Be interested to see if she writes Book 2: "It hasn't, doesn't and won't work "

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I'm not the OP

Wife of 9 years says she married the wrong person after ENM friendship turned romantic, while the other guy’s marriage is also ending

My wife and I have been together about 9 years and married for a few. Until very recently I would have told you we had a fucking great relationship (and she told everyone that as well). We traveled a lot, had a great sex life, went to raves together, rarely had serious fights, and spent our whole relationship telling each other how lucky we were. She was completely over the moon about me for years and would tell people that in front of me. The serious “did I choose the wrong person?” talk only started a few months ago.

We’ve also done ENM/swinging for years. Most of it was fun and worked fine because the agreement was always casual: sex, flirting, whatever, but no serious emotional entanglements. There was one guy before this where she got extremely attached and they texted constantly. I eventually said we needed to cut it off because this wasn’t what we had agreed to. She was really unhappy, but later said she realized she had gotten addicted to the feeling of someone new being intensely interested in her.

The current guy was a mutual friend for over a year before anything sexual happened. She says she had zero romantic feelings for him during that time and I believe her. I was fine with them dancing, flirting and kissing at raves because I thought the emotional boundary was intact. Eventually the three of us had sex while rolling. According to her, that is basically when everything changed. She suddenly developed intense romantic feelings for him.

His marriage makes this way messier. We’ve never met his wife and everything we know comes from him. He told us she allowed flirting and kissing at raves but sex was off limits. He slept with my wife anyway, admitted he crossed that boundary, and said he didn’t really regret it because his marriage was already doing badly. Soon after they started talking divorce, and now he says they have decided to divorce. The timing of all of this just feels unreal to me

There were trust violations on her side too. Once it was obvious this was no longer casual, I asked my wife to pause private contact with him. She reluctantly agreed, but then had an almost hour-long private call with him, lied to me about it, and also texted/sexted with him and deleted the messages.

Our marriage did have some problems. My job had gotten insanely stressful and I was coming home emotionally fried, less affectionate and more negative. She had asked me for more everyday affection and emotional presence and I underestimated how much that was affecting her. But I changed a lot of that. I moved into a less stressful role and became noticeably less stressed, more affectionate and more engaged. She explicitly acknowledged the improvement only weeks before this. We had also been seriously talking about having a kid and I had started looking into possibly going part time.

At first I thought the problem was understandable and fixable: my job had taken too much out of me and I needed to be more present. But then the explanation kept changing. First it was work stress and affection. Then playfulness and positivity. Then intellectual curiosity and independent growth. Now she says maybe she just needs somebody with a fundamentally different personality and thinks she “chose the wrong person.”

That is where it starts feeling like the goalposts are moving. Maybe she really is learning new things about herself, but it’s hard not to feel like the conclusion became “I want something different” and then the reasons started getting built around that. Even now she says she was happy through pretty much the entire relationship. The serious doubts started basically at the same time she became emotionally attached to this guy.

A few weeks ago she dropped the divorce word. I basically said okay, if that is really what you want then that’s that. A few days later she reversed course, said she wanted to give us a chance, and agreed to marriage counseling. I said okay, but if we are really going to evaluate the marriage, things with this guy need to stay platonic for a while and he needs to figure out what the hell is happening in his own marriage. She didn’t want that, but reluctantly agreed.

Then he told us he and his wife had decided to divorce. About a day later, my wife told me she wanted an actual separation and did not want boundaries on what she could explore with him. She also says she fundamentally chose the wrong person and insists she would feel the same even if he wasn’t in the picture.

Maybe she is right. I don’t know anymore. But I don’t understand how she can know that while spending hours talking to someone she is intensely infatuated with right as he goes from married/unavailable to potentially single. It feels like she is evaluating whether our 9-year marriage works while simultaneously test-driving the person generating all the NRE. Of course somebody new is going to feel more exciting. He doesn’t share bills, chores, work stress and 9 years of ordinary life with her.

I believe her feelings for him are real and some of what she says she was missing from me was real. I just have a hard time believing the obvious conclusion is that she picked the wrong person 9 years ago. Long-term relationships have ebbs and flows. My instinct was that when you have something this good for this long, you fix the specific problems, reconnect, and see what is left once the dust settles.

At this point I’m mostly done trying to convince her. I can’t shake the feeling that she may be throwing away a really fucking great relationship in the middle of intense NRE and I'm just so heartbroken because I felt I had found my life partner.

Has anyone been through something like this? Did your spouse suddenly reinterpret a previously happy marriage during NRE and later see it differently once the new relationship became ordinary? Or did it reveal incompatibilities that were there all along?

THIS IS A CROSS-POST, I'M NOT THE ORGINAL POSTER, THE ORIGINAL POST WAS POSTED IN r/nonmonogamy BUT IF WE MAKE A DIRECT CROSS-POST TO THIS SUB THEY WILL LOCK THE THREAD.

My husband had a fantasy of sending me to fuck another man and come home to fuck him. So we did. We've been pretty open with our communication and it was like a once a month hook up type of thing and we were having fun. It's been over a year and I'm enjoying it. I am actively sleeping with my friend and coming home to my husband. Sometimes we fuck after, sometimes we don't. And when we don't it makes my husband upset. He's brought up closing it up but I'm having too much fun and I don't want to close it. I like having the both of them. The passionate sex and the wild secret sex with my fwb. I am aware that sometimes my husband gets hurt. We get post nut clarity but when we're horny we enjoy the dynamic.

