My twin sis and me have been avid readers of yours truly since forever and now Sis is in a pickle. Apart from having the same looks and sexual identity (BISEXUAL!!! (just doing my part for bi visibility!)), we have very different personalities and I really don't know what to advise her.

Sis has a boyfriend of three years and they have a sweet toddler together. In May he fell in love with another woman who is married with children. This woman's husband is oblivious to the whole affair and Sis only found out about it by accident. Sis's boyfriend claims to be absolutely in love with the other woman, whom he considers his soul mate, but Sis can't decide whether to leave or not. Or tell the other woman's husband or not. Sis says she still loves her boyfriend and can't decide what to do.

IMHO Sis's boyfriend has a serious problem with staying in a relationship and accepting normal relationship dynamics. By his own admission, he needs to feel "in love" and also thinks that one sign of true love is always having this head-over-heels-in-love feeling. (He is 45 and not 15, btw.) He also appears to stumble from one overlapping relationship to another. Some background: he left his wife of a couple months for my sister and he was once married before that marriage.

Sis's boyfriend is otherwise a really nice, charming (obviously), and fun guy, as well as a loving and devoted dad. So what should Sis do? DTMFA and maintain a cordial relationship for their kid's sake? Stick around and most likely suffer through the same shitty drama every other year or so until she finally gets dumped? Something else? It is not like Sis would have a problem getting another guy/girl, Dan, but she does seem to attract relationships full of drama and complicated people.

Need Savage Advice

My response after the jump...

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Sis's boyfriend—the father of her child—is an idiot, NSA, and any woman who looked at his track record, listened to him run his mouth on the subjects of "true love" and "soul mates," and took up with him without expecting to be dumped herself in 36 months or less was seriously and sadly deluded. Your sister either didn't think this one through, NSA, or she did think it through and concluded that she would be the exception to his love-em-and-leave-em-to-love-someone-else rule. Either explanation makes your sister look bad: she didn't think this one through before scrambling her DNA together with this guy's DNA or she was conceited enough to believe that she was different from all the other girls he'd ever dated/fucked/married and dumped, i.e. she thought there was something wrong with them when there was something wrong with him.

What should Sis do now? She can start by answering three questions:

1. How badly does she want this guy in her life?
2. How attached is she to sexual monogamy and romantic exclusivity?
3. How much time is she willing to invest in beating some sense into this nice, charming, fun idiot?

If she wants him in her life badly enough to ditch her (presumed) attachments to sexual monogamy and romantic exclusivity, NSA, then she should round up a bunch of books on polyamory, dump them in his lap, and offer him a deal: She'll be the dependable, supportive, low-key love in his life—and the co-parent of his child(ren)—and he'll still be free to pursue other women. He can enjoy the brand of infatuation that he has long misinterpreted as evidence of "true love" while at the same time enjoying a stable, loving, committed relationship with her. But this will only work if 1. this is something your sister wants (not just willing to settle for) and 2. your sister can somehow convince this idiot that he has routinely and disastrously mistaken "new relationship energy" emotional dynamics for "this is my soul mate" romcom bullshit. If the idiot can't see that—if your sister can't pound an epiphany into his head—there's no hope for salvaging a functional, stable, poly relationship out of this mess.