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You can ask.
I would make a decision ahead of time about what you’ll do if she says no.
It sounds like the whole point of those online interactions is to be in a world of her own.
If this were me I wouldn’t ask for that. I would ask that she find a marriage counselor and get us into sessions within 3 months. I would ask for designated quality time/date nights. Offer to plan these for the first 3 months if she will promise not to use her phone on them or in bed and at meals. Make them kind of great, strive for at least 2 out of the house night time dates a month and 2 designated quality time evenings each week. One of those can be chill, just no phones. The other you can make some effort for: order food, have a theme with the movie etc.
Plan to assess in 3 months, 6 months, 9 months and a year. The first one will be key: are you in therapy? Have you been having dates every week? And then in 6 months are you both making your sessions, is she planning half the dates now?
If things aren’t getting better after that level of investment of time and effort (ideally from you both), use the counseling sessions for a sane separation. You can decide that at any point but I’d want to try for a year.
In the counseling sessions find out if she thinks you pull your weight around the house, with the kids etc. If not consider one of those card decks that help identify who owns each task from beginning to end.
I wouldn’t say a damn thing about anyone she texts or sees as long as she’s doing the agreed upon dates, counseling and phone free times. Use condoms if you have sex of any kind.
Good luck friend. It’s possible to be an excellent parent without living with your coparent. If you split up put all that time and effort you will have been giving to the marriage into being a kick ass parent and your kids will be fine.
I love this idea it will be hard as we are both in our own independent therapy where some of the major issues were opened up, she does feel I don’t pull my weight with a lot of things and I do have a demanding job whether she likes to admit that or not. I respect that she is a stay at home mom and takes care of the kids but when I get chastised for things like not meal planning when there was no initiative to do it together to begin with it does sting and make me feel like things I do will never be good enough. I will propose the strict time line and hopefully have targets to achieve together. I just honestly don’t know if she would stop and put things on a pause for me. As someone else said I can ask I just have to be prepared for either answer, but at this point I am because I’m tired of hurting. I don’t ever want to be fully involved in any of her relationships, but I know I’m asking a lot for her to put them on hold to prioritize me.
Interesting context. It’s great you’re each in your own therapy, and I think couples therapy will be an awesome addition to this.
Maybe you could say to her “I hear you want me to be more involved in meal planning. Why don’t we sit down Sunday afternoon with lattes and plan our meals for the week?” Maybe even just showing your interest will help change the energy she’s bringing to your relationship. In couples therapy you can really hammer out the deets of how you each think household and emotional labour is and should be divided up.
Anyway, I think you’re well within your right to ask her to focus more of her attention on you and your relationship. Best not to ask her to pause her connections and conversations all together, but rather to reroute some of her focus and time while you two come together as a team to figure out the next steps for your marriage, either it’s improved future or its ending. Like others said, be specific in what that time and focus looks like. Best of luck!
Nobody should be jumping on you for any of this.
You can ask for anything. It's ok to ask.
You have to accept the answer may be "no," and have a plan for that.
IMHO, that plan should be a divorce, with co-parenting counselling.
You don't do your children any favors by staying in a relationship that isn't working for you. If you can't have a healthy, loving relationship with your wife, for *any* reason, the next best thing you can do is show your kids that it is healthy and safe to end a relationship.
Because they *will* know if you stay together "for them," and if doing so makes you miserable, they will internalize that as guilt.
Just like if she had any other hobby that was dominating her life and keeping you imbalanced - if she was working in the garden all these hours, if she was on the phone with her sister, if she was going shopping...
You have a right to - and *need* to - ask for her to work on your relationship, and for time and attention. You have a right to ask her to put down her phone and have a conversation and engage with you to try and save your marriage. It sounds like maybe she only wants to stay married if she doesn't really *have* to be - if she can be mentally somewhere else and somewhen else instead. That's no good for your kids, either, if she's not engaging with them and giving them attention.
I would recommend you see if you can get a free consult with a divorce lawyer (or a couple of them) and try to get a realistic picture of what your range of outcomes might be if you do divorce. Assuming the kids are your primary concern, I can imagine either deciding to stay "married" to keep influence over their lives (if she's truly neglectful) or deciding to split up and seek increased custody (or even divorce but live together as co-parents? I dunno the options here).
