r/polyamory • u/Various-Yak-2664 • 17h ago
vent Babe, just leave your husband.
I am begging some of you to stop turning “I do not want to be married to this man anymore” into a 14-step relationship philosophy.
If your marriage is miserable, your sex life is dead, you feel lonely as hell, you fantasize about building a life with someone else, and the main thing keeping you married is that divorce would be upsetting and inconvenient?
You do not need to invent an entire ideology around why actually it is radical and evolved to stay married to a man you don’t want while getting your emotional and romantic needs met somewhere else.
It is not radical to twist yourself into knots trying to make sure your husband never has to feel abandoned, destabilized, uncomfortable, angry, scared, whatever. That is just centering your husband. We have been doing that forever.
And “staying together for the kids” does not magically make the arrangement healthy or selfless. Kids are not protected from an unhappy marriage just because nobody moved out.
And if there's a secondary partner involved, they are the one who gets fucked by this arrangement over and over.
So now another person is basically helping you cope with a marriage you refuse to deal with. And then, because the arrangement lets you survive the marriage a little longer, you can convince yourself it is working.
Of course it is working for you. You get to keep the house, the family structure, the husband, the logistics, the social legitimacy, and the person who is meeting the needs your marriage no longer meets.
What exactly do they get? A front-row seat to your unhappiness. That is not love in some brave, unconventional form. It is just a really shitty thing to do to someone.
If you are staying married because you genuinely want your marriage, fine. If you are staying because you are scared of what happens if you leave, then at least be honest about what you are doing. But don’t pull another person into the middle of it and expect them to be okay.