I would say that whoever is in that next relationship has to deal with your past history, especially if they are lucky enough to be in a monogamish relationship with you. It is the price of admission, as they say. It is no different for folks who have dated alcoholics, for example. You then date someone who likes to have a beer now and then, but you are paranoid. You think "here we go again", when that really isn't the case (or isn't likely to be the case). You get through it by talking about it, and making sure there isn't a problem. In your case, it means the next person that you date will need to be more open with you. He may end up showing you his phone and saying "See, nothing but adults". Since monogamish relationships are often "don't ask, don't tell", in your case, you are probably better off with more asking and more telling.

More to the point, you did not have a monogamish relationship that included allowing your partner to assault a minor. So his particular brand of betrayal piece of shit has nothing whatsoever to do with your monogamish status. He broke the rules of your arrangement (and the rules of law and the rules of basic ethics). If your arrangement had been monogamous, it wouldn't have changed this situation, nor if your arrangement had been poly, etc.

So step one is to compartmentalize what you are feeling. The betrayal and the particular way you were betrayed and the particular brand of shit your ex is- this is all one big compartment. An entirely different and separate compartment is what sort of relationship you have- what sort of arrangement you make (monogamish or otherwise). These two compartments have nothing to do with one another.

My guess is that the work you are going to have to put into unpacking that first compartment will inform how you go about trusting people again and that will influence the sort of people you date. As for the second issue (how to arrange your relationships in the future) you can cross that road when you get there- it will likely vary with circumstance and individual and life phase, etc. You dont have to decide this now.

How to trust again- well everyone who is burned deals with that, and I'm really sorry you had to deal with this level of betrayal. Dan might be right about trusting your gut retroactively but he misses the wider point moving forward- which is that once you've been so badly betrayed, your guts get confused and it's really hard to know how to trust them or even what they are saying. That's sort of the whole point of asking how to trust again.

If I knew the answer to that, I'd be famous.

There's nothing that says a relationship has to be all monogamish all the time, either. Life or health or whatever may necessitate an otherwise open couple to close ranks for a bit.

SOEW - you don't have to be monogamish with anyone right away. Let a (potential) partner know you're open (heh) to it but perhaps give it some time to gauge how open they are in general, how they handle difficult conversations, their character, etc. before you begin talking about it. It's not a perfect solution but allow that your ability to trust has been damaged and moving forward is such a way can help to heal it.

Just because you have a sportsball injury doesn't mean you'll never play again. But it may mean you're off the field while you recover.

Do some therapy LW. Find out why you picked a man to marry who turned out to be a total creep.

Don't let a bad experience chase you away from what you want or believe in. Also, introspection time on what you are attracted to, and if you are likely to be attracted to another creeper.

Yes, PsD@5, introspection. This man must have shown signs in other ways what sort of man he is.
Why did the LW miss them. Looking into herself and her intimacy patterns alone and with a therapist will aid in reducing being duped again.

@4, @5, @6: Yeah, maybe. If this has been a pattern in her relationships - various flavors of CPOS'es, then yes, she should do a deep dive into why that keeps happening to her. What's the attraction from her end, what about her attracts these guys, and why doesn't she clue into them sooner.

But if this is the first time she's had such a deceitful (and criminally creepy!) partner, then she shouldn't victim-blame herself nor spend the energy to game out why the dice rolled so badly this time.

@7 Spot on. Something is only /your/ issue if you /keep/ doing it, attracting it, or allowing it. And even then there's a real limit to the extent of your responsibility. Just because you were in a hurricane once doesn't mean you cause hurricanes - and even if you've been in half a dozen, you still don't /cause/ them. Maybe you need to think about moving inland, or investing in a genuinely hurricane-proof house - but the hurricanes still aren't your fault. In the terms of a relationship, if it only happened once, it isn't you. If it happened half a dozen times, it may still not be you - but you may have to make a change in your behavior to ensure that it doesn't happen again. @4, @5, and @6 are way too much in a hurry to make it about the LW. Maybe "moving inland" /would/ be a good idea for her - and maybe it's completely unnecessary for her to change anything. Probably, in fact.

