If you wound up married to someone who couldn’t stay faithful to you if their life depended on it, would you want to pursue an open marriage to alleviate some of your stress and frustrations?
This 30-year-old woman has a husband the same age as her who has a long-standing and sordid history full of cheating. Her husband absolutely is a serial cheater, and she keeps forgiving him for his mistakes.
They have been with one another for close to 11 years, and he has cheated on her throughout the course of their relationship. Six or seven months ago was his latest slip-up.
“The most recent time I genuinely thought we were fixing things for real, it had been 3 years since a dday, only to find out it wasn’t true. He had been sleeping with 2 different [affair partners] for the entire 3 years,” she explained.
“This was obviously a huge breach of trust. Everything I thought was a lie. I was genuinely starting to think he had stopped cheating, but he just got better at hiding it.”
“Going forward has been rough. I want to trust him, but I’m reminded that I felt this way before, and it wasn’t true. He seems remorseful, but he always seems remorseful.”
They share a seven-year-old child, which is why she keeps hanging in there with her husband. However, she’s sick and tired of being stuck in the same bad pattern, so she has resolved to let this be the final time she will try reconciliation.
She doubts she can make it work, but she’s doing her best for the sake of her child. She’s depressed and furious, don’t get her wrong.
Whenever she is physical with her husband, all she can think about is him sleeping with these other women. She’s stopped viewing her husband as her friend because friends don’t even treat one another like garbage.
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“More recently, I started heavily thinking about cheating back. I’m not actually going to, but the thought keeps crossing my mind,” she added.
“I know cheating back would be counterproductive, and I don’t want him to have that to hold over me. I’ve been telling him all of this, and he just says it makes him sad that he did this to me.”
“This has started to make me wonder if we could do an open relationship. I do not trust him, and I know healthy open relationships require trust, but I think I trust him enough to at least wear [protection] from now on. I know this all sounds insane, and a normal person would yell, ‘Leave him!'”
She’s trying to do her best given how her life has turned out. She very well may walk away from her husband in time, but at the moment, she’s not sure that’s what she wants to do.
She’s curious if anyone else has found themselves in a similar predicament and turned to an open relationship as a solution. She’s not convinced that’s the answer to improving her marriage, and she’s not positive her husband would agree to this.
She’s tired of feeling stuck, and since her husband had a whole romantic life that didn’t involve her, she thinks she deserves to have the same adventure.
I understand she’s only staying with her husband for her child, and that’s a tough spot to be in. I don’t think she should ask her husband for an open relationship; she should demand it and say that’s the one condition she needs in order for them to remain married.
Regardless of whether she ends up exploring that, at least it will help her feel freer and able to do whatever (or whoever) she pleases.
I think that will help her immensely, and it’s not like anything can happen to make their marriage uglier than it already is.
What advice do you have for her?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
