Tender Bender posted:

WE WERE IN A POLY!!!

vyst posted:

kids are the fuckin worst. lol if you have kids

gentle pete posted:

My [24M] GF's [24F] father referred to ISIS as "my people". I'm not even a Muslim or from Iraq or Syria. Now he says I disrespected him.

Jack Trades posted:

Was a kid at some point. Can confirm.

Professor Shark posted:

lol Baby Boomers are such crybabies

vyst posted:

kids are the fuckin worst. lol if you have kids

Moridin920 posted:

the disrespect was "i'm not from that area my country is 1500 miles away"

lmao

Edgar Allan Pwned posted:

I think swinging could be kind of cool, but it seems very different from the poly lifestyle. One goon said its probs because there's less chance of an emotional connection. Maybe you just pretend its a small orgy.

Edgar Allan Pwned posted:

I think swinging could be kind of cool, but it seems very different from the poly lifestyle. One goon said its probs because there's less chance of an emotional connection. Maybe you just pretend its a small orgy.

In regards to weddings idk how ppl spend a ton of money on it. Like others, I think its just a time to have a wicked party celebrating a happy commitment. Who needs expensive flowers when there's an open bar?

Professor Shark posted:

I think we talked about them in the CanPol thread, one of the most crass things I've ever heard of

Lutha Mahtin posted:

Even when I've used OkCupid, which is supposedly a haven for such things, I run across very few women in open/poly relationships. Also I am a Millennial who lives in the city that was Fred Armisen's inspiration for Portlandia.

Stuntman posted:

it would have taken much less typing to post "i hate women" and you would have conveyed the exact same thing as this post

Doctor Schnabel posted:

you live in portland oregon??

Business Gorillas posted:

haha yeah im just a huge sexist these people don't look gross at all

Business Gorillas posted:

haha yeah im just a huge sexist

Stuntman posted:

thank you for admitting it at least. the next step is to try and figure out why you hate women, and then work on improving that so in the future you aren't a bigoted piece of poo poo

Stuntman posted:

thank you for admitting it at least. the next step is to try and figure out why you hate women, and then work on improving that so in the future you aren't a bigoted piece of poo poo

Business Gorillas posted:

haha yeah im just a huge sexist these people don't look gross at all

Business Gorillas posted:

haha yeah im just a huge sexist these people don't look gross at all

loquacius posted:

I'm about three weeks off from a big ol' bonanza wedding and I'm super looking forward to it because I love throwing awesome parties and this is the only excuse I'll ever get to really go overboard with it without seeming really narcissistic

Being married to my fiancee is of course the central point and we'd have done it long ago if we were only financially able to do a courthouse thing, but given the chance of course we're gonna throw a fuckin' rager and it'll be the best fuckin' party anyone there will ever go to and if you have a problem with that I'm sorry you hate fun

That said an Indian coworker of mine, as in literally from India, had a thousand people at her wedding and just thinking about that gives me a migraine

Cthulu Carl posted:

How is this dude this dumb?

You're supposed to dump kik chick because "I've met someone else", set a time to hook up with her on the decoy account. Show up and be all whoa whaaaaa-? You're the dumpster skank I was gonna rebound with? Crazy!

Frosted Flake posted:

Wait what? My buddies all had them. Hard to pay for a wedding on an Army salary. Just a party with drink tickets, games, raffle, and goldfish insurance.

Professor Shark posted:

Yeah it's still very poor taste, sorry

Business Gorillas posted:

haha yeah im just a huge sexist these people don't look gross at all

quote:

Apologies for the ridiculous length of this.

I've been with my boyfriend R for about two and a half years. We live together with my daughter from a previous relationship [9F] in a converted warehouse that belongs to R's parents (we pay them rent). We moved in together about a year into our relationship. My life has been pretty perfect since then, and I've been more stable than I have been in my life for a very long time.

R is an amazingly lovely person who is very spiritual (he is Pagan) and likes to always be doing something - he goes out almost every night to his various activities. He has been practising Bujinkan ninjutsu for like ten years so he trains three times a week. He also is in a band (he's a drummer) so he goes to rehearsals. Other times he likes to meet up with his friends for drinks (I've met all his friends and they are my friends also now, all really beautiful people). He likes to go to D&D with two of his long time friends on Friday nights.

