Dear Joely: My Wife Wants an Open Marriage. I Want My Wife.

She wants to experience other men. He can’t bear the thought of it.

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Dear Joely,

I'm a 35-year-old male. I have been married for 9 years to a woman who is currently 27. Although she was very young when we met, we have a great relationship. We communicate well, for the most part, we share common interests and friends and we seem to make one another happy.

Last weekend, she kind of dropped into a conversation we were having that she would like for us to try having an open relationship. I was so thrown that I didn't know what to say... I find the idea absolutely abhorrent. She said that she is happy with our sex life, but that she increasingly feels the need to experience sex with other men. She wants to be honest about it.

I'm afraid I didn't handle it as well as I could have. I said something like "Don't be ridiculous, I'm your husband, you're my wife, we're happy." When she tried again to talk about it, I blanked her. It led to an argument and we haven't sat down and talked about it properly. We haven't had sex since.

I thought we were approaching a time when we could start planning to have our first child and she comes up with this, straight from left field. I can't bear to think of her with someone else and the whole idea is driving me to distraction. I don't even know how to have a conversation with her about it without going off the deep end.

I have no idea what to do and I hope you can help.

Yours,
Call Me Old Fashioned, But...

Dear Call Me Old Fashioned, But...,

You're not old-fashioned. You're monogamous.

Which is unfortunate, because your wife has just announced that she'd quite like to be monogamous with you and occasionally naked with somebody else.

I can see why you didn't immediately reach for the family calendar.

But “Don't be ridiculous, I'm your husband, you're my wife, we're happy” isn't going to make this disappear. In fact, there's one word in that sentence doing rather more heavy lifting than it should.

We.

You thought we were happy. You thought we were approaching the point where we would start a family. And perhaps you are happy. But your wife has just told you that there's something significant going on inside her that wasn't included in your version of “we”.

You need to hear it.

Not agree to it. Hear it.

Because I don't yet know what your wife means when she says she “needs to experience sex with other men”, and neither do you. You stopped listening before she got to that bit.

She may be sexually curious. She may have discovered that monogamy doesn't suit her. She may love you perfectly well and still be struggling with the idea that the last new man she will ever sleep with entered her life before she'd finished becoming an adult.

And we probably ought to linger there for a moment.

You're 35. She's 27. You've been married for nine years.

So your wife was around eighteen when you married her, and apparently younger still when you met.

I'm not going to turn you into a villain on the strength of some arithmetic. But nor am I going to pretend the arithmetic isn't sitting there waving at me.

The woman you're married to now has spent virtually her entire adult life as half of a couple. Whatever else she's had — a happy marriage, good sex, shared friends, somebody she loves — she hasn't had the experience most of us take for granted of finding out who we are romantically and sexually as independent adults.

She may now be wondering.

That does not mean you owe her an open marriage.

Please don't let anybody persuade you that recoiling from the idea of your wife having sex with other men means you're possessive, insecure or insufficiently evolved. Some people thrive in open relationships. Some people would rather exfoliate with a cheese grater.

You appear to belong to the second group.

Believe yourself.

An open marriage requires two people who genuinely want an open marriage. One person enthusiastically exploring her sexuality while the other lies awake imagining where she is and what she's doing isn't ethical non-monogamy. It's misery with progressive branding.

But your wife gets to believe herself too.

If what she's telling you is not merely I'd quite like this but I don't think I can happily remain sexually exclusive for the rest of my life, then you have a much bigger problem than whether you can talk her out of it.

That's why you need another conversation.

Start by owning your first attempt. Tell her you were blindsided, frightened and hurt, and that blanking her wasn't fair. Then tell her something equally important: you don't want an open marriage, and you're not going to pretend you might just to keep her.

Then ask the question you should have asked the first time:

“What happens if I say no?”

Not threateningly. Not as a test.

Because her answer matters enormously.

Does she say, Then I'm disappointed, but I choose our marriage?

Does she say, I don't know?

Or does she say, Then I don't know whether I can stay married?

Those are three very different futures.

And while you're finding out which one you're living in, put the baby plans away.

A baby is many things. A relationship stabiliser isn't one of them.

Don't start trying to create a child while one of you is imagining parenthood and the other is wondering what it would be like to have sex with Steve from Accounts. Sort out the marriage first.

You may discover that this is a desire your wife can talk about honestly and ultimately choose not to pursue.

