treeskin

Do you have boundaries in place against falling in love with other people, or is that allowed as well as long as the pair-bond remains paramount?

It's something we've not addressed in quite those terms, but it's an issue we've touched on. It's a dangerous issue, given the current long-distance nature of our relationship -- I think that emotionally opening the relationship to others might make it too difficult to sustain things long-distance. I'm pretty sure that he'd agree with me on that one, but certainly I think it's something that we should probably talk about and confirm that that's still our understanding. All-round, our communication isn't always the most thorough on these issues, but it's something we work on.

I know that when it comes to the way I'm presently wired, I don't know if I'm well suited for emotional non-monogamy. There was a while when soxnboxrs was regularly hanging out with a guy we had met up at the Chicago Eagle. I knew that they were playing on occasion, and I didn't have a problem with that. What tripped my [patented scorp-o-matic] jealousy response was (in addition to the fact that we were working on keeping things going long-distance) that he was getting to see this guy so frequently, and that I knew that this other guy was on the rebound from a failed relationship. I was concerned that they were getting emotionally entangled, and wasn't sure where that would take us.

Fortunately, I did the intelligent thing and talked to him about it. He put my concerns to rest about the other guy and that's not where things were going. We also made sure it was clear to the other guy where he stood.

I've also run into the issue from the other perspective. The first few months after soxnboxrs moved to Chicago, I was not in a good space. While being as supportive as possible to him, inside I felt upset and abandoned. I did a number of really stupid things during that time. Among those things was allowing an interaction with this guy, S, to go beyond a mere casual flirtation. He knew how unhappy I was with the situation and courted me in return.

Though we never played (oddly enough) I fell for him pretty hard for a while. At the same time, it was very painful for me, because it felt like a betrayal of soxnboxrs. The situation resolved itself when S started exclusively dating another friend, but it put me into another emotional tailspin for a while (leading me to do other stupid things to try to avoid dealing with how I was feeling).

Once I had some distance pulled myself out of that mess, I realized that I didn't want to put myself through that again. So I resolved that I wasn't going to permit myself anything other than casual involvements outside of my primary relationship. While I've told soxnboxrs as much, I haven't yet shared the full story of the S episode, mainly because I needed time and distance and because he had enough things on his plate at the time.