I don't really mind this as I am an introvert and like to stay at home. I work as an illustrator and study at tafe so I spend a lot of time in my caveroom working on creative things. I do like to go out with R places on the weekends but in general I like to stay at home during the week (also, I have my daughter to look after on weeknights, she goes to her dad's on the weekends), and I like to have lots of alone time. So the way we both spend our time has been working for us.

I had absolute trust in R, which took a while to build because I have been in a lot of lovely relationships. My biggest problem in relationships it seems, is that I always end up dating people who are polyamorous. I know that some people will use "I'm polyamorous" as an excuse for cheating and I've been in relationships before where that has been the case. But a large number of my friends have always been poly (including my daughter's father and his now-fiance, who both sleep with multiple people) and I've learned to tell the difference. R told me straight up when we started dating that he was poly. I was straight up with him that I am very monogamous. He was seeing and casually sleeping with a friend of his at the time (who is also in a poly relationship with her partner) and when I expressed that I was uncomfortable progressing with him while he was sleeping with her, he told me he would stop and enter into a monogamous relationship with me.

The couple of long time friends that R does D&D with are a couple about ten years older than us (I'll call them M and P) that R feels very connected to - he does ninjutsu training and spiritual work with them also. R went on a trip to Peru with M and another mutual friend last year, and when R got back he was full of stories to tell about his experiences. I felt a bit left out because he was so enthusiastic about his spiritual development and he would talk about it a lot, when I wanted to just hang out with him and chill for a bit (our everyday dynamic is full of fun banter). I expressed something like "is Peru all you are going to talk about now?" and he took that as me saying I didn't want to talk about deeper spiritual stuff with him at all. So he mostly stopped talking to me about that kind of stuff. I only found out last night that that's why he stopped talking to me about it. But I like having deep conversations with R, I just like the chill banter also.

Around the time R got back from Peru, our sex life dropped off a bit. At the beginning of the relationship we were all over each other, having sex multiple times every weekend (we lived about 40min apart in the beginning and with my responsibilities to my daughter, I only got to see R on weekends). R has a very high sex drive and mine is above average I think, but the sex still dropped off significantly. In hindsight I think this was because when R stopped talking to me, I stopped feeling a connection to him, because I talk to R about eeeeverything and all he would talk to me about was mundane banter. I form emotional connections through talking and emotional intimacy, R forms them through sex and closeness to his partner. We had a pretty heated discussion about the frequency of sex around August last year, in which I threw things out like "maybe we should see other people" but in the end we resolved it, I thought, with me agreeing to work on whatever it was that was stopping me from wanting to have sex as frequently (at that time I didn't connect it with R not talking to me as much about things that mattered to him). I thought our frequency of sex did improve after that but it was still less than ideal, we would sleep together maybe once every couple of weeks, sometimes two weeks in a row, sometimes with three weeks in between. I began working on myself so that I would feel more attractive and really did try to increase the frequency. But with R being out of the house so much doing his various activities, and with me being buried under tafe work a lot of the time, it didn't improve all that much - except for in the last couple of months where my libido started to suddenly creep back. I thought we were on a pretty good trajectory with it.

So R went to M after the heated discussion last year, to ask for her advice. M is a psychologist, does ninjutsu and is very spiritual, and her husband P is into the same things. They are in their 40s, and have a poly relationship. R has lived with them before, and is very very close to them both, and has had a relationship with M in the past. I don't know why he thought it was a good idea to take problems with our sex life to someone he had a relationship with in the past, but he did.

This apparently progressed over time, and he began sleeping with M when they would go to ninjutsu conferences in a different state, and also apparently a couple of times at M & P's house. He has kept this from me since August last year, so like a year of keeping this secret now. I asked him how he could justify what he's done and he tried to explain again about how he feels as a poly person, how he can be just as in love with two people simultaneously, but I've heard that stuff before. I wanted to know how he could justify keeping this from me, because he KNEW I was monogamous, and he KNEW this would destroy me and our relationship if I found out. Like how could he continue to do it and keep such an important thing from me for so long and be able to live with himself day to day? I thought he was above this kind of behaviour, different from all my past relationships. But talking to R last night about this, I felt like I was caught in the same loving cycle that seems to happen to me every time in relationships.

