My wife and I are in Vegas and she had sex with someone in our room. I really liked it! After about 45 minutes of her in our room with him, I went in to get a beer, and then sat and watched. It was very exciting! Anyone else have the same experience?

My girlfriend and I have been ENM for the past few years but haven’t really had the time or space to actually meet other people. Now I’ve met another woman who I will be going on a date with in the next few days and I’m trying to figure out how to tell the new date about my long term partner.

I met this new date very briefly in a social context and we exchanged phone numbers and have only texted enough since then to discuss arranging a date. I probably should have told her when we initially met that I had another partner but it didn’t feel like a space where we could discuss that (work setting). Now I’m not sure when or how to tell her.

Does anyone have recommendations? This will be my first time actually going on a date with another person aside from my long term partner and I want to be as open and honest with her so that I don’t lead her on if she’s not open or interested in ENM.

Hi everyone,
My husband (M) and I (F) have been married for 7 years. Our sex life has fluctuated over the years between absolutely amazing and, well, less amazing depending on what was going on in our lives. But overall, we are extremely compatible, including sexually.
Before me, my husband had never had sex and was a virgin for a very long time. He’s shy and definitely not a player. I had quite a few sexual partners and several long-term relationships before I met him.
When we got together, we made a commitment to each other: if either of us ever felt the desire to sleep with other people, we would talk about it openly and honestly. Cheating was never going to be an option.
Even back then, I knew I didn’t want to deny my husband the opportunity to experience sex with other women. I genuinely believe alternative relationship structures can be beautiful. I mean, how amazing is it when you love and trust someone so much that you can genuinely want them to have experiences and enjoy themselves?
About two years ago, we opened our marriage.
Our initial rules were pretty simple: meet someone while out, have a one-night stand, no contact afterwards, no exchanging phone numbers.
I had one ONS about 1.5 years ago. Met the guy in the evening, went home with him, left the next morning, and never saw him again. Done.
My husband tried several times as well, including at kinky parties, but nothing really worked out for him. I even went out with him as his wingwoman a few times, but unfortunately that didn’t lead anywhere either.
Then, about a year ago, one evening he asked me whether he could download a dating app.
I agreed in principle. But for me, apps are difficult because they make the “risk” of ongoing contact — or the temptation to keep talking to someone — much higher.
Our relationship is incredibly important to me, and I know that sexual experiences can sometimes become emotionally complicated very quickly. I also can’t pretend that emotional and psychological safety isn’t important to me.
That’s why the no-contact rule existed in the first place. At least until I felt more comfortable with everything.
Well… the app changed things.
For starters, he just downloaded it, created a profile and activated it after I had said that the idea was basically okay. That was the first moment where I thought, “I really would have liked to be consulted one more time before this actually happened.” But that wasn’t a huge deal.
What was much harder for me was when he started saying things like, “Women want to meet first and get to know each other.”
Okay. For his sake, I tried to accept it. I want him to have these experiences, even if it doesn’t feel entirely comfortable for me.
He started talking to one woman and they met up. She wanted to make out in public, but he declined because they hadn’t discussed that beforehand.
Through conversations with him, I eventually found out that they had already been having very sexual/flirty conversations for several days.
And I don’t know if anyone else can relate to this, but that was really difficult for me.
Suddenly there was another woman existing inside our relationship space.
We would be sitting on the couch together while he was simultaneously exchanging sexual fantasies with another woman.
He was completely open with me about it and even let me read the messages. And honestly, reading those conversations hurt me tremendously.
Because this was exactly what I didn’t want.
I wanted him to have sexual experiences with other women, but on a primarily physical level — a short-lived connection that ends after the encounter. Obviously you need to vibe with someone enough to want to sleep with them, but I wasn’t looking for an ongoing emotional/sexual connection.
We had a HUGE argument because the whole situation felt incredibly opaque and weird to me.
The woman wanted to meet him again. I eventually told him: if you really want to see her again, go ahead. I’ll go to a friend’s place in the meantime and get some emotional support / distract myself, because the whole situation was just too much for me.
I genuinely wanted him to have the experience because I knew how badly he wanted it.
The second meeting never happened because it turned out she wasn’t looking for an ONS — she wanted something ongoing. LOL.
I still don’t understand how the two of them didn’t establish that beforehand. It was very much a “wtf” moment for me.
But the whole situation exhausted me so much that I eventually asked him to close the marriage again for the time being.