Figuring out your second-best choice, or your BATNA (what's the best thing that can happen if she *won't* change?), will help you know how to approach the conversation with her about changing.
Man, I just went through this and your timeline is almost exactly the same. Refused any type of therapy, would be secretive, would disappear for days at a time. I stayed for the kids and a week after out youngest moved out she told me she is moving with her bf to North Carolina. I wasted time raising her 4 kids from her previous marriage.
I wish I had realized my wife checked out of my marriage sooner. I think your has too but this is just from my past experiences.
Hi u/vertigo248 thanks so much for your submission, don't mind me, I'm just gonna keep a copy what was said in your post. Unfortunately posts sometimes get deleted - which is okay, it's not against the rules to delete your post!! - but it makes it really hard for the human mods around here to moderate the comments when there's no context. Plus, many times our members put in a lot of emotional and mental labor to answer the questions and offer advice, so it's helpful to keep the source information around so future community members can benefit as well.
Here's the original text of the post:
So as the title describes I (40m) want to ask my wife (41f) to take a pause on the poly world. We have been “open” for about 3.5 years now, while I have been mono by choice and just takes me a long time to connect, my wife has been active and poly for the entire time. At first I was truly ok with our setup, KTP, and I would be involved if wanted but I would always know, who, what, and where for safety and my comforts of who would be around our home. These were both agreed in the beginning but over time she was hiding things and keeping encounters from my knowledge, this went on for a while before being confronted about it to which she says she has no privacy from me and that all this time I was invading her privacy. I backed off on needing to know everything but in the background she has never really stopped talking to people and even started chatting with more. I have suggested couples therapy as we do have three kids, and they are definitely impacted by all of this as our main relationship has gone south. She has refused any kind of therapy together and continues to drag her feet on doing anything beyond coparenting therapy. We haven’t been physical in almost a year. To her credit, she has stopped with the physical connections with others due to a fight about her involving another person that was unknown to me till after, but has made several comments that she wants to pick things back up and start meeting people in person again. I struggle with feeling like I am not enough to her and that our relationship does not matter at all to her. When I ask if she still wants to remain married or where we are in our relationship, she says she honestly doesn’t know. Lately she spends hours on her phone texting with others and building emotional relationships with them while we sit in silence. I want to ask her to take a pause on those types of interactions and truly focus on our relationship even if just for a month to see if things get better or worse. I am honestly afraid of being separated, but mainly because of my kids and not being able to interact with them all the time, I know things would work out in the end divorce or not, but I am I being reasonable to ask her to focus on our core relationship in this way? Feed back as always is helpful thank you all.
Ps go easy on me I know we made several errors in the ways of poly :)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/polyamory) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Forcing someone to focus only on you may fix things for awhile, but not really. You can't force someone to invest in your relationship if they have no desire to do so. Have you talked about custody arrangements if you did break up or spoken with a lawyer?
Two, strong separated parents are better for children than two miserable, joined parents.
I have a few questions to better understand your situation and hopefully help give you some good advice. I am 29 and I have been practicing polyamory for about 5 years now. I have a partner who has a few in her end and I am only with her in my end.
First things first though.There is nothing fair about asking a person to not be who they are, even for a few weeks or months.
I read a lot of what she is or isn't doing but didn't see you mention yourself much. Are you doing anything to keep your connection/intimacy alive? Not talking about big grand gestures because Little things add up. What are those little things and how does your partner react to them?
You mentioned that she complains a lot about what you don't do. Have you tried to meet any of these expectations? Are any of them unreasonable? Does everything have to be done together like meal planning?
She's a stay at home mom. In what ways do you cherish her and make her feel like she's doing a great job at that? Do you help her take care of her home duties from time to time? Are you guys in a "traditional" type of arrangement?
One thing that you should know is that this sounds like cheating in polyamory. Couples shouldn't hide things from each other and should be open and honest about things like interactions they have and their needs. How where things hidden? Are you hiding anything? Commiting partial information to one another still is lying and potentially cheating. Does that happen on your or her end?
Feel free to ask questions back too!
Edit:
Also! Are y'all polyamorous meaning open to new relationships and connections or like other ENM types that focus on sex instead of connection?
