Note: I posted this under Relationship Advice and was encouraged to repost it here for more tailored advice:
42 M here, a several months back my wife told me she wanted to open up our relationship (we've had previous experience in the lifestyle) and see other people. Kind of blindsided by the whole proposition but was like cool, let's give it a go (note: earlier in the spring I noticed she showed up as a new contact on an encrypted messaging app I use for work travel due to security concerns but didn't think much about it at the time).

During the first month, the disparity between our two situations was pretty noticeable. She had dates every other night, got dolled up and came home late. First week she had dates on consecutive nights (Friday and Saturday). I would have dates maybe once or twice a week and roughly half of those would either flake or I would get stood up. It's a pretty humbling introduction to middle age for those married men in their 40's wondering if the grass is greener…

Never made an issue out of it, just took the opportunity to explore the nightlife of my city or camp out at a late night coffee shop and catch up on some reading. Some nights I would just come home early and catch up on work.

After a bit of trial and error, I'm currently juggling 2-3 FWBs, and going out on the occasional first dates. Some days I'm having sex with multiple FWBs on the same day.

I'm a well educated affluent male but I'm also married, in my 40's, under six feet tall and have a dad bod for sure. Let's just say it took me a while to cultivate my current roster of FWBs and feel like I'm just getting warmed up.

Current wrinkle in the status quo is that my wife just recently broke things off with her side piece, I've never inquired about him and wouldn't be able to recognize him if we crossed paths. She's in an emotional free-fall right now and is really leaning on her close friends to grieve the end of the fling. She spent most of last night crying to her BFF on the phone, not realizing till later that they were in the middle of a storm surge from Hurricane Ian (Naples, FL) and didn't really have the bandwidth or battery life to provide the support she needed at that moment.

Additionally we have a lot of mutual friends so there's some issues of overlapping loyalties and weirdness there, I've received several unprompted check-ins to see how things are going on my end. There might be an overall lack of sympathy from her friends who are not in an ENM situation since they probably view this as strictly an extracurricular activity versus a “real stakes” relationship.

I'm making myself as emotionally available as I can right now but I suspect she's having a hard time seeing me as a confidant in that facet of her life. We've both enjoyed the unrestricted DADT privacy of our side adventures but am suspecting she's ready to get off the rollercoaster of emotions. I'm pretty familiar with the dynamics of NRE (New Relationship Energy) so kind of anticipated to perks and pitfalls of it from the get-go.

Any advice here? I don't mind hitting pause on my current situations but at the same time they're all very low key FWB situations that's mostly a variation of “Lets fuck and hang…”. Would like to keep that going if its a reasonable expectation to advocate for.