First time he's in love with another

LostInLove4

New member
I have been in an open relationship for 5 years now, but neither of us has ever had anything more than flings.

My boyfriend of nearly 10 years has found someone he says he has a "deep connection" with and I am having a hard time adjusting to this. They are classmates in university - lab partners. They spend 6 hours a day together in school and many nights they spend together doing homework and he simply doesn't come home. They go on field trips together and weekends away.

I am perfectly fine with him loving another woman and I welcome it. I am very happy for him. I work two jobs right now to put him through school and I am not home as much as I used to be either, but I really feel like this lack of time spent together is making us drift apart.

I thought we had a committed polyamorous relationship but he frequently tells me he can't possibly know if he will always love me. People fall out of love all the time. I know this makes perfect logical sense, but it hurts. I know I will always love him.

I'm torn up about it. I can't eat, I can't sleep, I'm distracted at work. I am turning into a basketcase and I think that will just push him away even more.

I guess my question is this: How do I make it clear that I think we need to work on US a little bit more without coming across as clingy and trying to keep him from her?
 
Hi,
This is obviously eating you up and it will ruin your relationship if you don't do something about it. You know already that he could have already moved on to another person and he's not so much polyamorous as polysexual. I think you need to have a sit down talk with the two of them and say exactly what you need to say and get the answers you need. Yes, lots of tears one way or another but that's the way it's going to be. I'm sorry you're going through a bad spot in your life.

It's really possible he's polyamorous, and if that's the case he needs to know he needs to pay lots more attention to you so you get your needs met even he is infatuated with her for the time being. Could be you need to split up for a while and sort things out.

I know this isn't what you wanted to hear, but IME it has to happen.
-SJ
 
Ask for specifics of what you need. It sounds like you don't have a lot of time together with him being in school and you working long hours. Relationships do need time and attention to keep functioning. It sounds to me like you need some dedicated time to really be with each other without other distractions. I'm not sure how much time you can carve out to spend with each other but find that time and really commit to spending that time together.

He's right that one can never know what the future will bring with how you will feel about another person. Can you try reframing that statement in your mind though? When I really thought about it I found it comforting that my partners are with me everyday because in that day they chose to be, not because of some outside force.
 
How about letting him pay for his own school and pay his own bills, or let the other woman support him if he doesn't know if he'll "always love you or not". Seems like he loves you and your wallet just fine for the time being. Sounds to me like one of you is using the other, and the other is being used. Which one of you is doing which? What does he do for YOU? You could be working two jobs and keep what you earn for yourself, to save for your own education or retirement, or you could work one job and have more free time to pursue your own hobbies, interests, and social life. I know you don't want to "give up" on a ten-year relationship, but ten years is not a very long time in the grand scheme, and do you really want to waste even more time and energy on someone who is not giving back to you what you give to them, and in addition to that is giving what little extra attention they have to someone else? tell him to figure out his priorities and tell you what they are, or you'll figure them out by yourself.
 
Thank you all for responding. I really appreciate the answers you've all given. I know it does sound pretty bad for me, but I really feel that this is just a growing experience for us both. This is uncharted territory and we are both trying to work it out. When we are together we are happy and love each other as much as ever, but those moments are too few in my opinion. I can't ask him to not do his homework with his lab partner though.

I want to ask him to schedule time with me and stick to it. Like a date night at least once a week. I think this is all we can reasonably manage right now with our schedules.

I also want to ask if I can meet the girl. They have only known each other for a month but she knows and understands our situation. I think it would make me feel better if we could get to know each other and form some respect for each other.

Any tips or advice for asking these things?
 
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I want to ask him to schedule time with me and stick to it. Like a date night at least once a week. I think this is all we can reasonably manage right now with our schedules.

I also want to ask if I can meet the girl. They have only known each other for a month but she knows and understands our situation. I think it would make me feel better if we could get to know each other and form some respect for each other.

Any tips or advice for asking these things?

Why can't you say it to him just like you said it to us right here?

He's only known her for a month and they've already spent "weekendS (plural) away together? WTF?
 
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Why can't you say it to him just like you said it to us right here?

He's only known her for a month and they've already spent "weekendS (plural) away together? WTF?

I am assuming those weekends are the school field trips she talks about. I know when Runic Wolf was in school one of his courses required 30 hours a week in the lab and it was only going to get worse if he stayed in school.
 
I am assuming those weekends are the school field trips she talks about. I know when Runic Wolf was in school one of his courses required 30 hours a week in the lab and it was only going to get worse if he stayed in school.

She said "field trips together and weekends away." If it were me, I would have said "Field trips together, which are often in the form of weekends away." The way she said it suggested that "weekends away" were IN ADDITION to "field trips together". OP, please clarify for us what you meant by this.

I have a degree in a field that required lots of lab work and spending time with class-mates and lab-partners while I was in college. I made "deep connections" with some of the people i met that way. However, I don't recall being REQUIRED to spend long, intense periods of time with any one particular person. I remember my lab partner and I hanging out together a lot, during meals and between classes, for examples. This person had a family and their spouse was working a full-time job to support the family while they were in school. They ALWAYS managed to make time to spend with their family. I was even included during some of those occasions. But my point is, it is the OP's partner's CHOICE to spend so much time with this one person, whether they "have to" see each other for school or not.

