Last year, my wife gave me an ultimatum: either we opened our marriage, or we would divorce. I begrudgingly agreed to open it.
She almost immediately began a friends with benefits relationship with our daughter’s piano teacher. For most of that time, I felt miserable and depressed.
Then, two months ago, I started talking to an ex girlfriend after Facebook suggested I add her as a friend. We had not spoken in 15 years. We caught up, met for coffee, and had a lovely afternoon together. Soon, we were meeting weekly to hang out and talk. Eventually, that led to kissing, and then sex.
Meanwhile, things had not been going well between my wife and her friends with benefits partner. They stopped talking, and he completely ghosted her after she kept trying to stay in contact with him. Our daughter has not been taking piano lessons for a while now. My wife became depressed over this for quite some time.
After she got better, she began treating me like she did before the whole open marriage situation. She became more affectionate, gave me more public affection, actually had conversations with me again, and started sharing what was happening in her life. I loved it. It felt like I had the love of my life back.
Last Saturday, I had a date with my ex turned friends with benefits partner. My wife knew about it and became very depressed when she saw me getting ready to leave. She kissed me and told me she loved me.
I came home around 3 a.m. and found her still awake, waiting for me. She told me she missed me while I was gone and that she had done some thinking. She said we should close our marriage again and focus on healing our relationship.
I told her I was not interested in closing it, but that I still wanted to be married to her and grow old together. She says she accepts my decision, but now she seems depressed again.
Am I the asshole?
You are focusing on the wrong question.
The question is not whether you are an asshole for refusing to close the marriage. The question is why you are still trying so hard to preserve a marriage that has repeatedly shown signs of being fundamentally incompatible.
Your wife gave you an ultimatum: open the marriage or get divorced. That was not a mutual exploration of nonmonogamy. It was a demand backed by the threat of ending the relationship. Whether she had someone specific in mind or not, she was willing to risk the relationship to pursue a life that she wanted more than the one you had together.
Then, when her outside relationship fell apart, she suddenly rediscovered her desire to focus on the marriage. That does not automatically make her manipulative, but it does make her timing impossible to ignore. From your perspective, it looks like the marriage was open when it benefited her and should become closed again once it started benefiting you.
At the same time, you are not being completely honest with yourself either.
You say you want to grow old with your wife, but you are also unwilling to give up a relationship that clearly meets emotional needs your marriage was not meeting. Whether you call it a friends with benefits arrangement, friendship, companionship, or something else, you are holding onto it for a reason.
The uncomfortable reality is that both of you seem to be clinging to the marriage while simultaneously looking elsewhere for things you are not getting from each other.
Your wife appears to want the security of the marriage while struggling with the idea of you having a meaningful connection with someone else.
You appear to want the security of the marriage while refusing to give up a connection that helped you recover from a year of feeling rejected and unwanted.
Neither position is irrational. But they are not compatible.
The biggest thing I notice is that you talk about your wife with enormous love, but very little trust. You love her deeply. That comes through in every word. What does not come through is confidence that she will not ask for this again the next time she develops feelings for someone else.
That is the wound that still has not healed.
If she had never met the piano teacher, would she still want an open marriage?
If you had never reconnected with your ex, would you still be willing to stay in the marriage exactly as it was?
Those questions matter more than who is technically right.
So no, I do not think you are the villain here. But I also do not think this is a story about who is right and who is wrong. It reads like the story of two people who love each other, have hurt each other, no longer fully trust each other, and are trying desperately to make incompatible visions of marriage fit together.
That rarely gets solved by winning the argument. It only gets solved by deciding what kind of relationship you are actually willing to live in for the next twenty years.