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?
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.