I found out about the situation myself. Last night when he was at M & P's house, I was spending my usual Friday night chilling, working on creative projects, etc, and went to go to bed and watch Steven Universe. I turned on his PC, and I'd been feeling a bit off all night, like I'd noticed R had been out more and more lately and my old insecurities from past relationships were creeping back in. So I thought I'd just take a quick look at his Facebook, to confirm that I was being an insecure idiot. (This is not something I had done before, because I felt so secure generally in my relationship.) And instead I found a lot of explicit messages between R and M. I didn't even think it was a serious thing at first. I definitely didn't imagine that they had slept together. I called R even though it was one o'clock in the morning, upset that he was talking in this way to someone who wasn't me. He became very serious and insisted on coming back home to talk to me. And then he told me about sleeping with her.

So I don't even know where to go from here. I told R that the only way we could possibly work on this and move past it is for R to cut off contact with M, but she is so involved in his life and his hobbies and has been a friend for so long that he says he can't do that. He says he is fine with not sleeping with her (though, at the beginning of the conversation when I pushed him, he admitted he would continue sleeping with her regardless of what happened) but cutting out M from his life would be like "cutting off a limb". I kept telling him that this is the consequence he has created for himself, like he literally has to decide if his relationship with M or his relationship with me is more important to him, because I'm not staying with him if he's going to continue to gently caress M. Tried that before, ended up seriously close to suicide. So I can't.

Then there are all these loving logistics. I can't afford to live on my own (I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and need to right now for my tafe course). My daughter loves and idolises R and tells her friends that she has a ninja drummer stepdad. She cannot be moved from her school again (she had two moves early on and I'm not doing it to her again). I'm a student and a freelancer so I depend on R to support us for a little while until I can graduate. All of our friends are mutual. I am really involved with R's family who are the absolute loveliest people, like I get more support from them than my own family. Like there are so many things that have been ruined by this it's ridiculous.

So I need advice. What do you think my next step should be from here? I know the usual advice here is to break up, but do you think if we went to therapy together (he is willing to) it might help sort out this stuff? I don't want him to not see M ever again, I know they have a close friendship bond, but I need time to be able to trust R again. So right now the thing that is frustrating me is that he said he needs time to figure out what he wants to do. I hate feeling like a choice to be decided on. I wish he would just say yes, I will cut contact with M so we can have space to work together to repair our relationship. But I'm not sure if he will.

Update: Thankyou so much to everyone who has commented. You've all really helped me understand that there is no salvaging this. I talked to R again earlier today, and he said that there isn't any way he can stop seeing M or let me see messages or anything I explained I would need to build back my trust in him. He said something along the lines of the way they flirt with each other when they talk is part of their intimate bond and he can't just give that up because it would be like ripping away a part of himself, and at that point I was done and told him I couldn't do this. I wasted a lot of time trying to convince him to not throw our relationship in the garbage over this. Now I'm just trying to be nice to myself and gently work out my next steps from here. glad this happened on a loving weekend when I didn't have too much work and stuff to take care of, did miss my friend's birthday party tonight which I'm a bit bummed about though.

oh yeah, he also said he wants to stay here and for us to basically live like roommates. I've gone down that path before, and nope. so I guess I'm working out a way to move out now.

tl;dr: Boyfriend of 2.5 years is poly, I am monogamous, he slept with his long time friend, I am having trouble dealing

Business Gorillas posted:

haha yeah im just a huge sexist these people don't look gross at all

mind the walrus posted:

$5 says they're going to Suicide Squad next Friday dressed as Harley and the Joker.

Gaunab posted:

you should bust a nut in her and make him raise your baby

Gaunab posted:

you should bust a nut in her and make him raise your baby

Business Gorillas posted:

is this gaslighting?

Business Gorillas posted:

haha yeah im just a huge sexist these people don't look gross at all

blarzgh posted:

"I Live for Halloween(I desperately look forward to the one day a year where I get to dress like a fat, slutty master chief or whatever)" is the hidden gem of this profile.

Rorobb posted: