Hi Pastehead,
This sounds like a really difficult time for you and your wife. I
was introduced to polyamory in a similar manner to yours and am still hurting from it, 70 days in. If I could rewind time, I would have sat my partner down and said "We're going too fast. We don't understand polyamory. We're still emotionally monogamous. We are underestimating the power of NRE and we are underestimating the power of jealousy." If I had the guts, I would have told my wife, "We can do polyamory, but we can't do it with this man because you and he have broken my trust in starting out with an (emotional) affair." I should have said, "I find this man inherently threatening to our relationship because he has shown me a disrespect in choosing to have an affair with you. He has never apologised and expects me to now sanction this affair by hiding it behind an ethical framework."
That's a big sentence, it shows my pain still and I need to take a breath. Your relationship is not the same as my relationship. Please don't be offended if I say things that show my hurt. I'm not completely well yet and I hope my comments help a little, though I realise they may also rub you the wrong way if you don't agree with them. I apologise for this in advance and hope I can still be of help.
Transitioning from
monogamy to polyamory is really difficult. Recovering from an affair is also really difficult. Neither was actually difficult for me individually, but when combined, I was introduced to a whole world of hurt.
I am uncertain as to the details of your wife's affair. Your quote below seems to say it was a woman, but then says it was with a man? Could you clarify for us please?
i dont have issues with the affair makes it easier as it was with a women. My gf new foynd desires are aimed at a male considerably older than herself and me.
Regardless, transitioning from a previously monogamous relationship to polyamory via an affair is real tough.
Experienced counsellors have said they have never seen it happen successfully with the original relationship intact. In my search for a counterexample, I found 2 rare relationships that seemed to have survived, but none have so far lasted more than a few months:
Example 1: A man cheated on his wife in a previously monogamous relationship and his wife agreed to enter polyamory. Somewhat unexpectedly, the wife and the affair partner developed a sexual relationship, which probably helped with the transition and feelings of jealousy. Another factor that I think is helpful is that the wife had full control over how quickly the transition process took place as evidenced by the fact that she called it all off after 2 months, took a while to process it, then said they could try again. Polyamory took a few months to happen but we hear nothing from the author after a while. Experienced polyamorists all over will say that this is an exceptional circumstance and I feel that the fact that it lasted even a few months is incredible. I hope it's still continuing but experienced polyamorists seem to feel that the situation would probably not work out in the long run.
Example 2: This guy is awesome. He and his wife transitioned from being a previously monogamous couple to a polyamorous relationship from what I believe was his wife's emotional affair. You may ask Al99 directly as to how he did this, but I feel that factors helping Al99 include his wife's commitment to proceeding with polyamory at the rate of the slowest person (that is, at Al's rate, or equivalently, giving Al99 full control of the rate at which he was comfortable with the progression of her relationship with her affair partner), a long distance relationship that limits physical contact to once a month, and Al's unique ability to really work through jealousy and feel compersion.
Example 3: From post 19 onwards, JaneQSmythe, an already experienced polyamorist describes how an emotional/semi-physical affair almost completely destroyed her and her partner. It took years to recover to where it is now. I will highlight that JaneQSmythe and her partner only had to deal with an affair or broken boundaries, and did not have to deal with a transition from monogamy to polyamory at the same time, potentially making this easier, though I'm sure JaneQSmythe found nothing easy about the situation at the time.
There are many many examples of previously monogamous couples who fail to transition to polyamory with an affair partner. I feel my wife and I failed mainly because the new relationship energy she felt for her affair partner propelled her to further the relationship faster than I could handle. Simultaneously, I was unable to devote time to understanding and managing my jealousy at a rate that satisfied her. I felt I was mistreated, which lead to jealousy. The exact way in which mistreatment led to jealousy is still a mystery to me, but I feel it may have had to do with my fear that her mistreatment of me was evidence of a lack of love, which in turn made me despair the loss of my relationship with my wife. Despair, and maybe the contempt I thought I felt from her as I was unable to allow her the freedom of enjoying her new partner... nothing kills love like contempt.
I will end by saying that my wife and I really felt that we had an unsinkable ship. The one hole in our relationship was my wife's desire for relationships with other men which, as a monogamous couple, we never found a way of dealing with. Polyamory gave us a philosophy in which we could understand and deal with this. Polyamory was wonderful. We took to polyamory like it was a blessing but attempted to transition too fast. Polyamory is hard. Real hard. A relationship that starts with an affair has lots of invisible hurts that needs to be healed. I never saw any hurt in me as I started polyamory. Her affair didn't bother me in the least. I was filled with compersion for my wife. I really felt like I was falling in love again. I was so excited, so keen, and really, so arrogant in thinking I would not suffer from jealousy. After I started polyamory, all the hurts and injustices of the last 10 years just seemed to pour in - hurts and injustices that had never bothered me in the past. It was a really painful experience and despite my personal growth from the situation, I would recommend transitioning from monogamy to polyamory via an affair in the same way I would recommend you get cancer and chemotherapy just for personal development.
EDIT: Apologies to anyone who has actually had to go through cancer and chemotherapy. That's obviously much worse.
You also say you are feeling inadequate. One of the largest lessons I learnt from this was that my wife's affair had more to do with her issues, her love attachment styles and her insecurities than it had to do with me as a person. This may not be immediately obvious, but websites on affair recovery, limerence/obsession and love/sex addiction may help with this understanding. You are not inadequate. Your wife's affair has nothing to do with you as a person - it's her affair, it's her fantasies and is likely to reflect her emotional and mental state far more than you as a person. (And if your wife is reading this, I don't mean your wife any disrespect either - these things happen. But your husband is hurting, and from an affair recovery perspective, accepting that he is not inadequate is the fastest way for a hurt partner to recover self confidence). Back to you Pastehead, if it was you she had a problem with, she would have divorced you first. The problem is not with you.
Finally, your wife might want to share her side of the story as well, otherwise the advice we give will likely be one sided, biased, and likely to be insulting to your wife as we fail to take her emotions and needs into account.
Good luck. And please keep us updated on how you're going.
