Context matters

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Beepsqueak

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I know my husband occasionally uses this site to vent. I had the misfortune of running across it. I will be leaving after this post so he still has a community to support him, but I feel our situation has been misrepresented and can’t leave it as it is.

It won’t be hard to tell who we are. Some have put the dots together already. Maybe this is messy, but I guess that’s just how my life is now. (My original post had some timeline changes to try to keep some semblance of anonymity, but I suppose that’s out the window.)

My husband and I married in 2011 and had a child together. We now have a platonic, open marriage. Our marriage opened because my husband suggested it two years ago, when I told him I was curious about open marriages and polyamory. We had a happy marriage, but I was curious what relationships with other people could be like, since my husband was the only person I’d ever dated or had a relationship with.

We did not open the marriage to save it. I would never have pursued anything had he even hinted he was not okay with it. I checked multiple times and always got the green light.

Even after we opened, I wasn’t actively looking for a partner. It was just nice to know that if a situation developed organically, I could maybe try it out. I actually thought it would never happen, and I was okay with that, because meeting new people is kinda scary for me.

My husband had said he wanted to know the person I’d date, even though I thought that could be hard for him. I told him as much, but he was sure about it. 6 months ago I fell in love with our mutual friend. My husband said he was rooting for me. I would not have pursued our friend had he said ANYTHING against it. Again, it was only green lights.

We moved in with our friend 4 months ago because we had already been planning to do so before a romantic relationship started, despite me worrying it was too soon. I wanted to wait and see how it played out, but both my husband and my boyfriend were adamant about wanting to move in to the same house. I would not have done this if they had not wanted to. I wish I would have pushed harder against it, since it seems to wear on my husband more than he thought it would. He is very optimistic.

My husband and I took a break from having sex a month ago because he suggested it. He wanted to try having other sexual partners. I agreed, but limited the break to a month instead of a hard stop, as I know how important sex is to him. I would not have taken this break had he not suggested it. He said he was sure it was what he wanted and thought it would be a relief to me.

Why a relief? My husband and I have always been sexually incompatible. Sex was the only answer to any problem he had. Stressed? Sex. Bad day? Sex. Sad? Sex. Whether I was in the mood or not, whether or not we’d just had it the day before. It was a NEED, he said, the only way he felt loved and valued, no matter what else I did. I loved him, so I had the sex.

This led to years of me feeling used and like sex was the only thing he cared about. We had some conversations about it, and it got a little better over the years, but I didn’t realize this or how distant I had become because of the anxiety it caused until our break. I thought there was just something wrong with me for not wanting sex as often, or sometimes pulling away involuntarily when he’d touch me. Turns out it was a trauma response. I know he never intended to hurt me. He is very kind. I had been able to rationalize it all as some sort of misguided love until now.

Three weeks into our break, my husband apologized for the years of abuse, having only now realized it himself during therapy. I cried. I didn’t know it was abuse until he said the word. He asked how I felt about him and said to answer honestly. I told my husband I realized I was no longer romantically or sexually attracted to him. It was a confusing and hard realization for me. I felt betrayed by myself for not knowing my feelings had changed until being forced to look them in the face. My husband said he understood and still wanted to have a relationship, just platonic.

To me, this sounded like the end of our marriage.
To him, it seemed like the beginning of something new.

My husband is optimistic and tends to take big leaps, expecting to fly and then falling hard when things turn out to be different than he expects. I try to mitigate this by asking a lot of questions, suggesting different possible outcomes, and checking in multiple times before changes are made. I love him, but this has often caused problems in our marriage, because it can be seen as me bringing him down.

I’m not a huge fan of change and am also extremely realistic. I have always thought of all the ways this could go wrong and have tried to have conversations about it, preparing for hard eventualities so none of us are blindsided. I care so much for my partners and have done everything within my power to help them with all the transitions.

We said in the beginning of opening our marriage that we’d need to be able to trust each other or it wouldn’t work. I trusted him when he said he was okay with these things. Perhaps I should have known better. But if I can’t trust my own husband, then what am I supposed to do?

As an aside, people seem to jump to assuming I am lost in NRE and my poor husband has been forgotten. I have never, for a moment, allowed myself to be swallowed by NRE, or even let myself enjoy it, because of how distraught my husband has been. How can I feel happy when someone I love is sad?

I never allowed myself to feel distant, even during the times he was cold or pulled away from me. I told myself this was the price I pay for turning our life upside down. I have always been there to reassure my husband, even when I felt the ground crumbling under my feet, because he could decide to just leave me and I have to be okay with that. Even when I was exhausted and feeling spread too thin, I made sure he knew I was dedicated and would give him my time and attention because he’s important and worth it to me. It’s more important to me than my health that he knows that.

