If You Need to "Outsource ..."
You need a divorce.
Editor’s note: I don’t consider an open arrangement “outsourcing.” The reason is the people in these forums who are calling it that are those in marriages so constipated they feel they can’t bring up the topic at ALL and are all talking about doing it on the sly … and “outsourcing” is the word they use.
If you’re married but it’s been a long, dry spell, no doubt you’ve tried everything you can think of to get your spouse interested in sex again.
Whether you’re lurking on dead bedroom pieces on Medium, iliasm.org (short for “I live in a sexless marriage”) or Dead Bedrooms on reddit, you’ve no doubt noticed the number of people mulling over the idea of recruiting someone else to have sex with in order to leave the rest of their home lives undisturbed.
Maybe your spouse has already turned down marriage counseling. Maybe your spouse just turns away and won’t talk about the problem at all. Maybe the issue is just too fraught and uncomfortable, and you’re scared of what might happen if you’re any more insistent on exploring it.
Most people in this situation think of stepping outside their marriage. It’s even acquired a name that sounds a little less questionable: Outsourcing.
My Advice?
Please don’t do this.
Since men generally have the higher sex drive and mostly it’s the woman whose libido falls off the map, I’m assuming you’re a man. Sometimes the tables are turned and it’s the woman who wants sex more.
Especially if you’re a man, once you have sex with an affair partner, she will most likely fall in love. Either way, you already know you don’t want to leave your marriage and you will not leave your marriage.
Therefore, you are just using someone to prop up your marriage. You are using them for sex.
Then, as soon as you’re found out or the “arrangement” gets too uncomfortable, you’re going to dump them for the wife or husband who won’t do their part in the marriage now! And you already know this!
Do yourself, your family, and especially the affair partner a favor, and just don’t do it.
Once an affair partner falls in love, she’ll fall on her sword and completely bleed out, wishing, hoping, waiting for you to leave your wife, struggling in vain to prove her worth to you. She loves you. She wants a life with you. She will do anything for you.
And you’ll just kick her in the teeth. Worse, this will go on and on for years before you finally kick her to the curb and drag your feet back, back, back to the wife you knew you would never leave in the first place.
As the editor of this pub for over five years now, I’ve seen it happen over and over.
If you need to outsource, you need to divorce.
It’s that simple. If divorce is unthinkable, you have two choices:
SCREAM AND YELL until this lazy spouse will go to counseling
Accept that this is the way your marriage is, it will never change, and you are choosing to stay anyway. Then stay there, suck it up, and shut the fuck up.
Do not use your misery as an excuse to use and hurt another person. You will just end up back with your spouse anyway, only now you will have the shame, hurt, and betrayal of an affair to deal with, and you will have the confusion and the cognitive dissonance of years in an affair nagging at you for the rest of your life. If you fell in love, you will miss your affair partner.
If your spouse finds out, you will wind up in marriage counseling anyway, dealing with the very same things you should have dealt with before, plus a betrayal that will change the way your spouse looks at you forever, and probably also your parents, children, friends, and anyone else who finds out.
If your spouse doesn’t find out … there you are in the same old marriage anyway. You had a short taste of freedom, but what good did it do? All it did was make you decide you really didn’t want it anyway. And it’s over anyhow.
So, why do it in the first place?
Just go ahead and divorce, drag your spouse kicking and screaming into marriage counseling, or accept the status quo, put aside your wishful thoughts of sex and closeness, and get on with it.
Two to five to ten years sidetracked in an affair only to end up right back where you started, only older and in worse condition, never did anyone any good, neither the straying spouse nor the faithful one.
And certainly not the affair partner who just got used and left.
Outsourcing is infidelity rebranded. One can argue that a marriage where one partner withholds all intimacy from the other partner is another form of infidelity but at least that action on its own doesn’t justify outsourcing.
I saw this happen with a friend recently and the results were tragic. Outsourcing is a coward’s way to get what he or she wants but doesn’t have the courage to face the reality of a troubled marriage. It’s not a “win-win” for anyone involved. It’s really a “lose-lose-lose” for all three people and you can add even more collateral damage if there are children involved.
My brother told me it was going to take a lot of work to get divorced and it was also going to take a lot of work to stay married. That flipped a switch for me. It’s all just work and I need to do it either way.