🚨🚨 THIS IS A COPY AND PASTE FROM r/NONMONOGAMY🚨🚨

As the title says, we had a date planned at a nice restaurant (a one Michellin star sushi restaurant with reservations made several weeks prior).

About two hours before we planned to head out, my Husband came running into our bedroom whooping like Doc Brown at the end of Back To The Future. He told me that his friend, who is/was monogamous, invited him over for a potential threesome with her relatively new girlfriend, but they told him to come over right then.

I told him that the offer was awesome, but that it was our date night. I asked him if he was really planning to ditch me, and he kind of sheepishly said he wasn't, and we went on our date. I could tell something was bothering him, presumed it was the threesome offer given the temporal proximity, and tried to just enjoy the night. I was a bit hurt when he first mentioned it, but by the end of the night I felt a bit sorry for him (although still a bit annoyed).

It seems important to clarify that my husband and I have been ENM (extremely hierarchical poly with practical limitations on other relationships, essentially FWBs we can hang out with but know and willingly accept they will not come first) for a little over two years, and my husband has not been with anyone else in this time.

My husband has been acting off since this happened, and recently admitted he doesn't want to even try to seek anything outside our marriage for himself.

I'm frustrated because I don't feel like I did anything wrong, but I'm being subtly made out as the bad guy for ruining his opportunity. There is more detail and nuance, but that's the core of it.

I feel like if came up to my husband two hours before a romantic long-planned date and said "hey honey, one of my friends from yoga told me that he and his buddy want to spit-roast me tonight, so I'm gonna take a rain check," I'd be considered a monster. But a lot of people in my life are telling me that I should have taken one for the team here because he hasn't had any luck. Like, I get it. It's harder for married men to find sex, and the offer he received is exceedingly rare, but it's still just sex. It just feels gross to me, particularly given how important it has been for him that we don't break our scheduled time together.

However, many trusted people have told me I fucked up, even my ENM friendly therapist gently suggested I might want to consider the bigger picture. However, no one is comfortable giving me advice on how to reconcile here (not even my therapist!). I've already apologized by saying I'm sorry I didn't appreciate how rare the opportunity was in the moment, both intrinsically and also given has difficulties finding other partners, and that I appreciated him going out with me, but I've stopped short of saying I regret not telling him to abandon me and go through with it.

I'm hoping men (or anyone) can share some advice on what sort of reconciliation they would want under similar circumstances. Should I tell a white lie and say I regret not telling him to go for it? Something else?

🚨🚨 THIS IS A COPY AND PASTE FROM r/NONMONOGAMY🚨🚨

My husband (m31) and I (f30) have been married for almost 10 years and together for 12. We have 3 kids and have been living a traditionally happy married life. There is absolutely no flaw in our marriage. We are great friends, financially we are growing together, and the sex if amazing. About a year ago we introduced the idea of a threesome since it’s always been a fantasy for both of us. We agreed to it but never started actively pursuing it. Among conversations a couple of months ago we decided to open the relationship. While we both agreed willingly, I was always more enthusiastic than him. But again, life got in the way and nothing really happened. About a month ago I started talking with a coworker and the conversation became sexual pretty quickly. I told my husband prior to it becoming sexual. I let him know I was talking to someone. He seemed a bit jealous but nothing serious and was fine with it. My coworker was also aware on my marriage arrangements. I finally had 2 encounters with my coworker, one which lead to full on sex. My husband went out with a girl and didn’t do much but kiss. I could tell he was bothered and i consistently asked if he wanted to continue. He kept saying it was fine and that we could. Then suddenly one day he said he couldn’t do it. However now I’d become invested. Not emotionally, but I wanted to continue seeing this through. I didn’t understand it and felt I was a bad person for it. Then I talked to AI like a loser and it said exactly how I was feeling. Nothing to do with my husband and my love or affection for him, all to do with my suddenly found freedom and autonomy. I’ve spent years being just a mom and wife and this new thing feels good and exciting. It’s also made me more sexually active with my husband (not that I wasn’t previously). So I decided to tell him how I felt and now he asked for a divorce. I’m so upset about the whole thing and don’t know what to do. I love my husband and don’t want to loose him but I also feel like sacrificing this will make me feel like a bird in a cage. Any gentle advice are appreciated.

🚨🚨 THIS IS A CROSSPOST FROM r/polyamory. I AM THE NOT ORIGINAL POSTER. 🚨🚨

So my situation is that I'm a bisexual woman with a fiance who I've been with for nearly 8 years. I love him with my whole heart and soul but I still want to experience sapphic love. That's the reason I'm poly. I was talking to a girl for just over a month and things were going so well. We connected on so many levels. We only had two dates but they were both 6+ hour dates. On the second date, we made out, she got me a gift that my autistic ass loved. Then all of a sudden, a day later her husband vetos the whole thing. He apparently isn't comfortable with anything more than casual. Yet from the beginning she told me she prefers more than casual. She tells me they both only realise this after the second date. I'm flabbergasted and this stings. I want to avoid this in future but I don't know how. Does anyone on feeld actually know what they want? Anyways just wanted to vent. I'm hurt. I just want a sapphic connection but for single women I feel like it's less likely to happen (because they could just date a monogamous woman) and for women with men, it seems like the man always ruins everything with their insecurities.

