I am dating a married woman. Her husband knowing is not the problem
I’m 36 and non-binary. I have been dating a woman of 39 for fourteen months. She is married to a man.
He knows.
I am putting that near the top because whenever I mention the situation, people assume the problem must be secrecy or cheating. Their marriage has been open for six years. I met him before our third date. We have had dinner together twice. He has his own relationship outside the marriage as well.
Nobody is being hidden from a spouse.
The problem is a holiday.
My partner is going to Portugal next month with her husband and six friends. Two weeks ago she asked me to come.
I said yes immediately because being invited felt important. I have met some of the friends, but usually as somebody she knows from work. The holiday would mean being introduced as her partner. No vague wording. No disappearing from photos.
Then I spent ten days hoping the trip would somehow be cancelled.
I like her husband. I do not want a relationship with him. I do not want to share a villa bedroom rota, become part of their anniversary stories or spend a week being the extra branch attached to a married couple.
That sounds ungrateful when I write it down. Plenty of people in my position would want exactly that kind of inclusion.
I thought I did too.
What I actually want is a relationship with her that has its own shape. We normally see each other every Wednesday and one weekend a month. We take short trips together. She has keys to my flat for emergencies. I know I am not moving into their house, marrying her or joining their finances. I do not want those things.
I also do not want to be treated as disposable or available only when her marriage leaves a gap.
Until the holiday invitation, I had confused being respected with being absorbed.
I told her on Sunday.
She was hurt. From her point of view, the invitation was a way of saying I belonged in her real life rather than being kept in a separate compartment. She had already spoken to everybody about rooms. She also admitted that she had pictured the three of us becoming more of a social unit over time.
That was new information to me.
We had been clear about sex, overnights and not becoming financially dependent. We had never discussed whether “more serious” meant more integrated.
For her, it did.
For me, it meant more reliable time, being named honestly and having a say when our plans changed. Not becoming part of the marriage.
We did not solve it in one beautiful conversation. She still wishes I would come. I still feel guilty that I accepted before thinking. Her husband is apparently relieved not to renegotiate the bedrooms, which made all three of us laugh.
The current plan is that I will not go to Portugal. I will come to her birthday dinner next week and she will introduce me as her partner. We are also going to plan a trip for the two of us in January.
None of that guarantees we want compatible versions of this long term. The holiday exposed a difference we had managed not to name for fourteen months.
But I am glad I said no before boarding a plane and spending seven days performing a kind of closeness I do not want.
I am not asking her to make me the centre of her life. I am asking whether I can be real in it without becoming part of the couple.
10 votes 2 repliesNotJoiningTheHoliday
Our children don’t know we’re dating. We planned it that way
I’m 46, divorced and have two children who are 12 and 15. The person I’m dating is 44, non-binary and has a daughter of 13.
We have been seeing each other for eight months. None of the children know.
That sounds worse written down than it feels in our actual lives.
We met through a local walking group. For the first couple of months it genuinely was casual. A drink when neither of us had the children, the occasional Sunday afternoon, messages that stopped when homework and school uniforms took over.
By month four, we were exclusive. We still did not want to introduce the children.
My divorce was fairly calm, but my youngest had only just stopped asking whether his mum and I might live together again. Their daughter had already met two of their ex’s partners in three years and had made it very clear she did not want another adult arriving with a toothbrush and an opinion about bedtime.
Neither of us wants to blend families at the moment. We do not want sleepovers when the children are home. We do not cover childcare for each other or turn up at school events as “a friend.” If one of us has to cancel because a child needs us, the evening is cancelled.
It is not especially spontaneous. It is also not a secret one of us is suffering through.
We talked about it properly in June. We agreed to revisit it at the end of the year, not because December is a deadline for introductions, but because we did not want “not yet” to become a rule nobody was allowed to question.
Last week tested it.
We had booked dinner for Thursday. Their co-parent became ill, so their daughter came home unexpectedly. They rang me while I was getting ready and said we could either cancel or I could come over after she was asleep.
I said we should cancel.
For about half an hour, I was annoyed. Not with them exactly. I had bought a shirt, rearranged a work call and spent the afternoon looking forward to seeing them. A small, childish part of me also wanted them to say that eight months was long enough and I should just come round.
Instead, I heated a supermarket pizza and watched something neither of us would have chosen.
They called later. I admitted I had felt disappointed and slightly ridiculous sitting there in the new shirt. They said they were disappointed too. Then we looked at the agreement again.
Nothing had changed.
I still do not want their daughter finding a stranger in the kitchen on a Friday morning. They still do not want my children wondering whether every person I date is about to join the family. We are not ready for the practical and emotional weight of introductions, and neither of us is promising that we will be by Christmas.
A friend thinks this means we are frightened of commitment. Maybe from the outside it looks like a relationship that only exists when the children are elsewhere.
But it does exist. They know the irritating details of my work. I know which supermarket their daughter’s school bus stops beside because it affects when we can meet. We have keys to each other’s flats for emergencies, kept in drawers rather than on our everyday keyrings. We plan around two custody calendars and complain when the calendars win.
