Managing RL and SL relationships

376 and counting ....

Personally, I'm grateful for anything that distracts the ball-and-chain from trying to talk to me about "feelings". I wish she'd do some housework once in a while though - but I guess you can't have everything.

Wait!

I'm Ricardo!!

But that means we.....I mean, you and I....we.....

I think I'm going to be sick.

/me goes to have a lie down in a darkened room.

the absolutely MOST important thing ... is honesty and openess, I dont fool myself into believing that its easy ..... but there are a LOT of people and i mean a LOT of people on SL that ARE having affairs .... mostly even those "close friend" relationships that i hear banded about .... they are "emmotinal affairs".

In reality ... if you are spending a LOT of time on SL ... rather than taking your RL partner to dinner .... then you are already having something you shouldnt.

I know quite a few people who have alts ... and each of the alts are dating as well as being married IRL ... and believe it or not .. many are woman. I also know of an instance when I went to a wedding and IRL the womans husband sat and watched his wifes AV get married in world.
It really depends if your marriage is already wrecked or if it needs a spark or just you would rather have that little bit of total escapism and wether the RL partner han distnguish between RL and SL if you are both inb world i guess its differnet ... its all very much a "per case" bases ...each has there reasons ... conditions ...rules. Ive seen marriages go down the toilet because of far less and some that are stronger through far more.

I cant say what works for people as I dodnt know ... all I can say is if you DO walk into this kind of thing .... everyone should do it with thoer eyes open.

just my 2 cents

Marty

The other good advice I was given early on: "If you have to hide it, you probably shouldn't be doing it"

I have heard of these curious specimens. I tried to include these in my 'indifferent' category.


Though being new to a serious relationship relatively late in life, I've learned two words that go hand in hand, tolerance and communication .. if you can't tolerate something, communicate the fact; if you can't communicate something, then tolerate it .. if you can't adhere to this, then I firmly believe the relationship is lost.

Many excellent views and opinions here with at least two posters implying anyone not complying with their personal opinions are either wrong or mentally insecure. Security is relative. There are many levels and interpretations of security. Yours is not neccessarily the equal of the next persons. Judgement comes too easily, one of the first personal lessons I learned coming to SecondLife.

And another thankyou to those being so open with what must hurt them.


added: someone asked for something light hearted;
Isn't it amazing how efficient the forum can make hot coffee go cold?

I love Canada, I love your wife, and I love how you view (and have) it all

I'm polyamorous, a bad word to some, but I am completely honest about it, upfront about my expectation, and encourage my loves to be the same. if we disagree about something, we discuss it first, hash out what each of us wants and is willing to give (or give up), before any commitments are made. I personally can't see devaluing the love I have for one person by loving another as well. and that goes both ways... regardless if I choose, or agree, to limit some aspect. any potential love of mine knows this first and foremost, if we can't find agreement suitable to both our needs, we just remain close friends... sometimes expectations aren't compatible.

@Danielle
because of the above, I can understand and agree with some of what you've said, and have great respect for that honesty, and I'll only ask one question for you to consider.... would your RL love, if they knew about your SL love feel the same as you? would your limits be enough for their agreement? and can you be sure that your interest in not making a point of telling them are unselfish? if you can answer yes to these with no doubts, I envy you, if you can't, it's possible you're looking at a very rough and hurtful time ahead if and when it's discovered.

My personal thoughts are as follows, and again, they're mine and not many others may agree and that's cool.

Honesty is the cornerstone of every relationship. I feel that both the RL and SL partner should be aware and accepting of the other. It makes sense that one discuss this with the RL partner first and obviously if the relationship cannot handle one having an SL partner, it should proceed no further. But I DO know of several very happy RL relationships where one or both have an SL partner (the SL partner isn't so much about a filling a void but RP, mutual enjoyment etc.). Broaching the subject with the SL partner can be a little tricky and is time and scenario based.

