Friend Confessed Feelings and Now Partner Wants to Open Up

I've been with my partner for 7 years. for a while ive wanted to open our relationship up but haven’t found the courage to properly approach this conversation with him. we’d spoken about it once before maybe a year ago, and both saw it as a possibility in our relationship but that it wasn’t the right time.

Then 2 weeks ago, a new friend id been hanging out with for about 2 months confessed he had feelings for me. i felt those feelings back. i told my partner about all this which he was obviously pretty upset about. However, we decided we’d try to start navigating the non monogamy world. 

Its felt hard to do this and make my partner feel like he is the priority when there was is this other person in the mix, and my partner felt pressured to make a decision as to if this was something he was comfortable with at the same time as trying to figure out what a non monogamous relationship would look like for us. I thought to alleviate this stress the only way forward was to tell this other guy that we needed some space and that i’d like to re-establish the friendship we had before. 

We would already message loads before the feelings were declared, but nothing that to me i wouldn’t say to a friend. However after a while it started to get romantic again which is when i decided to ask if i could meet him. my partner seemed unsure but i told him it was just as friends, which I think i wanted to believe but deep down knew wasn’t true. we met and kissed and felt the feelings we’d been sat on with each other. 

When my partner asked how the meeting went i told him some of the truths but didn’t want to tell him about this kiss which he could sense i was keeping from him, that then came out in a big blow up argument. my partner says we can work this out together but i need to decide what i want. i want both of them but i don’t see how thats going to work now, but to lose one of them would really break me. Me and my partner really want to open up our relationship but now it feels doomed and like it can never really work going forward. 

The thing that concerns me the most about this situation, which I don't think you've fully reckoned with, is the fact that your friend basically hit on you and confessed feelings for you thinking you were in a monogamous relationship – if I'm not mistaken about the way you've described this situation.

That's incredibly problematic. Is this a person who is even interested in non-monogamy? When you consider that this person was more than happy to potentially ruin the relationship you have and helped you do what many people would define as cheating... is that someone you want to be in a relationship with?

Deciding to do non-monogamy is a complicated decision and I don't believe there are ways to "test the waters" fully before jumping in. There isn't a perfect time to open a relationship really. Life is always going to throw obstacles at you and I think people often assume they have to be completely secure and unbothered before opening things up. If I could go back in time, I would have advised you to be more honest with your partner about your feelings and to ask for what you want.

You've got a tendency to avoid important discussions here which, even if your partner was keen on non-monogamy, makes most relationships difficult, especially non-monogamy. Being able to know what you want and be honest and clear about it as well as sit in the discomfort of being able to ask for something that someone might say no to is also something that can be critical in non-monogamy.

There's also definitely a case here where you didn't want to tell yourself the truth, it seems. It did seem like this situation could have gotten romantic and part of you might have been able to be more honest with yourself about the potential of that happening here.

This isn't to blame you or make you feel bad. The vast majority of us do not even get to be told that non-monogamy is an option and most of us do not know about it until we're already in monogamous relationships.

We're barely given the tools to communicate in normative relationships, let alone ones that require us to forge our own paths and constantly adjust our nervous systems that are freaking out that we're violating the rulebook we've been raised with. This is about recognising that this is a pattern you may want to pay attention to.

It also does concern me that you're concerned primarily with preserving the relationships you have with both of these people when I believe that the relationship you have with yourself is the most important. You're only going to be able to sacrifice your own happiness to keep people around you for so long. 

Your desire to avoid losing your relationships has on more than one occasion led you down a worse path of self-betrayal and ended up complicating more situations than making them better. At the end of the day, I can't promise you that you will be able to keep all of the relationships in your life because not even your partners can control whether or not they fall in or out of love with you.

Accepting that you could end up losing your partners is important. The more you try to control situations to keep them around, the more complicated even monogamy can become and the more you will end up in situations that don't serve you.

You can only cut off so much of yourself to please other people until you can no longer stand on your own. It's worth it to be true to yourself and lose the people who you're not compatible with. The more time you spend with people who aren't actually compatible with you, morphing to fit their needs and ignoring your own, the more you're not spending finding the people who are actually compatible with you.

Now might be a good time to deviate from the pattern. Do you have a good idea of what you want a non-monogamous life to look like? How much time will you have with your current partner versus anyone new – be it the friend you're interested in or anyone else?

Do you have a personal interest in pursuing non-monogamy that doesn't involve keeping your partner? Does your partner have a personal interest in non-monogamy? You can read my 101 and 102 articles to help you get through some of the basics.

There might be a moment where your partner decides they are not interested in non-monogamy and you are and you're not compatible. You may both be interested in non-monogamy but are still not compatible. I can't promise you that you'll be able to have what seems like the ideal situation for you right now.

But I do think that going forward, it might be worth realising the tendency you have to not be honest with yourself and partners and whether or not that is going to prevent loss.

Being more honest with your partners about what you want is usually the best option because there is only so long you can lie to yourself. Sit down with yourself and figure out what your ideal situation is and if you can work out with your partner a way for non-monogamy to work better going forward. I think if you also recognise the mistakes that you've made in not telling your partner the truth, you can rebuild going forward.

And really think about the situation with your friend and ask if someone who is willing to help a non-monogamous person cheat or confess feelings that could end a monogamous relationship is someone that you want to build a relationship with going forward.

I hope this helps and good luck.