Reverie
Active member
(. . . continued from previous)
I definitely think that no matter what happens with Rider, moving on directly to nest up with Dustin is not the solution. Firstly, I haven't known him all that long yet. I have a personal policy against moving in with partners till I feel that I know them pretty well—definitely at least a year—which dates back to my mid-20s. I don't think it's saved me any specific heartaches, personally, but I've seen enough friends decide to move in with people they've known for only a few months, and it has often gone poorly. If Rider and I decided to break up tomorrow, I'd finish out my lease with him and then get myself into a roommate situation for a while, to keep my space and clear my head.
Dustin did (way too early, like months ago already) offer that I could come live with him for free whenever I wanted, if I wanted out of my situation or if I just wanted to decrease my bills, and, as tempting as that is in such a high-rent area and with such staggering debt, allowing those worldly concerns to sway my decision would be a mistake.
If Rider and I do break up over something, and I do eventually nest up with Dustin, it wouldn't be till we've known each other for quite a bit longer and I am satisfied that he's actually a potentially long-term compatible partner for me. It may be that he's not, and I end up not being with either of them. Not that I'm excited about getting back into dating, but at least since I believe that poly's not my ideal anymore, my pool would be larger.
And now to expound at length on the topic of straying . . .
So, I've actually talked to Dustin about this at length on multiple occasions. What he tells me is this: up until a couple years ago, he spent pretty much the last 20 years of his life having sex with an uncountable number of women—women of all shapes, sizes, races, ages, experience levels, etc., everyone from naïve teenage groupie virgins to prostitutes. He was, in his own words, "a total dog" and, at one point, had four girlfriends all in different cities who didn't know about each other, and would regularly cheat on all of them even beyond that.
And, much like the Weezer song lyrics, he started to just get tired of it. Tired of sex. Grossed out by it, to some degree, even. "It's messy, and it smells, and it swaps whatever germs and DNA back and forth, and, just, ugh, when it is someone you don't know or someone you don't care about."
His last girlfriend had left him (this was 2014) because she wanted to escalate to marriage and babies, but he wasn't ready and wasn't sure she was the one he wanted to be with for that stuff. ("She has a baby now, with the guy who came right after me," he said, "and she seems really happy.") Also, he had cheated on her, which I'm not sure whether she knew about. He nosedived into a drug problem in 2015 and ended up wanting to clean up his act, so he went home to his family for the summer. He spent the whole summer around family, helping his sister with her new baby and helping his mom's next-door neighbor train a puppy. He did a lot of reading and thinking and distancing himself from toxic situations and toxic friends.
He suddenly felt like the life he'd been living was stupid and hollow and fucked up compared to the beauty of family and the purity and ease of loving that baby and that puppy. He started to think that he might want that for himself after all, but his last girlfriend definitely hadn't been the right choice. (He listed some personality traits he hadn't liked.) So he'd be single, and occasionally pursue interests and hook up (he downloaded Tinder but told me he never actually messaged anyone) until he found what he was looking for—someone he could really love, as purely and easily as what he'd felt that summer.
It was lonely sometimes, but it gave him greater self-satisfaction than constantly trying to fuck anything that moved. "That," he said, "started to seem to me like a young man's game. And I'm not that young anymore."
He said he was determined not to make the mistake he'd made in previous relationships, where he did feel some kind of spark but had to sort of talk himself into falling in love with the person just because he felt like he wanted to be in a relationship at that time. His friends saw him pursuing things with people and then ending them quickly as just an extension of his previous casual, dog-like behavior.
But this time there was a method to the madness. He was interviewing, in a way. And people kept flunking out quickly because he didn't want to waste his time and was comfortable being alone. "I just knew something was not right," he said. To paraphrase, he said something like, "I probably hurt a lot of people. But I wasn't going to settle this time. I'd be alone forever if I had to be. I was over chicks in general—chasing them, how they could be, etc. I was pretty resigned to it, actually, not entirely sure what I was looking for even existed. And if it didn't, I'd be alone."
But he said that when he met me, it was love at first sight. (Which I don't technically believe in, but that's what he says he felt.) He was daunted, that first night, when I told him I was married and open to FWB, but he was curious. He already didn't think we could just be "F"WB, but when I told him we didn't have a rule against falling in love, he wanted to see if maybe this was the thing he'd been looking for. And the rest of the timeline is chronicled in detail in this blog.