"Monogamish" really doesn't have anything to do with this question. The core issue is how can you trust your partner? You could be the straightest of the straight, only screwing with the lights on in strictly missionary position but if you can't trust your partner you're fucked. You could both be screwing very other person you meet on the street, but if you can't trust your partner you're fucked. Trust your instinct. Ask questions. Look at his/her attitudes toward yourself and everyone else in general. Is he/she a good, giving, kind person or is he/she a Trump? And still you might be wrong, but in my experience, assholes usually aren't that hard to spot. The charming, wool-over-the-eyes Ted Bundys of the world are thankfully few and far between. More likely would be your standard Mike Pence-model prick and they aren't that hard to identify if you look and listen carefully.

Two years since the arrest?

That's not terrible. It took me 3 years to find the desire to data again after a particularly traumatizing breakup.

I think the best way is to get out there and do the public-version of you. The you that rounds a bunch of maybeeees into yesses when it comes to going out to a show or whatever you dig, just creating ABs for yourself. When you find someone you are interested in, your trepidations will magically disappear. And maybe you won't like anyone for a while, but it's better to not go into the bunker for years and then feel like you need to "re-learn" how to date.

I was recently involved in a limited business relationship with a narcissistic bully and serial liar who did all sorts of damage to the project we worked on, and the people involved in it, due to a combination of mendacity and incompetence. It's made it hard for me to trust people... and also to trust myself. After all, didn't I "let" this happen?

The main thing to (try to) remember is that your desire to have the monogamish relationship was for good and loving reasons. Your decision not to snoop was for good and loving reasons. Your decision to attribute your feeling-something-was-off to your own insecurity or jealousy — even THAT was for good and loving reasons. You wanted him to be able to do whatever he was doing with his phone, because that was the point of being monogamish in the first place! Assuming the best of him wasn't a "mistake" you made (it was reasonable for you to assume that he wasn't being a total asshole!) — it was the opposite of a mistake! It was part of being the good and loving person you wanted to be!

So whatever you do, don't let this asshole, who violated your trust, make you feel that your good and loving qualities "failed" you. Don't let him make you a LESS good and loving person! (That's ultimately how cycles of abuse become cyclical.)

One of the worst things that an abuser does is to turn your good qualities against you, and make you feel that your good qualities are to blame for your abuse because your good qualities failed to prevent the abuse. Don't fall for that bullshit! Your good qualities are GOOD! You gave him a GIFT with those good qualities, and he DID NOT RESPECT the gift you gave!

Make sure the next person RESPECTS your good qualities! You don't need to become less giving, in any way. You just need give the gift with the clear expectation that it will be respected (and the responsibility to not be an absolute asshole when given a gift isn't a tough one for reasonable people to handle, so it's not like you're going to saddle the next person under an unfair weight of responsibility by lording the goodness of your gift-giving over them). Give the gifts you want to give in order to be the person you want to be. And expect respect for that. If you feel like you're not getting it, then take action. And as you take action, remember: it's not your giving nature that's the problem.

What happened to you is so insanely shitty, and I'm so sorry. The chances of something that shitty happening again, are, I would guess, pretty small. Go forth with confidence. :)

SOEW, as I see it there are two separate issues you're facing. First, during the course of your relationship, your then-boyfriend / then-husband got more deeply invested in online relationships, for which you had given him permission to engage in, than in your relationship. That raised issues of jealousy because you were losing part of the attention you wanted focused on you and your relationship. That is a garden variety issue faced by couples in non-monogamous relationships, and if you find non-monogamy appealing, then you have to accept that even a good partner may behave in a manner that causes you such feelings from time-to-time. You just have to promise yourself that in the future you are going to be vocal about your feelings with your partner. Then, judge for yourself how your partner responds to what you say and whether they can make the reasonable changes to their behavior to accommodate your feelings.