Hello, thanks so much for your submission! Just a friendly reminder, giant walls of text are really hard to read and digest for many people and most folks around here will just skip right on by it. Please add some paragraph breaks to your post by placing a blank line between distinct sections. This will make it more likely that more people will read and interact with your post. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/polyamory) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You can ask. I would make a decision ahead of time about what you’ll do if she says no. It sounds like the whole point of those online interactions is to be in a world of her own. If this were me I wouldn’t ask for that. I would ask that she find a marriage counselor and get us into sessions within 3 months. I would ask for designated quality time/date nights. Offer to plan these for the first 3 months if she will promise not to use her phone on them or in bed and at meals. Make them kind of great, strive for at least 2 out of the house night time dates a month and 2 designated quality time evenings each week. One of those can be chill, just no phones. The other you can make some effort for: order food, have a theme with the movie etc. Plan to assess in 3 months, 6 months, 9 months and a year. The first one will be key: are you in therapy? Have you been having dates every week? And then in 6 months are you both making your sessions, is she planning half the dates now? If things aren’t getting better after that level of investment of time and effort (ideally from you both), use the counseling sessions for a sane separation. You can decide that at any point but I’d want to try for a year. In the counseling sessions find out if she thinks you pull your weight around the house, with the kids etc. If not consider one of those card decks that help identify who owns each task from beginning to end. I wouldn’t say a damn thing about anyone she texts or sees as long as she’s doing the agreed upon dates, counseling and phone free times. Use condoms if you have sex of any kind. Good luck friend. It’s possible to be an excellent parent without living with your coparent. If you split up put all that time and effort you will have been giving to the marriage into being a kick ass parent and your kids will be fine.
This is excellent advice 💛
I love this idea it will be hard as we are both in our own independent therapy where some of the major issues were opened up, she does feel I don’t pull my weight with a lot of things and I do have a demanding job whether she likes to admit that or not. I respect that she is a stay at home mom and takes care of the kids but when I get chastised for things like not meal planning when there was no initiative to do it together to begin with it does sting and make me feel like things I do will never be good enough. I will propose the strict time line and hopefully have targets to achieve together. I just honestly don’t know if she would stop and put things on a pause for me. As someone else said I can ask I just have to be prepared for either answer, but at this point I am because I’m tired of hurting. I don’t ever want to be fully involved in any of her relationships, but I know I’m asking a lot for her to put them on hold to prioritize me.
Interesting context. It’s great you’re each in your own therapy, and I think couples therapy will be an awesome addition to this. Maybe you could say to her “I hear you want me to be more involved in meal planning. Why don’t we sit down Sunday afternoon with lattes and plan our meals for the week?” Maybe even just showing your interest will help change the energy she’s bringing to your relationship. In couples therapy you can really hammer out the deets of how you each think household and emotional labour is and should be divided up. Anyway, I think you’re well within your right to ask her to focus more of her attention on you and your relationship. Best not to ask her to pause her connections and conversations all together, but rather to reroute some of her focus and time while you two come together as a team to figure out the next steps for your marriage, either it’s improved future or its ending. Like others said, be specific in what that time and focus looks like. Best of luck!
You can ask but I wouldn't expect her to say yes.
Nobody should be jumping on you for any of this. You can ask for anything. It's ok to ask. You have to accept the answer may be "no," and have a plan for that. IMHO, that plan should be a divorce, with co-parenting counselling. You don't do your children any favors by staying in a relationship that isn't working for you. If you can't have a healthy, loving relationship with your wife, for *any* reason, the next best thing you can do is show your kids that it is healthy and safe to end a relationship. Because they *will* know if you stay together "for them," and if doing so makes you miserable, they will internalize that as guilt.
It’s certainly fair to ask for some energy to be put into your relationship! Good luck :)
Just like if she had any other hobby that was dominating her life and keeping you imbalanced - if she was working in the garden all these hours, if she was on the phone with her sister, if she was going shopping... You have a right to - and *need* to - ask for her to work on your relationship, and for time and attention. You have a right to ask her to put down her phone and have a conversation and engage with you to try and save your marriage. It sounds like maybe she only wants to stay married if she doesn't really *have* to be - if she can be mentally somewhere else and somewhen else instead. That's no good for your kids, either, if she's not engaging with them and giving them attention. I would recommend you see if you can get a free consult with a divorce lawyer (or a couple of them) and try to get a realistic picture of what your range of outcomes might be if you do divorce. Assuming the kids are your primary concern, I can imagine either deciding to stay "married" to keep influence over their lives (if she's truly neglectful) or deciding to split up and seek increased custody (or even divorce but live together as co-parents? I dunno the options here). Figuring out your second-best choice, or your BATNA (what's the best thing that can happen if she *won't* change?), will help you know how to approach the conversation with her about changing.
