My partner has recently come to me in considerable distress, feeling he needs more “love” and feels refreshed to open up about our relationship. After a few years of infertility and this new one we are desperately trying for a baby [wish] It did nothing for the stability of our relationship. How do we become parents if we struggle with monogamy?
Eleanor says: One of the strangest things about 21st-century romance is that it first chooses partners for dating and sexual attraction, and then divides those relationships into partnerships of parentage and family. These are very different relationships to have with another person. The things we look for in a romantic or sexual partner are often not the things we look for in a co-parent.
If I understand you correctly, your question is how to manage the transition to a co-parenting partnership when there is tension or uncertainty in the romance.
Whatever you decide about who you sleep with, I think the question of monogamy is more important than the question of how much you trust each other.
Say you're opening the relationship. Do you believe that he is still going to be available to you in the ways that you need from your co-parent? Do you have enough faith in how he feels about you that this might be a way to bring you closer, or do you suspect that it might be a way to withdraw or withdraw when you need stability the most? Do you believe there is a fair balance between who feels overwhelmed and exhausted during new parenthood and who feels attracted and excited by new dates?
Instead say that you are not open to the relationship. does He Do you believe he can get what he needs in other ways? In that open conversation, is he confident in your ability to quantify what he thinks he's not getting?
Who you sleep with is only one part of how you arrange the sexual-romantic side of your relationship. It's also a question of whether you can be on the same team, even if you have completely different preferences. that It's not a question you can isolate to the sexual part of your relationship: you want Be on the same team as good parents. The first few years of your child's life aren't the time to realize that you each don't take the other's interests as seriously as your own, that you're holding grudges, or that you're each dealing with their personal finances. Mindful of their stated desires.
Put another way: Are you sure there's a version of this relationship that makes both of you happy and harmonious enough to be a good parent to this brand new person? Numbers are helpful. Don't just say “I'm sure”. Say I'm 80% sure, 60% sure.
If you're opening up your relationship at the same time you're a parent, I think it's important to use help and guidance. Those two big emotional changes are on top of each other. Each can sink a relationship. Trying to manage them without professional help or community involvement, or advice from other couples who have done it, is deliberately taking more risk than necessary that your child will be raised in an unhappy environment.
Sleeping with other people is a wonderful form of fun and excitement for some couples, a way to close and sustain feelings that can die ignominious deaths in long relationships. But even if you are in a closed relationship, I think you face the important question of whether you can be on the same page.
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