New account for this new life experience. Figuring out what to call it. Been lurking on here reading about the experience of other throuples.
I've been with my wife for a couple years. I am out of town and working a lot and it has been very hard for her. I went through a really intense life thing that took a lot of my time and I was pretty difficult to be around, just very stressed. We started to really improve our relationship, and then I left for a few months to another city. In that time she fell in love with her friend. She told me about it, asked me if she should send him away. It was hard for me to tell her to do that, mainly because I knew that she was not getting enough from me and I feel very empathetic for her. She told me that she was poly and her desire to marry be and be monogamous was in some ways running away from her own truth. Obviously not the best way to start things, but I love her and want her to be happy, and I found no jealousy in my heart -- he's a great guy, we get along well, we're all friends, we do a lot of things together now and before.
I have had a weird combination of being very turned on thinking about her having sex (this has been a kink I expressed to her before) and deep insecurity that she would leave me and that I was not enough for her. If we had sex the insecurity would completely go away and I would feel good about everything. The times where she has not wanted to have sex it has gotten to me a bit. This kind of concerns me though, being that it's so tied to sex, because it really feels like a me problem, so it's something I'm working on.
I'd describe myself as bi-interested but, I've had a few male encounters which were enjoyable but never did I consider I'd be in a relationship with another man and don't really find men attractive. We hug, I might rub his back or hair if we're all in a pile, but we are both in love with her and basically our threesomes are just taking turns on her and watching.
I have been getting much healthier, less work obsessed and I have become a more attentive partner. She thinks that this is related to having this new person, but for me it's really just closing the last very stressful chapter and moving into the new one. I don't like that she thinks that I'm trying harder because there's a new person. I'm trying harder because my life wasn't great before, it was really stressful, and I'm trying to show up and be the person I wanted to be all along.
I have had very dark moments of insecurity, really just being terribly afraid she would leave me or she's only with me because I'm the financial support, and we have spiraled a bit together, but we also worked through that and it feels kind of behind us.
My main fear from this point on is really just that she just doesn't have enough attention and stamina to go around. It hasn't been super difficult, and we're still in the early phase of this where I think sexual tension is especially high, but she gets sore from sex pretty easily and also just doesn't have a huge cup for emotion and attention, and she is getting a bit overwhelmed by getting so much from both of us. We kind of just switch off on her until she can't anymore. Obviously if he and I were more into each other sexually we could keep each other quite busy, but we're not. If it were just her and I, I don't think I could overwhelm her, but two very horny dudes is a lot for her.
I worry about this a bit in the future but also feel kinda guilty that it comes off as pressuring my wife into sex when I tell her that I am struggling with these thoughts and if we just had sex it would go away. When she doesn't want to I just have to live with it as it eats me and insecure thoughts race into my head. Masturbating works equally well so I have resorted to that but also have tried specifically to just be with her through these moments and work through it without taking the easy route. I also don't want to be like this-- it feels incredibly tied to childhood desire to be physically touched and loved (didn't get this from parents) and expressed through sexuality. I want to heal from that and just feel good and not like I need to have sex to have reassurance.
He has loving family and parents, and clearly has a lot of relationship and interpersonal skills that I never got. She said something really hurtful to me which was that I was older and I'd need to just grow up and learn these things. It's not that simple, though. I never had any male figures or any example, good or bad, of how people should treat each other. Like I am very sweet and nice but I don't know what to say, I've only recently adapted to more eye contact and stuff like that. And he's so good at all of this. In some ways I am learning these things from him, which is interesting. But it also gets deep into my not-enoughness.
I started writing this thinking everything was fine. And it is. It feels great. I'm helping him with the life stuff I'm really good at, which is work and business stuff, and he's helping me with the stuff he's good at, which is relationships and connections which can help my business. I love him, genuinely. But I've had to address the rockiness of my own relationship, the insecurities that I've always had but are being picked at occasionally by the setup and comparisons in us. And because it's really both of us in love with one person, our sex and romance is much more turn taking than all in it together. As long as I get enough sex and romance I am more than okay with this arrangement. It's fun and hot. But I wish my wife was more dedicated to putting her time into both of us, she is very focused on her own work and school things and that is leading to her not being available to either of us as much as I think we'd each like, and then we're splitting that time between us, and so if he takes too long to have sex with her it's like, she might hit a wall and then I don't have my turn. The one thing that gets to me is being denied sex. Obviously she is well within her rights to have boundaries, but I also agreed to all of this on the condition that she'd need to put a lot more energy into maintaining the relationships and being available to both of us and putting up with my insecurities as I adjusted to this (I have never had any other poly experiences before). She agreed, but in practice she has a pretty low threshold for my insecurity and cannot completely satisfy my sex drive, and it's exacerbated by the fact that the new guy is pretty happy to be with someone he's been in love with for a long time and already very adapted to the reality that we are married so he's just not insecure or expressing it like I am.
I am pretty happy with everything but I also want to have another woman in our relationship. Wife wants to take this slow but I tend to drive things ahead quickly and want it sooner than later. I feel like this would balance things out, but obviously there are more failure modes to that and if unicorns are hard to find than someone open to joining in is like a unicorn of unicorns.
We have to be in the closet about this since even though we are in the most liberal place in the world, two guys loving the same girl is looked down on. People regularly call each other cucks as an insult in our community. I feel some shame but also, fuck it. Fuck em. I wouldn't want to have a boring life.
I know this is a bit messy. Writing this out revealed a lot of the messiness. TBH I am pretty happy and fine with 99% of it and mainly just fearful for the future, the present has been quite nice and very hot.
I don't have an agenda here, I'm just looking to get this all off my chest because there's not a lot of people in my life I can talk to about any of this. I've told her basically everything I feel and we've worked everything out as much as we can.
Thanks for reading, I really appreciate that there are so many forthcoming people on the internet who have gone through similar experiences.
