Affair forums vs polyamory forums

Shaya

New member
My situation is a messed up casserole involving trying to legitimise a brief emotional affair of my wife's into polyamory. It didn't work. The result is me scrambling on affair recovery resources to work through the broken trust and hurt, whilst simultaneously looking at polyamory to see if we can have a future together with non monogamy.

I wanted to whinge about affair recovery forums.

They're so... mopey and shit. The posts are all the same. We've been together <double digit> years with <single digit> kids. It's <months/years> since the D-Day (discovery of affair day) and it's still awful. It's now the anniversary of D-Day. He still has C/NC (contact / no contact) with his AP (affair partner). The COW (another affectionate term for affair partner) did some grievous crime. My H (husband) is repentant and tries but I can't trust him. How can I be expected to forgive this? We are working towards R/D (reconciliation / divorce).

The responses are not much better. Plenty of support and encouragement, but sometimes also so negative. There is no proof but she's probably still gaslighting you. Your situation sounds like mine and I was still being tricked so you're probably still being tricked. He needs to snap out of it and focus on your pain. You should totally force your partner to do a poly (polygraph). God will help you through your pain.

The names they choose are all so depressing. Lostandalone, Burn, Dazed, SoConfused, caterpillar, mindnumb, frostedsoul . There's so much activity on that forum. A whole page of threads in any 24 hour period. So many people that in fact, their names are Lostandalone7, Burn44 and Dazed62.

Their use of abbreviations is confusing. Is W that much easier to write than wife? Does affair have to be abbreviated to A? I'm sure COW has a name. The flavour of the website is blame. The cheating spouse has to bend over backwards to accomodate the hurt spouse, with examples including sharing all passwords, open access to all current and future SMSes, GPS tracking on your partner, rules on alcohol consumption when not together, rules on avoidance of all company of the opposite sex when alone. Everything seems to be about control and blame. Even the terminology is flavoured - Cheating Spouse, Betrayed Spouse, Hurting Spouse, Cheating Other Wife. Aren't both spouses hurting? Aren't guilt, remorse and shame, not to mention public shunning difficult things to live through for the Betrayer?

And while it is acknowledged that both sides need to work towards reconciliation, by far the cheating spouse is expected to work the hardest.

Gah.

Just my vent. I just feel polyamory.com has much more intelligent conversation, much less biased, much less hurtful. Does it help to pile all this blame and hurt onto your partner? I mean, I get the hurt and anger. I'm feeling those emotions myself. But is it helpful nurture those emotions? Do affair websites need a culture that encourages this? I get that the betrayed spouse has their world destroyed. Maybe my hurt is less than theirs and that's the difference. Their hurt may be magnitudes bigger and so to recover trust and security they recommend obscene levels of control and blame. But that doesn't sound healthy to me. Forgiveness and love should be the recipe of the day, not control and blame. I can't control my wife for the rest of my life. She's going to get resentful and leave. I don't want my wife acting guilty forever. I don't want to control my wife forever. What kind of monogamy is that? I reject it. I want a recipe for my case - affair turned polyamory and failing because of the pain that my partner's unchecked NRE did to our relationship in those early days. I want a recipe to go forward. Affair recovery websites should be giving me this but the culture of advice there is too controlling for me to want to adopt.

Just my rant. And maybe my casserole of hurt that is a mixture of polyamory and affair recovery and yet neither at the same time, ending with me processing things all on my lonesome with no road map for the future.

Just a rant. Hence the fireplace.
 
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COW? Seriously? Wow. I guess that's for 'cheating other woman'?

What if it was a man? COM?

That sounds awful. I mean I get wanting to be around others who are in similar circumstances. That makes sense. But it does read like a rather toxic environment.

But I also can't easily listen to pop or rock songs anymore because I notice all the toxic messages in them. Be codependent! Addictions are solved through LUV! Be controlling cause jealousy means you care! Your love can fix him (or her or them)!
 
Do those sites have a rapid turnover of members? I wouldn't think people could stand the atmosphere after they were done venting. It can feel good, though, to have other people tell you that you are on the moral high ground and can impose whatever sanctions you feel like. Not a good way to fix any situation.

People have occasionally mentioned that not all polyamory sites are as friendly to all sorts as this one is. Thanks to all the longtime members who set the tone here!

