468 - "I want to fix our desire mismatch, but my partner doesn't."- Listener Q&A

This week’s question

This week’s question for our Q&A minisode is:

I'm in a nearly twenty-year relationship that has been polyamorous from the start. We are married, have a house and kids and pets; my wife has had at least one other partner for most of that time and I've had other partners more in the last half of that.

We had a lovely few years at the beginning of sex and romance, and then with the arrival of kids things between us got a lot more exhausted and practical — I'd accepted that and hoped (out loud, even) that we'd come around to restoring some of the sex, play and romance when the kids were a bit more independent. We both have partnerships where we have managed to find romance and enthusiastic sex, but our nesting relationship is still stuck in practical mode. My wife is interested in getting out for a nice meal or even a day at the spa together but said she "wouldn't know what to do" with a couple of days away together, and that she's not really interested in restoring some of our sexual and romantic connection — not now and she can't see aspiring to it or missing it, really. I know she has energy for sexual and romantic connection with her other partners and I'm feeling left out and saddened that we can't even agree to aspire to making things better.

I know comparison is the thief of joy, that all relationships are different and that we all get to want what we want, but is there some ethical way to improve our odds of restoring some of the old connection? Is it just a matter of ensuring the good working of the household and wellbeing of the children and accepting her reduced view of what our partnership is about?

Quashed in Quebec

Transcript

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Dedeker: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we are answering a question from one of our Patreon supporters. If you want the opportunity to ask a question on the show, become one of our patrons at patreon.com/multiamory. We're going to be doing this for the next few months, releasing an extra episode each week answering listener questions, and we are really excited to hear from you all about what you think. About the new format.

Jase: Quick disclaimer before we get started. We have spent a lot of time studying healthy relationship communication, but we are not mind readers yet. Our advice is based solely on the limited information that we have from the questions people write in, so please take it all with a grain of salt.

Emily: Every situation is unique, and we encourage you to use your own judgment and seek professional help if needed. Ultimately, you're the only true expert on your own life and feelings, and your decisions are your own. The question that we have here today has been edited for time and clarity, and here it is. I'm in a situation of both desire mismatch and desire to fix desire mismatch mismatch with my long term nesting partner. Help? So here is some context for the question. I'm in a nearly 20 year relationship that has been polyamorous from the start. We are married, have a house, and kids and pets.

My wife has had at least one other partner for most of that time, and I've had partners more in the last half of that. We've had a lovely few years at the beginning of sex and romance, and then with the arrival of kids, things between us got a little more exhausted and practical.

, I'd accepted that and hoped, out loud even, that we'd come around to restoring some of the sex, play, and romance when the kids were a bit more independent. We both have partnerships where we have managed to find romance and enthusiastic sex, but our nesting relationship is still stuck in the practical mode.

My wife is interested in getting out for a nice meal or even a day at the spa together, but she said she wouldn't know what to do with a couple days away together, and that she's not really interested in restoring some of our sexual and romantic connection. Not now, and she can't see aspiring to it or missing it, really.

I know she has energy for sexual and romantic connection with her other partners, and I'm feeling left out and saddened that we can't even agree to aspire to making things better. I know comparison is the thief of joy, that all relationships are different, and that we all get to want what we want. But is there some ethical way to improve our odds of restoring some of the old connection? Is it just a matter of ensuring the good working of the household and well being of the children and accepting a reduced view of what our partnership is about?

Signed, Quashed in Quebec.

Dedeker: Oh, Quashed.

Emily: That's tough.

Dedeker: Yeah, that's really tough.

Emily: Also, none of us have kids, but I think that all of us have probably been in relationships that are long term that feel like the spark, the excitement is not there maybe as much as it once was.

Dedeker: For sure, I've been in relationships where that transition out of, ooh, fun, shiny, exciting, sexy, passionate, NRE, phase into more bonded, more pragmatic, more day to day phase where that transition doesn't feel distressing. It feels fine and it feels normal. And then I've been in relationships where it feels like there's been a real loss and it can be quite distressing for sure.

