I am by large a great believer in all kinds of relationships. Open, monogamous, same sex, multi sex, no sex! Hey, whatever suits you! A relationship is a private matter between the parties involved – as long as everyone involved knows what’s happening and has agreed to the arrangement. The line between what the general public deems as ‘acceptable’ relationships is already thin as it is, we don’t need selfish people who are only looking out for their own satisfaction to dirty up a legit relationship structure. The relationship structure I’m talking about is an open relationship.

So it comes as a pleasant surprise when a post written in a subreddit by probably the least self-aware man on the planet about his dissatisfaction with his open relationship got taken over by fellow redditors tearing him a new one. What did he write about? Well, the original post has been taken down by the reditor closeopenthrowaway who has also deleted his account. But lucky for us, the Internet never forgets (all spelling mistakes by poster).

How NOT to Have an Open Relationship

The background:

“Around 6-7 months ago give or take, I found myself feeling disconnected from her and the relationship. I was looking at other women quite a bit, and couldn’t seem to stop even though I DID feel guilty. I ended up singing up to a sex-themed website (fetlife.com). This is NOT a dating website, I wasn’t planning to cheat when I signed up, it’s more a social network and I was mainly interested in looking at pictures posted there.”

Becoming open:

I spoke to her about this and, well, it broke her heart at the time. She was sobbing on me the whole night of me talking to her about it, saying she wanted to be monogamous and she didn’t like the thought of an open relationship at all. She asked for a couple of weeks to think about it, which happened, but when we spoke about it again she told me she still didn’t want to do it. I had to tell her at this point it was this or break up as I didn’t feel fulfilled. At this, she said okay, she would try the open relationship. So, in short, she agreed to the open relationship even though she hated the idea as she didn’t want to break up.”

How NOT to Have an Open Relationship

The problem:

“Less than two months later from this, she’s signed up on FetLife too and now 100% enjoying herself. There are men crawling all over her, her profile, her pictures she’s put up. I know for a fact that she’s been on a heck of a lot of dates, both with people from the website and off it, and I also know she’s been intimate with many of them too (I keep seeing comments on her pictures saying vulgar things like ‘God I miss my mouth around those beautiful breasts’ etc from other men who I know she has been on dates with…

Me, on the other hand? I’ve not hooked up with anyone, and only had one date. All the women who seemed to be interested in me turned out to only want to flirt online and only wanted attention, and when I brought up meeting up with any of them I got rejected. The only women who wanted to at all meet me or go out with me I wasn’t attracted to. I went out with one local girl from Fetlife just to give it a chance, because my own girlfriend had found so many dates/hookups, but I just couldn’t bring myself to be attracted and nothing happened. I havn’t been able to find anyone else who wants to sleep with me off the website either.”

He ends with wanting to close the relationship because it wasn’t fair on him.

Other than the fact that this thread is so shallow that this whole thing might be a big troll, this really paints open relationships in a horrible light. Everyone who thinks that people only have open relationships so they can have more sex will use this as arsenal for their arguments and people who might genuinely want to try it might be scared away.

It goes without saying that open relationships are not for everyone, and forcing or giving your partner an ultimatum is not cool at all. In fact this guy’s argument just stinks and not at all indicative of what real open relationships are made of. I hope she realizes that she is worth more than a dick like that and moves on!

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