But he keeps saying—keeps insisting—that he's super ready to focus on just one person. That he's bored and exhausted by the idea of cheating and casual sex. That loving me is the easiest and purest thing he's ever done. That the depth of that love makes the sex so amazing that he doesn't have any kind of desire for anyone else—the one time he tried to go down that road, he was disgusted with her and with himself and stopped at manual penetration even though he technically had "permission."
And when I asked him what if that changes? What if one of us (because it could also be me . . .) gets a wild hair and decides to fuck up and cheat? He shrugged and said that if I cheated on him, as long as I was honest about it right away, and it was a one-off fuck-up rather than an ongoing emotional affair, and I promised to try not to let it happen again, he'd be pissed for probably a while, but he'd get over it. It wouldn't be a big deal in the scheme of things.
Which, honestly, is about how I feel about the matter, too. If I were ever in a monogamous relationship again . . . occasionally slipping up and messing around with someone is not the end of the world, as long as it isn't followed by subterfuge and ongoing lies. I still don't believe that strict monogamy is the natural state of the human condition. As Dan Savage says, monogamy is, for some reason, like the one thing that people try to do where, if they make one mistake, they're considered a total failure. I don't expect to hold anyone to 100% perfect score on the monogamy report card. I know as well as anyone how easy it is to get carried away in a perfect storm of a weirdly hot moment.
This is definitely something that I already consider, and another part of why I have no designs, no matter what happens with Rider, to immediately escalate with Dustin. If Rider and I break up, and I decide to try monogamy with Dustin, I would want to see demonstrated proof that at least most of his emotional volatility was due to the situation and not to just being a volatile person. I wouldn't want to spend more days over his place than I currently do for the first long while. I'm not trying to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire, if YKWIM.
(continued . . .)
And so acknowledging that, and moving on to nest up with Dustin, though it seems wonderful, he's also got his dark side. His occasional drinking and substance abuse issues...and his history of questionable relationship habits. I'd be worried that if I tried to nest up with someone like him, that the mundane-ness of it all would kill the magic and he'd get restless, want to stray eventually.
I definitely think that no matter what happens with Rider, moving on directly to nest up with Dustin is not the solution. Firstly, I haven't known him all that long yet. I have a personal policy against moving in with partners till I feel that I know them pretty well—definitely at least a year—which dates back to my mid-20s. I don't think it's saved me any specific heartaches, personally, but I've seen enough friends decide to move in with people they've known for only a few months, and it has often gone poorly. If Rider and I decided to break up tomorrow, I'd finish out my lease with him and then get myself into a roommate situation for a while, to keep my space and clear my head.
Dustin did (way too early, like months ago already) offer that I could come live with him for free whenever I wanted, if I wanted out of my situation or if I just wanted to decrease my bills, and, as tempting as that is in such a high-rent area and with such staggering debt, allowing those worldly concerns to sway my decision would be a mistake.
If Rider and I do break up over something, and I do eventually nest up with Dustin, it wouldn't be till we've known each other for quite a bit longer and I am satisfied that he's actually a potentially long-term compatible partner for me. It may be that he's not, and I end up not being with either of them. Not that I'm excited about getting back into dating, but at least since I believe that poly's not my ideal anymore, my pool would be larger.
And now to expound at length on the topic of straying . . .
So, I've actually talked to Dustin about this at length on multiple occasions. What he tells me is this: up until a couple years ago, he spent pretty much the last 20 years of his life having sex with an uncountable number of women—women of all shapes, sizes, races, ages, experience levels, etc., everyone from naïve teenage groupie virgins to prostitutes. He was, in his own words, "a total dog" and, at one point, had four girlfriends all in different cities who didn't know about each other, and would regularly cheat on all of them even beyond that.
And, much like the Weezer song lyrics, he started to just get tired of it. Tired of sex. Grossed out by it, to some degree, even. "It's messy, and it smells, and it swaps whatever germs and DNA back and forth, and, just, ugh, when it is someone you don't know or someone you don't care about."