Jase: Yeah, the, the mismatch is the hard part there, where there can be that situation where one person feels this is a problem to change, and the other is like, I've actually become comfortable with this. And I think that's kind of the crux of it that we can explore a little bit in this. Before we get farther into this question, we want to take a quick break to talk about how you can support this show by joining our Patreon.

Not only does it get you all of the amazing benefits there, like access to our private community on Discord, ad free episodes, early releases of episodes, monthly discussion group, things like that, but it also allows you to submit your questions to get them answered on these episodes. So, take a moment to look at some ways you can support the show.

by going to multiamory.com/join show going for free every week.

Jase: There's a lot of pieces going on here, and also a lot of history, a lot of time, right? They've been together with this person for 20 years.

They did mention in some of the background that we didn't read in the question that their youngest is around 8. I don't know how many kids there are or how long this has been, but, you know, minimum. Of, I would say, what, 10 years of this new kind of more maintenance mode, logistical, practical, how do we run a household?

How do we raise our kids type relationship? So that is a lot of and time there of doing things in a certain way. And I imagine. To a certain extent, being comfortable with that, like finding some way to feel stable enough and comfortable enough there. And I could imagine that's where some of that resistance to wanting to try to get in and change everything could come from.

It's this sense of, we've got something that's working. We have something that's, that's doing alright. Why do we need to go in and change that? Especially in this case, if there are these other relationships where you could be getting some of those other needs met. And that is, it is a hard thing to bring up if your partner isn't also feeling like, yes, this really needs to change.

We really need to improve this. So where my mind goes is to, rather than saying, okay, we're at this phase where we want to try to jump back into the relationship we had before, but instead looking at what are some steps that we can take. that we could be taking toward building up more of that connection, that over time maybe we'll open up more options for how our relationship could go.

So they mentioned here that wife is open to, going out for a nice meal or a day at the spa or something, but wouldn't know what to do. with a couple days away together. And so to me, that's honestly, that answer of wouldn't know what to do is a little bit concerning where it's like you chill.

That's the whole point of like going away is to, to relax.

Dedeker: Well, not for everybody, necessarily.

Jase: Sure, sure, perhaps not. But, but looking at like, what if there's something there besides just, let's get away together? But are there certain interests that she has and that you share that you'd like to go do? Could it start with these single day things and see how that goes and kind of establish a baseline of, hey, this is cool for us to get to have this special time together before?

I guess trying to just jump back to the way that it was before. Cause you've got a minimum of 10 years of a very different type of connection.

Dedeker: Will say that, yes, that is something that I've seen with a lot of clients, particularly after the birth of a baby or multiple babies, that whether we're talking about a scale of, a few months after the kid arrives to years after the kid arrives, that there can be this sense that we need to find each other again emotionally, before we can find each other again physically. And sometimes people are not necessarily on the same page about that. So it does sound like there needs to be some work here about that, of just finding ways to reconnect and carve out again that really nice, sweet, connective space with each other. And I don't know when is going to be the right time for this particular conversation, but where my mind goes is there might be an uncomfortable question to put out there of, was there anything that your partner liked about your original connection, your original sexual and romantic connection?

Sometimes looking back, it may be like, maybe the reason why she's not that interested is because it wasn't that great for her in the first place. Or maybe, and that's not a 100 percent that's one person's fault or the other person's fault. Often this is a co created dynamic of someone who's maybe not comfortable enough communicating what they actually like and maybe someone who just hasn't picked up on that, right, and is just thinking their partner really loves everything that's happening in that department and and we don't talk about it and we just kind of go along fueled by these assumptions, So I do think there may be some of looking to the past of, was there anything that was enjoyable there? If there was, that's cool. That could be a place to start. I do think that this would be a great conversation to have with a sex therapist in particular, even if this question asker, what went to a sex therapist solo, honestly, I think they don't even have to necessarily try to convince their partner right away.

But I do think that a sex therapist could offer some really good, um, insight into this and normalize it as well. I think this is a very, a common situation that people face.

