Boundaries Question / Relationship Advice Needed

Here's the setup: Happily married, 17 years. Things are/were going well in every way.

Old flame and solid friend from before the marriage. Things ended on a bad note, entirely my doing. There was no grapevine connection, and I ditched his contact information, so I had no way over the years of discreetly checking up on his well-being, even to find out if he was alive or dead. This always worried me very much, and I regretted the total cutoff, although I would not have settled down with the guy, and the impossibility of contact may have been a boon in early years of marriage.

Guy sends me a facebook friend request. I respond, send messages back, and ask for his contact info. He only does phone for substantial communication. I call once, promise to call again. He lives in a part of the country where I would never have reason to go. I would not invite him here. We had a thing then, but not now, not sexually. But I don't regret that part of the past. I still care about him and value his friendship.

Background: Husband and I had a discussion about facebook and exes several years ago. He said it's never okay to friend them, nor interact with exes in any way. I said it is and that I didn't respect his position on the matter. I said that I trusted him to talk to exes without sleeping with them, and I demanded the same trust from him. He didn't agree but did stop berating me about it. The matter dropped. In the years since then I have openly facebook friended several ex-lovers, in a way that he could have observed if he wished to direct his attention that way, since he knows their names. Nothing bad happened. No repeat of the facebook boundaries conversation. No old feelings were stirred up. Just some, okay, so-and-so had a kid type things. Friendly updates. No problem.

THIS guy though, husband hated. With a passion. I walked away from this guy to commit to him. We had many conversations in the early years of marriage, as people do, and when this guy came up there was always a disagreement. Husband wanted me to express remorse and self-loathing that I was ever with that guy. Wanted me to see that it was a fundamentally "bad" relationship because it did include sex that wasn't a prelude to committed monogamy. So, in husband's view, premarital sex is okay, as long as you might marry the person, and if you don't, you must break up in a way that leaves at least one party bitter. Apparently. I never agreed and things got ugly until he finally stopped bringing it up. I resolved to keep my feelings to myself.

So, this guy is ecstatic to have found me. He's in a committed relationship himself, and she is okay with us talking on the phone (I heard it from her mouth, and his). His life is a bit of a mess right now, and he could use all the friendships and moral support he can get. Again, this is phone only. I want to keep talking to him, because it makes me feel good just to hear his voice. Social bonding is a pick-me-up. Would I have sex with him again if we were both single? Maybe, but it's not on the table, and if life goes as planned, it never will be (and husband would be disgusted by that attitude). Nonetheless, the temptation is not remotely there, because I have too much to lose. Romantic commitment between me and this guy was never in the cards.

So, it's a lie of omission to keep this connection up behind my husband's back. I don't want to start a fight, to hurt his feelings, and I think that bad hurt feelings and anxiety are all that would come of disclosure. (Other guy knows this and has agreed that I may initiate all calls.) But I am getting hurt feelings in the fact that I can't share something with my husband. It feels wrong to keep silent about anything that affects me emotionally, or occupies my mind even momentarily. And yet I feel like it does make me a better spouse if I do what I must to not be miserable, to respect myself. And yet, that's the classic justification of a cheater. But in my view I am not cheating. And I would tell if I thought it would go well at all. And if I were "caught", I would tell the whole truth, as kindly as possible, and see where the pieces fell. And if I lost them both somehow, I would have my dignity at least.

The question is, what best to do? Am I being immoral here? On the path to bad unintended consequences?
I don't think this will destroy my marriage, but it might make it suck for a while, and yet, it's always a unpleasant to stand up to someone who wants to perpetuate an unsatisfactory status quo. Are husband's demands unreasonable? Are mine?

 

Thank you, Married Lady. You're right that I need to examine my motivations. I don't need the attention. This fellow doesn't actually need mine either. It was just the kind of friendship that one doesn't shrug off easily. It wasn't love, it was kindredness. Someone who experienced the world in the same peculiar way I did, occupied the same niche almost, fought similar problems.

So what am I doing? Am I flexing power, trying to change a suffocating dynamic without being the one to directly initiate another fruitless confrontation? Am I hedging my bets, so to speak? I don't think so, but maybe subconsciously, on an instinctual level, there might be some of that contributing. I don't know. I suspect a lot of this is that I'm just enjoying the feeling of getting in touch with my own better past self, the one who was confident, curious, extroverted and motivated to do more and be more than a beaten down workhorse with tunnel vision. And that's maybe a bit of escapism. And yet, what's got me down persistently over the years has been the timidity I feel when meeting new people, will they pass the test with my husband, or should I not bother growing to like them? With taking a new job, will my husband still accept me if I enjoy work instead of dread it? Things have worked out really well at home except times when I had a spring in my step walking out the door, off to accomplish something I valued, other than just making money. I think it's been worth it to put my family first for years, and yet I expect to have my turn one day too, and when it comes, will it come? All of this stuff has nothing to do with other guy. It's me. It is something to think about.


My husband, I love him. We see eye to eye on so many things. And some not. We work together toward common ends very well. We put aside stuff and deal. I think of marriage as a lifetime commitment, a contract, between two whole individuals. We're not insects, specializing. We're not mold, growing together into a single colony. With him, there's been an issue with privacy all along. The thing is I feel I have the right to my own private thoughts. For years I didn't feel safe articulating all of them, or even writing them down in a diary, even though I felt the need to, to ease some specific loneliness, because it would be read. In early years, he was jealous of my daydreams. "What are you thinking? What are you thinking?" I never felt the urge to give him a play-by-play, moment by moment. He doesn't really understand that, because he always says everything that's on his mind right away, whether it's wise to speak out loud or not. He literally couldn't cheat on me. He'd tell. And ironically that's one of the things I appreciate about him. He can't lie. But it's a disability that gets him in trouble with other people all the time.

Now I'm rambling. Anyway, thanks.

 

jbird - You sound very angry, but I'm listening to your point of view. I wonder if it isn't a bit abusive though to cut a man off over passively looking at pictures. Have you talked with a marriage counselor about it? You can go by yourself if he won't come with. At least you would get some of this off your chest.

Yes, you have to have the same idea of what marriage is before going in, okay. Well, is it a union for life, or is it a "team" only until he does something you don't allow, and then it's all over from you? You say he agreed to the terms, and if that's right, in that our situations differ. Maybe he told you what he thought you wanted to hear just to keep the peace. That's not an excuse, but if you're frightening him or refusing to negotiate, it would explain what he means by lying. My is also different because this isn't about sex. At all. And nobody outside the marriage is failing to support the marriage (not that it's really anyone else's job but ours). Nobody is asking me to spare any time but my own. And some of the time in my day is my own, right? Not all, but a little? Or does the marriage contract mean that every moment from waking until sleep has to be spent on the other partner's approved activities? My husband and I have big goals in common, but we also have separate personal goals. He's writing a book, for example. That takes thousands of hours. It probably won't publish or make money. Personally, I think it would be abusive of me to tell him not to do it, just because it doesn't serve me. So I wash the dishes while he types. That's not a sacrifice, that's just sharing according to what we each have to offer. He thinks it's amazing because his exes didn't even "allow" him to read books when they were together. (What?) I find that attitude incomprehensible, and pretty much assumed he just had really horrible exes. Would you have a different perspective on the matter? Serious question.

 

You're right. You're right. "I love you more than anyone else in the world, except myself. Except myself."

I'm beginning to get comfortable with being a bad person. Saying "no". Sleeping in. Failing. Failing to please. It all gets mushed up together after a while, the selfish innocent and the selfish horrid. I wasn't raised this way. Life was duty. "Christ died on the cross. How dare you feel entitled to do less?" Sin is to ask to be heard, if you're a woman or a child. Outside of that paradigm, it's a learning curve, doing right, balancing self and others. I haven't got it figured out yet.

 

Thank you everyone for the advice.
I came clean to my husband and cut off contact with the other.
It's not fun, no. But I think things will get better from here.

 

Dante's Shadow,

Nope, my bad. I was in a poor state of mind and easily triggered. Your post was reasonable. Thanks for the encouragement. And yes, things are getting better.

 

Nope. Today sucks. This week has been a roller coaster and I'm ready for the ride to stop.

Hubby reminded me that just two weeks ago he was saying, "Hey, we should do more stuff together! Because you're always sitting over there reading the news or playing solitaire, and I'm always sitting over here (3 feet away) vegging out, and we should do more together stuff together." And I was like, "Huh? Why? We talk every day. We're hanging out right now! What's the problem?" And I thought, I'm just not that social. I need my quiet time.

And today he's devastated because that coldness means something now. Because now he can't help knowing that the whole time we've been married I've been theoretically receptive to emotional intimacy outside the relationship. Well, yeah. I'm not naturally wired for monogamy. We knew that. I've had to work at it. And work hard. And I've succeeded, I thought. But it hasn't been good enough. And it hurts him deeply, I think because now he can see that this is as good he's ever going to get from me. When he hurts I hurt, but that doesn't mean I can change. It's tough to handle.

 

Thank you. Got to do as the famous fish recommended and "just keep swimmin'".