My foray into the world of poly hasn't been the smoothest of transitions. My husband and I have talked about a third in vague terms for about seven years now (I wanted a Cuban houseboy ala Bird Cage). We would throw out these big requirements when we would talk and then would drop it, so I always thought they were theoretical conversations like our talks about where else we would like to live in the country.
One day, about two months ago, R came to me and told me our friend J had had a big blow up with her husband and was finally leaving him - after talking about it for years now. He told me he had talked to her and told her we had a spot waiting for her to crash. I was fine with this. We held a weekly game night in our home once a week and played cards, board games and RPG games (ala D&D, White Wolf, Pathfinder, etc), and she had been coming to them for almost a year. I liked her and got along well with her, she loved playing with our kids and didn't mind our dogs, cat and chickens (we have a small backyard homestead).
After about a week, R took me outside and asked me what I thought about her staying permanently (she had been sleeping on the couch). I didn't mind so much - our teenager was enthralled with her because she had taken over her house cleaning duties lol. I mentioned we would have to clean out the room we were going to put our toddlers in (they were still cosleeping with us at the time) and make it more homey for her. This was when he brought up the possibility of something more with her.
To make a long story a bit shorter, I told him I didn't mind talking it over, but didn't think a sexual relationship was a good idea because of her just getting separated from her husband and I didn't want this to be something she regretted or later viewed as taking advantage of her. What I didn't know at that time was he had already been sleeping with her before he had originally invited her over for game nights.
Yes, folks, he had been cheating on me with her for over a year. But - before you all jump on his case - we had been having a lot of problems since our three year old had been born and I had been diagnosed with Postpartum Depression which turned into Major Depression. We had had sex for a total of four times during this period he had been sleeping with her. I had expected him to find an outlet, just not with someone we both knew. And I had expected him to bring it up with me first.
Expectations are a bad thing, people. We knew better. We had stopped communicating with each other. We had put our BDSM lifestyle on the back burner. We had stopped communicating with our old friends in the lifestyle. Our life had gone stale together and was heading toward a bad ending.
This said, having J with us has made us communicate again. We have resolved a lot of old problems. Unfortunately, it has also created a lot of new ones.
I hope people find this blog and can learn from the missteps and misadventures we are going through. We may have started out on a rougher road than most in the poly world, but we are trying to make this work to the best of our abilities.
In the coming days, weeks and months I plan on posting more about how our rocky start happened, how we have handled things, the problems we have encountered and how we are trying to improve things.
