Thought I’d be brave and post on here for the first time! My wife and I are currently trying to decide whether we want to adapt our marriage into a poly relationship!

I’ve always known my wife was bi and she never got to really explore that side of herself before she met me! She grew up in a fairly homophobic environment and so had to hide her feelings towards other women!

We met at young adults and have been together since, but while we were both happy in our relationship I was increasingly sad at how she had pretty much locked away that side of herself even from herself as she wouldn’t even give herself permission to fantasise about anyone other than me!

After nearly 15 years of marriage we started to talk about it more and more, initially I rather typically was rather turned on by the thought of a 3sum with another girl but then I started to realise that it’s not about me getting my end away but rather her getting to explore that bi part of her which she had denied for so long!

Eventually I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t about me so I suggested that I would be happy for her to go solo with another woman if she saw fit! I don’t think she believed me at the time and it sort of didn’t go anywhere!

A few years and a pandemic later we’ve started to start having some serious conversations about it and soon realise that neither of us is attracted to people unless we feel some connection to them, we look into it and my wife discovers and starts reading about poly

Initially we talk about having a partially open relationship where she can pursue a relationship with another woman and I set the expectation that I wouldn’t be comfortable with her going with other guys. At first she’s happy about this but on reflection decides that she wouldn’t feel right to be allowed unless I was also allowed. This was totally unexpected for me and I hadn’t even considered that but this did get me thinking about how I’ve always had more in common with women than most other guys but I tend to shutdown any friendships with women for fear that it would cause friction in my relationship. So after long discussion we decided as long as ours was the primary relationship and initially we talk about me being the only guy!

I then start looking into poly for myself and as I do I’ve come to really challenge myself over it and my motivations etc and I come to realise that the 1PP isn’t really fair on her and though while she has no interest in that now it might be that she is in the future! So we discuss at length and I said that if we are to do this then I’m not going to place any restrictions on her either!

So after years of discussion with nothing happening in a few short weeks we’ve gone from having a completely closed traditional looking marriage to be on the verge of declaring ourselves poly! What a rollercoaster ride!

It feels like there are only a few things left to try and figure out:

1) how do you manage this when there are kids involved? We don’t want to confuse them and I’m not sure I want to lie to them either! I thought about slowly introducing the idea of poly and other forms of relationship and eventually having a talk with them about it? What have others one done this?

2) how do you deal with any residual jealousy? I imagine it’s easy to talk about being happy for your partner to be with someone else and I genuinely do want to be okay with it but I worry that when I see her connecting with someone else it could be hard not to feel some level of jealousy? Even if it’s just a holdover from the traditional sensibilities that I grew up with

3) it’s been years since either of us were dating? How on earth do you meet people these days? Moreover from an ethical pov how do you meet people that are also open to being involved with someone who is already involved with someone else? Obviously I’m really only looking for friendships at this time but to be honest I’m even out of practice with that!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated