Mx. Riff Randell
New member
Hello, I am a 48 year old genderfuck trans guy femboy who has had "open" relationships on and off throughout my entire adult life who is coming to appreciate the difference between "open" and "poly" now that for the first time I have some real feelings involved in one of these.
I feel like this is such a remedial poly question as to barely even be in the poly 101 range (ie, a partner adding a new partner to a poly situation), but I would greatly appreciate any and all advice and links while I'm waiting for my express delivery of The Ethical Slut to arrive.
In a nutshell, I met someone (married cis M, 39, with a cis F wife who also has her own boyfriend) who lives a six hour drive away 15 months ago and formed an extremely close romantic friendship. We are in touch most days by text and have periodic phone calls, and a total of four in person visits, the last of which was about six weeks ago.
Since that trip, while the quality of the texts remained high and they continued to be fairly daily, the volume dried way up as he was "busy" and "stretched thin".
Then, I was delighted that for the first time in our 15 month relationship, he wound up being the one initiating a phone call between us and I felt happy, and just as I was opening my mouth to tell him how much I had been missing him, was looking forward to reconnecting with him, and giving him sympathy for how busy he has been, he disclosed that he is in a new "romantic relationship" with an old crush (cis F) who had moved away but was back visiting her sister, and now he's flying out to visit her in a few weeks.
He didn't offer any relationship reassurances to me, he didn't say anything about how this would affect me, and he didn't solicit how I felt about it.
Though I didn't say anything about it at the time other than wishing him a good trip, I didn't land well with me at all, and, since he wasn't soliciting anything from me anyway, I thought I'd hold off on saying anything until I could sort through my feelings and figure out why.
I'm still sorting it out, but I think it's several things. For starters, the way he had left he interest in other relationships with me was that he wasn't on any apps, wasn't looking for relationships, and to the minor extent that he had bandwidth for anything else, it would be sexual connections. I was down with that and free to do whatever, myself, and we have be supportive of the very limited extracurricular sexual encounters we have both had.
If this was just sexual I'd be high fiving him, again, but the fact that he is already in two very full time romantic relationships (with me and his wife) makes it hard for me to see how he can realistically do three and the fact that I totally noticed the fall off in contact feels like that backs it up a little. Then the roll out where there weren't any reassurances, I don't really know where I stand in all of this or what this means for me, the excitement that he was finally initiating a phone call only to then realize why, and also being ready to give him so much sympathy about how busy he had been, only to again realize why don't make this feel great.
I would appreciate any input while I'm thinking this through. Obviously we need to talk some more about it, but I need to organize my thoughts, and part of what I'm thinking about is that, to be fair, I'm not totally sure what the right way for him to have rolled this all out would have been, since I appreciate he didn't seek it out and he probably didn't want to say anything until he was clear on the situation himself. Thanks in advance.
I feel like this is such a remedial poly question as to barely even be in the poly 101 range (ie, a partner adding a new partner to a poly situation), but I would greatly appreciate any and all advice and links while I'm waiting for my express delivery of The Ethical Slut to arrive.
In a nutshell, I met someone (married cis M, 39, with a cis F wife who also has her own boyfriend) who lives a six hour drive away 15 months ago and formed an extremely close romantic friendship. We are in touch most days by text and have periodic phone calls, and a total of four in person visits, the last of which was about six weeks ago.
Since that trip, while the quality of the texts remained high and they continued to be fairly daily, the volume dried way up as he was "busy" and "stretched thin".
Then, I was delighted that for the first time in our 15 month relationship, he wound up being the one initiating a phone call between us and I felt happy, and just as I was opening my mouth to tell him how much I had been missing him, was looking forward to reconnecting with him, and giving him sympathy for how busy he has been, he disclosed that he is in a new "romantic relationship" with an old crush (cis F) who had moved away but was back visiting her sister, and now he's flying out to visit her in a few weeks.
He didn't offer any relationship reassurances to me, he didn't say anything about how this would affect me, and he didn't solicit how I felt about it.
Though I didn't say anything about it at the time other than wishing him a good trip, I didn't land well with me at all, and, since he wasn't soliciting anything from me anyway, I thought I'd hold off on saying anything until I could sort through my feelings and figure out why.
I'm still sorting it out, but I think it's several things. For starters, the way he had left he interest in other relationships with me was that he wasn't on any apps, wasn't looking for relationships, and to the minor extent that he had bandwidth for anything else, it would be sexual connections. I was down with that and free to do whatever, myself, and we have be supportive of the very limited extracurricular sexual encounters we have both had.
If this was just sexual I'd be high fiving him, again, but the fact that he is already in two very full time romantic relationships (with me and his wife) makes it hard for me to see how he can realistically do three and the fact that I totally noticed the fall off in contact feels like that backs it up a little. Then the roll out where there weren't any reassurances, I don't really know where I stand in all of this or what this means for me, the excitement that he was finally initiating a phone call only to then realize why, and also being ready to give him so much sympathy about how busy he had been, only to again realize why don't make this feel great.
I would appreciate any input while I'm thinking this through. Obviously we need to talk some more about it, but I need to organize my thoughts, and part of what I'm thinking about is that, to be fair, I'm not totally sure what the right way for him to have rolled this all out would have been, since I appreciate he didn't seek it out and he probably didn't want to say anything until he was clear on the situation himself. Thanks in advance.