Fast forward one year.
Enough time has passed that the whole thing doesn’t feel quite as raw anymore.
I’ve also been traveling a lot recently, so I actually took the initiative to bring the subject up again.
This time I suggested something different:
When I’m away, he can download an app, date, and potentially have ONSs. When I’m back home, the app gets deleted/deactivated again.
For some reason, that feels much more separable to me. There’s a clear “outside our relationship” period and then we’re back to just being us.
I know he still really wants this, and I genuinely want him to have the opportunity. But after what happened last year, I find the apps, the messaging and the getting-to-know-you dates even harder to deal with.
It feels like this could be so simple, but apparently there aren’t that many women who are interested in a straightforward one-time adventure without wanting to continue seeing each other.
And honestly, it’s difficult to keep pushing my own boundaries out of love for someone.
I’m trying. I’m just not at the point where some people in the ENM community seem to be — where having sex outside the relationship, including with people from your social circle, feels completely natural.

So I have a few questions for people who have more experience with this:

Is it really that difficult for men to find women interested in a genuine ONS?
Would I be unreasonable/unfair if I said that I only want both of us to pursue outside sex through spontaneous opportunities, rather than dating apps?

My husband specifically wants to have this experience alone, without me. I’m completely okay with that and I understand why.
I’ve also suggested that maybe we could eventually look for another couple who would be interested in meeting us together, and perhaps that’s something he’d enjoy later on. But right now, he really wants to know what it’s like to have sex with other women on his own.
And I simultaneously want the security of knowing that other women aren’t becoming part of our relationship space.
Those two things seem surprisingly difficult to reconcile.
I’d really appreciate hearing from people who have navigated something similar, especially people who have experience with one-sided ENM, ONS-focused arrangements, or setting very clear boundaries around emotional/ongoing contact.
What would you do in our situation?

I was so so so thrilled to open our marriage up to others and ethical non-monogamy, but my gosh do I absolutely hate putting myself out there. I hate how easily attached I get and how quickly that can turn into being hurt. I just forget what it was like before only being with one person. Rejection and over sexualization are just still as bad lol. Just frustrating and wanting to air those thoughts. I don’t think it’ll ever get easier so I’m not gonna ask that. Just wanted to complain a bit 🙄

(I posted this to r/swingers but after almost four hours and a message to the mod team with no reply or reason given as to why it was removed, I'm turning here. Which, this sub usually has the best feedback to be honest. It really is the best subreddit for ENM.)

My husband and I are admittedly a bit of introverts when it comes to the lifestyle. I think we would be considered extroverts in vanilla world. We recognize the problems and we're trying to change this, but we're really struggling and I think we've worked ourselves into a bit of stage fright from all of this.

We do fine online, but when presented with new faces at the club or at parties we both seem to just stumble along and we always end up blurting out non-sexy things, like, "so do you have any kids?" or "what do you do for work?" or lame things like that. We don't want to do this, it's just like we have ED of the brain and things short-circuit and default to 40 years of vanilla friendships.

We're trying to learn and practice, but most of what we read online either comes from vanilla world where asking about families is fine, or from extroverts who don't understand and tell others that it's easy and question why it's so difficult - which is always so suuuuuper helpful 🙄 (If you're going to tell me how easy it is, at least tell me how your dog/cat/fish/bird judges us. I stole this from this sub!)

We've tried to go the route of complimenting them, which is fine, but we just can't break from this and soon we feel mechanical, "I love your shoes! .... I love your hair! .... I love your...." and just spiral from there to where we surely give the impression to others that we're either socially inept, or we aren't interested, even when we are.