You may discover that something fundamental has changed.

What you cannot do is return to last Friday, when you didn't know any of this.

That's the really rotten part. She didn't just ask you whether she could sleep with other men.

She changed what you know about your marriage.

Now you both have to decide what to do with the knowledge.

Yours, monogamously,
Joely

Dear Joely: My Best Friend Shagged Someone Beside Me

When your best friend crosses a boundary you didn't know needed explaining

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Dear Joely,

You seem good at holiday problems so I thought I'd write in. I happened to find you while scrolling by the pool. My best friend (let's call her Christine) and I are both 24 and have known one another since secondary school. We are very close. There's no one either of us knows better in the world. We are called "the fixture" by my family. She's on the next sun lounge as I type this, but things are a bit strained at the moment.

We recently came to Tenerife on a holiday break, for a week. We looked forward to the trip as we have all our holidays in the past. Our days are made up of sunning ourselves, reading, chatting and swimming. In the afternoons we go back to the apartment and take our time getting ready for the evenings, a few drinks, getting showered and dressed and then out for dinner, more drinks, dancing and fun.

Last night was just like that. We both drank probably too much. Well, it was too much. At some point, I knew I needed to go back to the apartment. Christine wanted to stay out. I didn't think that was a problem. She was having fun with a guy. We weren't far away from the apartment. So I told her goodnight and told her to have a good night.

The sun shines in the curtains in the mornings and this morning was no exception. I felt as rough as a badger's arse. I looked over at Christine's bed. It was then that I realised she wasn't alone. I think it was the guy she was last dancing with when I left. To be honest, who cares? They weren't just sleeping, they were actually shagging. You know, in that kind of "let's do it quietly so we don't wake her up" sort of way.

I felt the bile rising in my throat, and I ran to the toilet and was sick. My head was banging and I was suddenly so angry I could barely see. I went back to my bed and just yelled at him to get the f*&% out. Christine started to protest. I just kept yelling, "Get out."

Things have been strained between us, to say the least, since this morning. I've got my dark glasses on and I'm under an umbrella on my sun bed, as I said. But I'm furious with her. She's tried to talk to me, but I won't have it. I just can't believe she'd treat me like this. I hope you can answer me urgently.

Yours,
Barf & Bitter

Dear Barf & Bitter,

First things first: your friend should not have brought a man back to your shared bedroom and shagged him while you were asleep three feet away.

I don't care how quietly they did it. Sex is not made private by reducing the volume.

You were entitled to wake up furious. You were entitled to tell him to leave. And Christine owes you an apology for deciding, without consulting you, that your shared bedroom could become hers for the night while you remained inconveniently unconscious in the other bed.

So far, I'm entirely under your umbrella.

But now I'm going to pull my sun lounge slightly away from yours.

You say, "I just can't believe she'd treat me like this."

Like what, exactly?

Because there are two possible offences here, and I'm not convinced you know which one has made you so angry.

Imagine the same morning again. Same murderous hangover. Same Tenerife sun drilling through the curtains. You roll over and Christine's bed is empty.

An hour later, she wanders in wearing last night's dress and somebody else's grin. She tells you she went home with the man from the bar and had spectacular sex.

Are you furious?

If the answer is no, excellent. We know what happened. Christine violated a perfectly reasonable boundary about your shared room, behaved selfishly while drunk, and now needs to apologise. You need to stop refusing to speak to her long enough to let her do it. You've been friends since secondary school. Don't turn one inconsiderate shag into the Treaty of Tenerife.

But if you're reading this and thinking, Actually, Joely, I'd still have hated it...

Then I'd be interested in that.

You call yourselves "the fixture". Your family calls you "the fixture". You holiday together. You have your rituals: sun lounges, books, swimming, the leisurely transformation from daytime selves into evening selves. And you tell me there's no one in the world who knows either of you better.

That's a beautiful friendship.

It may also have become an arrangement whose terms you've stopped examining.

Sometimes the most intimate friendships acquire invisible rules. We don't announce them because we don't realise they're rules. You'll choose me. I'll choose you. Other people may come and go, but this is the relationship that remains. This particular territory belongs to us.

Then somebody wanders into the territory wearing nightclub trousers and suddenly we discover there was a border.

I'm not telling you you're jealous of Christine. I'm certainly not telling you you're secretly in love with her. Perhaps neither is remotely true.

