Photo: Fabiana Ponzi / Shutterstock
Open marriages aren't for everyone.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Mar 22, 2022
The societal standard for relationships the last hundreds, maybe even thousands of years seems to be monogamy — at least for the majority of cultures.
In recent years with the constant progression of sexual identity, gender identity, and sexual education, people have started to get more experimental and have questioned the stone carvings of how relationships should be structured — opening up the table to polygamy, polyamory, and open relationships.
However, these things aren’t for everybody, and everyone should know their limits before trying anything new like that — which this father didn’t seem to understand.
A father on Reddit is lashing out and angry with his wife for sleeping with other people in the open marriage he asked for.
A 22-year-old woman posted about her parents’ relationship and how it’s flown south for the end of winter after the prospect of an “open marriage” has finally started to weigh on her father’s conscience.
“My mom grew up in a conservative southern town where she was taught to be a submissive wife,” she explained. “And even after moving to the big city, she didn't spend much time socializing. She had no friends and never went out.”
She gave context about their relationship — how it started, where it went and revealed that her father was never really around or much of a father figure to their family, to begin with.
As such, the mother-and-daughter relationship that they had formed turned into the only friendship the mother had for a while until the daughter convinced her 39-year-old mom to go out and find new hobbies and friends.
“After years of pushing, she started going to a nearby park and made her first friend, a gym trainer. Encouraged by her friend and me, she decided to join the gym,” she continued. “She met a few more people there and started having some semblance of a social life, but she still continued to tell me everything.”
According to the daughter, the idea for proposing an open marriage came from the father’s new secretary whom he wanted to sleep with.
“He told her he wasn't happy in their marriage and that she wasn't providing him with everything he wanted,” she explained but deciding not to be the one to end the marriage, her mother chose to stay on the condition that they would be transparent with each other.
Almost immediately, the father slept with his new secretary but hadn’t had much luck with any other women.
On the other hand, the mother took months to make dating profiles and see people before finally sleeping with some of them, and the father got pissed.
“My dad keeps starting fights by making snide remarks about my mom's clothing or appearance. He almost even called my mom a whore but stopped himself,” she said.
“I think ‘open marriage’ finally sunk in. My mom told me he tried to have a conversation about stopping their ‘open marriage’ but she immediately shot it down. I think they'll split up.”
It’s pretty clear that the husband was being selfish from the very beginning and also never really gave much care for the family he started.
His wife was nothing more than someone who gave him a child and he held no real respect towards her feelings or her desires, and the Redditors who have commented on the post agree.
“He wanted to be able to sleep around with whoever he wanted and never answer to anyone, while still expecting his primary wife to attend to all of his needs,” read one of the top comments, “keeping house, tracking bills and appointments, providing him emotional labor, providing him offspring and doing all of the work involved in raising them, etc.”
She was able to build confidence thanks to her daughter and the attention she was getting from all the other men she was seeing, ultimately realizing that her husband was the problem with their marriage and not her.
As a good rule of thumb, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into before you get into it because it might not be exactly what you wanted.
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Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.