I have limited myself at every turn, trying to balance things and make sure everyone feels loved and cared for. It apparently has not been enough. I still have to live my life and maintain my relationships whether one partner is feeling sad or not. I wish I could be two people at once, and that is what I tried to do for so long, but it is not sustainable.

I have done all that my husband’s asked of me and double-checked with every request I had of him to make sure he’d be okay with it. I don’t know what else I can do for him in this situation that he insists, and has insisted from the beginning, that he wants to be in.
He WANTS me to be with my boyfriend.
He WANTS me to have good sexual experiences.
He WANTS to stay married to me and live in this house, all of us together.

I know vent posts are written in times of distress. It’s a healthy part of processing and can be very helpful in some instances. I am not upset at him for this. I just kindly ask that people attempting to advise remember that there is always much more context than is offered in one blip of emotion.

My husband and boyfriend have greatly improved their relationship since this all began. Things have gotten much easier for all of us as we work together to figure them out. I am not flaunting my new relationship in front of anyone. My husband is not being replaced. I am not some dishonest woman that lied about my feelings and is kicking him out of his own house or whatever the hell people were suggesting.

If I sound defensive, it’s because I am. I am used to being seen through the monogamous lens as a villain in this relationship dynamic, but I didn’t think I would be met with that here.

Thank you for the advice that was given to me on my original post. The articles and threads on this site were very helpful in my time of confusion and discovery. I hope that it continues to be a place of help to my husband and anyone else looking for advice and empathy.
 
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Hi Beepsqueak, welcome.

Thank you for coming in here and sharing your side of the story. This makes everything a little more clear of how things enfolded and the state of things.

I'm not sure if you want feedback on your post, but I hope you, husband and your BF find the equilibrium to live together in the same house or perhaps find another solution for this marriage/friendship to thrive.
 
Hi Beepsqueak,

I am sorry you feel you have to leave this forum, your input has been valuable and welcome, but I do understand that you want your husband to have a safe space to vent. I apologize if I've said anything about you that was disrespectful, I can see now that there are two sides to this story, that you love your husband very much, and that you are very conscientious about treating him fairly. I think part of the problem is that he is overly optimistic, and that only when the rubber hits the road does he discover that he isn't okay with what he suggested. It doesn't seem like this is anyone's fault per se, it's just that the two of you have run up against some incompatibilities. I don't know whether this can be fixed.

Sincerely,
Kevin T.
 
We know that there's always two sides to a story and how a shared experience can be completely different for each person involved. We are also limited to the communication style of the poster and text writing without tone of voice, budy language, etc. We do the best we can. I know that I can interpret what someone writes very differently than others and respond accordingly.

I'm sorry you are feeling slighted and maybe even attacked by posters here. That's not our intention. We can only respond with the limited info we get with all of the possible variables stated earlier.

I do hope you stay and can find some support from this community, but I understand if you need to go. Thank you for venting. I do hope it made you feel more heard and understood.
 
Three weeks into our break, my husband apologized for the years of abuse, having only now realized it himself during therapy. I cried. I didn’t know it was abuse until he said the word. He asked how I felt about him and said to answer honestly. I told my husband I realized I was no longer romantically or sexually attracted to him.
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I'm sorry it was abuse. I'm not sure if people come back from that.

Did you want to stay married if you are not longer romantically or sexually attracted to him? How about living together?

I’m not a huge fan of change and am also extremely realistic. I have always thought of all the ways this could go wrong and have tried to have conversations about it, preparing for hard eventualities so none of us are blindsided. I care so much for my partners and have done everything within my power to help them with all the transitions.
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There is only so much you can do. Not everything is on you, or your responsibility, just because you are the hinge.Not everything is "our shared responsibility," either. Some of things are going to be just husband's stuff, husband's responsibility. Don't "carry" him or do his stuff for him. Only do your actual fair share.

We said in the beginning of opening our marriage that we’d need to be able to trust each other or it wouldn’t work. I trusted him when he said he was okay with these things. Perhaps I should have known better. But if I can’t trust my own husband, then what am I supposed to do?
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If you have hit your limit of tolerance, or are now past it, you could start thinking about not being spouses anymore.

He wants to stay married to me and live in this house, all of us together.
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But do YOU still want that? All parts, some, none?

If I sound defensive, it’s because I am. I am used to being seen through the monogamous lens as a villain in this relationship dynamic, but I didn’t think I would be met with that here.
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I don't think you are a villain. Now that I know you are the other party and colored in the rest of the picture. I think you've been doing too much.

In case this helps you assess:


www.scarleteen.com

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Feeling unhappy in or unsure about your relationship? Having problems you don’t know how to work through, or don’t even know if you should? We’ll talk you through making these choices, including how-to’s on conflict resolution and doing breakups better.
www.scarleteen.com www.scarleteen.com

I hope you and husband figure out how to be healthy and happy, whether that is together or separated.

