my open relationship revisited

[novel update: I’m at 437 words, at 9:38pm. As soon as I post this blog entry, I’ll be starting in earnest. I’ve even taken my laptop into the bathroom with me. Yes, I know that was something you didn’t want to know.]

I was blogsurfing today, and stumbled upon this guy who was talking about how he cheated on girls, and how he’d never been able to stop. That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that what he wrote about his emotional perspective and relationship “history” seemed at the time very similar to the way I would describe things. Actually, the more I sat there and thought about it, the less our histories sounded similar, but at the time, it “struck a chord” (that’s the way I put it in the comment I left on his blog). When I write about people’s blogs, or their entries, I usually link to them, but I don’t have the link handy, and I wanted to post this stuff…it’s all stuff I wrote that I thought I was going to post in response to his blog entry… but then I realized that, at the end of his entry, the message was clear, he wanted to change. He had met someone new, and he really thought this would be a new leaf for him… so much of what I said below just wasn’t relevant. (I went on about my open relationship.) So I deleted it from the comment, and decided to post it here instead.

I guess my point is that I knew at an early age that I was going to have trouble with commitment. Even in my 2 year relationship (3 years if you count the year afterwards that we kept trying to make it work, even though she could never trust me again) we started out with a 1 or 2 month period where we were “dating other people”. (Until we both decided we were “it” for each other. Last mistake like that I’ll make.) Almost every relationship I’ve been in has either a) had a point where my girlfriend decided she didn’t want to be in this open relationship anymore, or b) fizzled because somehow lack of commitment turned into lack of intensity (to be fair, there may have been any number of other factors involved in any of those “fizzles”.) At least, that was true until just recently.

A little over two years ago, I went through what felt like a very long dry spell in relationships. I only dated one or two people in a 2 or 3 year period… and I was just about ready to abandon the whole idea of “open relationships” entirely. It seemed the older people were the less likely they were to accept the idea of a serious relationship where you could still date other people.

Then I met my current girlfriend. We’ve been dating for 2 and a half years, and are still going strong. We’ve both “made out” with other people plenty of times… (we have a “no sex” rule–intercourse only, oral sex is fine). Anyway, it’s working great. We’ve lived together for over a year, and I think this truly is “it”. I mean, why would I ever leave her? Why would she leave me? We’re both happy with the situation… So take it from me, it can work, you’ve just got to find the right girl.

Yes, I wrote all that crap in a comment on someone else’s blog. But I changed my mind at the last minute. I’m now returning to my regularly scheduled slavish novel writing.

One Reply to “my open relationship revisited”

  1. I am so happy to have come upon this…I am also in an open relationship, in fact my girlfriend lives with my husband and I at the moment (and hopefully for long term). I’m glad to see there are others out there who don’t fit nicely into the ‘norm’. By the way, are you in Minnesota?

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