The second issue is that your ex-husband was willing to engage sexually with a 14 year-old, a crime for which he may now be incarcerated, but that act is not an outgrowth of a non-monogamous relationship. Non-monogamous people may fail to abide by the terms of their non-monogamous commitment - because people are human - but what you experienced, a partner willing criminally violate a societal norm, could happen in any relationship model. Looked at another way, non-monogamy didn't lead your ex-husband to having sex with a minor. He either sought out that opportunity or it presented itself and he was then willing to proceed with something that he knew to be unlawful. At a point in which he was willing to violate the law, it is unreasonable to believe that a different private sexual commitment would have made any difference to his actions.

@8, No. If you’re caught in a hurricane it can’t be you causing it. Silly.
I’m not victim blaming, she was involved by marrying a man so fundamentally flawed.
This man turned out to be a child predator.
Self reflection is good to do all the time anyway. Keeps one looking inward as well as outward.

I'm Italian: here the age of consent is exactly 14 (16 if the adult is the child's guardian or teacher) - so I can't really understand your point of view. Of course the rules of their monogamish marriage were broken (sex wasn't allowed, etc etc) but the pressure on her to call the police, the statutory rape... it all sounds so extreme to me; a bit disconnected from reality even (adolescence being an age of emotional and sexual exploration).
Ps: that said, of course it's creepy if a 35 years old man is in a "relation" with a 15 years old girl. No parents would like that... but it's not necessarily an abuse.
Just wanted to add another perspective.

I'm Italian: here the age of consent is exactly 14 (16 if the adult is the child's guardian or teacher) - so I can't really understand your point of view. Of course the rules of their monogamish marriage were broken (sex wasn't allowed, etc etc) but the pressure on her to call the police, the statutory rape... it all sounds so extreme to me; a bit disconnected from reality even (adolescence being an age of emotional and sexual exploration).
Ps: that said, of course it's creepy if a 35 years old man is in a "relation" with a 15 years old girl. No parents would like that... but it's not necessarily an abuse.
Just wanted to add another perspective.

@14 You seem of two minds here: "the pressure on her to call the police, the statutory rape... it all sounds so extreme to me; a bit disconnected from reality even"
"that said, of course it's creepy if a 35 years old man is in a "relation" with a 15 years old girl."

Here, we mostly overlook age of consent issues when they involve two underage teens, or when one is slightly over, the other just under, but even those have had some lasting legal repercussions for the individuals involved, some deserved, others not so much. You know it is wrong for a 35yo to fuck a 15yo, and you sort of acknowledge that. Are you sure you don't understand this point of view?

LW, you are telling Dan that you and your husband both agreed you liked ice cream, and so far as you knew, he started enjoying ice cream shops more than you, until it turned out he was fucking a 14 year old girl, and now you're asking Dan if you will ever be able to enjoy ice cream ever again. It's terrible that you were so disillusioned by a person you loved, and you do need to unpack that, perhaps with therapy, but without equating it to the unrelated definitions of your relationship.

I'm with Sportlandia: It's only been two years. She shouldn't think of herself as ready to move onto a new relationship yet, a new relationship that requires trust (as all relationships do), when she's had her trust so badly broken. I agree with both @4-@6 and with @7-@8. It wouldn't hurt for SOEW to ask herself if she missed any signs, with an eye to being more vigilant in future. But it is indeed possible that there were no signs, other than spending too much time on his phone -- which no one reasonable would take as a sign that someone was an active paedophile. So, alongside asking herself whether there was anything she could have done differently, she needs to forgive herself for not seeing the non-obvious, and come to terms with the fact that sometimes people get away with lying in spite of every reasonable vigilance. These people are called sociopaths and they're very, very good at deception. And yes, she might meet another one. Therapy would be very useful for her.

She should also put things into perspective: the overwhelming majority of men have no sexual interest in 14-year-olds (Italians aside, ahem). So the likelihood that her next partner, even if they are monogamish, will abuse this licence by committing statutory rape is very, very low. And agree that her shitty ex-husband would have done this whether or not their marriage was open. He'd have used the same web app, he just wouldn't have let her see him doing it.