Good luck,
Galagirl
 
Oh, gosh. I hope you will be back to read this because I think you misinterpreted our intent here.

I have pondered how to respond to this and I am sorry that my comments in your husband's thread contributed to this.

I don't think you're a villain, and I don't think that's what anyone else was saying, either.

Regarding NRE: you actually SHOULD be experiencing NRE for your boyfriend! It's a normal and natural phase in a relationship. It doesn't automatically mean that someone would be blind to red flags or behaving selfishly or cruelly. It's just the phase when they'd be so caught up in sexy feelings that they view the world through rose-colored glasses and might not notice if there's a spouse or metamour feeling even slightly hurt or neglected. It's the phase when the two new lovers would ideally NOT yet be sharing a home with other partners who might not be thrilled to witness it.

It's the phase when a poly person can't necessarily focus on repairing any serious issues with another partner. I think experienced poly people often figure out how to go with the ebb and flow of relationships... riding out a partner's NRE without being too bothered by it, reconnecting when the NRE has ebbed a bit.

When your husband described the loss of sexual connection with you, my initial thought (obviously, without knowing the backstory you describe here) was that it might be a temporary phase and your husband might reconnect with you after the NRE with your boyfriend had reduced. I didn't mean that you were doing anything wrong by being in the phase of NRE.

Clearly, that wasn't actually the situation with why you and your husband had decided to end your sexual relationship, so I am sorry for not understanding.

To be continued...
 
Continued from above...

But, I am puzzled about the wide gaps between how you describe things and how your husband describes things. And how wildly different your first post was from this one, and even how different your husband's first thread was from his second.

There's context, and then there are Rashomon-like twists that drastically change the basic premise of a situation.

Your first post described you running yourself ragged trying to please both partners and divide your time fairly. (From your post, I quite liked you and was rooting for you to get the time to yourself that you needed!) The living situation with the new relationship sounded fast, but you indicated that your partners were the ones who seemed most excited about it and most sure they wanted to do it. Ok!

Your husband's first post described him being very supportive of you being poly , but that he was struggling with some aspects of the situation, such as feeling he'd lost part of his connection to you, and that his former friendship with your boyfriend had declined. His metamour then seemed to refuse his request to work on their friendship. I think most of us who posted on that thread were concerned about the new relationship combined with the new living situation, but your husband assured us that he was overall happy with it.

The details about the living situation made me realize you must be the wife in his situation. I asked your husband specifically about it, because it's always delicate to give advice if both members of a dyad are posting on the forum (and clearly, I failed at it anyway). And I also thought it was useful to know both sides in this case, because your post struck me as describing things completely differently than the husband. Which could, ideally, help both of you to recognize a communication or perception gap.

Then your husband's second thread changed the situation drastically. A big change had occurred in your relationship with him and he was mourning the loss. This was very surprising to me (obviously, I was missing a lot of backstory) and cast your first post in a different light. Rather than merely balancing your time between two partners, you were also transitioning to a new platonic dynamic with your spouse, while having a new relationship in the same house. (Or, at the time of your first post, were at least struggling with significant decline in the sexual connection with your spouse).

It makes sense that when posting here, people can't include all the details and will leave out things that don't seem relevant, or to protect a partner's privacy. And that's okay! I don't mean that you did anything wrong. Just that we might have given different advice if we knew that sex was an issue between you and your spouse, so time management/time to yourself wasn't the only thing going on. (There are other posters here who have experience with transitioning to a platonic live-in partnership, for example).

However, your post here changes everything again. I am honestly not sure how to process it all. I am sorry that you experienced this in your marriage and that your experience on this forum has made it all worse for you.

To be continued below...
 
Cont'd again from above.

I am, again, sorry about all this, and I do understand where you're coming from in feeling betrayed by your husband's posts here. If it helps, here's my story:

When I was in my 20s, I had a long-distance boyfriend named David who I had met through our shared mutual friends (which was also a circle of creative professionals I expected to be involved with as colleagues for all of my life). I did not want to be monogamous with anyone at the time, was exploring my sexuality and not ready to commit for life, was focused on building my career, etc, and I explained this clearly to David before we started dating. David was enthusiastic about this idea because he was similarly exploring his sexuality (dating for almost the first time ever, in fact), and also building his career as an editor in my creative field. When we started dating, it also became clear that David had issues with erectile dysfunction, which he attributed to sexual inexperience and questioning his sexuality; he was already in therapy for sexual issues when I met him. He voiced enthusiasm for me dating others and seemed genuinely relieved that I would have other outlets for sex.

We proceeded to have an open relationship for 4 years. I checked in with him many times about his feelings. He also insisted he was supportive and happy with everything. Even so, I chose to limit my other dating to casual/friends with benefits that I saw very infrequently, since I wanted to give David time to date others himself, and my priority was him. I was blissfully happy and felt like I was giving David a safe space to explore his sexuality, both with me and with others. We lived 4 hours apart so we didn't see each other much, but it was exactly what I wanted at that time in my life.