The children are not being used to keep one person at a distance. They are the reason two adults are moving slowly in the same direction.
Could one of us change our mind? Yes. I might eventually want shared holidays and Sunday lunch with everybody at one table. They might decide they never want that. If those answers separate, we will have a real problem.
For now, the privacy is mutual, specific and regularly discussed.
On Saturday we went for a walk, got caught in rain and ate chips in my car. I was still wearing the new shirt under a wet jumper.
Not a grand romance. Not nothing either.
It is the pace we have both chosen, until one of us says it no longer works.
6 votes 2 repliesTwoCalendars
I wanted to be single until I actually went on a date
I’m 27 and I ended a ten-month relationship three weeks ago because I wanted to be single.
I am calling it a relationship now. I avoided that word while we were in it.
We were not officially together, but we were exclusive in practice. I saw her every Tuesday and most Saturdays. She knew my friends, kept shampoo at my flat and was the person I called when my car failed its MOT.
She asked more than once whether we were building towards being a couple. I kept saying I was not ready.
What I meant was that I liked her and did not want to lose her, but I also wanted the freedom to date other people and have a life that did not need to be discussed with anybody. She said she could not keep being almost chosen, so I ended it rather than ask her to wait.
I felt relieved for about ten days.
On Friday I went on my first date from an app. The woman was funny, attractive and had done nothing wrong. I still spent the evening noticing that she did not tell stories like my ex, did not order the same drink and did not know why a particular pub quiz answer would make me laugh.
I left after one drink and called my ex on the walk home.
She did not answer. The next morning she sent one message: “I cannot be the person you call whenever being single feels bad.”
I was angry for five minutes and then embarrassed, because she was right.
I have spent the weekend wondering whether the bad date means I made a mistake.
The honest answer is that I do not know yet. I miss the familiarity, the Tuesday routine and being known without having to explain myself. I also still cannot picture offering the relationship she wanted without immediately feeling trapped by it.
Missing her does not solve that.
I sent one apology for calling. I did not add a question or ask whether she missed me. We have agreed not to contact each other for six weeks.
I have also paused the dating apps. Not because I am secretly waiting for her, and not because one awkward drink has proved I am meant to be in a relationship. I do not think using new people to numb the silence is fair either.
I made being single sound like freedom and being her boyfriend sound like a loss of freedom. At the moment, both choices feel uncomfortable.
That does not mean I get to keep her available while I work out which discomfort I prefer.
13 votes 4 repliesjusttryingtoheal
We are romantic partners. We are not a sexual couple
I’m 54 and my partner is 57. We are both women and have been together for nearly two years.
We are romantic partners. We are not a sexual couple.
That sentence seems to make other people much more uncomfortable than it makes us.
She told me early on that she is asexual. I asked a lot of clumsy questions, mostly because I did not want to assume what that meant for her. She likes kissing, sleeping in the same bed and physical affection. She does not want sex.
I had come out of a marriage where sex had become a duty neither of us discussed. I did not want to recreate that with anyone. I also did not know whether I would miss it.
So we did not make enormous promises.
We dated. We checked in. We agreed that either of us could say the relationship no longer worked without turning that into an accusation. For the first six months I probably asked too often whether she was secretly tolerating kissing for me. She probably asked too often whether I was secretly waiting for her to change.
Neither was true.
What we have is not friendship with nicer bedding. We are in love. We are exclusive because neither of us wants another romantic or sexual relationship. We spend four nights a week together, know each other’s children and have keys to both houses. She leaves half-read crime novels everywhere. I make tea and forget to drink it.
Last month we changed our emergency contacts and wrote down what we would want if one of us was in hospital. That felt more intimate to me than several things I used to call intimacy.
The awkward part is other people.
One friend asked whether I was “giving up that side of myself” because I was frightened of dating. My sister once referred to us as companions and then looked surprised when I said girlfriend. Her friends have asked whether I will eventually want permission to sleep with somebody else.
Those are not ridiculous questions once. They become irritating when our answers are treated as temporary.
We did have one difficult conversation in August. I had made a joke at dinner about us being an old married couple without the marriage or sex. She laughed in the restaurant and cried later.
She thought the joke meant I saw our relationship as missing two important things. I thought I was making fun of the checklist people keep applying to us.
We talked properly the next morning. I apologised for making our private agreement into a public punchline. She admitted she still sometimes waits for me to announce that affection is no longer enough.
Nothing dramatic changed after that. We did decide that I would stop explaining our sex life to curious friends. “We are happy together” is a full answer.
Maybe one of us will want something different later. That is true in every relationship, even the ones following the standard script.
For now, there is no person waiting for more and no person withholding it.
Tonight she is coming over with the dog and the second half of a detective series I dislike. I will complain about the plot and move her bookmark when I tidy up. She will accuse me of losing her page on purpose.
It is not a friendship we are pretending is a relationship.
It is the relationship we chose.
27 votes 10 repliesnumb_waiting_94