Non-Monogamy in Committed Relationships

Hi BiCavalier,
Thanks for starting this. i suspect you are referring to some exchange JT1999 and i have had on another thread where she encouraged me to start a discussion like this, so thank you for making the effort.

First off, i want to qualify that i don't think the thoughts and feelings i express are anything but that, mine. i no i don't make the rules or standards for society, so i'm not making judgments that one way is right or wrong. Which sort of segues into the topic.

We grow up being fed standards for relationship, standards and notions from blatant to subliminal, and it generally becomes 'the norm.' The challenge many encounter is, who and how they are does not fit "the norm." Eating ketchup on fries is the norm when you grow up in the US, then you visit France where they eat mayonnaise on their pomme frites and have an emotional response of "ewww, the French are weird and doing it all wrong." Or vice versa. i laughed when i once visited France and saw a French person had burned a McDonalds down. i admit, i love the French.

my point is, many standards have a rational and emotional place in us, and society in general, of how one should be. There are still laws in states in the US where gay sex is a felony (i know, i was once arrested using a 100 year old law). There are many places in the world where people are imprisoned for being LGBQT, and there are people everywhere who think of us as "sick and sinful." In many respects, these are also the same people who made monogamy and one woman/one man and a marriage contract "the norm." It hasn't been that long in most countries where LGBQT people were granted the 'right' to marry.

We want to be accepted and one approach to gain acceptance is to conform to the norm. Not that i think we are fully aware or conscious about such efforts and decisions.

What i question is, how much of our choosing marriage and/or monogamy is taking a hetero norm and trying to conform ourselves to it? Again, i am not making a right/wrong judgement here about marriage or monogamy, i'm suggesting exploring the reasons, both conscious and unconscious behind using those models for relationship.

There's a start for me.

 

Wow! Thank you for sharing. To me so much of what you express is what i see as the essence of a truly intimate relationship. Simply put, people being fully open and honest with each other, naked, vulnerable, loving accepting and affirming of each other.

So much of what passes for relationship is based on projected image of what we believe the other person wants or expects. What gets accepted is the projected image, the 'role play,' and the real person remains unseen, unloved, un-affirmed, essentially alone.

To me, the how or model of relationship is secondary, monogamous, polly, open, ___________. What matters, as i see it, is a safe person/s to be exactly who and how you are with, without fear of rejection or reprisal. Even the understanding to maybe experience the more scary stuff like jealousy, fear of loss, to me is better if it is reality. Better than pretending to have something that we do not really have.

 

i don't see doing something that is good for you as "selfish," especially when in a setting where sharing benefits more than your self.

Yeah, i agree living an open life is not "easy." i think one of the reasons people seem to gravitate towards responding to an image or idea of each other is because it's a mostly one and done process to make an image and use it vs constantly having to look, listen, see and hear what and who is happening right now. That's a continuous process. To me though, that is more apt to be real and not acting in some sort of play or production.

 

So I’ve had a pretty rough day today. A healthy but slightly awkward conversation with my fiancé off the back of this thread and the other one in the welcome forum - but also we haven’t really talked through the events of late last year either.

And then I did my mile circuit hoping to beat my PB and properly wrecked my left hip somehow. I hobbled home, took some painkillers and spent the afternoon laid up. Half a domino’s pizza, two glasses of prosecco and 2x dark & stormy’s later, my mind is doing backflips. Love my fiancé, but I’m desperate for some female connection. Ugh I hate feeling so torn like this.

 

Yeah the cheating comes from doing it behind someone’s back. If it’s done with someone’s consent, it can’t be cheating. I watched my fiancé ****ing another girl, it wasn’t cheating - I was kissing her at the time. If he had done it behind my back it would have been cheating but consent & honesty are the most important things.

I’m not sure how masturbation can be seen as cheating. It might be disappointing if you weren’t getting as much as you liked and found out the other person in the relationship was sorting themselves out. But in any relationship, someone is going to want more than the other does. Either the person with the lower sex drive ends up having sex when they’d rather have an early night, or the person with the higher sex drive takes matters into their own hands.

Funny how we assign ourselves roles. How is it being a total gay submissive bottom? You say that’s a loaded phrase but to me I don’t really see anything controversial there. In fact I kinda feel that’s the role I am in within my relationship. But whenever I have been with women I have always been top or at least switch. I have to say when I am with my fiancé I don’t have that desire to take the lead but if I’m with a woman, that’s my default position.

 

Cognitively (and now emotionally) i don't see masturbation as cheating either. i think it has to do with conditioning. In the case of my wife and myself, it was religious conditioning. There's a verse in the christian bible that says:
'"You shall not commit adultery;' but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a. woman to lust after her has committed. adultery with her already in his heart."
So in our christian circles, that got extrapolated that if you are fantasizing about sex and its not with your spouse, your committing adultery. i know, it gets very involved. i don't think i have ever masturbated thinking about a woman in my life, it's always fantasy about a guy.