Leetah
 
It's good that Polyamory.com has a variety of thoughts and opinions.
 
In the thread on compersion, I talked about "muggles" ...that is a lot of what I mean. That a partner has a right to control another partner because they are insecure, or for any reason really, is one of the assumptions of muggle life.

Let me tell you about some things.

I HATE the term "emotional affair." I presume this to mean no sex was involved, just talk and feelings and such. It was important to me to burn that term out of the lexicon of my love life with a flamethrower. Or to at least hold the polyamory door open just enough to allow for such in my future.

I will love anyone I goddamn well please and no one will stop me ever again.

I will tell anyone I goddamn well please, that I love them, and no one will police my words.

My Zen, when pressed by me, told me that his preference would be that we closed to specifically me having sexual contact with other men, as in, genital contact. I wanted to pin this down as precisely as possible. Because THAT, I can agree to.

I can easily not have sex with people.

But I have found that it is not realistic to expect me to have similar control over my feelings. I feel things for people. I can try to suppress it, avoid them, not tell them...that is me being disingenuous and inauthentic for the comfort of an insecure partner. I would rather not.

A partner who wants me to not feel love for others, wishes to diminish my life experience and my joy and my enjoyment of living, for their own insecurity. Put me in a dark little box, unable to see the sun, just so they can feel safe.

NO. NEVER, EVER AGAIN.

I meet plenty of people, especially "muggles" who seem to think that casual sex is no big thing, but FEELINGS...well now having FEELINGS for another person is some sort of betrayal. Psh. I have feelings because I'm alive. Feelings won't get anybody pregnant or give you AIDS. Casual love is a lot safer, technically, than casual sex.

The part that isn't ok, is the lying. Now that, is a betrayal. I lied once. During my marriage to my ex, there came a time where I went off of Depo Provera and I was also new in the world of social media, discovering new realms of community and the ease of connecting with other people on the internet. I mention the Depo because in case anyone didn't know, that stuff affects your mind. It can destroy libido. It is marketed as birth control in the US, but Google up "Depo Provera chemical castration." That's basically what one is doing when one uses it, though since the pamphlet won't tell you that, you get to find out once you realize you're repulsed by human touch. So I went off of that, and suddenly...it was like that scene where it goes to color in the Wizard of Oz. I was full of needs and urges all of a sudden.

But I still had the head-baggage of feeling disgusted after every time I'd had sex with my husband, for about five years prior...in fact a remarkably similar feeling to the disgust I felt after I had been assaulted as a teenager.

That isn't easy to recover from, and I couldn't talk to him about it either.

But I did get into conversations with a new friend online. He lived in Hawaii, and was a talented musician, but one with terrible self esteem. I talked him up, took great joy in making him feel better about himself. And yes, we ended up writing rather detailed and explicit sexual fantasies to each other.

I thought it was a safe outlet for my new urges. He was across an ocean. There was no way we were ever going to meet in person, ever. To me, he wasn't really real. He was like a video game, something I was interacting with through a screen.

My ex, already plagued by huge insecurities, did not see it that way when he cracked into my email, upon suspicions from monitoring my Myspace, and began reading those messages. He blew up. Told our small children that I didn't love any of them anymore and was choosing a friend from the computer over my family and I was going to leave, but it was my fault they were losing their mommy. He put my clothing in the driveway. The only way I got back "in" was to come home and sit in contrite (actually shut down) silence while he shouted and raved and slammed his fist into walls. Finally he decided what humiliation would suffice to allow him to forgive. He changed the content of my Myspace page to read, in large red font, "I AM A LYING CHEATING BETRAYING WHORE SLUT" and he had me call, while he listened and watched, first the friend from Hawaii, and tell him I would never speak to him again, then every one of my family and friends he could think of, to confess my sins in humiliating, graphic detail, including what a horrible wife, mother, and person I was and that I was sorry I'd acted so shamefully.

I did this. Numb. Robotically. Because anything was better than my children crying because their Mom was going away.

And I then proceeded to pretend to be a happy, loving, dutiful wife, for a further ten years. I actually made things...ok. But he complains that I was sexually disengaged and never "made him feel wanted"...yeah. I never felt safe being vulnerable to him ever again. My walls to shut him out of my heart, mind, my sexuality...were big, thick, solid. I smiled and made with the domestic harmony, and I often wished he would die.

