My partner wasn’t pleased about it, but it became pretty apparent I wanted an open relationship quite pointedly and urgently, so we determined that it was something we were both going to explore mutually. But this definitely should have been something we shook hands on. It did feel different than the times I cheated in the past, though, because we’d had conversations about this being a possibility, and I leaned on the fact that at some point, the trigger was going to be pulled. I didn’t feel great going home-I cannot emphasize enough that this is not the best way to start an open relationship. There was a novelty about sleeping with someone new, and about it being someone I knew, and it was a good one in the context of sexual experiences. It was with someone I knew, and I certainly didn’t leave the house knowing that this was a thing that was going to happen, but I think it felt a lot safer. It’s not an approach that I think is advisable, but it’s what happened. But there wasn’t really an ‘Okay, let’s go.’ What happened is that I slept with someone else. We had been talking about it, what we wanted our arrangement to involve, for six or eight months.
My partner was open to the possibility of us being open, but he wasn’t sure what that would mean. And I was also interested in maintaining a higher ethical standard than I had before. And so with my current relationship of seven years, it’s not that there was a risk of falling back into old habits-I didn’t meet someone new or see something coming-but I knew I had an appetite for extra-curricular activity. It was a difficult standard for me to adhere to, prior to my current relationship, and so I wasn’t really enacting any ethics.
“I don’t have an extraordinarily strong record of maintaining monogamy.