Emily: I know throughout the course of a relationship, the paradigm of that relationship, the ideas of like, this relationship exists in this world, and then it may shift into a different kind of space and world, and when you have a kid, I'm assuming, it becomes an even different thing then. And sometimes that thing can represent.

For especially specific members of a specific gender, I have so much more work involved in keeping up the household, keeping up the kids, keeping up everything that comes with just sort of existing in our world as a married couple, and that often a woman may feel as though she has to kind of take on a lot of responsibility when it comes to caretaking and that that may make it challenging to feel as though the nesting partner in the house exists outside of that and is something that it doesn't also get lumped into those ideas about now our household and now what, that relationship represents is kind of this thing and I get to go off and do something fun.

And another relationship that exists outside of that kind of bubble and outside of that kind of space. And I don't know if there is a way to separate those two. Like, that to me is what I would be looking at. Like, how can I help take things off of this person's plate? give acts of service, for example.

Not that maybe they're, maybe they're doing that already and maybe they're doing a great job at that, but I would maybe start there and look at what are ways in which I can kind of separate myself as a sexual being and as this person's romantic partner from I'm the dad or I'm the you know, spouse that is having to exist in, in this one space as this one type of person with.

My, partner who is having to run around and be the nesting human and exist in, like, one specific way. If you can kind of, like, change that paradigm and shift that a bit, maybe I would start there. And I'm not sure if there is a way to do that, but if there I would try explore.

Jase: That is interesting. And, and I will say that if the youngest is around eight, I mean, eight is still not that independent, right? Like still takes a lot of work, I guess, is what I'm saying from both of you. And I do think Emily makes a good point of maybe you're already having these conversations and aware of it, but yeah, look into, you know, Is my partner taking on a larger share of that burden of maintaining this household?

And am I part of that burden? At least in her mind, am I part of the household that needs to get taken care of? Because maybe that's not, oh, fun, I want to go do more of that for a weekend away, or something like that. But assuming that's not the case, Or that maybe that is something that you're already working on.

I do think there's something worth pointing out here that most likely for the last however many years, the dominant thing that you've talked about and the thing that you've had in common with your wife is the kids and the household. And so something to explore would be what is our connection without that? It's like, if we did hang out, like we had a spa day or a dinner or something, could we have a dinner together where we never talk about the kids or about the household or any kind of like, logistics around sort of the business? of what we're doing together. Could you do that and still have a good conversation?

And honestly, the answer is probably going to be no at first, and that's going to take some practice and some time to build up, you know, my experience of this is on a much smaller scale of when the three of us will hang out or, you know, when I spend time with Dedeker, we'll challenge ourselves to not.

Talk about Multiamory stuff, right? To not talk about these things. And it's hard, but has been a really good practice. And I think if I extrapolate that out to a much bigger responsibility and a bigger kind of life consuming thing like having children and doing it for the last 15 years or whatever with someone, that's going to be extra challenging.

So that's just another thing I would throw out there as, again, a place to start of just, how do we build up what our connection is outside of this? To then see where that takes us, if, if there is something there.

Dedeker: And some of this work, I think that regardless of how this all plays out, there's a possibility that the sexual and romantic part of this connection will probably never it'll never return to a carbon copy of what it was at the beginning. And that's a very normal piece of being in relationship with shifting, changing human beings who go through different stages of life.

And before being able to move on to, like, what it's going to look like next, there may need to be some grieving and some mourning of the fact that it may not go back to exactly the way that you thought that it was going to. And it doesn't mean that it's never going to be good or that you're never going to get your needs met again in this particular department, but sometimes that can be an obstacle that prevents us from being able to move forward.

Be open to what could be next and to be creative about what could be next and how we might want to build something, a new connection with someone that's good for both people involved. So that's a piece here as well as there may be some work to mourn and to grieve and to let go of what it was in order to clear a pathway for what the sexual and romantic connection is going to be next.

Jase: Well, thank you so much for writing in your question, Quashed, sir Quashed we're just gonna put sir before everybody. Quashed.

Emily: Quashed.

Jase: We don't know your gender here, but Quashed in Quebec, thank you for writing in. And we would also love to hear from all of you out there.