Is it infidelity or polyamory?

If anybody ever reads this blog -- and maybe they won't -- I'm going to get a bunch of angry replies telling me that all of my wife's extramarital sexual experiences are by definition "infidelity"; and I'll get another bunch of angry replies holding up the allegedly good name of "polyamory" by quoting some exact definition that spells it all out. But I have to put this question front and center at the beginning because real life is not so tidy as anybody's definition, and because I really don't know the answer. That's part of why I'm writing this blog in the first place.

I guess (from what I see on their websites) that the first question the polyamorists would ask is what ground rules Wife and I set up about extramarital sex when we first got married. But we didn't really set up any. We talked about it a bit before the wedding, but we didn't really come to any kind of conclusion. We both said we couldn't imagine it happening. (Ah, young love!) When we sat down with the pastor who married us, to plan the service, he outright said that he didn't believe the line about "forsaking all others" should be in the vows because he certainly hadn't forsaken all others and he didn't expect anybody else to, either. (In retrospect, this guy was a real piece of work, but I didn't see it all so clearly at the time.) I had some idealistic notions lifted from Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land that made me think objecting to extramarital sex was silly and irrational, and I probably said as much to Wife. I even read that book aloud to her over a couple of weeks -- how romantic! I do believe (though I can't remember for sure at this late date) that I said I would at least want to know if it ever happened.

Wife met Boyfriend 1 at the end of our second year of marriage, and for a variety of reasons fell into bed with him almost immediately. I was out of town that week, and when I came back she told me the first day, ... in the middle of a very long conversation about a whole bunch of other things too. It had been a really rough two years, and my immediate reaction was to be glad she'd had the confidence to tell me. But over the next year (which is about how long she was involved with Boyfriend 1) I found myself on a violent emotional roller coaster. Turns out that the ideas in Stranger are really interesting at an intellectual level ... but in actual practice, let's just say that your mileage may vary. It didn't help that Wife and I had plenty of other things to fight about during that time, too. I said the first two years were rough, but so were many of the others after that.

Next was Girlfriend 1. (Yes, you read that right.) I knew about her even before anything happened, because Wife told me she thought this girl was chasing her, and I -- having loose gravel for brains and therefore having learned nothing the first time around -- asked "Gosh, what if you let her catch you?" So again, everything was all above board, and you could even say that in a sense I encouraged the whole thing from the beginning. (I should add that Girlfriend 1 was really, really hot, which may have colored my thinking; she had, of course, less than no interest in me even though she had a monster-sized crush on Wife.)

I'm not going to go through all the rest of the history right now except to say that, after Girlfriend 1, I told Wife my emotions had been through the wringer and I didn't think I could handle any more of this. Wife seems to have taken this to mean "Please don't tell me about any more romances that you decide to have." So when she took up with Boyfriend 2, she was scrupulously careful to say nothing. When I figured it out any way and confronted her, she denied it hotly and on oath. It was probably eight years that she was with Boyfriend 2 before she finally admitted it; and by that time Boyfriend 3 was on the horizon and Boyfriend 4 shortly thereafter. She was a little easier about admitting them, because I lied and said that it didn't bother me as long as she told me what was going on. That's not really true, of course. The truth is that it bothers me, sometimes intensely; but even so it doesn't bother me nearly so much as having her hide the truth from me. But when I tried to explain the more complicated version first, the subtle distinction was lost on her. Finally I went with the other version instead. The irony is that I had to lie to her about my feelings to get her not to lie to me about her affairs.

Fast forward to the present. She still sees Boyfriend 2 every so often, supposedly to get his help in solving her computer problems. Boyfriend 3 dropped out of the picture almost immediately. Boyfriend 4 was a steady item for a couple of years, but moved out of town last spring. He dropped in to see us for Christmas, though, and left before I got home from work. Wife tells me "nothing happened". Anybody taking bets on how much time they spent trimming the tree?

The history is background -- it may be necessary for you to understand the setting. But it leaves me all confused. I look at this and try to figure out how I feel about any of it, and the fact is that I don't know! And trying to put definitions or labels on it leaves me just as confused. Is it infidelity or polyamory? Boyfriend 2 fits all the classic descriptions of infidelity: she skulked and hid, she lied through her teeth about it, there was zero openness and honesty ... the works. Girlfriend 1 was at the other end of the spectrum: we talked about it before anything "happened" and at an intellectual level I even gave my consent. (I was an idiot, but never mind that.) The others are all in some kind of nebulous middle ground: in all three cases (that's Boyfriends 1, 3, and 4) she told me only after fucking them and not before; but in all three cases she told me pretty soon after first fucking them (anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks), and in all three cases I didn't throw a fit or get mad or insist that she stop, ... and in all three cases she continued to fuck them after telling me until the relationships fell apart on their own. (Or didn't, depending on what the truth is with Boyfriend 4.)

My emotions are all confused. Looking at the same events on different days, I feel dramatically different things. And when I try to make sense of all the hubbub, I keep coming back to the same basic questions. Is the fact that I get upset a sufficient reason to say Wife is behaving badly? Or do I have to just suck it up and get over it? Should I have done anything differently? Should I have been more accepting? Or less? Is this OK, or not?

Is it infidelity or polyamory? And how can I tell the difference?