You don’t want to be the other white meat?:dubious:
communication and having rules/terms/procedures-to-resolve-conflicts are important in any relationship. with poly more important.
sometimes solutions require creativity or flexibility.
if you have a nightly call then that is a standing date or ritual. you let each other know your desires and come to an agreement.
what would she do if mom or long lost friend called when secondary boyfriend was over. likely she would talk at least for a short call. if the call was private then she could do in a room where the secondary boyfriend wasn’t. i don’t think this an unusual action.
since the secondary boyfriends know of you then there is no need to hide your photos in general. it might be reasonable to put ones out of view where she and secondary boyfriend are spending time together if they prove distracting.
I concluded years ago that having multiple sexual relationships ongoing at the same time sounds like a great thing, but in reality, the hassle of dealing with the emotional entanglement of more than just my significant other, is WAAAAAAYYYY too much work. We love each other and work on keeping our sex life fresh and fun, but that certainly doesn’t include 3rd or 4th parties.
The problem is that you are thinking of “priority” as a static thing.
In any person’s life, there are macro-priorities and micro-priorities. Something may be a priority to you on a macro-level, but that doesn’t mean that it has to take precedence every minute of every day.
For example, a mother’s main priority in life might be raising her small child, but on a micro level, the dishes gotta get done and other people in her life deserve her attention too. If she puts the kid in a playpen for a little bit while she does the dishes or has a cup of tea with a friend, does that mean that her child is not her first priority? Of course not.
Do you really and truly believe that you are your girlfriend’s first priority on a macro level? It sounds like you do. If she prioritizes someone else on a micro level, it does not take away from that.
Sounds like you’re a bit insecure in the relationship and you depend on the reassurance of that nightly phone call. I get that. But that is YOUR problem, not hers. As your partner, she should be willing to help you work through it, and it sounds like she’s doing exactly that. For this relationship to work, being both long-distance and open, you need to learn to live without getting all of the reassurance you want exactly when you want it.
As for the photos - I can see why it bugs you, but it also sounds like you want to be “present” during her dates so her boyfriends don’t forget that you exist and you have dibs. If you trust her, you don’t have to do that, and frankly, concerning yourself with her interior decoration seems a wee bit controlling (though I don’t think you mean to be). I’d suggest dropping the subject and putting it out of your mind.
Good luck.
In every relationship, we’re allowed to have our feelings and to have things that bug us. It’s on us to communicate that to the other person and, if it’s important enough, to break up if they don’t go along. Be respectful of the other person(s) while discussing it, determine how much it matters, and decide from there.
A long-distance poly relationship is a pretty daunting undertaking. Both require enormous amounts of trust and compromise. And frankly, trust and compromise aren’t always about what’s rational.
This. The OP is spinning it as his feelings versus the other man’s feelings, but it could just as easily be his feelings versus her feelings.
This is my thinking as well.
I’d also suggest that maybe you guys could skip the nightly phone call on the nights you hook up with other people.
Also, out of curiosity, what is the rule wit regard to sleep overs? When you all hook up with your respective partners, do they sleep over or do they leave after the sex is done?
If they’re sleeping over, that seems kind of detrimental to a relationship. That time directly after sex is when most people do some serious bonding. I think you would have to be a robot to resist that very strong urge to bond.
And if there’s bonding going on you run the risk of falling for other people which means ONE of you is going to get hurt. Unfortunately, I fear getting hurt is likely to be in one of you guys’ not too distant future.
Good luck to you guys though.
Why is that? He is part of her life. I think the fact that she hides them is ridiculous and perhaps has little to do with doing it “out of respect” for these other guys.
I am not in an open relationship and never have been, but I am, however, in a relationship with someone who was married for 23 years and has a son. We’ve been together for 4+ years. There is a large photo (16x20 possibly) of my boyfriend (then married) his ex-wife and son, mounted on the wall on the way down to the family room where we spend a lot of time and often have sex. It was taken when his son was around 10 years old during a vacation. His boy is 21 now. I see it every time I’m over there. I don’t expect him to take it down, not now, or when I move in with him in about 3 to 4 years. I’d like a picture of us up somewhere in the house, but we haven’t gotten around to it. Instead, for now, he has my artwork framed and hung in various places. My point about the photo is this - I don’t find it disrespectful of him to still have it up. It’s his family, his past and part of their memories. His son is like my own and I’m friends with his ex, but even if I wasn’t, I would never expect or ask him to take that picture down. I know where I stand. I know how he feels about me. And a photo is not going to change that or make me feel less loved/disrespected.
