For about 4 months I had been dating a wonderful woman. She’s so much like me it’s scary sometimes, and we are always saying the same thing at the same time, getting really obscure jokes I usually only make for my own benefit, etc.
When we first started dating, she expressed concern that she felt like she was falling into another long-term relationship, and she had been either alone or in a similar relationship since she was 13. She had virtually no social life for the last 4 years, and had only recently started dating (and had gone out on only a few dates) a few months before meeting me. I told her it was OK if she dated other guys, as long as she let me know if things were starting to get serious with somebody else, so I could decide at that time if I was comfortable with it.
Anyway, she had not taken advantage of this freedom the entire time we dated, and it kept feeling more and more like a serious relationship - spending more and more time together, we even went up to Oklahoma for the weekend to visit her family recently. Things were good.
Over the last couple of weeks, she had started developing a closer friendship with a couple of her friends, a couple who say they are polyamorous, but more closely fit the definition of swingers as their talk about sex with other partners is described more as play than some kind of emotional thing. She asked me if it was OK to ‘play’ sexually with the female one, and told me she might try kissing the male one. I told her it was OK, we had agreed to dating, and though I didn’t really see this as dating (which I admit I agreed with in part because I knew she was very slow to get involved physically, rarely even kissing on the first date), but I knew she wanted to explore this so I told her it would not be a problem. One time while over at these friends house she was having fun sexually teasing the female friend and invited me to join in, which I did half-heartedly - I saw nothing wrong with it, I just didn’t find the other girl attractive at all.
Well, the morning of my birthday, she told me that she had experimented with voyeurism, watching these two friends have sex. No problem, asked if she helped…yes, she smacked the add and tweaked the nipples of the female friend. No problem. Then she admits she touched the guys penis. I think this is a bit fast for her (she’s only really known him for a few weeks, and it was a couple of months before we had gotten past making out and light petting), but I was still OK. Then she told me she kissed him while doing this.
I realize I was wrong now, but the mental image all came together in my head and I became crazy with jealousy and anger. I know my overreaction was due to a couple of factors in my past - that my last birthday I got dumped by a girl I was starting to fall for, and that a few months before that my wife left me and I found out later she was cheating on me.
I felt betrayed, and let her know this, and pretty much unloaded all my negative feelings on her. She became very upset and apologetic about it, which of course reinforced in my mind that she had done something wrong. That evening, she took me out for dinner for my birthday, and we talked about it, and I told her I realized I was wrong for getting upset at her, explained that my sense of betrayal was misplaced, and that I wanted to continue to see me.
She says she is afraid of hurting me more, she didn’t know I would be so hurt. She says she can’t make any promises regarding her future behavior (which is something I asked for originally when I was still upset). She says she isn’t the kind of woman I need. I tell her that I am past that, that I still love her whatever she does, and that I was wrong to get mad after we had already agreed it was OK.
She doesn’t buy it, says she doesn’t want to see me hurt myself by changing for her. I told her I had been in open relationships before, the only reason I got upset was because of the timing and the surprise of it. I told her how I feel about her, and how jealousy can’t really infringe upon it.
Originally she wanted to stop dating me forever. Now she says she is considering dating me again in about a month, after I’ve had time to think about if I still want to date her, but she says that if we are going to have an open relationship that I will HAVE to be dating other girls too.
So, I want to hit the Ethereal Rewind and go back to when she told me about her kissing and touching that other guy, and instead of saying “What?!?!?!”, just say “That’s cool, was it as big as mine?”