Hi,

First time visitor, first time poster. This site came up as the second link in google search for the topic title, so I thought this might be a good place to start. I’ve never really written a post about such a topic before since this whole experience is very new, so my apologies for any weird ramblings, but I am looking for some feminine opinions on the subject.

Just to give some background, I am 36 and a happily married man of 11 years; I’ve known my wife since 1993. We have one son who is almost 3 and are both satisficed with our life, including our finances, our work, our hobbies, our home, each other and our son. I had two longish-term girlfriends before getting married, my wife had dozens of relations before we met. My wife has brought up the idea of open-relationships in the past, one – because we know many couples in open relationships who are happy, and two – because we grew up in the 90’s and are very liberal minded… for the most part. I have always believed in monogamy, my wife, not so much, but regardless, I asked her to tell me if she ever finds anyone else, because I’d like to know so we can discuss the situation. We were driving home from vacation and she mentioned that she met a guy at work that she is attracted to. It was a 5 hour drive home with our son, so we had a lot of time to discuss the matter sporadically between entertaining the little man. My wife says that she loves me, wants to grow old me and celebrate many anniversaries together, but she is also getting her pre-pregnancy body back and is very hormonal, which she openly admits, and also admits this attraction might be a result of hormones. Question 1: I do not understand what that means – I asked her to explain how that can be and she got offended and the conversation turned negative. I am not one to tell anyone what to do, so I have told her that I accept how she’s feeling and that she should talk with the guy at work to see if he feels the same way(he is also married with children).

To say the least, I feel absolutely crushed and confused and have no way of really talking with anyone about how I feel, aside from an awkward phone call, since all my friends(who I could talk to about this) live out-of-state, and I don’t feel comfortable talking about the situation with any family members, so…anonymous blog for the win.

I guess I’m really looking for other experiences of how people deal with an open relationship, as it would be one-sided since I have no desire to go outside of our marriage. If anyone has experienced this from my perspective, or knows anyone who has, I would greatly appreciate any insight. Other from that, any comments or feedback would greatly appreciated.