the part I like is the part I am ashamed of

I have been sitting on this for a while and I do not really know who else to ask.

Everything I have read about this frames it in a way that does not describe me. Freedom, openness, wanting your partner to have a full life, enjoying her enjoying herself. All of that is nice and I do believe in most of it, but it is not the engine. If it were only that I would have suggested an open marriage and been done with it.

What actually does it for me is being the lesser one. The one who is not chosen in that moment. I can dress it up but that is the shape of it, and writing it out is not comfortable.

The problem is that I do not like what that seems to say about me. I am not a person who thinks poorly of himself in general. I am reasonably successful, I am not miserable, I do not walk around feeling small. So where does a private appetite for feeling small come from, and what does it mean that the one place I want it is with the person I care most about.

The second problem is her. She has been game about all of it and she has never once complained. But the version of this I want requires her to take a particular tone with me, and I have never asked her whether she actually enjoys that or whether she is doing it because I clearly want it. I am not sure I want to know the answer, which is probably its own answer.

I am not looking to be talked out of the fantasy. I have had it since I was about twenty and it is not going anywhere. I would like to know whether other people have made peace with the specific content of theirs, or whether you just carry the awkwardness alongside it forever.