The fact that the OP's partner keeps REMINDING her that he "may not always be in love with" her is a red (orange?) flag to me. She's investing a lot of time, energy, and money in making it possible for him to get his education, and he can just walk away when he's finished and there will be nothing she can do to get a return on her "investment" because they are not married.
 
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To clarify: he has gone on one field trip with her and now they are away together with a couple friends this weekend for fun.

He paid my way through two years of college a few years back and now I am helping him through one year of university. We are common law and have been living together for 8 1/2 years.

I admit I am more concerned about the unwillingness to say he wants to be with me forever. I can live with separation if I know we still have a future.

He is very unattached to life in general. I admire that quality in him. If he lost everything he has in this world - including me - he would still be quite peaceful. I am not so enlightened and I truly fear losing him.
 
Yeah. You need to talk to him and make sure he knows where you're at. He is not a mind reader. If he truly cares about you and values your relationship, he'll respond with something to the effect of, "really hon? I'm sorry to not have been meeting your needs. Let's work together to get our relationship back to the point where we're both feeling good about it. I'll make the time to spend with you and i'll tell my friend you would like to meet her and see what she says. I want to reassure you that i do want to be with you now, and for the foreseeable future. Here are some things you can do or say to help me or get my attention when you feel neglected or lonely because i'm busy with other things." etc.

If he comes back at you with "you're cramping my style, i need my freedom to do whatever, don't expect me to promise you a date night because i want to keep it open in case something better comes up at the last minute", etc, in other words, act like a single "college boy" playing the field, then that is his way of letting you know if you don't like it, you can leave the relationship and he gets to be the one who was dumped and in need of comfort and sympathy - which he has someone to get those things from.

I hope i am wrong but i have seen this happen before and it's pretty obvious when it isn't you who is involved.
 
He's right that one can never know what the future will bring with how you will feel about another person. Can you try reframing that statement in your mind though? When I really thought about it I found it comforting that my partners are with me everyday because in that day they chose to be, not because of some outside force.

This is always how I have felt about our situation. We never felt like marriage or anything like that because this is what we believe. But when he chooses another so often it make me wonder.

Thank you all for your help. I really appreciate all the support. I think I will be back here with more questions.
 
I am perfectly fine with him loving another woman and I welcome it. I am very happy for him. I work two jobs right now to put him through school and I am not home as much as I used to be either, but I really feel like this lack of time spent together is making us drift apart.

I thought we had a committed polyamorous relationship but he frequently tells me he can't possibly know if he will always love me. People fall out of love all the time. I know this makes perfect logical sense, but it hurts. I know I will always love him.

I guess my question is this: How do I make it clear that I think we need to work on US a little bit more without coming across as clingy and trying to keep him from her?

I can totally relate. My husband works out of town because it's the only way we can afford for me to focus on school without a part-time job. As a result, we don't have a lot of time together.

Like your man, my husband admits that he can't be sure we'll always love each other. He's too savvy to say he might stop loving me, he usually frames it the other way, that he's worried I'll one day "grow out of him." I deny it, though logically I know it's possible. But dammit! No!

The way I look at commitment is this: It doesn't mean you promise to always love each other, because that's a promise you just can't make. But we promise that as long as we love each other, we will work on every problem that comes up, and that we will be caring and supportive to each other as we deal with our problems with the rest of the world.

More than likely, he's just under the influence of "New Relationship Energy" (i.e. the "Honeymoon phase") and he's forgetting about his other obligations in light of something new and shiny.

The conversation you need to have will be focused on you and your own relationship. You can do this without mentioning the other woman at all. Start with what's positive in your relationship, then move to the things that used to be there and have since dried up (just the facts, ma'am... don't speculate on the reasons), finishing with the things you'd like to see change. Don't forget to give him a voice in this.

For months, I've been complaining that my husband's out-of-town-job puts strain on our marriage. After much discussion, we got to a point where I was able to understand that part of the problem was me. I wasn't doing a bang-up job of listening to him talk about his problems at work, which left him feeling unsupported. As a result, he became disinterested in communicating with me at all, because I would just go on and on about my day without asking about his. Super not cool on my part. When I started listening to how his day went, he started feeling more supported and became more interested in talking with me. In only one week, we've regained a lot of the intimacy we'd been missing.

So... don't be overly surprised if you open this can of worms and learn that perhaps you've been less than the perfect partner yourself. You work two jobs to put him through school. That's probably very stressful and exhausting. Possibly, at the end of the second 8-hour shift in the day, you're just too tired to really give a shit that he got a bad grade on his term paper. You might even feel resentful that he's dumping his problems on you when you can barely see straight. Meanwhile, as they're spending so much time together at the lab, they've got ample opportunity to discuss the challenges they share with getting their education. And so the snowball rolls down the hill...

Don't get me wrong, I'm in no way saying this is all your fault, merely that these things are seldom one-sided. Until I acknowledged that I had a role to play in getting where we were, I was unable to do my part to fix the problems my husband and I were having.
 
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