Opening relationship? Advice needed

The advisability of you having legal advice, exit strategy etc has been raised before Sister catsloveme .

Do you have all that in place yet ?

If not, then I'd suggest that you don't try anything in regard to this until such time as you do have a safety net in place.
The introduction of a 3rd party into an ILIASM situation is invariably a game changer and the changes can be quite spectacular and unpredictable.

Meantime, the idea of writing out what you'd say is a good idea.
The exercise will require you to organise your thoughts and put them down in some sort of order that gets to the point you wish to make.
That's a worthwhile exercise in and of itself, whether you actually proceed with delivering your essay or not.

There's one guiding principle in these situations, and that is - you are not seeking your spouses approval to do it.
Your spouse has already ceded any say in how you conduct your sex life. It no longer has anything to do with them. That horse bolted some years ago.

If you are going to do this, then it has to be because you see it as being in your longer term best interests to do so. It is a choice that has to stand up all by itself.
It really doesn't have much to do with your spouse any more.
He hasn't been a participant in your sex life for a long time, and has no right of veto over what you might plan.

Why do you need to ask his permission to have sex outside your marriage? He didn't ask your permission to stop sex inside your marriage. He has no right to control your sex life since he has no sex life with you. I also agree with Baz that you should seek legal advice before seeking a lover.

BTW, I did not ask my refuser if I could step outside the marriage. I told him that due to his lack of sexual interest in me, I would step outside of the marriage if I chose. He didn't answer. And, in truth, I didn't start looking for lovers until a few years later when we -- at my institution-- decided to divorce. It ended up that he had been stepping outside of our marriage before we decided to divorce.

I can bring in a how-to folder but I have lost it and will need to look it up.

Do you know how a guy doesn't just take down his trousers in front of you when it is the first time having sex? They look for mini-yeses like salespeople do. They look for a pack of mini-yeses before they move in. Or the first kisses may be a better analogy. Instead of outright kissing you, he will lean in for a kiss and have you meet him or wait for rejection or correction. Why not look for feedback with an open marriage series.

Although my husband is very loving and understanding He did a 180 on this subject and is stern about it today.
In the movie, his FWB says "I don't like to share!" My husband shook his head up and down in agreement. And I have been doing this for a decade! What is your answer?
I had to redefine the old definition of "open marriage" and address jealousy. I learned everything I could about jealousy and polyamory. Why Polyamory? Because they know all the ins and outs. My husband went into a green fit of rage!

The book -"More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory is a non-fiction book about consensual non-monogamous relationships, written by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert."


You can use MirrorOrchid's opening line and then after that there can be no more blame coming out of your mouth. None. I meant to say, none. And there lies the challenge. haha

Did you recently find a beau or have one in mind?

Netflix's WanderLust is a series that you can get feedback from by watching it together since you are so close.

Your husband wasn't sharing (and still isn't.)
To share you, he'd have to be taking some of you sometimes.
He isn't. 
So he needn't worry. Right?

He can thump his chest and proudly say, "I'd never do that! One man is enough for my woman!"
He doesn't have to explain he isn't the one man.
Everyone will admire him when you say "That's right!" as you lean in close for a hug.


Here's the link to your 14 steps post:
iliasm.org/post/139720

"Wanderlust" looks like it may actually do polyamory some justice to all its complexity and difficulty. I'll have to watch it by myself. It'd scare the Mrs. too much. She'd think I was hinting and she's done so great on this reset. 

After years of unwanted celibacy, followed by my wife's affair, ,,a year recovery from the affair with therapy, and then a return to celibacy, I called things quits.
My wife responded with the offer of an open relationship when she realized her amorous imagination had returned at the prospect of new partners and being single.
Her thought was, "The open relationship allows the freedom for me to feel sexual again so that I can choose you." Interestingly, this was the second time she had pitched this angle with a live in partner. The first had ended in disaster and the end of the relationship.

As we were imminently headed for divorce anyway, I agreed.
Knowing that divorce was on the table, it felt like superpowers - like I could try anything and if it didn't work out, we could always divorce as plan B. I rationalized that as a newly single man from a celibate relationship, if someone fitting the description of my wife moved in next door and offered an open FWB relationship where we shard some meals and time together, I'd likely try it out.

