Dear Joely: My Wife Wants an Open Marriage. I Want My Wife.
His wife wants to sleep with other men. He can’t bear the thought of it. Is an open marriage something they can negotiate — or has the question itself already changed their marriage?
She wants to experience other men. He can’t bear the thought of it.
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: Was I Just His Wank Bank?
Sometimes the hardest heartbreak isn't losing a great love. It's discovering that what you thought was friendship was simply someone else's nostalgia, with benefits.
The memories are warm. The messages are filthy. Then she suggests meeting in real life and discovers just how little of the relationship exists outside his trousers.
Dear Joely,
An unanswered message has hurt me a bit, and I thought you might be able to give me some perspective.
Yes, it’s a man involved.
This man is not a current lover, far from it. I am not trying to win him back, and I wasn’t expecting some grand romantic reunion at the airport.
Here it is in a nutshell.
I met him when I was about 24, living and working in Scotland. I’m in Australia now. We worked together. He was married with two young children. We fell very hard for each other, and I became the other woman.
It went on for a few years and was exactly as intoxicating and dreadful as those situations tend to be. Ecstatic highs, terrible pain, an astonishing amount of sex and not nearly enough sense. I remember being convinced that I could no sooner hold back the tide than stop loving him.
Eventually he left his marriage, but he did not leave it for me. He left me as well and began a relationship with another woman from the office. They lived together for five years. I was heartbroken for much longer than I care to admit.
But somehow we never disappeared completely from one another’s lives.
Over the next thirty-five years there were occasional calls and messages. He would bring up old moments between us, sometimes very sentimental ones, as though they still meant something to him. I listened. I gave my best advice when he went through difficult times.
We have slept together a few times since, on my rare trips back. Our connection had always been intensely sexual.
About ten years ago, I suggested meeting while on one such trip and he sent me a very harsh reply. It was so dismissive that something in me finally woke up. I stopped speaking to him for years.
Then, around five years ago, he contacted me and asked whether I was really never going to speak to him again. We began corresponding once more. Some of it was ordinary conversation, some of it reminiscing, and quite a lot of it sexual.
To be blunt, I began to wonder whether I had become little more than a sort of wank bank.
He has old and newer photographs of me. He sends sexual scenarios and dick pics. I have joined in and sent him nude photographs too, although the truth is that I wasn’t really getting much from it anymore.
I wasn’t pining for him. I wasn’t imagining a future.
I simply thought there was affection there. History. Some basic friendship after all this time.
I told him I am going to Scotland for a holiday in a few months and will be flying home from his area. I asked whether he might like to spend a couple of days together at the end of the trip. I made it easy for him. I said that if he was happily involved with someone, or it simply wasn’t appropriate, that was completely fine.
He answered the next day with a breathless little message about how lovely the trip sounded, complete with enough exclamation marks to frighten a flock of birds, but he did not acknowledge my suggestion that we meet.
Not yes. Not no. Not even, “I’ll think about it.”
He simply stepped around it and carried on.
I wasn’t expecting sex. I wasn’t expecting declarations. I wasn’t even necessarily expecting him to say yes.
I was expecting a reply. I thought he'd be pleased to see me after all this time.
I think what has upset me is that for years he has spoken about our shared past as though it mattered to him. He has recalled rooms, moments, sex, things we said and things we did. He has accepted my listening, my advice, my photographs and my availability. He has behaved as though there is some tenderness attached to that history.
Yet when I appeared in the present as an actual person, asking for nothing more than a courteous answer, he vanished.
It feels awful. Worse, it feels familiar.
Not because I am still in love with him. I’m not.
It feels awful because I thought that after thirty-five years we had become old friends. Or, at the very least, two people who had once meant enough to each other to warrant basic respect.
Am I making too much of an unanswered message?
Or have I finally understood that he is sentimental about the memories, but not especially concerned with the woman who lived them?
Yours,
Closing an Account
Dear Closing an Account,
You are not upset because he did not agree to see you. You are upset because he could not bring himself to answer you plainly.
That distinction matters.
For years, he has revisited the history between you. He has remembered the sex, the rooms, the private moments and the woman who once loved him beyond reason. He has accepted your photographs, your attention, your advice and your willingness to enter his fantasies. This has apparently required no shortage of enthusiasm on his part.
Yet the moment you asked him to meet you in real life, he became strangely short of words.
There is something shabby about a man who can summon the energy to maintain a wank bank but not the manners to acknowledge the account holder.
He may insist, if challenged, that the memories meant something to him. Perhaps they did. But sentiment is very easy when it asks nothing of us. It can survive for decades on reminiscence, fantasy and selective tenderness. Ask it to do something as ordinary as answer an invitation and suddenly the whole structure begins to wobble.
That is because nostalgia can imitate intimacy for a very long time.
You thought the two of you had become old friends. He appears to have thought he had retained access to an old lover.
Those are not the same arrangement.
The unanswered message was not the wound. It was the diagnosis.
Never mistake someone’s ability to remember you for their willingness to show up for you. They are entirely different talents.
He has shown a considerable gift for the first and very little appetite for the second.
Do not ask again. Do not send a wounded follow-up. Do not explain why his response hurt you. Do not provide him with another opportunity to turn your perfectly reasonable expectation into an emotional discussion he can avoid, minimise or eroticise.
And when he next returns with a sentimental memory in one hand and his trousers unfastened with the other, do not confuse the performance with affection.
The house of cards has already fallen. You are simply no longer obliged to crawl underneath it looking for friendship.
Yours, in closed accounts and considerably better investments,
Joely