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What Does Reddit Think?
![Hands, phone and woman typing on sofa in home living room, texting or scrolling social media. Tech, relax and female on couch in lounge on mobile smartphone networking or internet browsing in house](https://www.sheknows.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/reddit-aita-open-relationship-husband-wants-divorce-04.jpeg?w=300)
Now OP is asking Reddit if he might be the asshole here. Reddit’s response? Absolutely not — which makes sense, given this site’s generally poor opinion on open relationships. Filtering out the baseless accusations of cheating and gloating over OP’s wife getting what was coming to her (do better, Reddit!), commenters agreed that OP was in no way in the wrong here.
One commenter dubbed this “a story as old as time,” where the spouse who pushes for the open relationship ends up being the one who regrets it when they see how popular their partner is. “She dug her own grave here,” they concluded, with another commenter agreeing that the open relatinship “backfired.”
Another person pointed out that OP’s wife knowingly took a major risk to open up their marriage, and OP did his part by being honest about his “emotional connection personality.” They concluded, “She is facing the consequences of her actions.” A fellow Redditor advised OP to get the divorce ASAP. “Why prolong the inevitable?”
Our favorite comment framed it succinctly: “You’re monogamous,” they told OP. He’s only able to be emotionally or romantically interested in one person at a time, they said, and in opening the marriage, OP’s wife made it possible for him to form that attachment with someone else and thereby diminish their own connection. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” they said. “She shouldn’t have forced the open relationship when you told her you wanted to stay monogamous. She has brought it upon herself.”
We think this is the best take of the bunch. While there’s nothing wrong with starting an open relationship if that’s what OP’s wife genuinely wanted, and while her desire to do so doesn’t necessarily mean she was already cheating (despite Reddit constantly being convinced otherwise!), the truth is that OP himself appears to be monogamous through and through. A fully monogamous person is just not likely to thrive in a non-monogamous relationship, no matter how many boundaries are put in place. That’s why it’s so important that an open relationship is started with both partners equally invested — unlike in this case, where OP’s wife simply wouldn’t take no for an answer.
At the end of the day, if OP’s wife truly wants to be non-monogamous and OP does not, they might just be incompatible. That’s a harsh truth to face and may not alleviate the pain that OP’s wife, at least, is clearly feeling, but it means that leaving this relationship (which we think is the right choice here) frees them both to find a partner that they’re more compatible with.
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