Then he ghosted me, and our mutual friends stopped speaking to me.

It took me MONTHS to piece together what had happened. David had met someone else (who made his penis work LOL) and decided that I wasn't his real girlfriend, so he didn't even need to break up with me. His friends (who had been my friends!) supported this idea because David had been complaining to them for YEARS about how unhappy he was with me and how I wanted to fuck other people.

He left out the context that he was impotent (that we'd never managed to have intercourse in 4 years and that he was never enthusiastic about non-intercourse parts of sex) and that he'd told me he was questioning that he might be bisexual. I had never told our mutual friends this context, obviously, because it would be a huge violation of his privacy!

My (former) friends, who I had known for 6 years, never bothered to ask my version of events. Nor did they respect me enough to ever let me know that David's description of our relationship, even while we were dating, never matched mine. I frequently talked about how well things were going with David; they knew he was complaining about me behind my back and never told me. Nor did they ever tell David to TALK TO ME about it? So weird!

It's like they thought I was so awful and villainous that they didn't think David should bother. Or, so disapproving of open relationships, I guess. Once, my friend gave me a weird look after I mentioned something about David and me being happy to be non-exclusive. At the time, I dismissed it as her disapproval of non-monogamy and changed the subject. Later, when I figured out what had been going on behind my back, that look of hers would haunt me and I would regret not calling her out at the time and provoking a conversation. I might have learned the truth about David, or at least been able to get my version of the context out there.

More than 15 years later, neither David nor any of those former friends have ever talked to me again, even though we run in the same creative circles.
 
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So, I get it. You feel your husband encouraged you to be poly, even perhaps pushed you into it when you were doubtful. He encouraged you to date his best friend, even though you all were already getting a house together and you had doubts it was a good idea. He reassured you that everything was fine. He told you that the transition to a platonic relationship would be the positive beginning of something new.

Then, he posted here, claiming to be struggling and suffering while you were happy.

The innocuous explanation is that he was simply managing his feelings on his own and not burdening you with them, or making you feel guilty. He just needed an outlet for feeling sad sometimes. We advise people to do exactly that-- own their feelings and manage them on their own! Don't make the feelings their partner's problem.

I hope that's the case here and that's all it is. Your husband sounded loving, supportive, and thoughtful toward you.

I hope it's not like what my ex David did to me. There was something manipulative in the way David shared certain things with our friends that made me look bad, and left out the things that would have made him look bad and me look reasonable. I spent a long time wondering how deliberate that was, or if that was David's genuine perceptions of me.

Your husband doesn't come across that way to me, at least not initially. However, he omitted the significant context of his history of coercive/abusive sex with you. That's a big deal and I can see why you feel a lack of trust now.

I suppose he could have simply wanted to protect your privacy as much as his own. It's a difficult area to talk about on an anonymous forum.

Regarding this forum: one of the main things we do is help posters identify whether a poly situation is unfair or not, or what aspects stand out as seeming not quite right. (Because the monogamous world will tell you poly is ALL unfair and ALL not right!)

It certainly struck me as unfair that your husband should find himself living in a situation where the sexual connection of his marriage is gone, his best friend is no longer interested in hanging out, and his wife and best friend have a new relationship of their own right down the hall. This sounds pretty objectively like a situation that would be hard for even the most experienced poly person.

However, since your husband has known for a long time about the sexual incompatibility with you and his history of coercing you, that changes things. He could certainly have anticipated this outcome.

From your first post and your husband's posts, I would have guessed that YOU are the optimist and HE is the realist. But now it seems like he is the one who viewed things through rose-colored glasses.

Regarding your boyfriend, I still feel that there's something odd there, something that sounds not quite right. The only things I know about him are that he decided to get a house with his married friends, then he decided to date the wife without seeming too worried about it, then he complained that he wanted more "just us" time with you in the shared house, and makes you feel like you need to divide your time strictly, then he has declined to work on his friendship your husband.

These facts don't sit well with me, but I'm sure there's a lot left out. (Maybe he'll post here too and complete the full Rashomon experience). I hope he's a good support for you emotionally and makes you happy.

Given your post here, I want to make sure that YOU are happy in this situation. You make it sound like your two partners were the ones pushing for this situation when you weren't sure. You have a history of being the recipient of coercion/abuse. You feel like you do everything to please everyone else at the expense of what YOU actually want. And you lash out if you feel like people are telling you you're doing something wrong, because all you've been doing is what OTHER people want and not even what YOU want.

You deserve happiness too.
 
Meera, wow, I am so sorry you went through that! What a hall of mirrors and swathes of deception! I hope the OP reads it and gets something out of it to feel heard and supported. Thanks for sharing your story, my friend.
 
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