Hey everyone,

I'm engaged to the love of my life, but he is also a serial philanderer. We are extremely open about it, and my only rules are that he only continue doing it if it helps him continue to protect and provide for me and if it continues to nourish him so he can keep pouring into our relationship. If the philandering ever gets in the way of that OR if it is shoved in my face too often, then I'm out. So far he has not broken these rules.

We're both from some communities where we are under the belief that men feel the need to spread their seed and that this has been going on for millennia and maybe for good reason? That's what he TRULY feels, and that's what I intellectually believe. I can TOLERATE it. Accept it. Sometimes make peace with it, even. But I do not LIKE it, it gives me no thrill, no turn on, no excitement, no comfort knowing that my husband to be is out there occasionally seeking what he could get from me from somewhere else. He has shown me many statistics that women get bored when they know their man isn't cheating anymore and then they leave. It seems like he's doing everything he possibly can to ensure that I stay and find his as attractive as possible, and that he finds me as attractive as possible so he can stay too. He warns that if he lets it go he will get bored too, and he doesn't want that. He wants our relationship to last as long as possible, till the end of our days. I want that too.

I'm not looking for advice on how to leave. I know I'm not going to. I don't feel like a victim. I do sometimes think this is a form of spiritually immaturity on his part--that he could take that same sexual energy and put it into work, or into something else that involves his body in such a way that he still gets to feel like an animal. He still wants to and does go deeper and deeper into relationship with me, and so, aside from this ONE thing, I do feel I am getting everything I want from him and from a relationship in general. I often feel like maybe there's something greater for me to learn here about possessing a person, like maybe there's some spiritual lesson I haven't learned yet either. He makes me feel so special and loved and taken care of, but I do have concerns about how this may affect me long-term.

Mainly I just want a clearer picture of the psychological profile of a devoted husband who is also going to seek extramarital sex a few times a year. That seems very reasonable to me, but it still hurts me very deeply when I'm reminded of it too often. So what am I missing here in the picture of a man who is devoted but also seeks the thrill of feeling the fullness of his masculinity?

My hope is that one day he'll find another way to experience that without affairs, but in this polyamorous, sex-fluid time, I really have no expectations of that happening. If this is the way he is forever, I'm okay with that. I just want to find a way to be more at peace with it than I currently am so that if it does get brought up in conversation, I don't completely collapse.

Please share your thoughts, wisdom, advice here please.