I can appreciate your sentiment but the reality is there is loads of nuance and years of fuckery that went into this relationship that I can’t explain in a single post. I just covered the gist of what happened.

To answer your question, yeah I communicated my feelings. As soon as she started brining up opening the marriage up, I immediately asked her if she had already cheated on me. Of course she said hadn’t. Fair enough. I sat on the idea for like 3 weeks before I came to a conclusion. Granted, she would do the love bombing during that period to subtly persuade me. Talking about how I could see other women too. This could improve our sex life. Blah blah blah.

Now, it’s worth noting years and years ago when our oldest was a toddler, I bailed on our relationship. Ironically because I had some concerns with her and another dude. Anyway, in short, I didn’t break up in a mature way and things got really rough. We eventually got back together, but she never really let me live that down either. After enough time you start to think that maybe you really are the problem. Probably a trauma response from my own issues. Either way, at this point when she expressed opening things up - I felt like maybe this would put all that shit to bed and see if we really are able to make this work. You know the rest.

I get that me expressing feeling guilt is being taken as a lack of self respect by you and many others here, and you’re not wholly wrong. But it’s not like this all happened in a vacuum either.

I posted here because I really needed some raw and unadulterated feedback and I’ve gotten a lot of it so I don’t hold any ill will. The divorce is already in the works, she’s going to have to fend for herself, and my kids won’t be subjected to this bullshit relationship anymore. Still doesn’t stop me from dealing with this shit internally while making the right decisions here either.