I agree with what everyone said about monogamish, etc.

But can we talk about the snooping rules for a second? Snooping is always wrong except when it isn't is not exactly helpful. Saying, basically that something is never justified unless you do it and discover that it was justified is basically saying go ahead and snoop. Relying on your 'gut' to tell you when it's ok to snoop also seems pretty damn suboptimal.

So which is it?

Pete05 @19: I think that's what Dan's point was -- there can't be a hard and fast rule. Snooping is generally wrong, unless the snooping uncovers activities that are far more wrong than snooping, but it's only possible to know that in retrospect. So one should err on the side of not snooping, and have a damn good justification if one decides to commit this privacy violation. Perhaps one should go through a mental exercise of asking for a search warrant. Would a hypothetical judge grant a warrant based on the evidence you present? If the only evidence is gut feeling, better to confront than to snoop, and if they behave oddly when confronted, that may constitute evidence to justify snooping. Or dumping. If you really feel you can't trust your partner, you don't need proof to leave.

Something I've found useful, when it comes to trust and risk, is to decide on a level of caution I'm willing to live with. This doesn't work just for relationships, but for everything. It changes the focus from "What if something bad happens?" to "How do I want to live?"

For example, I don't want my wallet to be stolen. So I'm willing to go to the trouble of keeping it with me rather than leaving it lying on the restaurant table while I go for a pee. However, I'm not willing to go to the trouble of wearing a money belt while walking around my home town.

I don't want to be killed in a car accident. So I drive defensively, don't drive when drinking, keep my vehicle in good condition. However, I don't refuse to get into a car ever again.

I don't want to get burned in a relationship. So I try to get to know people well before committing, and see how they behave with the other people in their lives. However, I don't refuse to ever even try to meet someone in case they turn out to be a monster.

Bad things are going to happen to me. I've already accepted that, and made a conscious decision to live in a way that seems reasonable to me, and hope I can survive the inevitable bad things. I'll take some precautions, but I won't live in fear - and accept that this means I'm not totally safe.

You might find looking at it that way, as the kind of risk assessment you make every day about all kinds of non-relationship issues, to be helpful. You DO know how to do this, you do it all the time about your money, your health, your career....you can do it when it comes to love and sex, too.

@20 "If you really feel you can't trust your partner, you don't need proof to leave."

I could stand up and cheer for this.

Trust your gut is always good advice, but how would she have known her suspicions would be so accurate? I'm mistrustful of a lot of men based on my own prior bad experiences. I have to actively remind myself that most men aren't pedophiles or I would never feel safe dating anyone at all. It's not easy to figure out who the bad guys are. She gave him permission to have phone sex with grown women, not with little girls. I feel like she didn't do anything wrong and that it's not that easy to identify the pervs/sickos, because they don't exactly go around advertising that on their dating profiles. Not her fault and no way she could have known or predicted that.

Wow, she really is burying that she’s learning to trust again after being with a pedophile.

This may seem irrelevant on the surface, but it goes to the whole issue of her judgment and ability to trust. Is her husband, in fact, a pedophile? If he is, then go no further. What her husband did was wrong, but that doesn't in itself make him a pedophile. It is possible for him to do all the things he did, be convicted, sent to prison and still not be a pedophile. The general consensus here is that he is (he probably is), but she doesn't call him that. Excluding her age, was anything he did wrong from a monogamish perspective? She had greenlighted the activity, in general, but not universally.

If he isn't a pedophile, then she is beating herself up for no reason and there isn't anything wrong with her instincts. It all revolves on when did he become aware that the female he was "involved" with was underage? From the start or when he was arrested? Is this case specific or representative of his sexual predilection? Please don't tell me that (given the sexualization of children in our society) it is impossible for a 14 year old to pass herself off as someone of legal age (and don't tell me that it doesn't happen). I AM NOT BLAMING THE VICTIM AND GIRL IS A VICTIM. Her ex is an adult who is responsible for his actions, the girl is not. In any event, the girl needs counselling and/or therapy.