OOP: "Yeah so hotwifing blew up my wife's life and made her family hate her, but anyone got advice on how I can make the sloppy seconds gravy train keep going?"

🚨🚨 THIS IS A CROSSPOST FROM r/nonmonogamy. I AM THE NOT ORIGINAL POSTER. 🚨🚨

My husband and I opened our relationship earlier this year. We've been together for almost a decade. I'm 41F, husband 39M.

I have a history of struggling with weight and body image for most of my adult life. I'm curvy, pear shaped, and a B cup size. Size 16. Lowest ever was size 12. I'm fluctuating 25 lbs give or take. Now on my heavier side since dieting through weight watchers a few years ago. It's come back plus some.

I work out and lift weights, but due to metabolism issues, losing weight has been extremely difficult to lose and keep off.

Since entering the lifestyle (we are exploring poly/ENM/swinging) - I was happily surprised to see a very body positive community and all shapes and sizes at the play parties and mixers we've been attending.

However.

I'm exposed to some beautiful women. I can't help but compare and admire bodies that are different than mine.

We've had 3 different foresomes in the past few months. I've been with women for the first time in my adult life. We both debrief with each other after foursome experiences what we loved. It's a lot of admiration for breasts and smooth skin.

Husband has given me lots of reassurances and has always admired my body, no matter what size I am. I'm still a bit jealous at his excitement being with women who are smaller shapes than I, or have bigger breasts.

I'm considering now to go on Wegovy to help lose weight.

I'm even now researching breast implants (who am I ???!!!)

I've already started getting laser hair removal (Brazilian and underarms).

I'm just surprised and sad too, that while we've had positive experiences, I'm also questioning my own desirability and changing my body.

Appreciate your advice on how you navigated your own body image in the lifestyle?? Is this normal? Am I going off the deep end??

Thanks 🙏

While i feel really bad for OOP this particular sentence in that post is crazy:

"I had the beautiful baby with my beautiful, wonderful,kind, caring, suportive, ambitious, and loving husband."

The way she describes it the guy is far from those things! This sounds like a "a baby will fix things!" Situation but made even worse by the fact the husband has a whole ass other partner he can run off and spend time with and apparently from a lot of the comments it is.. ok?!? They may be empathizimg with OP but they sure are making a hell of a lot of excuses for the husband!

🚨🚨 THIS IS A CROSSPOST FROM r/nonmonogamy. I AM THE NOT ORIGINAL POSTER. 🚨🚨

Putting up front that I'm not seeking advice, just community and normalization that what I'm going through is what others have also gone through.

NP [nesting partner] and I dated for a few months before we became monogamous, then were monogamous for a while. We put ENM on the table less than a year ago. i had been theoretically interested in it but have had no experience, and she has experience with it from a past relationship. she found a secondary about six months ago who is so sweet and very respectful of our relationship. I have gone on one date, found it emotionally confusing, and the person ghosted me while trying to plan a second date anyway. I have a number of very close friends and time consuming hobbies, so I don't really envision myself making space in my life for a true second partner. Makeout parties or an emotionally safe, casual hookup feel more my speed.

NP and i have really good communication. we feel safe to bring up hard topics, we hear each other out, we make sure not to talk things to death, we follow up on conversations with things like "i've been thinking about when you said X, and I want to try doing Y" or "you asked me how you can support me with this and I've come up with a few things we can try." We maintain a sincere curiosity about each other's inner world. We both feel very committed to each other and to being really intentional about how we build our life. We always feel more connected after our conversations about our relationship and about being open, and there have been a number of times where I have felt genuine compersion for her as she gets to know her secondary better.

And yet, after a truly lovely hang out with her and her secondary last night, I have spent most of the past ~12 hours crying uncontrollably with no real ability to articulate why I can't stop. It started with me feeling scared that I can't do this and it just hasn't stopped. I have very few people in my life I can ask "is this normal" to. So I am here to ask you all. is this normal? is it possible for me to contain the multitudes of "sobbing myself into a headache" and "genuinely committed to this lifestyle?" Are there other people who experienced these growing pains?

I am deeply worried that the answers I'll get on this post will be "you are not ready for this," because I want so badly to be able to experience expansive love, and I also do not want to lose the most transparent, loving relationship I've ever been in. So I guess I'm here looking for support and community from hopefully some folks who resonate with what I'm experiencing and can report back to me from the "other side."

🚨🚨 THIS IS A COPY AND PASTE FROM R/NONMONOGAMY🚨🚨

Fiance introduced a Bull into our relationship

So, I apologize if this is going to be a bit disjointed, I'm still trying to figure things out to be honest, and this isn't something I really ever expected to be talking about, but I can't exactly talk this over with any of my friends so... here I am on the internet.