When you treat your partner like property, and when jealous is "normal"...you get situations like this. Whenever I hear about "muggle" couples where a jealous or insecure partner is snooping in their partner's electronic communications, or their diary or something, I cringe.

Yeah. I lied to him. I did. But I think maybe the problems started when I let him think he could expect that kind of full ownership and control over me in the first place. I am far more careful to manage expectations now.

So for me, polyamory is not about having sex with more than one partner concurrently with everyone's knowledge and consent. For me, polyamory is about the freedom to have my own needs even if they might fall outside of the relationship that I am in, the freedom to be able to be honest with my partner without being afraid he'll go crazy over it, the fact that any needs I might have don't make me immoral or wrong... Just respect for my freedom and that of my partner(s) and love that isn't about control. Flexible thinking.

And I expect that if someone REALLY LOVES ME, then my happiness will be more important to them, than their ownership rights or their insecurities.

I would not even want to look at that affair recovery site. It sounds kind of awful. The road to happiness in a relationship looks like whatever you and your partner can build. It's not some kind of a 12 steps thing. All it takes is willingness to write the script, TOGETHER, in love and respect.
 
That's an awful story spork. I'm sorry you went through that.

Yeah, sorry, I might have gone way too far into "all about me" land there. I guess my thinking was in a place of...

This is what can happen when that stuff goes wild.

And the thing is, I have known people who validated him in his actions. Lots of them. He in fact made a point of telling me that he asked all sorts of people he knew and they affirmed that I was in the wrong, and he was right to react that way.

Lots of people also think that revenge porn is ok.

I think that people are using jealous feelings to excuse horrible actions. And this is about not OWNING your own feelings, but instead demanding that another human change their actions, or structure their choices, to mollify you. That is almost a cornerstone of a lot of um..."muggle"...traditionally Monogamy-as-practiced relationships. And a lot of times too, I see that one partner is far more insecure than the other, so that one partner winds up being the controlling one. Sometimes that is actually the partner who has done more of the cheating, and gotten away with it, and acts suspicious and controlling because they just cannot BELIEVE that their partner would not be doing the same. Sometimes it's a person who has attachment issues or has been hurt in the past (that was my ex, all over...and this is probably why I could forgive him enough to keep on with our relationship, I DO know where he came from. He is only running the programs that are coded into him.)

So to the point... I think that if a partner cannot keep agreements in good faith, the agreements need to be revised, or the relationship is headed for an ending. People need to stop agreeing to things they can't do, just because it's "how relationships are supposed to work" and instead look at what would actually WORK for them. People can't live happily being "honest" with a partner, but lying to themselves, denying their own authenticity and needs just because they are told that they're wrong for what they need or want. If trust is damaged to the point where people have to compromise privacy, let a partner into electronic communications like phones and emails, there is a huge problem...that relationship might continue on limp mode for a long time after that, but what's going on in the hearts of those people probably isn't good. Having now experienced the joy and fulfillment of a relationship where we can be honest with each other, trust each other, be authentic together... There is nothing like it.

Believing that this person is YOUR PERSON and you HAVE to make it work, because they are the one you've got and the one you're with...is scarcity thinking and it's not really sensible. There are billions of humans in the world. No one should give up being what they are, to try and square peg/round hole into another person's needs. That is not sustainable behavior. You're better off looking for a better fit. But then...I believe that NO relationship, is a superior option to a BAD relationship, at least in the long run.
 
Spork said:
I believe that NO relationship, is a superior option to a BAD relationship, at least in the long run.

Amen!

Shaya said:
Forgiveness and love should be the recipe of the day, not control and blame. I can't control my wife for the rest of my life. She's going to get resentful and leave. I don't want my wife acting guilty forever. I don't want to control my wife forever. What kind of monogamy is that? I reject it.

True. Because if she has apologized, asked for your forgiveness and offered to make amends?

And you chose to forgive and offer opportunity to make amends? When she's done making amends, you agree to start from a clean slate and put this stuff behind you.

  • If you already know you are not willing to do that? Forgive only. No opportunity to make amends. Do NOT start something new with your wife. Part ways instead.

  • If you are only giving opportunity to make amends so it becomes a weapon? So it is "endless amends" like a way of "punishing" her? Skip it. That behavior keeps both of you in the stuck place. Neither gets to move on.