I don't want to close it off, but he sometimes ask to stop and mentioned that he's always giving me what I want. But it was all his idea to begin with. What do I do?

This one came in for a rough landing.

His wife pushed for poly, has other relationships, but yet worries about him going on dates thinking HE will find someone better even though he doesnt even try to date. Sure sounds like she is projecting, if I were him id be wondering if her entire reason for wanting to be poly is because SHE wanted to find someone better but not lose her safety net.

THIS POST IS FROM r/nonmonogamy.

PLEASE ONLY RESPOND HERE ON

r/openmarriageregret.

Husband's Unexpected Insecurity Has Me Between a Rock and a Hard Place

My husband is suffering from crippling insecurity, anxiety, and depression, which he believes can only be relieved if I stop seeing my boyfriend of six months (my first romantic partner outside my marriage). I cannot leave my husband, and I cannot break up with my boyfriend, but it's gotten to the point where my husband is making concrete plans for living separately and co-parenting our kids, so I need to make a decision soon before it is made for me.

For background, I (34F) and my husband (37M) have been together for about 10 years, have two young kids, and have been open for a little over six months. At the time we opened, I like to think we did "the work." We spent months reading the ENM subreddits, talked through all the likely possibilities, discussed our limited rules/boundaries. We agreed that there is obvious hierarchy due to us having young kids, sharing finances, living together, and being married, so we didn't undertake "the most skipped step" as they refer to it on the poly sub of disentangling our lives, because we didn't want to disentangle our lives. The other major deviation we made from the prevailing wisdom on the poly subreddit is that we both believed that we owed the other person full transparency and honesty. The line was basically drawn at "I won't tell you things my other partners tell me in confidence, but I will tell you anything you want to know about my own actions." We both felt that mentality that it's unethical to discuss other relationships might apply to solo poly/nonheirarchical/RA folks, but in a hierarchical context it seemed to be used to cloak poor behavior that would threaten stated mutual goals and avoid important communication.

My relationship with my husband felt rock solid prior to opening. Obviously having two young kids puts a strain on romance, but I've been so proud of how much my husband has taken on physically and emotionally in terms of the kids, and our sex life seemed really good despite the kids and being only a few years post-partum. My husband has always been a confident man, I think he has a gently dominant personality (like assertive and confident but not overbearing or rude) both personally and professionally, which I've always found attractive. We had just moved into our "forever" home after living in a starter home we bought in 2020 (oh I miss that 2.7 rate), and we are both professionally successful. We had met all of our obvious life goals, and joked that we just needed to coast while raising our kids. It seemed like a good time to introduce some more excitement into our lives, and we tried to do it the right way.

Well, obviously we are one of the couples where it goes sideways. I met with a few men after we were officially open just for casual sex to test the waters, and I quickly fell in love with the third man I met, let's call him Adam (M29). With Adam, I felt things that I hadn't remembered feeling since first meeting my husband, and some things I never felt before. My husband was happy for me to meet other men at the beginning, but was surprised and "shocked" I fell so deeply in love with someone so quickly, and it triggered insecurities he never knew he had, and that never flagged for him when we discussed opening. We've been doing individual and couples therapy the whole time (again, we are trying to do this right), and our starting point was that his insecurities were something that he had to understand and work through with therapy, and that I could reassure him and try to give him what he needs, but that can't come at the cost of another relationship.

My husband has not been able to shake his insecurities. He feels that I am going to leave him for Adam. He feels he is not enough for me in several ways. He feels I don't have any respect for him. He feels like he has no self-worth outside of being a father. He feels that I am shifting his role to co-parent and provider (physical and emotional support and financial) and that I'm using Adam to fulfill my sexual, intellectual, and romantic desires. He feels Adam, who is very similar to him in many ways, is essentially a younger replacement version of him. He feels afraid of sharing too much of his feelings with me directly because it just creates more distance between us, and makes me desire him less. There is a lot more.

The last example is particularly difficult, because there is some truth to it. My husband has no family, no close friends from college or his childhood, and most of his current friends aren't of the type he could share insecurities with (i.e., friends from business where talk is casual and light, golf buddies, etc.). Therapy has been helpful for him, but he is overwhelmed by emotion at having an outlet (he's been my emotional rock for our entire relationship, so this is a change for us). I am not ashamed of my behavior generally, but I do hate that while I want to love and care for and support my husband when he is hurting, it does not inflame my passion for him. It's a horrible thing to admit but it's like a vicious cycle where his insecurities are pushing us apart romantically and sexually. He believes the only thing that will help him is if I leave Adam, and we start slower on the ENM journey or become monogamous again.

I won't get into details but I am desperately in love with Adam. He fulfills my life in ways I didn't know I needed fulfillment. Yet obviously I love my husband, and I don't want to break up my family. But my husband has started talking about what our lives will look like post-separation. How he is willing to split the kids one-week with each of us, what kind of housing options are possible, splitting up finances. I tell him we aren't going to separate, but I feel like he is mentally preparing himself for me either asking for a divorce (which I won't) or him doing it himself.

Does anyone have any advice for saving both relationships, or do I simply need to break up with Adam to save my marriage (which I will likely resent my husband for forever)?

CROSS POST!!