His last girlfriend had left him (this was 2014) because she wanted to escalate to marriage and babies, but he wasn't ready and wasn't sure she was the one he wanted to be with for that stuff. ("She has a baby now, with the guy who came right after me," he said, "and she seems really happy.") Also, he had cheated on her, which I'm not sure whether she knew about. He nosedived into a drug problem in 2015 and ended up wanting to clean up his act, so he went home to his family for the summer. He spent the whole summer around family, helping his sister with her new baby and helping his mom's next-door neighbor train a puppy. He did a lot of reading and thinking and distancing himself from toxic situations and toxic friends.
He suddenly felt like the life he'd been living was stupid and hollow and fucked up compared to the beauty of family and the purity and ease of loving that baby and that puppy. He started to think that he might want that for himself after all, but his last girlfriend definitely hadn't been the right choice. (He listed some personality traits he hadn't liked.) So he'd be single, and occasionally pursue interests and hook up (he downloaded Tinder but told me he never actually messaged anyone) until he found what he was looking for—someone he could really love, as purely and easily as what he'd felt that summer.
It was lonely sometimes, but it gave him greater self-satisfaction than constantly trying to fuck anything that moved. "That," he said, "started to seem to me like a young man's game. And I'm not that young anymore."
He said he was determined not to make the mistake he'd made in previous relationships, where he did feel some kind of spark but had to sort of talk himself into falling in love with the person just because he felt like he wanted to be in a relationship at that time. His friends saw him pursuing things with people and then ending them quickly as just an extension of his previous casual, dog-like behavior.
But this time there was a method to the madness. He was interviewing, in a way. And people kept flunking out quickly because he didn't want to waste his time and was comfortable being alone. "I just knew something was not right," he said. To paraphrase, he said something like, "I probably hurt a lot of people. But I wasn't going to settle this time. I'd be alone forever if I had to be. I was over chicks in general—chasing them, how they could be, etc. I was pretty resigned to it, actually, not entirely sure what I was looking for even existed. And if it didn't, I'd be alone."
But he said that when he met me, it was love at first sight. (Which I don't technically believe in, but that's what he says he felt.) He was daunted, that first night, when I told him I was married and open to FWB, but he was curious. He already didn't think we could just be "F"WB, but when I told him we didn't have a rule against falling in love, he wanted to see if maybe this was the thing he'd been looking for. And the rest of the timeline is chronicled in detail in this blog.
But he keeps saying—keeps insisting—that he's super ready to focus on just one person. That he's bored and exhausted by the idea of cheating and casual sex. That loving me is the easiest and purest thing he's ever done. That the depth of that love makes the sex so amazing that he doesn't have any kind of desire for anyone else—the one time he tried to go down that road, he was disgusted with her and with himself and stopped at manual penetration even though he technically had "permission."
And when I asked him what if that changes? What if one of us (because it could also be me . . .) gets a wild hair and decides to fuck up and cheat? He shrugged and said that if I cheated on him, as long as I was honest about it right away, and it was a one-off fuck-up rather than an ongoing emotional affair, and I promised to try not to let it happen again, he'd be pissed for probably a while, but he'd get over it. It wouldn't be a big deal in the scheme of things.
Which, honestly, is about how I feel about the matter, too. If I were ever in a monogamous relationship again . . . occasionally slipping up and messing around with someone is not the end of the world, as long as it isn't followed by subterfuge and ongoing lies. I still don't believe that strict monogamy is the natural state of the human condition. As Dan Savage says, monogamy is, for some reason, like the one thing that people try to do where, if they make one mistake, they're considered a total failure. I don't expect to hold anyone to 100% perfect score on the monogamy report card. I know as well as anyone how easy it is to get carried away in a perfect storm of a weirdly hot moment.
Like why change anything if it's perfect? What if you gave him what he wanted and it turned out...to not be actually so good? So it's by no means certain that would even work if you did it.
This is definitely something that I already consider, and another part of why I have no designs, no matter what happens with Rider, to immediately escalate with Dustin. If Rider and I break up, and I decide to try monogamy with Dustin, I would want to see demonstrated proof that at least most of his emotional volatility was due to the situation and not to just being a volatile person. I wouldn't want to spend more days over his place than I currently do for the first long while. I'm not trying to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire, if YKWIM.
(continued . . .)
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