Wife Is Worried About Closing Her Open Relationship

Turning a monogamous relationship into a non-monogamous one can definitely be a challenge, if all the I-tried-it stories are anything to go off of. It’s definitely possible to become non-monogamous while maintaining your previously monogamous relationship, but it’s crucial that you and your partner are on the same page — and that any future partners are too. What usually isn’t a good idea is opening up your relationship in a bid to save it. As author Molly Roden Winter previously told SheKnows about her non-monogamous marriage, “you can’t save your marriage by opening it. … [I]t’s about you two as individuals, and you’ve gotta be willing to give some space to your partner for where this is gonna take them.”

One couple on Reddit is struggling on multiple fronts after opening up their marriage — with communication, different desires, self-esteem, and more. Our OP (Reddit lingo for the original poster, aka the author of the post) is the wife, who took a while to come around to the idea of opening up their marriage but — now that their relationship is “better” — is in a mental crisis over the idea of closing it again. The word divorce has been thrown around, and OP has had been panicking over the whole thing. She turned to Reddit’s Am I the Asshole? forum for advice, and Redditors were ready to chime in. Keep reading for the full story.

Opening the Relationship

OP has been with her husband for 25 years and says she still loves him deeply. “Our lives are intertwined,” she writes, so when her husband told her he wasn’t sexually attracted to her anymore — despite still loving her — she says she understood. “I see you as my best friend and companion,” was the general vibe she got. OP sums it up: “He didn’t want to lose me but he wasn’t attracted to me.”

They agreed to open their marriage with a few rules, like no “relationships” (just sex), no paying for other people (like buying dinner for dates), and no sex in their marital home. It’s been a year since they opened up their marriage, and at first, OP had a hard time. “I cried all night when I knew he was… with someone else,” she said. She eventually downloaded Tinder and started talking to people, later realizing that “there are so many other people out there and I started to feel attracted to men other than my husband.” OP started to meet up with men in-person and eventually began sleeping with a few.

A Shift in the Dynamic

Strangely, since OP’s husband started sleeping with other women, he seems to want OP more. Before opening their marriage, her husband would want sex “maybe a handful” of times a year, OP writes, but now they have sex once a week.

The day before OP posted, her husband told her he wanted to close the marriage now that they’re having sex — all while telling her he loves her and that she’s the most beautiful woman he knows. The conversation sent OP into a “panic episode,” she says, because she doesn’t believe him. She thinks her husband only wants her now because of the open relationship — not in spite of it. “If we close it, he will go back to being unfulfilled.”

OP told her husband that she wanted to keep the relationship open, which he was “very unhappy” to hear. “I said that we can divorce if this didn’t work for him anymore because I have done everything in my power to save our marriage and I feel that I succeeded,” OP replied. “I don’t want to go back to when we almost lost each other.”

Continuing down that hypothetical, OP’s husband asked: if they did get divorced and she started dating again, would it be an open relationship? OP said no, she’d be monogamous because (as she later explained in a comment) “that’s what I really think a relationship should be” — leading her husband to say she was the asshole for not wanting “to give him the same decency as my hypothetical future partner.”

In comments, OP also gave some more context on why she didn’t want to close their marriage. “I am afraid that he [won’t] find me attractive once I am his only option again,” she explained. “I would want nothing more than to have him back just for myself but I am terrified that he would get bored again and hurt me again.” She added that she was “in shock” when her husband initially suggested the open marriage, and how it suddenly put the lack of intimacy in a new light. “Everything was explained and my explanation was that I was not good enough,” OP wrote — something she still believes of herself, and she thinks he’ll realize again if they close their marriage.

What does Reddit think?

OP initially wanted to know if she was in fact the asshole for telling her husband she’d be monogamous if she wasn’t with him — but Reddit had a lot more to say about their relationship as a whole.

“I think his attraction to you is from OTHERS finding you attractive,” wrote one commenter, who also called out OP’s husband for seemingly assuming OP wouldn’t sleep with other men, and “he would get to play the field knowing you were sitting at home. Things [didn’t] turn out like he thought and now he wants to close the door to your ‘open’ marriage.”

Other commenters thought the same. “This is almost a cliché,” one person wrote, adding that it doesn’t seem like OP truly wants a non-monogamous relationship. “‘I would want a monogamous relationship’ implies that thats what you wanted all along… these are merely the consequences of his own actions.”

Another Redditor summed it up aptly: “So you want monogamy, yet you are afraid that if you give it to him, your relationship with him will become what it was,” they wrote. “I feel like this experience has traumatized you in some kind of way. It sounds like you would have preferred divorce rather than open the marriage.”

We agree — it sounds like OP is not in a good mental and emotional place in this relationship, especially given how deeply it’s affected her self-esteem. One Redditor even gave OP some encouragement in a reply to one of her comments. “You could try [to be] monogamous with him just to be sure, but don’t let your insecure husband tell you you are not good enough,” they said. “He is trying to control you by undermining your confidence — don’t let him. You are enough.”

At the very least, some therapy could go a long way in helping OP and her husband communicate about what they truly want out of this relationship — which for OP, despite what she said, appears to be monogamy with her husband. Whether that’s possible given how poorly she feels about herself due to his behavior… well, that remains to be seen. It’s up to OP to decide whether it’s worth maintaining a long-standing marriage with someone who’s made her feel this way. No matter what, we hope OP can get on the road to improving her self-esteem, because no one should ever feel like they’re not enough.