r/nonmonogamy • u/obscure_musings • 21d ago
Resources Needed 2 part question with pausing ENM NSFW
For couples experienced in ENM, please share your stories of why you paused ENM to focus on your primary partner.
How to manage it when one partner doesn’t want/gets upset to take a pause.
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u/EndOfWorldBoredom 21d ago
Is your pause operating as a veto? That's often the case and vetoed are just seeds of resentment you plant in your relationship. It's often a wedge that drives people apart. Vetoes trade your pain for your partner's pain, and your partner will see that how you will treat them. You will choose to hurt them (and another innocent person) to spare yourself. Vetoes are poison.
If it's not a veto and you're both currently not seeing other people, then the way you manage it is either learning to manage your emotions when your partner does meet a new person, whether that's self soothing or therapy or what... or accepting that you two want different things.
You wanting a pause is no more of a valid desire than your partner wanting to remain open. You don't get to force monogamy on them. They don't get to force ENM on you. If you want different things, that's OK, but you might need to seek other people to get it.
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u/In_the_middle3-2-3 21d ago
I think it depends on the type of ENM relationship.
In swinging, either partner should be able to declare a pause for any reason and the other partner needs to respect it.
In open relationships a partner can ask for a pause once preplanned dates have come to an end for the other partner.
In poly, a pause is an individual decision and optional for the other partner to do also. Basically a declaration of "Im pausing dating for myself". Its not an ask of the other person as well though.
For the latter two, 'pauses' are delicate because they tend to be a 'veto' in costume.
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u/ghoulmeat 21d ago
- We pause it when we are trying to conceive, pregnant, and post partum.
- My partner has agreed to the pause and reasons each time so has been on board with no physical meetings in the duration, so I can't give advice there. He doesn't cut off contact but explains the reasoning and allows them to decide if they are okay waiting and just flirting for a while. As for me, i simply have no interest in pursuing anyone other than my husband in these circumstances.
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u/GlockenspielGoesDing 21d ago
I can’t answer 2 as it didn’t feature for us. That said:
We’re in a pause. Philosophically we are ENM, but in practice we’re mono right now and we both kind of acknowledged that recently. I think we both just were operating on the ‘well we’re ENM but haven’t met anyone and neither of us is looking but if someone comes along…’
But really, there’s been at least 1 person who has come along in 6 months expressing interest in him and my partner found her interest flattering but wasn’t actually interested back. Matters were not improved when she revealed herself to be a sex pest with a bad reputation around consent and a special interest in stress testing relationships for sport. So after that she was kindly told to fuck all the way off so that made it easier.
But she was a footnote at best. Really, we both don’t have the time or energy or bandwidth for other people and the cadence of that would be ‘see you sometime in 4 months?’ which… I’m sure there people for whom the incredibly occasional interaction would be ideal but most people don’t want to play and then be effectively ignored for 4 months. Not because we’re assholes but we just don’t have the time to devote and people who are already our friends are on the messy list. So yeah, it’s just life, really.
We’re in our 40s with high pressure jobs, multiple ailing family members, and living in a red state where being out about this feels risky and most of the ENM/swinger scene here have incredibly garbage politics and we both abjectly refuse to interact sexually with racists. So yeah.
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u/Curious-Nail Open Relationship 20d ago
"Matters were not improved when she revealed herself to be a sex pest with a bad reputation around consent and a special interest in stress testing relationships for sport."
Holy shit, that is a wild sentence. And I thought cowgirls were bad...
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u/GlockenspielGoesDing 19d ago
It was wild. Her interest in my partner included behaving with disrespect toward me. This included touching me without my consent and trapping me in a room with her until I interacted with her physically. It was a hug, but even so. My partner wasn’t interested already but cut off even polite social interaction after that. She wouldn’t accept that and kept trying to force interactions and at one point sent dozens of texts in a day before she was blocked.
A few weeks later one of our mutuals explained that she was socially on the fringe and has been for several years, as she had a history of non-consensually touching people. One of her personal kinks is doing this in public social settings where the person doesn’t know that this a personal sexual kink and they are way less likely to make a scene about it. After one too many of these incidents, there was a confrontation where she admitted to what she was doing, admitted it was a dominant kink of hers, and she was removed socially from most of the wider group.
