By: Ailsa Keppie
Many people are curious about the sister wife relationship. I have to agree, I am always curious about this particular partnership also, even after living my own version of it!
What really happens behind closed doors?
Are you friends?
Are you lovers?
How do you deal with the jealousy?
These are some of the questions people ask me when they hear I’ve been in a polygamous marriage.
Polygamy in Islam
I have to begin by saying that it was me who began the discussion with my husband at the time about including another wife in our relationship. This was partly out of a sense of wanting to be a pious Muslim and help another woman who was not likely to be seen as “marriage material.” Divorced women, women with children, older women, infertile women; there are many reasons why a woman might get overlooked by eligible men looking for a wife.
It is said in the Quran that there will be 40 women to one man as we near the Day of Judgement, so for this reason, we are asked as Muslims to consider supporting and including other women in our family. Being a wife comes with status and some level of respectability and thus it is a gift to another woman to ask her to be a sister wife. On the other hand, part of me was aware early on in my marriage that things were not as easy as I had expected and that having another woman “on my side” so to speak, helping with house chores and kids, could be very helpful.
My husband was not particularly inspired to help around the house, and as anyone who has kept a house and family knows, it is more than a full-time job! Why not then, ask another woman to enter our marriage and split the workload? So, my intention in having a sister wife was both charitable and personal.
Finding a Sister Wife
Having made the decision to include another woman in our relationship, it was actually very difficult to find the right woman to fit into our family. One Muslim sister we considered had four boys of her own and was concerned we would not provide for her children. Another woman was young and inexperienced, and her father felt affronted that we would have her as a second wife instead of his hope for marrying her off as a first wife. The drama in her family came as a shock to us, and we hastily withdrew our interest and began looking for someone who did not have such expectations.
We finally found a woman living nearby whose mother had raised her and her three sisters alone after her husband left her. In Morocco, being a single mother was a difficult role and she was only too happy to have one of her daughters get married, even as a second wife. It was a simple task to ask the woman and her mother, the challenge came for us as we faced the long legal process of marrying a second wife.
This ended up taking over a year to finally make it official. Our relationship actually improved my marriage overall, at least at first. I had someone to help me around the house and with my children, and she felt a sense of belonging that had been lacking in her own family.
Juggling two wives
Our husband felt proud to have two wives and attempted to treat us both with respect and patience. Very quickly I think he realized that two wives made his relational life more difficult. Instead of just one person’s thoughts and feelings to attend to, he now had two. It seems kind of funny now to remember what a shock it was to our husband that having two wives was not just about who he was sleeping with that night! There was so much more to a marriage relationship than the logistics of whose turn it was.
We shared a house, and although we each had our own bedroom and living space, we shared a bathroom. It was one of the hardest things I remember about that time of my life, hearing my husband and my sister wife coming up to use the shower outside my bedroom on her night. The feelings of jealousy never completely went away, even though we were together as co-wives for five years.
As far as having a sister wife, it was an interesting relationship. In hindsight, I can see it was the beginning of the end of the marriage because she and I started realizing that the common denominator in some of our problems was him, not us. So, he could no longer play the blame and shame game on us.
In that sense we really did bond, and she did join in the family full on. She helped with the kids and the house everyday. There was a lot of nice things about it, like having coffee together every morning. Where it really broke down was when Said left Morocco and I stayed on for two years and she and I did a lot together. We were kind of like a couple at that point, except for the sex.
The beginning of the end
So, I went out to work, and she stayed home. And then there was this other person who was supposed to be providing for us who wasn’t. The relationship then became me giving her an allowance from my wages. That would have been different if we had chosen each other, but it became awkward, and was never resolved.
There was a lot of resentment built up, although I don’t think my kids noticed it. They just thought they had two mothers and it was great. When I left Morocco, the betrayal she felt with me leaving with the kids was worse than Said leaving. Her dad had left her mom when she was a kid so in some ways she didn’t expect more from a man.
She and I had developed a working relationship, so I think it was harder on her when I left. My oldest daughter actually went back to live with her, and there was a lot of abuse, probably subconsciously directed at me. That was unfortunate because we did have a loving relationship, but I don’t talk to her at all now. I’m not interested in keeping that relationship going because it’s difficult to know what’s true and what’s not true.
Having considered other models for polygamous relationships since that time, I think our marriage may have been different if we had all been clearer about our expectations of each other. Perhaps also, if my sister wife and I had more of our own relationship to fall back on. We both looked to our husband to answer all of our issues, and the fact that he was probably the weakest link in our family made this solution a rather poor one.
Lessons learned
If I had the opportunity to go back and live this over again with my current relationship wisdom, I would cultivate a much more robust, maybe even intimate, relationship with my sister wife. We would have had more resilience then to withstand the challenges of life. As it was, we both became disillusioned with our husband, and our family split apart with hurt feelings all around.
I sometimes feel sad that I don’t have my sister wife in my life anymore, as we weathered a lot of things together, but I don’t think it’s possible to rebuild our relationship now that I have stepped away from both her culture and her religion. I miss her sometimes with that knowledge that our sister wife relationship can never be rekindled without our husband.
I would consider a non-monogamous relationship again in my current life, but I would take much more time and consideration in implementing any form of polygamy again. It is not as easy as it might seem!
My Memoir, By the Light of the Crescent Moon, delves into the complexities and emotions of relationships in the many forms they took in shaping my life. It is a poignant and powerful reminder of how so much of our lives are built around those few important and intimate relationships.
About the author
Ailsa is a lifelong student of self-awareness and spiritual connection. She finds expression of her personal view on life and relationships through writing, coaching and working with the body. Expanding the feeling of aliveness both in herself and the people she comes into contact with is something she finds enriching and fulfilling.
In her younger days, Ailsa desperately sought fulfilment and inner peace. She studied music, science, dance, and the performing arts in an attempt to find her place and a way to contribute to the world.
During this time of expansion and exploration, there was an underlying fear. Fear that she was not enough, fear of not being perfect, and a fear of being seen. At the age of twenty-five, these fears consumed her, and she retreated into Fundamentalist Islam, and a polygamous marriage.
She started wearing a burka in an effort to regain some sense of herself.
Over the years, as she nursed her mother-in-law and raised four daughters, the containment of her chosen life became too constricting, and she began to wonder if this path was truly the one for her. Finally, the overwhelming desire to once again be seen in the wider world prevailed, and she left her life in Morocco to return home to Canada.
She continued to raise her daughters on her own and spent a decade learning and practicing the healing arts, which has finally led to a readiness to share her story, from a place of self-knowing. Through the process of diving deeply into the religion of Islam and living that way of life for many years, she has learned to embody the diversity of another culture as well as the ‘way of peace’ that is Islam. Ailsa continues her work these days with somatic coaching, teaching and writing.
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