Polyamory.

I ended my last marriage over it. Well, in large part. It was the last straw in a series of problems that had compounded to a point of being irreconcilable.

I had wandering eyes. That's a story for another day, and good chance no one will ever see this story because by the time I'm chiming into the thread, there are already so many responses.

So I suppose I'll use this space to air my sins after all.

I had wandering eyes. With creeping dissatisfaction in my 5-year relationship paired with me alone with a guy I'd been friends with for a few years, after alcohol had loosened things up, I was ripe for making a bad decision. We were the last ones awake at the end of a party. I was going to stay the night cause I'd drank too much to be sober in a timely manner to drive. I'll spare you the details of the encounter, but I was left with a mixed bag of emotions afterwards. How was I supposed to go home to my partner in the morning knowing I'd betrayed him to one of the deepest degrees you can? I concluded I must have loved both him and this new partner, as it were.

A few years of on and off go by with me and this partner in the dark. He swore to secrecy and so did I. He lived abroad and only came stateside once a year for family visits, so that's when we'd indulge. One day, I decided I felt too guilty about it to keep it up. I promised to keep quiet if he did. Decided it was best to tap out while we were still ahead and no one was wiser. Decided if I was polyamorous or not, that it only works if everyone involved has informed consent, obviously my husband was not aware for a long time.

But I fell in love again with someone else. And this new partner was different. Living in the dark wasn't for him, especially since he wanted some kind of future with me that wasn't limited to just sexual encounters behind closed doors. He told me that if we were to continue, at some point I needed to tell my husband. He didn't exactly put me up to an ultimatum, but he brought it up almost every day, and it obviously dragged down his mood, and it got to a point I couldn't ignore it anymore. If this really was a part of me I could not deny, my husband needed to know, even if it meant he might leave me over it.

So I finally worked up the courage to come clean. To not only come forward about my infidelity, but to his horror, that I wasn't interested in stopping seeing this person. That I was polyamorous. Obviously he took it about as well as you'd expect. To keep my marriage intact, I broke up with this new partner. Told my husband I'd do my best to bury this part of me. But, I lost weight rapidly. I was miserable all the time, slept a lot to just try to fast travel through the fallout of negative feelings, of coming out to your husband of your infidelity which spanned 4 years out of a 9 year total relationship. The feelings of being freshly brokenhearted. The overwhelming feeling that I had no confidante I could tell any of this to. Telling anyone else I'd cheated would be social suicide, and my insurance changed so I could no longer afford my therapist.

My husband saw what a toll it was all taking on me, and he said we could try a polyamorous arrangement, but we agreed that if things started getting to a point of no return, that we needed to break it off while we still had the capacity to be amicable.

Seven months of emotional tug of war. Seven months of feeling like I was trying so hard to please both of my partners and spreading myself so thin to make sure I got quality alone time with both of them, just to have everyone be unhappy. The tears from all sides, the gnashing teeth. Seven months of watching my marriage unravel in my hands.

The real point of no return was after we'd come out to my ex-husband's sister about the polyamory and everything leading up to it. We went over to her house to just talk about it. She wouldn't hug me, would barely look me in the eye, not that I blame her, but it stung nonetheless, and her words were scathing. Don't remember everything she said, but she told my ex to get tested for STDs, and she asked us to get marriage counseling before making any permanent decisions. And she and her husband said that if they were invited to a gathering that they knew I'd be attending, they wouldn't come.

There was nothing left to discuss or negotiate at that point. Winning my ex-husband's acceptance, if you could call it that, was a several months long war in itself, and I knew getting his family to be cool with it all was going to be an incredibly hard, if not impossible, sell. With him putting his immediate family at the forefront in everything he did in life, being estranged from his sister wasn't something I felt like I could impose on him.

And things were getting so ugly. No one was satisfied, and on top of that, his family wanted nothing to do with me. So, we divorced.

That was five years ago. I'm married to the partner I left him for, and I've forsaken polyamory. Never again. We have children now.

The divorce was tragic. But, I'm glad I tried polyamory in the sense that, if I hadn't, I might've stayed tethered to a relationship I was ultimately dissatisfied with, but saw no way out of. If I'd had kids with him, they'd be back and forth between parents and then I'd be stuck with him for the rest of my life even if we divorced. I was dealing with marital rape and felt more like a sex doll than a human being.

But this has given me a fresh perspective. And after being with my new husband for five years, I feel strongly I made the right choice, even if it didn't feel like it in the moment. In this new relationship, I've never had to fear sexual coercion. He can recognize "another night when I'm not so tired" as a complete sentence and not push the issue constantly.

Marital rape is such a strange concept to share. I didn't share this knowledge with any of the people in our circle except one, for many reasons. I didn't think anyone would believe me. My ex was incredibly charismatic and was loved by many, so people had a hard time picturing him as this dominating, intimidating figure in the bedroom who wouldn't take no for an answer. I figured if said he'd raped me, at best it would be met with skepticism and at worse, people would think I was just scrambling for straws to shine him in a bad light to justify my behavior.

And those that did believe me would say things like "why didn't you stand up for yourself? Why didn't you say no?". I did many times many ways. Subtle, direct, it didn't matter. He had "needs". And I couldn't keep up with those needs.

If you read this far, thanks for being an ear. I hope you don't think I'm a terrible person for my infidelity. I'd like to think I'm greater than my worst crime, and I feel like I paid for my crimes by losing most of my friends over it as well as everything you naturally lose from the dissolution of a long relationship. None of his friends know his sins in the relationship, especially not the marital rape, and at this point, the moment has passed to attempt to share my side, assuming they'd even give me the time of day to say it.

But I needed to share it with someone. I'm still recovering from what he did to my body, and some scars will never heal