I have known a handful of people in open relationships, and frankly, very few can pull it off without problems such as what the OP stated here. Problems start of small and sort of insignificant, but then get progressively deeper and harder to deal with. At times, relationships can be difficult enough with just two people, no?
deryk, I wonder if the “putting yourselves before all others,” is something that’s sustainable long term. Maybe that’s something that you two should discuss further.
I consider a photo of a past relationship, that is presumably most meaningful because it contains your SO’s child, nothing compared to a picture of a girl I just met and am about to sleep with and her still-current boyfriend. If your SO was still married to his ex-wife and was sexually active with her, are you telling me that photo would still be acceptable to you?
No, it takes somebody who is truly okay with being her secondary bf, which it sounds like you’re not and at least one of the secondaries in the OP is not. And it’s okay not to be okay with being #2, it really is. The line of people not okay with that forms to the left. But it’s NOT okay to be #2 but advocate for the illusion that you’re #1, especially when that illusion is anithetical to the ground rules of the primary relationship.
It seems to me that that’s the real issue here–the OP feels like taking pains to make sure these guys are never confronted with evidence that he’s an actual person who is a major part of her life violates the spirit of their rules about secondary partners knowing they’re…well, secondary. I understand and sympathize with that completely, because sometimes you just need your partner to stand up on his or her hind legs and tell someone “Look, this person is more important to me than you. Deal with it.” When someone constantly reassures you in private that you’re vitally important but won’t clearly and unambiguously communicate that to other people, it kind of feels like you’re the secret gf they’re ashamed for people to see them with. And that is just fucking devastating, to you and to the relationship.
I also understand and sympathize with the awkwardness of saying to some guy, “Take your finger out of my vagina for a second, I gotta call my bf. Here, look at this picture of us on vacation while I’m talking.” That’s clearly not an acceptable way to treat a secondary partner, and if that’s honestly what the OP is expecting, he’s entirely in the wrong. But it seems like there’s plenty of middle ground between that and “Here, I’ve removed all traces so you can pretend he doesn’t exist.” My instinct would be to take down pictures in the actual bedroom and make a very short (2-3 minutes) call from another room well before or after actual sexytimes.
Sounds like the “rules” need to be revisited, because they’re not working for her. Or maybe you should try compromising, perhaps agreeing to end the night with a less obvious text v. a phone call.
I used to openly date another guy, Mike, for ~2 years when we were in college, though they called it “playing the field” at the time. We were the “primary” couple and on the rare day or night we were both available, we’d spend it together. We also ran in the same circles, so I met a few of the girls he dated, including a woman named Diane, who I really enjoyed. She had a personality like Melissa McCarthy’s, bubbly and funny and loud, with curves to boot (though Diane wasn’t obese).
Anywho, one night I unexpectedly got off work, so I called Mike, hoping he was free. It was quickly apparent that he was not, because he started acting all goofy. He lowered his voice, and wouldn’t answer anything except in short answers. So, I asked, “Are you on a date?” He said, “No.” Before long, I heard Diane’s voice in the background, so I asked again, and again he denied it again. And that irritated the hell out of me, because there was no reason to lie to me; we were openly playing the field! Long story short, we got into a fight, not because he was in the middle of a date with another woman, which was something I’d signed up for, but because he persisted in lying about it. To make matters worse, Diane left in a huff after being ignored for a half an hour, while we discussed the ethics of open relationships.
Mike and I eventually concluded that we were both wrong and both right. He lied, yes, but only because he was trying to spare my feelings. Had the situation been reversed, he’d have wanted me to lie, because he’d rather live in blissful ignorance than know the truth, and sulk all night imagining his girlfriend with another guy. I, on the other hand, would rather him always tell me the truth, even if it caused me pain, because I value honesty over jealousy. So we actually came away with different rules: I wasn’t to talk about other guys with him, even if that meant lying right to his face. And he wasn’t to lie to me, even to spare my feelings. (Oh, and we also had Diane’s new rule, which was “No extended phone conversations when I’m over!”)
I’ve said this in other threads, but I’ll repeat it here. It was helluva lot easier to play the field before cell phones. I can’t imagine attempting that today. People are naturally jealous, and it’s so much easier to suppress it when your SO is out of sight, out of mind. I don’t know how it would work being in constant communication. Because you multiply exponentially the number of instances where you have to deal with either brutal honesty or kind lies. I don’t think that there’s a good answer for everyone.