We do.. and we sometimes assign them to others. The religion i came from was full of that stuff: "...the man is the head over the wife..." "wives submit yourselves to your husbands...." Never mind how one really is, the husband is always the dom, the wife is always the sub. i'm actually on a couple of BDSM discussion forums where there are people who identify as "Christian" who argue their D/s relationship is "God ordained." i'm one of the few gay guys on the discussion forum, and i'm pretty sure many of my comments are upsetting to them when i talk about being a sub and a bottom with another Man.
When i was still trying to follow my religious conditioning, i played the role of Top and being in charge, and it always felt awkward and unnatural to me, like i should apologize for being disingenuous. i think authoritative systems assign roles all the time. To me, all those terms, Top, bottom, sub, Dom, versatile, etc., are just tools to try an convey, communicate what is there, not definitions carved in stone that we need to conform to, ore others expect us to conform to.
Since i have learned there are 13 year olds on this site, i won't go into detail about how and why gay total bottom submissive sub is loaded for me, but it has a ton of individual meaning. Even when i try to explain it to some potential mates, it makes a lot of guys heads spin. To me, intimacy is about digging deep... "to infinity and beyond."

 

Yeah, wow, i gotta say i'm impressed by that kind of depth and, to me, maturity of relationship. It's so easy to bury the awkward stuff, but burying it doesn't make it go away. "Out of sight, out of mind," is not gone. We more easily accommodate some feelings, the good ones, and push the conflicting ones down or to the side. i think you being open about your being "desperate for some female connection" makes your relationship with each other even more intimate, certainly more real.

As i see it, your need for female connection does not diminish your love for your fiancé one bit. To me, your openness about this part of yourself is very much and expression of love and respect. You are being vulnerable, showing him yourself. i don't think we can pay a higher honor to anyone, than to be naked, vulnerable, with them.

 

Yeah he does know how much I need that closeness, I’m just not sure how well he understands it…. What I feel for women absolutely doesn’t take away for what I feel for him, although it hasn’t always been that way. When I first discovered women, I did lose all interest in men for like 2 years. And then after I met my boyfriend it felt like I was into him despite the fact he was a man, not because he was a man. I think I only really pursued the sexual side of things with him because we clicked so strongly and he was so was so cool about it. I was 18, pretty much every week I had guys from 18 to early 20s ish who were interested in me and I shot every one of them down. But he was 28 and seemed more on a similar maturity level to me and the women I’d been seeing, and I really had to chase him, not the other way around. But it was only the 4th or 5th time we’d been together sexually, we went on a last minute holiday together and I don’t know what it was exactly but he seemed to finally get what worked for me and all of a sudden the sex was really good. Previously to him guys were disappointing. Non existent foreplay & bad sex were my only straight experiences. He was very good in the foreplay department and sex was good from day one but not mindblowing. But on that holiday I think he just learned about getting the angle right or something and things got very good very quickly for me. And for a few months I was 100% craving only him before the thoughts about women crept back.

These days my attractions to him and to women are basically not related. I think he’s pretty happy at 3-4 nights a week but I can quite happily go every night and Saturday/Sunday morning too. And even with a ‘busy schedule’ I can be craving that girl time….. they are definitely not substitutionary needs. I’m totally sure of that now.

 

Thanks. It still hurts but not as bad. I’ve been pushing myself pretty hard lately, guess it’s my body’s way of telling me to slow down.

 

What distance are you training for? Is it indoor or outdoor? I enjoy swimming but rarely do it for some reason. I was a gymnastics kid, kept it up from being primary school age all the way to adulthood. For some years it was 10 hours a week and competitions on weekends up and down country. Learned some cool party tricks! I’ve always been a decent runner too, and for a few years now I have stuck to a free weights program which has been a revelation for body composition and just day to day stuff.

 

Yeah running can be tough, especially if you're carrying weight. I'm pretty skinny so I generally get away with it, but still I prefer running on grass. I was pretty competitive at cross country and fell running in my teens. Probably still would be now but haven't done any competitive runs in years. Well, I would be if I was on top form anyway, my hip is mostly better now but I'm not going to do any running this weekend. I did a slightly lighter than normal leg day at the gym yesterday. Biking around here is not great, roads are wet and covered in mud from tractors a lot of the time, and they're all fast roads but narrow. I don't have a death wish!

 

Distance running can be brutal. I've never done a marathon, 16 miles is my maximum and there was a lot of incline/decline in there as well. I put in a good time for that but I ached for a couple of days after. I would have been 20 then, probably at my lowest weight as an adult, around 103lbs at 5ft 5". That is a competitive advantage in running for sure. I'm about 10+ lbs on that now, after 3 years of resistance training. Functionally a lot stronger and faster than I was then too, at least over short distances, but I think beyond a certain point that extra weight would slow me down. My fiance is 6ft 1" and around 210-220lbs, mostly muscle from years of gym and a manual job. He is an ex rugby player though so in a sprint he has no trouble pulling away from me. He's comfortable over middle distances but the longest we've done together is a 20k and he was flagging. I kept thinking about asking him if he wanted to train with me, I've been trying to do a 5-minute mile since January. But I worry he would beat me and that would seriously annoy me as I haven't been able to get under 5:17 in 3 months. I don't like losing!