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Originally Posted by Ustwo
Good luck to you, but having been involved in swinging off and on for several years, I can tell you that open marriages often end in disaster and I wouldn't recomend it to anyone. Someone gets left out, and gets hurt. Often it seems they leave for a play partner, and I've seen the sob story again and again on swingers boards, which tend to get posts from open marriage types as well even though they are not the same.
With swingers or poly's the is a respect by all for the underlying relationship, with an open marriage the other partner doesn't give a rats ass about your relationship with your spouse. At best I see it as having 'allowed' affairs, at worst I see it as a ticket for divorce.
Maybe its just me with a biased perspective based on what I've seen, but I've never known a happy long term, until death do you part, open relationship, I've only seen the broken marriages.
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I thank you for your input, but I am not too worried about it at all. Our marriage is quite strong, and in fact, it occurs to me that our marriage has advantages that tradition marriages do not.
For one thing, if she has an extramarital fling, I will know about it the very next time we talk, whereas in a traditional marriage, the cheating spouse will typically try to keep it a secret as long as possible.
You might not think that is a big deal, and I used think it wasn't a big deal, but during the years she was keeping her affair a secret, our marriage was hell. She had so much guilt and remorse it was tearing her and us apart. She would spontaeously cry for no reason. Once she said it was because she was thinking about her cat that died. The cat had been dead for 5 years. Another time she started crying while we were having sex.
The closest we ever came to divorce was when she was keeping that secret and I couldn't figure out why I couldn't make her happy.
Another advantage of our arrangement is that not very many men could offer her more freedom than I have. It is very unlikely that she would leave me anyway. She is crazily in love with me, but it doesn't make sense that she would leave me for someone who would, in all likelihood, offer her a more restrictive relationship. I am giving her the freedom to have as few or as many flings as she wants, and still come back to me with open arms and passionate kisses. Do you honestly think she could find a better deal than that?
I don't worry at all about our marriage. She isn't going to be out hunting cock at age 70. She is going to be hanging out with me watching PBS. She is the woman I will grow old with and the reason she is that woman is because she and I have a marriage that is perfect for us. If we had maintained our marriage as it was before, we would be probably end up divorced. This "open marriage" business saved our marriage.
I know that like I know I am sitting here typing these words.
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
What you do have going for you is that most open relationships have people looking for sex, its not a circumstantial thing like you described, so I suppose you may be more like 'condoned affairs' than an open marriage that most people seem to talk about having.
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Good point, and in fact, that's why I wasn't even sure if it could be called an "open marriage". As I said, the only other couple we knew in an open marriage were two horny creeps who used to get each other laid. He would hunt for guys for his wife, and she would hunt for chicks for him.
I take that back. When I was in the Navy, there was a guy who was supposedly in an "open marriage" but the way he talked about it... man, he was really uncomfortable. He tried to act like he was all cool with it, but the more he talked, the more I suspected that SHE wanted the open marriage so that she could fuck other men while he was at sea. I really believed that was what was going on.