My Open Relationship Experiment Goes Too Far

So yeah, I'm in this open relationship thing since grad school started to fail me. You know how it goes, the funding ran out, my advisor went MIA after publishing a couple of papers with me and taking credit for them all. I felt like I had no choice but to drop out, go back home to live with my parents, which wasn't going well either because everyone acts like you've failed as soon as your PhD aspirations take a hit. But I have this girlfriend, let's call her Maya, we're both in our mid-twenties and trying to figure shit out. She wanted open because she was starting to feel trapped with just me, so I thought sure, why not? It’s all about consent and boundaries, right? Plus it sounded really cool at first. Thing is, when you have full-on, completely consensual non-monogamy going on, suddenly everyone's an option. It turns into this weird game of seeing how far we can push each other and still be okay with it. Last weekend was wild, I ended up sleeping with a girl who Maya introduced us to as her casual hook-up friend, but she didn’t know about my part in that until after the fact. I’m not going to sugarcoat this: It involved lots of skin-to-skin contact, mouths exploring every crevice, and fingers pushing into tight places. We got pretty intimate, all explicit body parts, no euphemisms here. I described it with precision because there was a mutual understanding that honesty is key in an open relationship. The fallout? Well, Maya’s upset about the surprise of it all, but also about me not telling her directly what I wanted and why before acting on my desires. We’re still talking through it all, trying to figure out new boundaries without throwing away everything we built together. So yeah, experiment in non-monogamy gone slightly sideways for now. But hey, at least there’s plenty of room for growth and learning from our mistakes, right? Now if only I could figure out what comes next career-wise.