DADT Marriage

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10/23/2023 17:47

Subject: Re:DADT Marriage

quote

Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My marriage is monogamous but I think a DADT marriage makes more sense than a true "open" marriage even though it seems less emotionally mature. Everyone I know who is in or has tried open marriage, it's just an endless series of annoying choices that you have to be "mature" about but actually suck. Everything from setting the rules of what people are allowed to do, to deciding how much to share with each other, to deciding who outside the marriage to tell about the openness, then dealing with kids... it's logistically just suuuuuuper annoying. I get why people do it but have seen enough of these from the outside (two that are still intact, the rest ended in divorce) to know it is very much not for me or my DH.

At least in a DADT marriage, it's pretty simple. Be discrete. Don't do anything that would compromise that discretion. Use protection. Never talk about it. I could even see it sort of helping to revive a marriage by adding some mystery and competition and just making the individual partners feel wanted and sexy again, which is the stuff it's hard to access after years of monogamy and kids. But without all the logistical annoyances of open marriage because the assumption is that any affairs must fit around the marriage without disturbing it. So there are no "arrangements." Figure out how to make your affairs happen on your lunch our or at "the gym" or during work travel, but no we are not sitting down as a couple to figure out how to arrange childcare so that you can do a couples weekend with your girlfriend, ffs.

But don't you have to talk about it a little bit for it to be this and not just an affair? You can't just assume your spouse is also sleeping with other people, right?

I think sometimes people in these marriage will have told each other "I would never want to know" but won't necessarily make a formal arrangement. My DH once told me he'd never want to know if I cheated, that it would be cruel to tell him unless we were getting a divorce because they he'd have to live with the knowledge. I've never had an affair, but I think people in DADT marriages sometimes have conversations like that.

Or they might have conversations where they address it indirectly and one or both say explicitly "I don't want to know." Like maybe someone discovers evidence of cheating by accident and there's a moment when a confession could take place but instead the other person says, "let it be" or "I don't want to know."

Willful ignorance is a VERY popular method of coping.

Okay, I can see the second scenario. The first one, though, yikes. I have had that theoretical conversation with my husband and like you I'd never interpret that as the initiation of a DADT policy in the sense that OP is talking about.

For the first scenario, in our case it didn’t play out like that. We had an explicit conversation, and we settled on a one-sided DADT because I didn’t want to have to hear about, or think about, what my spouse was up to. Except that I do think about it, so that didn’t really work.