    • Or eventually she gets tired of "perpetually serving time" and she chooses to move on without you and stop trying because she sees you will NEVER be satisfied and choose to start anew from a clean slate.

I want a recipe for my case - affair turned polyamory and failing because of the pain that my partner's unchecked NRE did to our relationship in those early days. I want a recipe to go forward.

Here's a generic "recipe" for recovering from a cheating affair. It does not address "what happens next? Back to Closed/Monogamy or try Open/Poly?"

http://www.rd.com/advice/relationships/15-steps-to-surviving-an-affair/

Here is this one again, if you guys choose to try to transition from cheating to polyamory.

http://felislunae.org/relationships-love/coming-clean/

But before you can even decide that, you might have to assess if you are even up for open/poly things or ready for open/poly things. Maybe these sheets help you with that.

http://openingup.net/resources/free-downloads-from-opening-up/

And even if you find that you are up for open/poly and are not willing and able to do open/poly relationships... is this the right time to start? Because your foundations have been shaken. Maybe you both want to spend some time strengthening foundations rather than going on to poly right away.

If you need something more or something else? It may be that you have to DIY your "recipe" with the aid of a counselor. Only you know your full picture situation and what the "recipe" has to address. Could seek professional help if you are struggling.

Galagirl
 
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Thanks GalaGirl, your resources have always been helpful to me. Surprisingly, I've seen them all already this time. You're going to have to find me new ones! ;)

Hi Karen, I think this forum has many like-minded individuals. Yes, we argue and often violently about hierarchical vs non hierarchical poly, but the difference is negligible to someone on the outside. Contrast this to the affair recovery forum I was speaking about and there is a big banner on every page that says "There is to be NO mention of political names, and absolutely no political topic content in any context. Any violation of this guideline will result in the loss of posting privileges."

I'm not against keeping posts or topics on track. It's an affair recovery forum, they don't want the discussion siderailed on politics. That's fine. But I'm pointing out that on this forum, we're all likely to stick our middle fingers up at society's conventional rules on sex, and by extension, likely to snub society's rules on religion, politics and anything else related to society. If we don't snub it, we're likely to have the maturity to understand why others on the forum are snubbing it and not feel overly offended. We've all been on the wrong end of prejudice and so we're more likely to be open minded.

I think that's why we have intelligent discussion here in this forum - because we've been forced to be open minded and our poly lifestyle forces us to be able to hear the other person's point of view.
 
Forums like that are for people who want to sit around and blame others instead of working on themselves. That is quite a rabbit hole to go down.

I think poly people are more individualists. We don't define ourselves by that one partner. Advice given here is more on dealing with it than blaming others.

Plus, we have a sense of community, loosely. That community is based on a positive thing, not a negative. It's nice to be able to discuss even mundane things with other poly people. We don't have to edit our speech to avoid explaining our situations. Those conversations suck.
 
And while it is acknowledged that both sides need to work towards reconciliation, by far the cheating spouse is expected to work the hardest.

In my experience, I've found the opposite to be true. While both parties have to work to repair the damage done, I find that the work that the cheating partner has to do is often clear cut. Stop cheating, fix trust issues, be honest, offer reassurance, build trust.... it is a fairly obvious laundry list that will be identifiable almost from the start. The work needed will not necessarily be easy, but the partner will already be on the "right" path to it merely with the intent of initiating repairs.

On the other hand, the partner being cheated on, will have a far more unpredictable range of damage based on many factors - original beliefs, nature of cheating, extent of betrayal, nature of any deliberate cruelty..... and the impact on the person. Just identifying it can be difficult with things hitting out of the blue months later (possibly even years later). In that sense, there is a lot more need to be self aware, work on the damage and so on. Often existing issues can flare up.

IMO, an affair recovery approach that puts the onus on recovery on the cheating partner will feel very protective and supportive of the cheated partner, but will have a lesser chance of returning to a successful relationship. It has to be a mutual approach that recognizes that while it is not fair, the partner who was betrayed is going to need a lot more attention and work and the nature of what could come up in the process will be highly unpredictable - and of course the cheating partner will have to be supportive for any hope of success.

It is not fair. There should be a cosmic rule that says that the person to fuck up should have the greater load of fixing, but sadly, it is how it is.

But then, that is me. I have also seen many partners - particularly in monogamous relationships be fine as long as the cheating stops and ownership is restored.
 
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