So it sounds like "monogamish" just meant "I have no self esteem so I let him mess around because I don't think i can get better." Get better self esteem and find a man that is devoted to you. You don't want actual polyamory, you just are worried that you aren't good enough so you'll let your partner fuck around, Get a proper honest loyal man.

@26: She was insecure because he prioritized the flirting over her.

She’s fine with the existence of it, but he was selfish and handled it poorly.

...and he turned out to be a pedo.

“Get a proper honest loyal man”

None of that is incompatible with monogamish.

Color me clueless

Is this an instance where something is theoretically appealing (I've always loved the idea of a monogamish relationship), but the reality isn't? Was she trying so hard to be GGG and monogamish that she ignored what her gut was telling her?

Skeptic @25: Yes, some 14-year-olds look older. With makeup tricks they could pass themselves off as legal age. But they would still look YOUNG. SOEW doesn't say how old she and her ex-husband were, but he was a married man. What's any man who's old, and supposedly mature, enough to be married doing fucking around with "barely legal" girls? I'd be more sympathetic if all they did was trade pics, as pics can be photoshopped etc. But they met in person. They FUCKED in person. When he met her, he should have seen that she was terribly young. Hope this serves as a warning to men.

Traffic @26: What Undead said. This wasn't about "letting her partner fuck around." She says SHE always wanted a monogamish relationship because SHE wasn't down with the idea of one person fulfilling all her needs. If the letter said that the monogamishamy was at his insistence, you might have a point. This isn't about monogamy or non, it's an age-old story of someone picking someone who turned out to be a lying asshole. As if that's never happened in a monogamous setting.

Skeptic @28: Yes, that's what she said: she pooh-poohed her feelings of being rudely ignored in favour of his sexting buddies because he wasn't technically breaking any rules, aside from "be considerate." But it's not that "the reality" of monogamishamy was a failure; THIS PARTNER was a failure. Is the lesson of "we were monogamous and he cheated", "so don't be monogamous"? Or is it, "Dump the POS and find a better partner"?

(Point of order: no one is "being GGG" by asking for what THEY want. GGG refers to doing something you don't want in order to please your partner. So she wasn't being GGG by being monogamish. Possibly, he was.)

I would also revisit her statement that "I was tempted to snoop, but I didn't, because monogamish." No, she didn't snoop because monogamish. She didn't snoop because she's an ethical person. She should feel good about that.

From the letter:

"My first thought was that the dumbass had started exchanging messages with a girl who hadn't turned 18 yet."

Sounds like she may have had some sense that his sexting partners were in the "barely legal" category.

My advice would be to date people who seem solidly attracted to people roughly their own age.

BiDanFan @20 -- well said!

EricaP @30: Perhaps that "sense" only popped into her head when the cops showed up. Because why else -would- cops show up? (Unless he'd raped a woman who was of legal age, I suppose.)
But yes, it's possible that she had glimpses of these pics and knew he fancied jailbait.
Your advice is sound though. Perhaps amend it to "people who seem solidly attracted to people who are mentally mature," ie 25+. Regardless of their own age. (I tend to fancy people about a decade younger than myself, I don't think I should be thrown out of the dating pool!)

Far be it from me to dictate what poly rules others should make, but it seems that "nothing that will get you thrown into jail" is a safe assumption and doesn't necessarily need to be a part of the monogamish agreement.

@29 I've worked with a lot of teenagers over the years. There are 15 year olds who could pass for 30 and 18 year olds who look 15 (and some who are now in their late 20s who could still wander into any public high school in suburban America unchecked) . It's also a lot harder cross-racially; AND white Americans are the strictest in the history of human civilization when it comes to age-closeness of partners. Makes me wonder if one or both of these people are non-anglos.

BiDanFan @31, I can't remember your approximate age, but if you're over 40 I think people with a decade age gap are still roughly the same age. In any case, I'm not in charge of the dating pool; just advising people who have been burned like the LW to try to assess their partner's genuine attractions via their porn interests, who they check out on the street, etc.