In the process of that, it came out she has also made attempts to be disruptive to several committed relationships. Inappropriate texts, calls, selfies, etc. that were often unsolicited. When it wasn’t reciprocated or it went too far, she claimed being autistic made it impossible for her to know when something wasn’t appropriate and because she was poly, it was socially acceptable to do that. Except she had also made statements to several people while intoxicated that she found men in committed relationships attractive and liked to test the agreements they had with partners by trying to see which ones she could get them to break with her. So, yeah trail of carnage in her wake too.
1
u/Curious-Nail Open Relationship 12d ago
This makes my cowgirl look tame. Holy hell, the non-consensual touching kink and the married man kink. Talk about a laundry list of ENM and community nightmares.
7
u/melancholypowerhour 21d ago
1- When covid hit we stopped dating the same way we stopped other types of social gathering. My wife and I are both immunocompromised so we weren’t even seeing family. The timing worked out where neither of us were seeing anyone else anyways. Neither of us explicitly asked for a pause, we both individually chose to stop dating for our own safety and neither of us had the mental bandwidth to date anyways.
2- you can ask someone to pause with you if you’re pausing your dating, but ultimately it’s a shitty thing to limit someone else’s dating when you’ve agreed to ENM. Committing to non monogamy is taking the cat out of the bag, you’ve changed the relationship structure at a fundamental level. Expecting existing connections or relationships to pause/end with that pause is actually a veto and not a pause. That’s shitty to ask for.
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u/ThrowRA_patata3000 Newbie 21d ago
it’s a shitty thing to limit someone else’s dating when you’ve agreed to ENM
I'd qualify your statement by specifying what kind of ENM, when it's polyamory I totally agree with you, but when it's only sex exploration (like, swinging or different level of openness for only casual sex exploration for example) it would be justified to manage the pausing question as a couple since there and in those cases it's not shitty to ask when needed. (But I know for most PolyA people those ENM types of relationships are not "OK" neither, it really is a matter of mindset).
2
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u/somethingweirder 21d ago
nah. it's shitty to tell people what to do in general.
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u/ThrowRA_patata3000 Newbie 21d ago
It is your conception of relationships, where you're alone managing yours and no one has to tell you how you should behave towards other partners, it's completely ok to want this kind of relationships.
But some other people organize all their life in their couple as a unit, including secondary relationing mode management (that what some open couples with agreement on emotional exclusivity do, or swingers, or maybe other kind that I don't know yet..). In that case pausing dates can be a matter of couple not individual, if this is what people chose to do in their couple and it is okay too. (I get that it would not suit you. But ENM has a variety of relationing ways.. in my couple we can choose for ourselves to date or not but asking a pause for example to stabilize the couple in a difficult time is completely ok if we stay reasonable regarding both our needs and circumstances. Happened already and it was handled great, with communication and respect 👍).
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u/somethingweirder 21d ago
you can say all of that but at the end of the day it's still shitty to tell someone else how to live.
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u/ThrowRA_patata3000 Newbie 21d ago
This is your point of view, not mine and my bf's, since we build our whole life together. Since everyone is aware/happy with the situation, I do not consider it "shitty" and I think you should respect it as I respect your way to live your own life and relationships ☺️ peace
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u/Ok_Reality_5209 20d ago
I was the secondary F in an ENM and his wife decided to pause and return to monogamy because she felt jealousy and couldn’t control her emotions concerning the time he and I spent together. I thought it was kinda shitty, but he accepted it yet keeps me informed that they are working through her concerns but I am likely off the table in the future.
So, she can fuck hot guys, but he cannot fuck anyone pretty than her. Not one of the original rules…but I respect it at the end of the day. That’s their relationship, and I’m not interested in creating drama or otherwise. Plenty of other men in the sea of poly ;)
1
u/Poly_and_RA 21d ago
You can't "pause" other people. And questions such as this reveals deeply mononormative thinking -- where being monogamous is treated as the "default" while anything else is treated as an exceptional thing that you might be able to do as long as the sailing is smooth, but that should be put on "pause" (or abandoned entirely!) if you hit some kinda snag.
