Savage Love Letter of the Day: Gone Camping

My partner and I consider ourselves to be monogamish and/or open. We hadn't tested the idea of having sex with anyone else until recently—we had fooled around with others, but no sex—and it went very poorly. My partner thinks I'm the one who handled it poorly and cannot be monogamish due to jealously, and I think he handled it poorly and needs to communicate better and care about how I feel. We went to a fun camping event this past weekend and my partner met someone he liked a lot. He proceeded to ignore me for all of Saturday in favor of hanging with her and this led to an argument Sunday morning. I told him I felt like he was prioritizing her over me and that it did not make me feel happy and was hurting me. He seemed to get it and we spent time together on Sunday. I had given him permission on Saturday—prior to feeling ignored, although to be fair, I never revoked that permission—to make out with the woman we had met. On Monday morning, I woke up alone and went looking for my partner. I walked up to find them beginning to engage in sex. My partner didn't seem to be worried about me walking in, but I felt horrified. We had not discussed sex at all, and when he gave me the "thumbs up, thumbs side, thumbs down signal," I thumbed down. He stopped the sex and I told him we needed to talk. He asked if he could meet me back at camp and I agreed, assuming he wanted to smooth things over with the woman. I was correct, but apparently to him that meant finishing fucking her. This feels like a 100% betrayal to me. Not only did he not discuss having sex with her ahead of time, he continued having sex with her after I had veto'd her very clearly. This felt like cheating. He seems to understand why he should have talked to me first and asked my permission to fuck, and he says he will do "better in the future," but he does not see anything wrong with finishing fucking her. He says he was trying to make her feel less awkward and empathized with her feelings of unhappiness. However, he seems to have no empathy for me sitting in camp upset for 45 minutes waiting for him to come back to talk about this, and instead he gets defensive with me. He is a long-time reader of yours, Dan, and he respects your opinion. Am I wrong that this seems like cheating and betrayal? I feel like communication is so important to do this correctly, and I think he was the one who dropped the ball, not me. I'm worried we may not recover from this first foray in to being open. Can't Erase That Image P.S. And I've just now been catching up on SLLOTDs and I see a recent question was somewhat similar, so I feel like you probably don't see a problem with how he acted as far as not discussing ahead of time, but the betrayal for me was more the ignoring my veto—how can I possibly trust that he will ever listen when I veto someone when he didn't with the very first one? Perhaps this question is too similar to the other one, but he sees no problem with ignoring my veto in this case and I was hoping you may have some insight.

I think you may have misread my advice for Stumped For Clever Name, the woman whose ex-boyfriend violated her One Simple Rule. I didn't tell her that it was silly to have a rule, or to discuss things ahead of time, or that (God forbid) there shouldn't be limits on their hookups with thirds. The problem was her particular rule, which was elaborate, unworkable, and seemed intentionally designed to trip her boyfriend up.

To recap: SFCN wanted her ex-boyfriend to tell her—in advance of a date with a third—exactly what would happen that night so she could "prepare [herself] emotionally." (For the devastation?) She got mad at her ex-boyfriend for smooching—only for smooching—two girls on two separate occasions without first warning her in advance that he might smooch the girls he was going out on dates with. SFCN said she would've been totally fine with smooching—she would've be totally fine with fucking—but only if her ex-boyfriend told her advance so she could, again, brace herself emotionally. That seemed like game playing to me: If she was fine with her boyfriend doing anything, from smooching to fucking, why not send him out the door with a simple "Have fun, honey"?

These three commenters may have done a better job of identifying the problem with SFCN's rule than I did:

What you wanted him to do is pre-emptively set a hard limit on a date with someone else. The practical effect of doing it your way was of you standing behind his left ear and clucking "Nuh-uh-ahhhh! Don't you dare. You promised." Sure, that's going to go over real well with his date. In other words, you were basically preemptively fucking up his evening—all the while claiming "Look how giving I am, see, you nominally have permission to go all the way!" That's pretty manipulative.

If you need to emotionally prepare for every kiss when your monogamish partner is out on a date—and in fact, if you need to get a report of every intimate activity after said date, in a not-a-turn-on kind of way, but to compare to the previously approved activities—then maybe, just maybe, you aren't emotionally ready for an open relationship.

What I don't understand is why these arbitrary rulemakers seem completely incapable of putting themselves in the position of the third person: You have a date. The date has gone well. You want to kiss the person. They say, "No, I can't kiss you, I didn't clear kissing with my partner beforehand." WTF? If I were this hypothetical "you," I'd conclude that, A, this person is a loser, and B, their partner doesn't really get poly and continuing to date this person is going to be a whole lotta drama from an immature metamour. So in other words, yes, SFCN, your "rule" is unreasonable.

So: you can have rules in open relationships—you gotta have rules—but when someone insists on rules that are silly and/or unworkable and/or essentially traps, that person is screaming, "I don't want to be in an open relationship at all!"

The rules you describe—obtain approval before fucking someone else, keep lines of communication open, respect the thumb, don't abandon your primary partner on a camping trip to run off with someone else—aren't silly or unworkable. Your rules, unlike SFCN's rule, seem perfectly reasonable. And it's clear that your boyfriend bent the rules that day and then added insult to injury by pretending not to understand the rules (a "thumbs down" is not hard to decipher). He selfishly prioritized his dick on that camping trip and he was clearly willing to risk doing permanent and perhaps fatal damage to your relationship to get with this other woman.

That's not okay. That's not how you earn someone's trust. That's not the way healthy open relationships function.

If he wanted to fuck her, he needed to ask you for your okay. When you found him fucking her, you let him know he didn't have your okay—and he fucked her anyway. He then justified his actions first by claiming not to understand what your thumbs down meant and then by insisting he only fucked her to spare her feelings—bullshit rationalizations.

My readers told SFCN that her insistence on her boyfriend adhering to her unreasonable rule may be evidence that she's not "emotionally ready for an open relationship." I would say that your boyfriend's inability to honor your reasonable rules may be evidence that he isn't ready for an open relationship either.

It's up to you whether you give him a second chance—I would, CETI, if he were my boyfriend—but definitely no third chance.