Good morning everyone!
I've been reading this board as a guest for quite a while now and I believe now the time has come to share my thoughts and ask for some much needed ideas and maybe advice. (Please excuse my english, non native speaker here)
Boyfriend (37) and me (F, 31) have been together for 10 years now. He's only my second boyfriend and the second man I've ever been intimate with. Before him I've had a 5-6 year relationship with my first boyfriend who also was the first man I had ever kissed. So obviously I don't have a lot of experience with different partners and for a long time I wasn't interested in that at all or mildly curious at most.
Boyfriend on the other hand is quite experienced and has done a lot of dating and ONSs years before we met.
Both of my relationships have been strictly monogamous with the exception of me having sex with other women or us having threesomes which was just fine.
At the end of last year boyfriend and me were in a crisis (which felt much more severe for me than it did for him and I was actually planning to end the relationship if nothing changed). Communication was bad or didn't happen at all, as did sex and other kinds of good stuff. We were focused on our problems but didn't manage to solve them. At that time I started focusing on myself and what my life and my relationships should look like. I went to counseling and found a lot of new energy which seems to have affected him as well. We had a counseling session together and things improved dramatically, suddenly we could talk, spent quality time together, had lots of good sex. His sex drive still is somewhat less than mine but not dramatically so.
I felt like waking from a long sleep on many levels, sex being the most prominent. Sex with boyfriend was great and satisfying but I still started phantasizing about other men, wanting to have sex with them too. I kept this inside for a while, partially blaming it on me no longer taking the pill since last autumn which can do a lot of queer things to you, but the phantasies didn't go away and I even developed a mild crush on a friend's friend (who is poly himself and also would be interested). Two months ago I started talking to my boyfriend about my curiosity. I told him that our relationship had first priority for me but I'd like to date others and maybe finally have some of the "adventure" I've never had. He didn't even take it seriously at first but then did a lot of thinking, the result of which being that:
- he'd be happy for me if I could do what I wanted and wouldn't want to hinder me
- he found it very hard to predict what it would feel like for him if I actually dated another man
- he himself had zero interest in dating other women
- in short, he'd try to live with it but it as far as he could see he couldn't detect anything good in the idea.
Well, it didn't sound like he'd be truly OK with it so I decided to give up on the idea as I didn't want to hurt him but also felt I wouldn't be able to go on a date and truly have fun while having to fear for my relationship all the time. He signaled that his views might change over time since we'd only just had recovered from the recent crisis and he wouldn't want to risk what we had just now.
What I hadn't imagined was how increasingly unhappy I would feel over the next few weeks, being annoyed by trifles, unhappy with the amount of sex we're having, phantasizing about things I know I "mustn't" do. In short it's harder than I thought and I'm asking myself how to go on from here. Should I revert my decision, go on some dates and just see how things play out? (While keeping in touch with boyfriend's feelings of course) Or would it be my responsibility to end the relationship as it's pretty likely he will get hurt and it wouldn't be fair?
A friend of mine says I can't ignore my needs and I'm too eager to protect boyfriend's comfort zone but I'm not sure if she's right. He didn't ask for this, isn't it my responsibility to make sure he's OK?
I'm grateful for any opinions and ideas he might have.
TL;DR: I've told my boyfriend I'd like to try nonmonogamy. He wouldn't want to stand in my way but doesn't seem happy at all. I've told him I wouldn't do it then but now feel increasingly unhappy with that decision.
I've been reading this board as a guest for quite a while now and I believe now the time has come to share my thoughts and ask for some much needed ideas and maybe advice. (Please excuse my english, non native speaker here)
Boyfriend (37) and me (F, 31) have been together for 10 years now. He's only my second boyfriend and the second man I've ever been intimate with. Before him I've had a 5-6 year relationship with my first boyfriend who also was the first man I had ever kissed. So obviously I don't have a lot of experience with different partners and for a long time I wasn't interested in that at all or mildly curious at most.
Boyfriend on the other hand is quite experienced and has done a lot of dating and ONSs years before we met.
Both of my relationships have been strictly monogamous with the exception of me having sex with other women or us having threesomes which was just fine.
At the end of last year boyfriend and me were in a crisis (which felt much more severe for me than it did for him and I was actually planning to end the relationship if nothing changed). Communication was bad or didn't happen at all, as did sex and other kinds of good stuff. We were focused on our problems but didn't manage to solve them. At that time I started focusing on myself and what my life and my relationships should look like. I went to counseling and found a lot of new energy which seems to have affected him as well. We had a counseling session together and things improved dramatically, suddenly we could talk, spent quality time together, had lots of good sex. His sex drive still is somewhat less than mine but not dramatically so.
I felt like waking from a long sleep on many levels, sex being the most prominent. Sex with boyfriend was great and satisfying but I still started phantasizing about other men, wanting to have sex with them too. I kept this inside for a while, partially blaming it on me no longer taking the pill since last autumn which can do a lot of queer things to you, but the phantasies didn't go away and I even developed a mild crush on a friend's friend (who is poly himself and also would be interested). Two months ago I started talking to my boyfriend about my curiosity. I told him that our relationship had first priority for me but I'd like to date others and maybe finally have some of the "adventure" I've never had. He didn't even take it seriously at first but then did a lot of thinking, the result of which being that:
- he'd be happy for me if I could do what I wanted and wouldn't want to hinder me
- he found it very hard to predict what it would feel like for him if I actually dated another man
- he himself had zero interest in dating other women
- in short, he'd try to live with it but it as far as he could see he couldn't detect anything good in the idea.
Well, it didn't sound like he'd be truly OK with it so I decided to give up on the idea as I didn't want to hurt him but also felt I wouldn't be able to go on a date and truly have fun while having to fear for my relationship all the time. He signaled that his views might change over time since we'd only just had recovered from the recent crisis and he wouldn't want to risk what we had just now.
What I hadn't imagined was how increasingly unhappy I would feel over the next few weeks, being annoyed by trifles, unhappy with the amount of sex we're having, phantasizing about things I know I "mustn't" do. In short it's harder than I thought and I'm asking myself how to go on from here. Should I revert my decision, go on some dates and just see how things play out? (While keeping in touch with boyfriend's feelings of course) Or would it be my responsibility to end the relationship as it's pretty likely he will get hurt and it wouldn't be fair?
A friend of mine says I can't ignore my needs and I'm too eager to protect boyfriend's comfort zone but I'm not sure if she's right. He didn't ask for this, isn't it my responsibility to make sure he's OK?
I'm grateful for any opinions and ideas he might have.
TL;DR: I've told my boyfriend I'd like to try nonmonogamy. He wouldn't want to stand in my way but doesn't seem happy at all. I've told him I wouldn't do it then but now feel increasingly unhappy with that decision.