Let me start by expressing how elated I am that I found the MRP community here on Reddit a few days ago!

In the last 48 hours, I've read through many of the top posts looking for advice, expertise, and insight that I can apply to myself and my current situation, but I've found that I'm in a unique spot and am lacking the ability to successfully analyze where I'm going wrong and how I can work to be better. I'm posting with an open mind and hoping to leverage the collective experience here to define a better path forward, even if it is difficult or requires admitting things about myself that I've been denying.

With that rather cryptic intro out of the way, here's my situation:

  • I've been married to my wife for just over a year, dating for 4 previously.
  • I found Rollo Tomassi's "The Rational Male" after a breakup with a previous girlfriend. I was struggling severely with self-confidence, self-worth, and was cheated on repeatedly while begging for her love and attention. Painfully, wholly Beta.
  • I read The Rational Male shortly before meeting my (now) wife, and it started our relationship in an intense, passionate way. I spun other plates while courting her, I was confident, and didn't get overly-invested. We had sex 2-3 times.. daily, for at least a year.
  • Two years into our journey we both realized that relying on one person to supply all of your sexual needs was unhealthy, and physical monogamy was just a social construct. We both fucked her female friend together the following week, and we loved it.
  • A year later, and we are regular swingers with other young, married couples. Feeling incredibly secure, confident, and knowing I had the world at my fingertips. I married a 10/10 bisexual goddess who not only loved me emotionally with everything she had, but loved watching and helping me fuck other women in our bed. Not only that, but there was no motivation to hide our ethical non-monogamy from each other. We acknowledged human nature and decided to embrace it rather than delude ourselves, and it was always about the both of us doing it together. We stayed in the same room, all the time, every time. It was about being with each other as we had these new experiences, it was still about us.
  • We get married. Still swinging, still passionate as ever.
  • 4 months ago I find her journal, and I know something had been off. I looked into it and she had been having an intensely emotional affair with her boss. She'd been pulling long hours and weekends (She's working on an engineering PhD) and it turns out.. so had he. I read about her falling for him, it turning sexual, them traveling to Spain together and "escaping" their marriages for a while at research conferences. (He is married, just had a baby, his wife still has no idea and they definitely AREN'T non-monogamous.)

Anyhow, this brings back a lot of PTSD for me from the previous situation. Somewhere down the line (despite having the ability to fuck anyone she wanted, as long as we did it together, and ethically) she lost the emotional connection and went to another man for it, while concealing all the details from me for months. I think that makes it even more painful, despite our nontraditional lifestyle.

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This intense pain has converted me back into the Beta I know and hate. She still works with him and stays late, weekends and evenings. Despite me confronting him and her, I believe they will eventually grow close again, which drives me to paranoia, desperation, "checking in" on her during the late nights and lacking any ability to reinforce boundaries or my frame. She now believes I won't leave the relationship because (of course) I issued ultimatums regarding their contact, and what's worse, didn't even follow through on them. She's becoming less interested as I push harder, and turning to him. She knows I'm weak, and she's taking advantage of it.

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Where the fuck do I even start?