We closed the marriage for two years over a friendship
Looking for somebody willing to hear the rule and where it came from
The thing that stopped us was not sex and it was not jealousy. It was a friendship. My husband and the man we were seeing became genuinely close, closer than any of us had planned for, and when it ended I was fine and he was not, and it took him the better part of a year to be able to say so.
That is the whole story and it is duller and sadder than the version people expect. Nobody betrayed anybody. A man we all liked moved away, and my husband lost a friend at the same moment an arrangement ended, and he had nowhere to put that. We closed everything for two years while he worked out what had actually happened to him.
Forty six and forty four, Kreuzberg, nine years open before the pause. We are starting again now, carefully, with one rule that came directly out of it: whatever else happens, he keeps his own friendships running, separately, with people who have nothing to do with any of this. It sounds unrelated. It is not remotely unrelated.
So: one man, ongoing, unhurried, who will not take offence when we go slowly. And somebody who will not treat my husband's fondness for him as either a problem or a prize, because last time it was neither. It was just a friendship with nowhere to go.
Before the first drink Replying goes through the connected platform, so nothing about you is shared until you decide to share it. Take contact slowly and keep identifying details back until trust is earned. Meet somewhere public the first time, with your own way home from it, and if you are a couple then go together. Tell someone outside it where you are going. Never send money to someone you have not met. And if a post or a reply reads wrong, flag it rather than talking yourself out of the feeling.
Before you answer a post like this
Two people wrote this together, and both of them have to say yes to you. These are the three written for the man on the other end of it.
- What makes a single man read as safe
- Vetting a couple: the screening men skip
- The first meeting: a drink, all three of you