DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’ve (25, cis male) been seeing my girlfriend (29) for over a year now. I met her family this past holiday and we all got along well. Her family even invited me to spend time with them after the holidays.
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I was having a conversation with my girlfriend’s sister and cousin when the topic led to the ending of her engagement with her previous fiancé. I already knew about the bad break up, but I didn’t know the details as to why. Months before the wedding, my girlfriend suggested the possibility of an open marriage after they got married. The fiancé immediately ended the engagement over the suggestion. I kept my reaction hidden and moved on to something else.
I haven’t confronted my girlfriend with this information and still trying to process the whole thing. First, I feel it’s none of my business when it comes to my girlfriend’s past relationships or the choices she makes. I also don’t have any issue if others want to have an open marriage. But if the question had been posed to me, I probably would have the same reaction as the ex-fiancé. Which leads me to wonder if my girlfriend still has such desires. And there are still lots of details I am not clear on.
I don’t know if this was suggestion to someday try in the future or just a fun conversation started that went sideways. I don’t how to broach this subject with her without coming of as a jerk.
Is The Past Merely Prologue?
DEAR IS THE PAST MERELY PROLOGUE: Alright PMP, I think your girlfriend’s family may have been telling tales out of class in this and I think it’s important that you avoid leaping to conclusions. As you said: there’re a lot of information that you don’t have, likely a lot of critical details too… and there’re likely even more details that your girlfriend’s family doesn’t have.
What we have, for now, is gossip, not history. You don’t mention how close your girlfriend is to her family, so I don’t know whether she would’ve given them all the dirty details. Some people are very close with their siblings and cousins, some folks aren’t. It’s entirely possible that there’s a lot of vitally important information that’s been left out or that the others were filling in a whole lot of blanks with their own speculation. So do yourself a favor and don’t try to draw a lot of conclusions based on what you’ve heard.
The fact that she floated opening up the relationship to her previous partner doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s going to have this conversation with you some time in the future. It’s certainly possible that your girlfriend is generally non-monogamous and prefers an open or polyamorous relationship over a monogamous one. But it’s also possible that this was a relationship-specific circumstance.
Dropping this particular mortar shell so close to the wedding could suggest a lot of possibilities. It’s certainly possible that she didn’t see why lobbing this when and how she did wasn’t the smartest move. It’s also possible that she did so strategically. There are people who propose or start practicing non-monogamy for reasons beyond they’re someone who has a lot of love to give, who needs a certain amount of sexual novelty or who just generally doesn’t do monogamy.
There are, for example, people who’ve used opening up the relationship because – consciously or unconsciously – they were actually looking for an escape hatch. Perhaps things with her fiancé weren’t as rosy as it seemed. It’s also possible that your girlfriend wasn’t satisfied with her sex life with her fiancé and this was how she thought she could fix it.
Now, one thing that’s important to note is that people who know that they’re non-monogamous and are going to require an open or poly relationship are more likely to bring this up early on. They’ll frequently agree to a period of exclusivity in order to both prove that yes, they’re committed to their current partner, and also to help build up the levels of trust and communication a non-monogamous relationship requires. So the fact that your girlfriend hasn’t mentioned it before, while not conclusive, doesn’t suggest that this is definitely in your future.
But there’re a lot of things you don’t know and a lot of things you don’t know that you don’t know yet. You know who does know those things? Your girlfriend. So you should ask her.
However, you don’t want to come in guns blazing about whether this is going to be your future too or treating family hot goss as the unvarnished truth. You want to start from a position that she’s going to be telling you the truth, not that she needs to do damage control after her family accidentally slipped you some scandalous news.
So when asking her, the best approach here would be to leave the whole open-relationship aspect aside and say “hey, your family had some wild stories to tell about your ex and your break up. I don’t think I we ever actually talked about it; what actually happened?” Then let her tell her story as completely as she can before you start asking follow-ups. Since I’m presuming that you weren’t told about her fiancé calling off the wedding in confidence, you can give a little info on what you were told, but it’d be better to let her tell her story without pushing one way or the other on the monogamy question. The last thing you want is for this to turn into a weird confrontation when it’s not needed or warranted.
If her asking about opening up the marriage was something she asked for and was serious about, you can ask “So how do you feel about that now?” or “Is that something that’s important to you?” Keep in mind: the answer may well be “yes, it is”. If that’s the case… you’re going to want to take some time to sit with it, rather than leaping to ending the relationship right then and there. It’s very easy to make snap decisions based on how you were taught to feel, only to realize that maybe on second thought you weren’t feeling as strongly about it as you supposed. Of course, by then, it’s frequently too late to do anything about that.
This doesn’t mean that you have to be cool with it or that you don’t actually prefer or require monogamy. You just want to give yourself some time to actually think about it before doing anything, rather than having a knee-jerk reaction. It may even help to do a little research and read up on it – I recommend Opening Up by Tristan Taormino and Building Open Relationships by Dr. Liz Powell (who, in full disclosure, is a friend of mine and has contributed to the column before.)
But that may not be an issue. That may well have been a situation-specific issue, not something she’s hoping to pursue with you.
But it’s better to have the information than a lot of unanswered questions lurking in the back of your mind.
Good luck.Top of FormBottom of Form
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