I've been married 18yrs, have 3 wonderful kids...recently within the past 6 months my spouse has fallen in love with another. My spouse says that he doesn't love me any less than when he first fell in love. I have been raised to believe One Man One Woman, but now what I am experiencing is totally opposite.
I love him with all my heart and I am trying to understand this polyamory lifestyle as well. It is very hard to understand how a person can love 2 people at the same time. In the same breath, the lady he has fallen for doesn't believe that he can love me and her at the same time. I don't want to lose our marriage so I am trying to understand this lifestyle.
Can anyone help?
My wife and I had been married nearly 18 years when she brought up the possibility of polyamory . . . but before she had gotten involved with anyone. Now, we have a shared understanding of how we can have intimate relationships with others while we maintain our relationship with one another and continue to raise (and dote upon) our children.
I can assure you it
can work out,
if there's a shared understanding of intentions and boundaries going in, not just between the existing couple, but with possible others as well.
It's all well and good for your husband to have "fallen for" someone - it happens all the time.What you and he and she actually
do is quite another matter.
The intense feelings he has for her are
not imperatives: he is not obligated to follow through on them, nor are you obligated to let him.
Instead, each of you has to come to a conscious, deliberate decision about how you will live and relate to others. You and your husband need to talk it out, come to an explicit agreement, and he needs to keep his feelings in perspective.
Coming to an agreement may mean, in the end, that your husband can explore a relationship with the woman he's fallen for. But it could equally well mean that he has to let go of her.
Your post suggests the other woman is monogamous, too. This bodes ill for any really workable poly agreement among you!
I encourage you to read widely in the forum. Many, many people have come here seeking advice for situations very much like what you describe . . . and not all of it is
pushing poly on people.
As wonderful as it
can be, there are times and circumstances in which polyamory is actually the wrong way to go.
There are also many, many threads and posts about relationships in which one partner is monogamous while the other is polyamorous.