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Let's translate this for a second. 1) He did not tell her he was cheating. He was lying and fucking someone else and somehow she found out. 2) struggling with monogamy could mean that he was just sexually frustrated before, or it could mean that he has cheated before. 3) His response to being caught cheating wasn't to reassure his wife but to threaten to divorce her so he could be with his lover.
As we go on through the letter, we see other things. He works a lot and has a very busy schedule. With what little time he has left, he does chores with his wife and then spends days with his girlfriend. Dan addressed this aspect pretty well so let's skip it.
Then, his wife is lonely, sad, grieving for her marriage. This is a natural part of discovering that your spouse is a lying cheating asshole. Instead of helping her through this, he continues to spend time with his lover. He tells her to get a hobby, go visit her mom, or take her own lover.
These people are not poly. This is a wife who is going through a heartbreak and trying to decide what to do about being in an unhappy marriage who discovered the double insult that A) her husband is lying and cheating and B) he also doesn't prioritize their marriage over the affair. It's incredibly cruel.
The wife might be OK with an open marriage in the future and their marriage could recover now and you're all right that we have no idea about the details that are keeping them together, but the guy sounds like an inconsiderate fucking asshole lying scumbag to me. When he got caught cheating, he should've told his girlfriend (who knew he was married) that he needed to spend some time rebuilding his trust with his wife, prioritizing her emotions and helping her through the heartbreak while they discussed possibly opening up. Instead, he said accept my girlfriend or I'm divorcing you.
If this is poly, then poly isn't any different than every fucking backwards partriarchical culture in which a man takes a wife and then when he gets bored, he takes second who he has fun with while the first wife does all the chores?
Don't all LWs?
Lava @92: Where did I say that I accept this man's behaviour? Saying it's fairly common isn't saying it's acceptable. I took so long to join the comments because I agree 100% with Dan. My comments regarding Bianca sticking around were to agree with EricaP @25 that she has every right to take her time in making a decision, as many commenters were stating unequivocally that the should DTMFA immediately. This is a difficult situation, it's a new situation, and if she needs some time to make a decision then she shouldn't be berated for taking it.
Someone asked if PTF, being a guilty party, had the right to make an ultimatum. I think that anyone has the right to make an ultimatum, but that the preferred outcome for the recipients of ultimatums would usually be the "or else" option. "Accept my girlfriend or let's divorce." "Okay, you'll be hearing from my lawyer."
"Accept my girlfriend or let's divorce." -- that's not how it went in my case. It was more like this:
"I love you and I want to grow old with you, but I find I can't do monogamy anymore. Let me know what you need to be able to stay."
In that situation, it turned out I had things to ask for, things I'd been craving and not getting. We worked it out.
I'd advise Bianca to take her time grieving for the monogamous marriage that ended, and then think about what she wants her life to look like and whether she can see any upside to non-monogamy moving forward.
A moot point considering he doesn’t want to spend any time with his wife to begin with. He’d have to see her to have sex with her.
I figure a guy who is trying to make himself look good mentions lack of sex. He says he's poly, loves more than one, not nonmonogamous, fucks more than one. He's doing wifey a favor outsourcing it. Dude was sidepiecing Val before he got found out, he probably is spending roughly the same amount of time with his wife as he was before. He says the quality of the time is crappier cause chores, but he's always been busy/cheating so thats not new. My wife doesn't fuck me that's why I'm fucking around is the standard complaint, but he doesn't include it. It would be an odd omission.
What he's trying to do is two things, not one. Come out as poly, and also recover the marriage after an affair. That's a lot. He doesn't mention marriage counseling, but w a sex positive therapist it's surely something that would cross my mind.
If you had not had sexual things you needed that he could not provide, but non sexual requests he was not able to comply with, do you think you would have stayed?
I'm here to say that staying together through a difficult period can lead to renewed happiness in the marriage.
I don't think I fully understand your second question -- but my answer is that I want time with Mr. P, and leaving him wouldn't have gotten me more time with him, so, no, leaving him wasn't something I considered.
As for your post @117, I think you misunderstand my situation. What I wanted was as much of Mr. P's time as I could have, and his exclusive romantic attention. Once he was seeing other people, I definitely got less time than I had had before, and once he started dating other people seriously, I lost my belief that I was his only love. I grieved those losses and I feel that Bianca is going through a similar period of grieving.
As for whether she has any unmet needs which non-monogamy can help address, I don't think the letter gives us enough information to answer that. And I don't think it's reasonable to expect her to have the answers while she's still grieving. He needs to give her time to be sad. In another six months or a year, they can start figuring out what a good path forward for both of them looks like.
Not really getting a great feeling on either from the LW.
I would mention that, if he didn't choose the signoff, he didn't call himself poly. 'Open' generally involves fewer rules, in my knowledge of the nonmonogosphere. However, the fact that he is having a deep emotional affair is pretty damn polyamorous, it's true. I bring this up just because we have zero idea of what they've negotiated past the word 'open'. Maybe nothing. Rules are really good, especially at the beginning when one or more parties are feeling uncertain and low-self-esteemy. They give you something to fall back on: at least he isn't doing Y with her, at least our bed is OUR bed, at least she never gets to meet our dog, at least they're using condoms. Also, the partner honoring those rules shows they CAN honor rules: given you've thrown the biggest damn rule in conventional marriage out the window, that is very important. Particularly here, where the guy cheated and got found out. They need rules, rules she proposes ideally, and he needs to honor those rules like they're his only hope of heaven. That's giving him the massive benefit of the doubt that he actually does give a shit and want this to succeed in the sense of 'be a happy and fulfilling marriage' not just 'no one stops me doing what I want'.
On the general question of Poly Under Duress:
My husband and I went PUD and are very happy. I say Duress because I had fallen in love with someone else, and I gave an ultimatum, and also because our marriage had a big problem. This last particularly is considered bad bad form by poly people. "Relationship broken, add more people" is the common sneer.
However, the problem was near-total sexlessness -- DH now acknowledges being on the asexual spectrum -- and while I was in love with a friend of mine, I wasn't fucking him. OH MAN DID I WANT TO FUCK HIM. I was sex-starved, and he was imaginative and kinky (yes, we'd talked about it enough to know our compatibilities, which I'm sure someone somewhere considers cheating.) I didn't even kiss my now-boyfriend until my husband authorized the 'experiment'. I gave the ultimatum after every other damn thing I'd tried hadn't gotten my actual husband to fuck me more than once or twice a year (or more than the one way) and he still didn't think the lack of sex was a very big deal (which it wasn't! To him! Because he's graysexual!).
So I'm saying...PUD can work. It's been years now and we're very happy. Despite his lack of interest in fucking me, at first DH was NOT COOL with someone else doing it, and felt horrible, but now it's a completely normal thing that bothers him far less than, like, my forgetting to run the dishwasher. My point? PUD can work, but even someone who was on the Duressing side of that thinks this letter-writer is selfish, willfully blind to his wife's needs, and unlikely to succeed longterm. He sounds like Newt Fucking Gingrich, minus the wife having cancer. I don't rule out his making this work: she did choose to stay and we don't know why, so maybe giving her a giant apology(or more than one), her pick of rules, the lion's share of his time, attention and appreciation for her forbearance, support around the house and in getting all the sex-pos therapy she can eat, and frankly whatever she likes in bed over and over for quite some time...oh, and never lying/cheating/breaking agreements again...could keep this marriage together and make it better than ever. But I doubt he's self-aware or generous or self-denying enough to pull all that off, even if it would work.