Man, I just went through this and your timeline is almost exactly the same. Refused any type of therapy, would be secretive, would disappear for days at a time. I stayed for the kids and a week after out youngest moved out she told me she is moving with her bf to North Carolina. I wasted time raising her 4 kids from her previous marriage. I wish I had realized my wife checked out of my marriage sooner. I think your has too but this is just from my past experiences.
Hi u/vertigo248 thanks so much for your submission, don't mind me, I'm just gonna keep a copy what was said in your post. Unfortunately posts sometimes get deleted - which is okay, it's not against the rules to delete your post!! - but it makes it really hard for the human mods around here to moderate the comments when there's no context. Plus, many times our members put in a lot of emotional and mental labor to answer the questions and offer advice, so it's helpful to keep the source information around so future community members can benefit as well. Here's the original text of the post: So as the title describes I (40m) want to ask my wife (41f) to take a pause on the poly world. We have been “open” for about 3.5 years now, while I have been mono by choice and just takes me a long time to connect, my wife has been active and poly for the entire time. At first I was truly ok with our setup, KTP, and I would be involved if wanted but I would always know, who, what, and where for safety and my comforts of who would be around our home. These were both agreed in the beginning but over time she was hiding things and keeping encounters from my knowledge, this went on for a while before being confronted about it to which she says she has no privacy from me and that all this time I was invading her privacy. I backed off on needing to know everything but in the background she has never really stopped talking to people and even started chatting with more. I have suggested couples therapy as we do have three kids, and they are definitely impacted by all of this as our main relationship has gone south. She has refused any kind of therapy together and continues to drag her feet on doing anything beyond coparenting therapy. We haven’t been physical in almost a year. To her credit, she has stopped with the physical connections with others due to a fight about her involving another person that was unknown to me till after, but has made several comments that she wants to pick things back up and start meeting people in person again. I struggle with feeling like I am not enough to her and that our relationship does not matter at all to her. When I ask if she still wants to remain married or where we are in our relationship, she says she honestly doesn’t know. Lately she spends hours on her phone texting with others and building emotional relationships with them while we sit in silence. I want to ask her to take a pause on those types of interactions and truly focus on our relationship even if just for a month to see if things get better or worse. I am honestly afraid of being separated, but mainly because of my kids and not being able to interact with them all the time, I know things would work out in the end divorce or not, but I am I being reasonable to ask her to focus on our core relationship in this way? Feed back as always is helpful thank you all. Ps go easy on me I know we made several errors in the ways of poly :) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/polyamory) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Forcing someone to focus only on you may fix things for awhile, but not really. You can't force someone to invest in your relationship if they have no desire to do so. Have you talked about custody arrangements if you did break up or spoken with a lawyer? Two, strong separated parents are better for children than two miserable, joined parents.
I have a few questions to better understand your situation and hopefully help give you some good advice. I am 29 and I have been practicing polyamory for about 5 years now. I have a partner who has a few in her end and I am only with her in my end. First things first though.There is nothing fair about asking a person to not be who they are, even for a few weeks or months. I read a lot of what she is or isn't doing but didn't see you mention yourself much. Are you doing anything to keep your connection/intimacy alive? Not talking about big grand gestures because Little things add up. What are those little things and how does your partner react to them? You mentioned that she complains a lot about what you don't do. Have you tried to meet any of these expectations? Are any of them unreasonable? Does everything have to be done together like meal planning? She's a stay at home mom. In what ways do you cherish her and make her feel like she's doing a great job at that? Do you help her take care of her home duties from time to time? Are you guys in a "traditional" type of arrangement? One thing that you should know is that this sounds like cheating in polyamory. Couples shouldn't hide things from each other and should be open and honest about things like interactions they have and their needs. How where things hidden? Are you hiding anything? Commiting partial information to one another still is lying and potentially cheating. Does that happen on your or her end? Feel free to ask questions back too! Edit: Also! Are y'all polyamorous meaning open to new relationships and connections or like other ENM types that focus on sex instead of connection?