SillyOldBear, interesting take on one's "rights" in a marriage. I'm glad I didn't read your reply before I got married -- I might have cancelled the wedding! So, before you're married, you're free to have sex with anyone, except those who don't want to have sex with you. And the only difference with marriage is that you're free to have sex only with your wife, except when she doesn't want to have sex with you. So in the sense of sexual freedom, marriage is entirely restrictive. I suppose the "benefit" is supposed to be that your spouse's restriction is to your benefit. OK, not a bad arrangement. The only problem is, it falls apart completely if one partner shuts the other one off sexually -- then it becomes WORSE than being single, especially for the other partner.
Not easy, is it? And yet, if you refute it, you have to argue that a woman doesn't have a right to decide when or whether to have sex. The truth is that she has the right to decide that, and marriage can't waive that right. It does cause complicated lousiness in many marriages, but there's no way around it except requiring that women have sex with their husbands against their wills. If you don't want that, then you have to default back to persuasion, seduction, or ending the marriage. You've chosen to end the marriage. You can't have a right to someone else's labor, someone else's body, or someone else's emotion. I realize it feels like a trap when you're in an SSM--it still feels that way to me sometimes, and my sex life is a hundred times better now than it was when I first came here. But that is the arrangement. Marriage is a long-term commitment to one person, and when you make a long-term commitment to one person or one company or one thing, you have to take into account that people change and the world changes. You're committing now to be married to that person 30 years from now. There are three ways out of the "trap." 1. Build your marriage into what you want it to be. I know you've tried to do that. I'm not lecturing you, just listing options. 2. End the marriage. Cancel the agreement. Not a good option, but an option. 3. Restructure the agreement to everyone's satisfaction by sitting down and negotiating a new structure for the marriage so that it can continue with altered rules. You say you've done this. The only thing that seems to be worrying posters here is that you've given indications that you didn't sit both parties down and negotiate the new structure, but rather made the changes on your own and hid the changes from your partner. More on that below, because you give me hope that you didn't do that.
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And if, as you all seem to suggest that I do, I sit her down to really unload all the details of what I do, she would ask why are you telling me all this? You know I don't want to hear this! Whatever. And she'd leave the room. And that's happened many times when I insisted on talking about the situation. So I've been there with the honest talk, and it doesn't work. "Here we go again, another discussion about sex. Why do you insist on that over and over and over again when you know I don't want to hear it? Whatever you gotta do. Just leave me out of it." Maybe I didn't make that clear enough. That part of it has been pretty tough, at least at first, because I didn't know how to deal with the situation if my wife simply didn't want to talk about it. If you can't talk about it, you can't make any progress, was my thinking. So that might put it into perspective a little more why I have sort of taken things into my own hands and made my own decisions independent of my wife.
I can't speak for anyone else, but it wasn't clear to me. So you did tell her that you were going to have sex with other people, and she responded that you should do whatever you have to do? I'm just trying to pin down a clear answer on that, because it does change the discussion. I don't understand the talk about Playboy calendars and strip clubs if you took the much more relevant step of actually discussing your intention to have an affair, but if you've already tried to have the discussion and gotten your answer, then you're right, you're at a later stage.
Assuming all that comes back a "yes," let's see if we can move this along a different way. You say you want to know about where to go from here, having done what you've done. The reason people have been emphasizing being honest with your wife is that if you haven't been, that's hanging over your head and moving forward is hard to do. But let me ask you this: what do you *want* to do? Where do you *want* to be, say, ten more years into the future? Do you want to be married to your wife the rest of your life? Do you see yourself trying again for a full marriage with your wife, ending the marriage at some point in the future, or continuing to get sex with other people for the rest of your life?
