Going mono and Snapchat

Hi folks,

Thanks in advance for reading this and for your advice.

I'm in a relationship with a woman who is very sweet and loving. We both have come out of bad marriages and came together due to our mutual points of contact and history. We've been together full-time since about April of this year and practically live together. I do have a separate apartment, but I wind up spending the night at her house 4-5 nights a week.

Early on she asked if we could have an open relationship. She said she was coming out of several years of bad marriage and would like to be able to date around. While I didn't feel a need for that, I, after much consideration, agreed. I've never been in an open relationship and I could see her point of wanting some freedom.

She has established a relationship with someone she refers to as her "other boyfriend," and she typically spends one weekend a month with him.

Meantime, whenever I came close to starting up a relationship with another woman, she would freak out and we would have a very bad time for a while.

Eventually she admitted that she just can't handle an open relationship. She can't bear the thought of me being with another woman. She says "you're so much better at the open relationship tihng than me."

So I said, OK, great, that means we're going monogamous, right?

Right?

She said she would prefer if I was monogamous with her and just found a way to be OK with her going to stay with her other boyfriend once in a while. I let her know I'm not ok with that and will never be ok with that kind of arrangement, and can't imagine what kind of man would.

So then she offered to let me move in with her. I said that is something I would want, eventually, but there's no way I'm doing that while you are still involved with that other guy.

So she finally agreed to go monogamous.... in February. She asked me to please give her until then. I'm considering it. As part of us doing this, she says she "needs to know she can trust me" that I won't be with other women (as she can't handle that). So a few days ago she asked for an open-phones policy. I readily agreed. She opened her phone to me and I opened my phone to her. She let me read the message stream with her and her other boyfriend and it did seem like their relationship is strictly physical... there doesn't seem to be any feelings of romance there. She says her feelings for him are "about as emotionally involved as if I was eating a fine steak or a great piece of candy." She read all of my phone and was satisfied that I'm not actively pursuing other women.

Kinda weird, but I'm willing to move ahead.

Then the day after the open-phones policy I'm walking past her computer and I see she's received an e-mail from Snapchat confirming her setting up her account. I'm not familiar with this app so I looked it up and read about it. Interesting.

We really do get along well when we're together and she is very loving and affectionate. I am very happy that we are moving towards monogamy and I am willing to give her her time and space to get comfortable with that idea. But I need to know that she is comfortable with the concept of monogamy. Could she be using Snapchat to subvert our open-phones policy? To enable her to continue seeing other men while claiming to be monogamous?