Dear Prudence,
I’m a gay man in a relationship with my wonderful boyfriend, “Jay”, who is bisexual. We’ve been dating three years and talked about marriage. My problem, however, is either legitimate concern or my own insecurity, and I need advice figuring out which and what to do. Mine and Jay’s dating histories could not be more different. I had one boyfriend before him, my high school sweetheart whom I broke up with aged 19. Our sex life was very “vanilla,” which suits me. I met Jay and became friends when we were 24, by which time he had over a dozen ex partners and a lot of wild experiences—think sex parties, threesomes, BDSM scene etc. He was poly, but opted to become monogamous when he started dating me as he knew from our longstanding friendship that I would only be comfy with that. I spent a long time worrying I was too boring for him but thought I had finally gotten over that fear.
Now two of his exes—a married couple for whom he was their third—have moved to our city. He stayed on great terms with them, which I didn’t mind when “great terms” involved occasional friendly Facebook messages. Now, he is excited to have the chance to regularly meet up with “Nick” and “Sarah” for coffee as friends, and introduced us. Prudie, I hate them. They still have an open marriage, and Sarah seems very flirty with Jay, though he laughs it off as her mannerisms. I know a lot about his relationship with them from how he talked when we were just friends, and I feel sick with jealousy and the fear that he is going to remember how exciting things were with these two and get bored with me. He has always seemed happy with our pretty vanilla sex life, but there are things he did with them that I know I can’t offer him and that I know he found incredibly fun. It’s all I can think about whenever I have to see these people. Would I be out of line to ask him to scale back the friendship with his exes, or am I being insecure? He doesn’t know I feel this way as I have tried hard to be nice to Nick and Sarah, though I have dodged his attempts to invite them into our home. What should I do?
— Return of the Ex(es)