The view after 30 years

Clyde

New member
I'm a strong-willed straight mono male almost 60, burned out after a couple of careers in science and industry & now a painter (watercolour) daytrading spot currencies for spending money, married over 30 years to a strong-willed straight mono female approximately the same age.

I'm here trying to make sense of our mono marriage, which was touch-and-go for the first couple of decades, calmer these days only because I suspect we're in transition yet again, perhaps as predicted by Voltaire ("Make love in your youth and in old age attend to your salvation"). I'm not looking for new intimate relationships but wouldn't mind new friends & some perspective on existing relationships.

I wish I'd known what polyamory was in the '70's since I suspect it would have saved my wife and me a lot of grief over our extramarital partners, in my opinion pre- and extramarital partners a corollary of mono marriage (modern sense, although we may already be in the post-modern as far as relationship goes). As it is, the only thing that saved us was we have always been deeply in love & struggled constantly to stay together, and these days if love doesn't keep us together trust it will help us part friends.

Old girlfriends I'm still talking to still remind me about what women want and how to keep a marriage together, correct me on my more sexist comments, tell me what to read, and I thank them for that. I'm not sure what her old boyfriends tell her (boyfriends she recollects or with whom she still corresponds & still plans to meet one day) because I'm not good at asking questions and she's not good at volunteering information.

Yep....have a hatred on for the mono lifestyle.

I suppose I'm looking for emotional & spiritual growth, and clues to the dynamics of how one opens a marriage to include existing relationships.
 
Welcome. You'll find a lot of support here. I would recommend the book Opening Up: a Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino. There's also website associated with it: http://openingup.net/. I haven't explored it much yet, but I'm going to now that I know about it. :)

It's about all types of open relationships, not just polyamory. But it's a good source of information.

JG
 
Thanks for the welcome & the book reference.

Please forgive me if I seem cold, long time in the wasteland but warming up already.
 
:)

For anyone who happens upon this thread (including mods), by replying to ISportsNutritionist I may in fact be succumbing to Rule 14 ("Never argue with a troll -- it means they win", even if in this case "they" is a bot), except I'm compelled by Rule 21 ("It is delicious trap. You must hit it.").
 
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