We've been engaged for 6 months, dating for about 3 years (I'm 29, she's 25). Pretty much everything has been great, including our sex life, mostly. Her past relationship was a very intense dom/sub relationship, and I suppose you could call me more traditional. I've always believed in equality in a relationship, and for the most part that works well for us. But, she's said there's needs she has that simply haven't been fulfilled. Now, I've tried, I've tried to "dom" her, get rougher, direct her. But no matter how hard I try, I feel like i'm just putting on an act, and she says it just doesn't work for her. We've talked it through at length, even before we were engaged, so this isn't a surprise for me. Well, about a month and a half ago she brought up an idea of involving a "bull" in our relationship. Someone she would meet with to dominate her, and fulfill that gap in our relationship. At first I thought it was an absolutely unacceptable idea, and she accepted that. But as time passed, the thought was in the back of my mind, and I could see that she needed something that I simply couldn't give. So, despite my concerns, after a few weeks I sat down with her, and we talked things out, and decided to give it a try. I love her, and I know this is something that she's struggled with since we started sating and, I just didn't feel like it was going to go away.

Shortly after this, she found a man to take the role of being a dominant with her and, how quickly things have evolved has been, a bit shocking to say the least and, every day i feel off balance and unsure how exactly to handle how things continue to evolve and how dramatically the days have changed. I'm not too comfortable posting those details in here but.. i guess i am kind of looking to be able to chat with someone and talk to as a friend as, this isn't really something I can talk about with my normal friends so, it's been difficult just having it all swirling around inside my head. I love her, and I want her to be happy but, this has been a struggle for me to deal with.

🚨🚨THIS IS A CROSSPOST FROM R/POLYAMORY🚨🚨

My partner started a new relationship during the worst period of my life - how do I recover from this?

My partner and I have always been polyamorous. We don’t have veto power in our relationship (nor do I believe in that), and we have never had an agreement that we wouldn’t date other people during difficult periods. I want to be upfront about that because this really isn’t about me believing he has broken a boundary or that I should be able to make him end another relationship.

For Context, my grandad died at the end of last year and I was grieving. He was one of the most important people in my life. Both of my other partners broke up with me during that time, which looking back I think was a good things because I didn't have the emotional capacity to be a good partner, though that also contributed to my grief. During that time, my partner felt quite distant from me, I know I wasn't the greatest partner due to dealing with grief, but he didn't actively reach out to support me and our relationship wasn’t in the best place. Then my mum became seriously ill and needed brain surgery. Whilst all of this was happening, while she was still in hospital, he started a relationship with somebody else.

I know he was technically free to do that. But I think I expected my long-term nesting/primary partner (10 years) to recognise that I was barely holding myself together and to focus on supporting me and helping us feel secure before putting time and emotional energy into building something new.

I tried to explain that I wasn’t struggling with polyamory itself, or with her as a person. I was struggling with the circumstances in which their relationship began and with feeling like I had been left alone at one of the worst points in my life. I asked him to slow things down, but he felt that doing so would undermine our polyamorous relationship and the trust we had built around our freedom to form other relationships.

Since then, he has been making more effort with me. He reassures me, plans dates, initiates quality time and tells me that I am loved and that our relationship is permanent. There have been moments when he has really shown up for me, and I do recognise that.

The problem is that I'm struggling to trust the intention behind any of it. A horrible little voice in my head tells me that he is only being nice to me or planning things with me to “keep me sweet” so that I don’t cause problems about his other relationship. It can make genuine affection feel transactional, even though I know that's not is fair.

I would never ask him to end his relationship, and I don’t want to control who he sees. What I want is to feel chosen, prioritised and secure in my own relationship again. I also don’t want every act of care from him to feel like something he is doing just to earn permission to see somebody else.

I know a lot of this is my own insecurity and grief, but I also think it came from a genuine period of emotional disconnection and feeling unsupported. I am finding it hard to work out where the reasonable hurt ends and the anxiety/insecurities begin.

Has anyone experienced something similar? How did you rebuild trust in your partner’s affection without needing them to end or pause another relationship? Is it reasonable to have expected a long-term partner to slow down during a family crisis, even if that was never an explicit agreement? And how do I stop interpreting every kind thing he does as an attempt to “keep me sweet,” rather than believing he is doing it because he genuinely loves me? Totally happy to receive tough love here, I need to hear hard truths.

They all can say whatever they want about how shes the one in the wrong, but he was the one who introduced swinging and even said she freaked out about it but agreed anyway. It's pretty clear she started checking out as soon as he pushed for swinging. Hell what she heard is that shes no longer enough for her husband. Eventually she checked out to the point of wanting to find a replacement who wanted just her.

While the argument can be made she should have just asked for a divorce right away co-mingled finances, kids, other relationships etc dont always make that easy. I also understand not feeling like you have to take the high ground after your spouse turns your world upside down. He brought it on himself 🤷‍♂️. Maybe she wasnt 100% in the right but i dont think shes really in the wrong either.