RL must always come first. If arrangements with the SL partner begin to overshadow RL activities, then it's time to reevaluate and perhaps step back.

There is an inherent danger of thinking one is falling in love with the SL partner, of course. I don't doubt that some people find real love in SL, meet, marry and so forth, but mostly -- I don't believe it's really beyond anything but infatuation. I feel that the happier a person is with their RL and their RL partner, the less likely they'll fall into the "Oh no, I'm in love with my SL partner" -- so that bears some consideration.

Using SL to escape a life or relationship in RL and pursuing an SL partnership is not adviseable. That is the stuff of more disharmony.

Those are my thoughts. Maybe they help?

To me, it all boils down to this -

If your SL relationship would emotionally hurt your RL partner, it is WRONG!

THAT is all that matters, in my opinion.

Love is not IMO simply a feeling, it is an action, a verb. My heart is big enough to love many, and all differently (family, friends, pets, and even strangers - ex. I love my community) but the question was more about how someone *manages* 2 or more partners.

Do you feel you give enough TIME to your loved one(s)? Do you DO enough for them,(doing implies taking the time to)? How do you manage your time? Unless you do not work outside (or inside lol), how do you justify giving what little time most of us have to share with our children, job, spouse, friends to another partner? Why get married at all? There's no need for that. I'm not married and the idea of 'falling' for someone online hasn't crossed my mind. We are all different and SL represents different things to each of us. To actually make a commitment to someone by marrying them, and then say "we have an open marriage" WTH?
Why did you get married? This is what I'm not getting. I am not Religious or Pro/Against marriage. If you both decide to have an open marriage, fine. I just think it defeats the purpose. I don't think anyone will argue with the 'all parties involved are aware and agree to the terms' part. If this applies to you, hats off, and I hope you are happy - why not. I just think the majority of people who have SL relationships, are not telling their spouses, and those who seek to be partnered in SL don't say they are married.

/me winks : hey, big boy!

I like the idea of discussing this in terms of managing and not right/wrong.

This is an issue that I have thought about almost from day one. I came into SL without any idea of the sex and relationships that could happen here. Very quickly I started whoring around.

I'm partnered and have been for years. I love my RL partner. We're intimate, we have sex, we're healthy. So pretty quickly I started to feel some guilt. I opened the discussion by telling him, "you know my avatar is quite a slut." He looked at pixel sex as no different from porn, (i.e. not a big deal). His only request was that any SL relationship not cross into RL.

OK. So far so good. I get to be a guilt-free slut. (And our RL sex life got a little spicier.)

Then, pixel sex led to a full on pixel relationship. I fell in love. It was a pretty awesome feeling. That intoxicating first blush of love. I felt like I was 18 again. I went the whole nine yards with the guy. Building a home and a life together. Pretty enjoyable stuff. The yearning that I felt for this guy when offline was magnificent.

I think both my RL partner and I were surprised to see that what started as "pixel sex" could deepen and become so emotionally real to me. He stuck with me, and I was honest with him about what was going on. I didn't overdo it: there's a line, I think, between being open with someone and shoving potentially hurtful information at them. In fact, if I have a regret about that phase of things it's that I told him a little too much in my giddiness and I feel sort of foolish now.

In my experience, people who are serious about (sexual) relationships in SL are missing something in their RL sex lives. Maybe they are single and unhappy, married and estranged, or partnered and not totally fulfilled. But I think we're all looking for what we're not getting in RL. As happy as I was in my RL relationship, there was something beyond just the curiosity and the thrills that propelled me into SL to explore new relationships.

What I realized fairly soon with the SL boyfriend is that I had basically recreated my RL relationship. I found a man of similar temperament and I basically re-created the wonderful feelings that I had experienced falling in love (many years ago) with my RL partner. So the "something" that I was looking for propelled me to seek out other relationships in SL.

