard her in the background, wailing like a banshee. He hung up to tend to her. The emergency? She’d taken her blood pressure, found it high, and rushed to hospital. Nothing was wrong.

The next day, she told him he could still come to me. But it wasn’t permission. It was a test. One he failed. She didn’t forgive him for choosing me that day.

The lasagna never came. And neither did the future I’d briefly imagined.

My Origin Story

That was the beginning of the end with Marco. What began with flowers and gothic romance ended with banshee wails and silent punishments.

A relationship that had given me passion, romance, and poetry had also left me hollow, overwhelmed, and questioning everything.

It was devastating, but it was also clarifying. I realised I’d been caught in someone else’s script, cast in a role I never wanted. So I picked up a pen and wrote my own.

This blog began as catharsis. A way to laugh instead of scream. A way to reclaim the narrative. And now, it’s grown into something more a place where I share the messy, funny, painful, absurd truths of dating in midlife.

So here it is: Part One of my polyamory cautionary tale. If you take nothing else from it, let it be this: if it looks too good to be true? It probably is.

So here we are. This is where Forty & Flirty in Tassie began. Out of heartbreak, out of confusion, out of the realisation that polyamory, for me, wasn’t progressive freedom. It was chaos dressed up as liberation.

Part two coming soon.