Translation: "I'm going to cuckold you, but I don't want to feel guilty about it, so I'll call it an 'open relationship.'" These are not naturally kinky people pushing their mutual exploration to the next level, this is a woman who either feels emotionally stunted in the relationship (in which case that needs work) or feels she is NOT GETTING good "play" (in which case that needs work) or is unwilling to accept the results of her major life choice to get married as a "conservative by nature" person (in which case, SHE needs work.) There are ways to negotiate extra-marital stuff, as long as you have "hand", or you belong to the small % of people who really CAN pull off mutually-satisfactory poly, but this guy's basically getting the message that while HE may not have married too early, his wife did, and he's f*cked. His only way to get out involves a potentially-ruinous divorce.

This is EXACTLY the scenario that MRAs warn against, and most would probably suggest paternity testing for his two children--not that CA law is much good to a man who is raising some other man's children as his own. I am getting a VERY bad vibe about this because having a "conservative" spring something like this is bad news--they're not going to easily transition to free-swinging Mr. & Mrs. Poly. I'd even go so far as to venture that this guy is a cuckold fetishist who knows he's been had and it putting together a Penthouse Letter about it to rationalize/disguise it as consensual poly. Thanks to Em & Lo for exposing this train-wreck, for the bane and enlightening of men.

[Setting aside all the other interesting perspectives here, ES, I think the bit about paternity testing one's children is just one more reason to completely dismiss MRAs. I mean, unless someone's part rat or something it's not like you can *smell* your half of the DNA in a child. Nor is that what makes them love or not love, like or not like you. I swear the whole flipping paternity thing, including its presumptions (in Anglo culture, not so much Euro) that the child "goes" with the mother in a divorce. It's not just backwards it's *savagely* backwards. Your children are *yours,* and *know* they're yours, when you're there for them, not just for their graduations or ball games or whatever but at two in the morning, then four in the morning, then six in the morning when they need a bottle, a diaper, comfort after a nightmare, bandages after a scraped knee, laughing out loud with them at pre-school joke books... *all* that stuff matters -- it matters as much to an adopted child as to a "natural" one, and the idea that a child you've done all that with isn't "yours" in the only ways that really matter are just... primitive, superstitious, and completely, completely contemptuous of everything fatherhood *or* childhood *really* means. I agree they both have a lot of processing to do. It didn't sound like the guy had a cuckolding fetish at all. Sorry to be so firm about it but that's just the way it is. --fl]

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fl-depends how far from the apes you think we are, also whether your culture (like ancient Rome) values belonging to a "house" as well as genetic descent as a form of belonging.

There's a really, really big red flag in the "high-school sweetheart" element of their relationship, and the total absence of kink heretofore. It's entirely possible that she's just trying to renegotiate the terms of their relationship, but it seems to me that it's possibly a dodge for cheating, possibly an adoption of trendy libertinism in order to sidestep work on the stable, monogamous and functional relationship they previously had.

It's really interesting because my knee-jerk reaction is that a man who tried renegotiating that way would find himself divorced and single in a heartbeat, and firmly in the Too Much Information zone, like Phil Weiss.

The Pill, condoms, urban anonymity. It's true I don't have much respect for women, because I've always lived in conditions where the average woman has had many more willing potential partners than the average man, with attendant pickiness. Which, in the experience of the average man, reads as "an undifferentiated mass of 'wants-to-fuck-assholes-and-not-you.'" I think she made the request with an implicit understanding that their relative "market values" would take care of the "variety for me but not for thee." BTW, I have some experience with poly and I would hazard that the wife in fact already has someone in mind. The question becomes whether he can trust her for full disclosure and adequate safety given that she's decided to be poly, or whether he needs to get out of the relationship.

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fl,

Remember I have a patriarchal culture where women routinely died for straying only three generations in back of me, which means "in living memory" for my father, who is 83. So you're speaking to someone whose image of "Poly" includes the serail and the harem, within living memory, because such things lasted informally in society in certain places until the 1950s-60s, and continue informally in seclusion TO THIS DAY, with legal blessing for polygamy (even in Israel) for the communities whose religious law allows it. So I see a "Western" man who has been forced into an untenable situation of female autonomy and simultaneous sexual scarcity, and it's incredibly hard to be generous when operating from a situation of lack of agency for oneself, full agency for one's partner, and potentially assured abundance for one's partner and relative scarcity for oneself. Also a question of whether the intangibles they share can survive a situation of egalitarian poly, mono for him/poly for her, or cuckoldry.

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P. Burke,

Absolutely no one. But this man's situation raises my hackles because early-married conservatives don't suddenly become happily poly people without an awful lot of discussion of boundaries that we can only guess about. And I'm awfully suspicious, perhaps without cause. If they can work it out, more power to them. Looks like they'll need a flowchart to define the whole who/what/where/when.

And as a Middle Eastern disabled man I have a VERY big chip on my shoulder about "whose sexual desires are legitimate", precisely BECAUSE I've been subjected to slut-shaming of the worst kind. Ever had a seizure in public in glorious, liberated America and been accused of masturbating? (And I have a boatload of patriarchy issues, too.) I have GOT to work on my fabled Levantine tolerance of human weaknesses, really.

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I know a couple that has been married 10 years monogamous and the woman just came to her husband and asked for open relationship. She was married before and cheated on her first husband, and told her second husband that she would leave him before doing that again.

But along the way she discovered this option, open marriage, and decided to bring that up. She was amazed that he was agreeable to it, and so for it has been working for them. One thing I noticed in talking to them is that they don't explore much sexually together, but are trying new things out with other lovers (such as oral sex).

They definitely need to reconnect and let this exploration bring them closer together and bring new things back to the bedroom to try. I am optimistic for them, they seem like good partners.

PS: I am in an open relationship and it feels very right to me. I feel very secure with my primary partner and love the freedom and openness. We had this arrangement from the beginning of our relationship, and are learning as we go!

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1) I don't see anything in the query about kink in the first place, so its presence or absence is a fish of the ruddy-coloured variety.

2) I have frequently seen people of all sexes successfully negotiate a previously closed relationship into an open status. (In fact, my most recent ex was such a person, and yes, he's male. His wife is a dear friend.)

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