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The other woman: what it was really like dating someone in an open relationship
Story from Someone Single Files. Last Updated April 26,AM. Like most women, I grew up conditioned to look at monogamy as both the relationship and the destination. I had my share of casual datingwhere romantic entanglements involved varying shades of pleasure tempered with meaningless open and inconsequential hookups.
My more romantic pursuits were always colored by the desire to match attraction with commitment. I was more than someone to sacrifice my personal boundaries on the altar of love and loyalty. I saw monogamy as the epitome of being wanted. Desperate to be wanted my entire life, I latched onto it with everything I had. Dating never quite knew how to love someone without making them the center of my universe, without feeling like I needed to mold myself into whatever form the other person wanted.
As I realize now, the thing that happens when you chase love like an addict is that you end up living a life of illusions — a life built on the exhausting distance between how wonderful something seems in your head and how it plays out in real life.
In hindsight, it feels a lot like a wilful erasure of my individuality. As I saw this distance increase in my last relationship, so did my assumptions curious skyexsummers leaked onlyfans consider being loved.
Thrown into the breathless world of casual dating after that relationship ended, I sought control in extremes. I vowed not to be dictated by the potential of an eventual relationship when meeting dating for the first time. But I was still seeking connections and looking to bond over mutual intellect, shared commonalities relationship silly likes and dislikes. So I dived into the bottomless possibilities of meaningless sextelling myself that it was the easiest way to school myself in managing my expectations. Yet I grew weary of it soon enough, when the electric thrill of skin and chemistry started feeling like a monotonous chore.
I wanted something more but I also wanted to be met midway. He told me he was in an open relationship in the same breath that he told me about being unsettled by the degree of attraction he felt toward me.
The alcohol flowed that night, as did the banter. We exchanged numbers but got in touch with each other only when it was convenient for both of us to meet. Every time we met, I felt a strange contentment, as if it were possible to experience the open I was searching for without wishing for a way to trap that feeling forever. He wanted me as a significant part of his life but never as a witness. That someone could visit web page for me and multiple others while retaining their own identity and priorities felt like stumbling onto a secret.
Over the next few months, I made it a point to only date men in open relationships. I made absolutely no effort to halt my own life while seeking these connections. In a way, being in these relationships made me feel so desirable that I felt compelled to protect my own boundaries rather than sacrificing them at the first promise of a monogamous arrangement.
I see now that monogamy prevented me from prioritizing my own pleasure.
2. Sounds fun. But why do you need this when you have a great S.O. at home?
In every relationship, I was overwhelmed by the duty of making my company as pleasurable https://telegram-web.online/dating-a-scottish-girl.php possible for my partner.
Their needs became my own, to a point where I felt incapable of defining the outlines of my pleasure. My dating life right now has attraction as much as it has commitment. It seems radical that I can also derive pleasure from it. Related Stories.
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