Hello community,

i'd like to share my story in this sub, to share my experience with you and to find a support-group to ask questions in this matter, when they arise. First of all i am new to this sub and i apologize for my sometimes bad english, ia m native german ;) And please don't be to harsh to me and us, i think one or another here can be at least a bit triggered about our story. Please tell me if i missunderstand something and i dont know all abbrevations 😬

I (M38) met my Partner (F35) at the age of 20. I won't tell all about our relationship but to be said, it was as it seemed the perfect relationship for us at least the first 12 years. And perfect did not and does not mean without problems for me, but we were always able to solve issues and to move on and build a life together. We now have two Kids and are married since 2015. We started our relationship monogamous, not really because we discussed this thing a lot but for the most because this was the general good and socially most accepted thing to do in our minds.

As life went on i had a problem in my job in 2021, the company changed and not for the good of my work (found a resolution in 2023). Because of the change i became sowewhat distant, and from that moment on things slowely did fall apart. My wife also found a new Job in 2021. She felt my distance but is also the type of an avoidant person, so she did not talk to me to a deep degree about it. In this new job she became friends with another married male coworker. And for the matter even our both families become friends, the kids of our families played together, we met to play games or to go to dinner etc..

Because my wife was not good to recognize her beviour and i did not mention my gut feelings, the relationship between my wife and the coworker became an emotional and physical affair. Yeah yeah i know this is not ENM 😅, believe me or not, i can see some comments coming in for this ;).

As you can imagine after the affair was discovered (a whole story for itself 🙈) there was a hard path to reconcile our partnership. By the way i knew my wife is bi-interested. As she told me they did handjobs, the first thing i said to her was: "Oh shit i would have done the same with him". This was so true and she did not expected that, because she thaught i am purely hetero. Ahh, no, i am not ;).

To be clear with you here, yes we have had and have a lot work to do to rebuild our communication, we both know this. But things go pretty well today :)

As we did go through what we want and need we got to the conclusion to do ENM together. Since then we found other couples and (who would have thaught) multiple men to enjoy companionship and more.

Especially i did a lot of work for myself and i recognize more often, that as i become myself more, other women are now very more attrcacted to me, and to be honest: This feels f***ing great. So i even had more of an understanding why the things happened that happened.

Our relationship is really striving, and things are very very good between us. I really just liked to share this, because i now know, that life can be really harsh but there comes the time when sun is shining again. Wish you all peace and joy in life, thanks for reading :)