This is from Dear Prudie today:
Q. Paternity: My wife and I have a female-led relationship. Before we got married, I agreed that she could "take other lovers," while I would remain faithful to her alone. She said that she might not ever see anyone else, but she liked that I knew she could. Well, now she's pregnant, and I'm wondering the obvious. We do have intercourse, but not often. She was away on business near the time she would have conceived. I don't know whether she's ever had another lover. I could have asked that before, but now I'm afraid of how it would come across. Should I ask, or just wait to see if the baby looks like me?
A: Thank you for informing me of the phrase "female-led relationship." From reading the definition, I see that it doesn't necessarily mean that the wife take lovers while the husband is home making soup. It just means she is in charge. (Hear that, Darling, it's not me being intolerably bossy, it's a lifestyle!) In an earlier day, writer John Mortimer delightfully appropriated the term, She Who Must Be Obeyed, to describe this sort of relationship in Rumpole of the Bailey. But just because you agreed your wife would set the terms of both her behavior and yours doesn't mean you are not now entitled to rethink things. If you say you want to talk about the pregnancy and the child's possible paternity and she orders you into the dungeon, then you two are suffering from a failure to communicate. One of the basics of embarking on parenthood is knowing how the event came to be. If you're afraid to ask, then you need to rethink what it means to raise a child together not as equal partners. I assume you don't want your offspring to think of dad as a timid, quivering wreck. If you don't have the guts to discuss this up with your wife, then maybe you can pass her a note saying you'd like the engage the services of a marriage counselor so that you have a safe place to talk to her.
I'm sorry, what the what the WHAT??
I'm gonna go with 'not my circus, not my monkeys.'