I'm asking whether you felt displaced.

Because your reaction interests me. You weren't merely irritated. You were incandescent. And somewhere between the badger's arse, the vomiting and the strange man moving rhythmically in the next bed, several different kinds of nausea may have become acquainted.

Incidentally, I wouldn't place too much evidentiary weight on the vomiting. You had drunk far too much and woke with your head banging. Christine's sex life may be many things, but I'm not yet prepared to hold it legally responsible for your stomach.

What I would do is take off the dark glasses, turn towards the woman on the next sun lounge and let her speak.

She may say, "I'm so sorry. I was drunk, I wasn't thinking and I behaved appallingly."

She may say, "I genuinely didn't think you'd care."

She may even say something that makes you angrier.

But at the moment you don't know, because you've sentenced your oldest friend before hearing her defence.

And when she has finished, tell her why you were angry.

Not just "You shouldn't have done that."

Tell her what hurt.

If all that hurt was waking beside an unsolicited live sex show, that's quite enough.

But if something else hurt too, don't be frightened of looking at it. You don't have to give it a name immediately. You just have to be honest enough to notice it.

You asked me urgently, so here is your emergency holiday prescription:

Drink some water. Eat something salty. Stop looking at Christine over the top of your sunglasses as though you're Joan Collins discovering a second will. And talk to your friend.

You have several days of Tenerife left.

Don't give the best sun lounge to a grudge.

Yours, in better boundaries and separate bedrooms,
Joely

Dear Joely: The Bedroom Goes Quiet

Dear Joely,

My wife and I have been married just over four years. It is a second marriage for both of us. I’m 53, she’s 49, and until recently we’ve always had a very active sex life. That’s partly why I’m so thrown by the sudden change.

For the past few months, she always seems to have a reason not to. She’s tired. She’s stressed. She wants an early night. She’d rather read, scroll, or disappear into a game than come to bed in any meaningful sense of the phrase. She’s friendly enough, and not cold exactly, but there is a distracted quality to her now, as though I’m approaching her from slightly too far away.

I’ve tried not to make a big performance of it. I’ve been patient. I’ve made dinner, brought flowers, made an effort. She seems touched by those things, but not moved in the direction I’m hoping for. The more I try, the more I begin to feel like a man laying rose petals in front of a door that isn’t opening.

So now I’m wondering what I’m meant to think. Is this just a phase in a marriage and I’m being oversensitive, or should I be worried there’s someone else?

Signed,

Missing My Wife

Dear Missing,

The first thing to say is this: a drop in desire is not, by itself, proof of a third party lurking in the shrubbery.

People go off sex for all sorts of reasons. Fatigue, resentment, distraction, hormones, low mood, buried irritation, feeling unsexy in their own skin, or simply getting stuck in a pattern where avoidance becomes easier than explaining what is going on. The human libido is not a punctual little clerk. It wanders off, goes silent, and sometimes needs coaxing back under less pressure than flowers and hopeful dinners can create.

That said, you are not wrong to notice the change, and you are not shallow for missing your wife in this particular way. Sex is not the whole of a marriage, but neither is it nothing. When it goes quiet without explanation, people start telling themselves stories. Usually unpleasant ones.

Before you leap to infidelity, I would ask a duller but more useful question: have you actually spoken to her plainly, without the bouquet, without the seduction campaign, and without making the conversation sound like a charge sheet? Not “Why don’t you want me?” Not “Is there someone else?” But something closer to: “I miss you. Something feels different between us. Is anything going on that I’m not seeing?”

Because at the moment you are trying to solve a communication problem with romance, which is understandable but often ineffective. A woman can enjoy a lasagne and still not want to take her clothes off. The flowers are not the issue. The silence is.

If she brushes you off repeatedly, refuses to talk at all, and leaves you alone with your increasingly inventive theories, then yes, you may have more cause for concern. But don’t promote yourself to detective before you have first tried being a husband in a chair, asking a difficult question and waiting for the real answer.

There may be someone else. There may equally be stress, sadness, menopause, anger, boredom, or some private knot she hasn’t yet untangled into words. Your job for now is not to guess correctly. It is to open the conversation without accusation and see whether she meets you there.

You say she is friendly. I would aim for something more intimate than friendly. Friendly is for baristas and neighbours. Wives should, at the very least, be reachable.

Yours, with a steady hand,

Joely

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