Mods, feel free to delete this post.
My girlfriend and I have been talking about entering an open relationship the last 3 years. We’ve been together for 6 and had our ups and downs but we’ve been really solid the last two years. We love each other and I say our relationship is strong.
The last week, we’ve been laying ground rules for potentially opening up our relationship. We want to keep it very casual with other people.
Anyone willing to share their experience both good or bad?
I was, but we had different ideas of how serious our relationship was. She mostly stopped seeing other people aside from me, and then I realized I had really strong feelings for someone else and broke things off. I feel really awful about it ngl.
Isn't that a better outcome though? What would the normative formulation have been? After six months the relationship devolved into momentium and acrimony? Relationships ending is not a negative outcome. Relatinships going poorly is thr negative outcome.
I suppose you’re right. But it still made me feel like a monster when I told her I needed to end things and she sobbed because she could see us being together for the rest of our lives.
As it should. You are, I assume, a good person. So causing another person pain made you feel bad. That it is good. That is a risk we open ourselfs up to when we become involved with other people. You probably did nothing wrong.
In a perfect falgsc world there would be resupurces and rituals available to allow us to help people through pain like that. Under capitlaism where time is precious and resources are hard won it isn't easy for people to recieve the emotional labor they need. That isn't your fault.
Yeah. It’s almost like being a human with complicated emotions is difficult or something. And even under falgsc “I don’t share your feelings, I love someone else” will still suck.
I think I mostly said that.
No, it won't. Or at least not as bad. Pain is a sensation. It is created by your brain, that's why we can use medicine to change perceotion of it and stuff. Under falgsc where life is less stressful in general things like this would factually hurt less.
This presupposes that the relationship would've ended without any open relationship exploration.
In my particular case the relationship was never not open. And also I was already heavily considering ending things before I slept with my then-roommate-now-gf, that just cemented that I needed to.
Honestly the problem wasn’t the open, it was the difference in thoughts of what our relationship was. I thought we were basically friends with benefits and if we were together that presents as acting like a couple. She thought of us as a couple but sometimes we go on dates or sleep with other people.
Opening up doesn't alter the fundamentals of a relationship. If you can comunicate well, or poorly, a bit of pleasant exercise isn't going to change that. People often make a mistale where they think the new context will change who they are and that very rarely happens.
What it does change is it raises the ammount of work you have to do to maintian relationships healthfully. So sometimes you don't have thre energy for that and that is a concern. That is part of why you see so many comfortable liberals in the lifestyle. The have the time and resources to do it.
We want to limit the time we see someone and only keep it to casual dates/hookups to try and prevent emotional connections but ah.
Can’t say that wouldn’t work. The person I slept with that I had feelings for was my roommate so that’s a whole other thing. Ultimately the problem wasn’t that we were open, it was that I just didn’t really have feelings for her.
Gotcha, still have very strong feelings for my gf.
Why? Getting feelings is the best part. Love is good. When you meet new people you get a flood of brain chemicals. It is called new relationship emergy. NRE because it is such a thing people feel a need to acronym it. It is fun, but it passes, and maybe you will still be into the person when it fades or maybe you won't. That's fine. It can be hard to adjust to seeing a partner have more fun with a new partner than you can give them. That is the point though, if you truely love the person you are happy you can allow them to have those great experiences and you share that. That new emotion is called compursion. It is like empathy except you are having it for your partner. So boomers fundamentally never created ways to teach us about it. That is a whole lot though, if it sounds like to much swinging or sex parties are perfectly valid and fun as well.