Dear Daddy: what are your thoughts on monogamy?

Daddy Responds:
Monogamy, Polyamory, open or closed relationships, all have one trait in common (ideally) and that is mutual decision. Not capitulation, not giving what the other wants, but a shared feeling for shared (or at least understood) reasons.
Everything has a ‘spectrum’ it falls on with extremes and middle grounds. The concept of monogamy however has a LOT of ‘baggage’ tied to it because of religion, culture, and personal history and is often viewed as having a singular meaning: one and one equals one. Two people, one relationship and nothing (and no one) else involved encompassing both romantic and sexual relationships outside that core pairing.
I was very much one of those people who saw the only valid relationship as purely monogamous in both senses. No one but the two of us. I was also one of those people who was stuck in the ‘knight in shiny armor’ kind of fantasy when it came to my partners and felt like that meant everything that went wrong was my fault. When things ended I blamed myself, i wasn’t good enough as a person, wasn’t good enough in bed, wasn’t ...enough and that wasn’t the truth at all.
I hated the idea of even a three-way sexual encounter with no lasting involvement. It felt like a judgement about me instead of the idea just sounding like fun or having ‘ulterior’ motives from my partner. The idea of ‘sharing’ my relationship with a third (or more)? That wasn’t ever anything I had considered because it was so alien to me that it simply never crossed my mind.
All this said, I have over the last few years evolved at an alarming (and natural) rate and my understanding of things has changed accordingly. “growing up” can suck but in this case it opened me dramatically. In the past I’d seen open monogamous relationships fail, even with rules like ‘no repeats’ so I was immensely skeptical they could work at all. It wasn’t until a talk with my boy that my mind changed. He’s good at that. Irritatingly at times.  Here’s my narrative of the conversation: https://dirtydaddythings.tumblr.com/post/131413448487/i-apologize-in-advance-this-is-another-very-long
As when we first talked about a ‘third’ in bed once in a while, his reasoning was something I not only understood but appreciated. He loves watching me ‘work’, so to speak, with another person and the idea appealed to him deeply to have the chance to watch me do for someone else what I did for him. His only ‘ulterior’ motive is that cuddling is something he loves and being cuddled from both sides was something he really wanted on a regular basis. I could understand that and even developed my own ‘dream’ of having a happy boy in each arm as I drifted off to sleep.

Did this mean there was a weakness in our relationship? That he was somehow unhappy or unsatisfied? Not at all. It did have everything to do with wanting to give someone else the chance to experience what we had and to share it equally and fully. So the idea evolved of having a ‘little brother’ and grew to be one of great value to me on many levels and for many reasons, of which (to my surprise) sexually was the least important because the fantasy wasn’t sexual.
I struggled for a long time with my feelings about monogamy and my suddenly hurt self esteem when it came to this sort of thing. After a little while I discovered that what had happened was, when taken out of the context of sex, exactly what happens when a couple decides they want to have children. The relationship was stable, the ‘life’ together was stable AND there was a sense of their being a special place shaped like another person. They weren’t ‘missing’, it was simply prepared and waiting for him to arrive.
The change in the relationship dynamic wasn’t subtractive but multiplicative. This person would have the benefit of not only me, but also of me 2.0 (my boy) and each of us would have two people to share with. Would it divide the time able to concentrate on each other? Not really because we developed a model that wiped the board, leveled the playing field and balanced every potential conflict.
From ‘seniority’ to ‘#1 boy’ all of that went away. No favorites, no preference because of experience and other than being ‘new’ to all of it, nothing different about their position from his in what already exists. A ‘binary’ equation became a ‘trinary’ one and the strength of two became the strength of three which in turn caused that stability to multiply instead of even adding. Each of us would get more out of it instead of less. The result.. I discovered I had a capacity for love that dwarfed my expectations of myself.
Boys are troublesome things. Their presence can change a “Daddy” as much as the other way is true but when the relationship is built upon change, growth and evolution as a person who is ‘becoming’ their real self, that change can be for the best for all involved. I knew he was special from the moment we began talking but I had no idea just how important to my growth he’d become.
So my short short answer about monogamy? It’s a wonderful thing but it is absolutely not the only valid kind of relationship. Each has it’s benefits and fits people individually.
Many of the boys who could have been that little brother weren’t ready for all it meant because what they needed was a one on one with their Daddy and that’s understandable. We still hold out that someday that special little star will join our world, but nothing in us is diminished by it staying monogamous. We’ve played with a special friend on occasion in the past, but just the one because being with us requires an emotional connection first.
Hopefully this answers, and clarifies, my stance on relationship dynamics. At the end of the day THIS is all that matters.

and should that become this:

Then my world would be the bigger for it.