I looked up every resource I could find on the subject of polyamory and ethical non-monogamy.
We favoured "open the relationship a crack"
Rather than "swinging", per se, we each tried to pick out what we intended as a longer term extra partner.

We discussed what and how that would come to be in our relationship.
We had many iterations - around, for example, how much involvement the other spouse would have in selection, or even in the live sexual act.
I agreed to "don't ask don't tell" on my end initially because she didn't want to know what I was doing.
Immediately, it became clear that the onus was on me to keep it secret, while she immediately began to "suspect me of an affair" 100% of the time -setting up a paranoid and intensely toxic, resentful dynamic.

Eventually she discovered that I'd been talking to someone and had kissed her. It was someone much older than me and obviously not a threat to the relationship, but her relentless drilling me on what she'd posed as "don't ask don't tell" made things so unpleasant and burdensome for me that I was no longer interested in doing this. Any potential joy was sucked out and it made me feel like I was having an affair. It also seemed that this was her intention- to somehow draw a moral equivalency and post hoc justify her own infidelity.

The next iteration was about us having mutual paramours, both sides. It was very easy for her, as it is for most women - to find a partner quickly. I'm not unappealing, but it took me the better part of a year, while my celibate wife had a partner in addition to me.

Our rules - my rules were:
1. I never ever want to have to explain this to the neighbors or our kids.
2. I never want to deal with a jealous husband
3. Whatever we do, we are still primary partners, including with sex. Meaning, if our own sexual connection does not increase - then we proceed with divorce.
4. No dissembling. Total truth - ugly and all, front and center.
5. Sometimes we need check ins and courtesy calls. THese are sacred. It might sound like "Are you ok" but might actually be "I need reassurance now."
6. We don't go into a situation without a plan or parameters.
7. We will know each others' partners, and we each have veto capability - no questions asked in the moment. Arbitrary veto making things impractical or impossible, means you don't support this and we go back to plan A. So exercise it carefully and with authenticity.
8. We do this together and with full transparency. Meaning, this discussion itself is not carte blanche to go out and get some but not tell. If either of us does that, it's cheating, and it's over.
9. From the get go, her former affair partner is off the table. No contact there at all.

What I found across the next two or three years of our adventures was that my methodical approach, treating it with care and caution, was widely considered to be the most successful within the "community". Mrs Apocrypha made a habit of routinely and repeatedly breaking almost every rule -- almost as if daring me to call her on it. It also became apparent that SHE was inclined to act with fierce jealousy when I was with my partner - sometimes violently, whether or not she had been with someone else herself.

My takeaway from this experiment and all the versions of it that we tried, was that the common denominator was that Mrs Apocrypha wasn't there for me.
It didn't matter in the grand scheme whether she was there for other people - she wasn't there for me.
At the end of the day, I was still in a celibate resentful marriage that was occasionally interrupted by sex with someone else who wanted me.
No matter how much sexual freedom Mrs Apocrypha had - and she had experiences akin to Penthouse Letters - she regarded her marriage to me as a prison, and continually moved the goalposts on what she wanted and found new ways to express her displeasure at being married to me. She characterized our marriage as a constraint. In the end, the "relationship 2.0" became simply another tableaux on which Mrs Apocrypha would paint her displeasure at our association. It played out at home, in bed, when drinking, when sober, on dates, and in therapy. I objectively had more sex in my life, and she made as sure as possible that I would never enjoy it, and that I'd never enjoy it with her.

You can be in an open marriage, but still be in a celibate, dysfunctional marriage.
The addition of sex from the outside did not fix my problem at all - because the problem wasn't the lack of sex. That was but a symptom. The problem was the contempt.

I might love my resort vacation to Belize, but it doesn't change the fact of where I live, day to day, you know?

I'm not necessarily against having open relationships of various kinds. I just don't see them as solving this problem in a sexless marriage unless one of the partners has a particular fetish for it and the other finds enjoyment in indulging it with that person.

This is interesting to me, as I’m missing g intimacy immensely. I just cannot help but wonder if he is stepping out somewhere, though he insists he isn’t. It’s just been way too long and when I confronted him on the length of time it had been he was insistent that it hadn’t been that long until I corrected him by telling him when and where ( but not how bad) the last time having sex with him had been.