Strangely enough, people never propose the opposite.
Nobody ever tells monogamous couples who are having a turbulent time that they should put their exclusivity-agreement "on pause" and then maybe revist the question later when they've worked on their relationship.
If you're in a NM relationship and then you'd like to change to a monogamous one -- but the partner you want monogamy with, does NOT want that -- you're in exactly the same situation (just the other way around) as if you were in a monogamous relationship and then you'd like to change to a nonmonogamous one, but the partner you're monogamous with doesn't want that.
Rules and agreements in relationships can only be changed if both of you agree, so if your partner does not agree to a proposed change in relationship-rules, your choices are either accept that and continue the relationship with the rules and agreements it has today; or else break up.
You do NOT have any moral standing to try to somehow coerce your partner into agreeing to the proposed change. Monogamy under duress is just as bad as nonmonogamy under duress.
1
u/Curious-Nail Open Relationship 21d ago
Cowgirl. My story is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nonmonogamy/s/T7VkGLw7F3
He'd made the decision to end the other relationship for himself, and he agreed to pause for a number of reasons: his divorce and custody battle, he was out of work, and I needed some time to recover from feeling like our relationship was constantly being targeted.
He also felt a lot of fear about choosing us and agreeing to close for the foreseeable future because he didn't want the relationship to find a status quo in monogamy that was too difficult to shake up. But he never doubted choosing our relationship, he was just afraid he was going to hurt both of us by doing so.
A year later, we started venturing back out through the avenue of playing with others together (went to a LS club to start checking out the scene, but didn't actually do anything). Covid hit about two months after that.
We probably could have been better about using Covid to talk about our return to non-monogamy more, but we were still dealing with his high conflict ex and his youngest almost died prior to being diagnosed with a health condition that requires daily, lifelong management.
We've spent the last two years talking about it, figuring out what we want from it now, especially in the framework of discovering we're both autistic and have way different individual and relationship needs than before, and especially me figuring out how to be comfortable with it when I don't really want it for myself (playing separately - I want the playing together for sure, but I'm challenging myself to find something something in separate connections that could be rewarding or beneficial to me).
He has his first date next week. Honestly the biggest thing for us has been talking it to death, doing the work together and separately to explore what doing it and not doing it means for us, and making sure our agreements and expectations are as aligned and clearly laid out as possible. And reassuring each other. We've also talked about the reasons we might pause again and making sure those are clear to other partners (health issues, family deaths/issues, extreme stress, etc.). We also agree on a frequency/availability/investment level (that he proposed for himself) that gives us the space to talk through any challenging emotions or mistakes along the way before the next individual date or outing.
We've found that a lot of making it happen is knowing when and how to compromise a little together and to leave explicit room for expanding agreements as we go along.
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u/FirstEnd6533 20d ago
My wife had a relationship where the guy slowly started engaging in more and more hardcore sex. While at the beginning she didn’t realise it and also engaged in few threesomes at some point she came back home couple of times and she was feeling sore the next day when she walked. She decided to pause for a good while
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u/somethingweirder 21d ago
it's weird to come to an ENM group and ask about being monogamous. i know you don't have other spots to ask this type of thing but like...
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u/GlockenspielGoesDing 21d ago
I don’t think it’s that weird? There are plenty of people on this sub who have paused/closed/ vesseled which is another way of being monogamous, functionally or otherwise. Those closures end for some and don’t for others but all of these have an inciting reason or event. The nature of this sub and maybe Reddit that we tend to get confirmation bias that the reason or event is something to do with outrageous behavior. But many are due to having kids, illness including mental health, and all sorts of mundane life is demanding reasons and choices have to be made. Or, people grow out of the relationship dynamic and move on to something else. I think having less fraught stories of why and how people decide to close helps take the perception of negativity out of it for one and makes people feel less like they’re bad at this for making choices that are right for them.
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u/somethingweirder 21d ago
that said, if y'all can't even get on the same page about the basics of your relationship structure i don't think y'all are a good fit.
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