Eventually I found what I was missing, the object of my unconscious quest. Sometimes I think that SL can be the greatest (and cheapest) therapy ever invented. I explored a kink that I have in a deeper way than I ever had before. Lo and behold, I found in a new SL partner the fantasy figure that I had been craving and needing. A lot of what I found was, I know, a result of my own projections, but I love the SL friend who helped bring out this strong but hidden part of my personality.

Because I had been open with my RL partner about my SL adventures I was able to share with him what I discovered about myself there. Now we've incorporated this fantasy into our sex life and it has never been better. So in this case the RL relationship has been strengthened through the SL ones. Lucky for me I have an incredible, patient, and loving RL partner.

My concerns lately have been more about the friends I made in SL along the way. Once I got things figured out I lost interest in some of the sexual friends I made in SL and basically abandoned them. And they're real people. In some ways SL can be a harsher world, you can almost too easily walk away from a highly intimate, deep relationship here because there are so few of the repercussions we're accustomed to in RL. Something to keep in mind.

Bottom line: we're dealing with real people and real feelings in RL and SL and each one of them deserves our best.

Well, this is where the problem comes in, Everyone in this relationship is being Honest, and above board EXCEPT YOU. You are even being Untruthful to yourself. IF you honestly believe that what you are doing is The right and proper thing to do, WHY NOT tell your RL partner all about it? If you are doing nothing wrong then there should be no hesitancy to do so. If you would NOT be PROUD to tell him what you have been doing, then you shouldn't be doing it, and you KNOW it. It's not a matter that it is not Physical "YET' (as you achknowledge that you Might meet in Future) The fact is you are sharing an emotional bond with someone Outside your current RL partnership, and you are Hiding it.

Rationalize it any way you like, say it isn't real, the Fact you are Hiding it PROVES you Know you are doing Wrong. If you weren't, if you were confident that everything would be Ok, then you would share it with your RL partner without Fear.

I'm sorry, the only person you are fooling right now is yourself.

Angel.

While I respect your (the collective, general you, not the specific one you) rights to your own opinions, and morals, I ask again that you not judge me. I offered my situation here as an aswer to the question. It's not up for public vote. This is my life, and in the end, it's only between me and what I percieve God and Judgement to be as to what I did wrong, and what I did right. I am sure there are aspects of all your lives that I would not agree with.

Even though you don't agree with my lifestyle, please return the courtesy of respecting my right to my opinions and morals. Thank you

Edited to remove some funky not working html code, and then to put some words back in that disappeared...

The answer is to only have affairs with foreigners whose laws are irrelevent.

I believe there is only a problem if your rl husband finds out. What he doesn't know can't possibly hurt him.

If my RL partner leaves me any desire to seek a relationship in SL then I need a new RL partner.

Yes, well, there's a person unconsidered in this ethical equation, isn't there?

Maybe you're just ugly though; had you considered that?

Never had any complaints.

Hypothetically I mean; if you had a RL partner that wasn't givin' you sufficient lovin'

We've had this discussion before. The fact that she's hiding it only proves that she knows her partner will think it is wrong. That doesn't mean it actually is wrong.

LOL ok, that went over my head. Then I guess I would have to lower my standards.

And if/When he DOES, it will Hurt him DEEPLY, and YOU as well.
Have you REALLY considered what you stand to lose should your dishonesty has been discovered?

I'm sure that is a very comforting distinction after such a thing causes a Marriage to disintergrate. "I wasn't wrong, he just THOUGHT i was wrong" Seems to me, the divorce would still be as bitter.

Angel.

She just needs to make sure not to be caught. And yes, I imagine it would be comforting to know that even though the marraige had broken down atleast it was your partner's anal retentiveness that caused it and not any wrong doing on your part. I can see that being extremely comforting actually.

Nevertheless, your reasoning that she must know it's wrong because she's hiding it is still flawed. I seem to recall last time this thread came up (which it does often) I pointed out, as an example, that lying by telling your partner that they don't look fat is the right thing to do. Lying is not, in itself, inherently wrong.