My roommate and I both ended up developing strong feelings for each other but I do still love my husband. They both have agreed to try to find a female to add and expand our relationship so that we could all four be a couple together. They aren't bi so they only have sex with me and they would with the other female. Basically it would be a four-way couple emotionally but not sexually. How do we find someone?
I’m assuming that your roommate is a man, and you’re a woman. It sounds like you want to date your male roommate but stay married to your husband. Doing so does not require a fourth person to be involved, in any way. If your roommate is interested in being involved ‘emotionally but not sexually’ with your husband, he can have that close, positive metamour relationship without a fourth person.
It sounds like you three have determined that the only way you can be with your roommate is if you set up a “four-way couple” so everything is ‘even’ or ‘equal.’ But adding extra people to a situation just to mitigate other people’s emotional concerns doesn’t work, and it doesn’t make sense. You will not find someone to fill that role, for two reasons:
1.) Finding someone who is emotionally and sexually interested in all three people, and who is interested in joining an already established relationship situation, and is proximally and personally compatible with everything you have going on, is impossible. It’s just logistically, mathematically, socially, not a thing you’re going to be able to make happen.
2.) What you’re asking for is unfair and inappropriate as a relationship proposition. Essentially you want to use “a female” to balance the scales, realize a fantasy, and/or mitigate whatever fears or concerns you three have. You want to plug in the perfect thing to fill a very specific need - and that’s how we treat objects, not people. An individual person, with her own feelings, relationships, desires, needs, and interests, is not going to work like a folded up piece of cardboard wedged under a wobbly table leg to stabilize it.
You three need to figure out why you’re so committed to this “four way couple,” and do some emotional strategizing and problem-solving based on what you three can do and provide, without planning on a magical, unknown fourth person to show up and save the day. Some questions to guide the conversation:
Why wouldn’t V-shaped polyamory (where you date your husband and your roommate, and they are friendly but not dating each other) work? What problems are you trying to use another woman’s presence, sexuality, and emotional labor to solve? How can you solve those problems in another way?
How would you feel if your roommate or husband dated another woman, but she was not also dating you or the other man? How would you feel if you were approached by three people with a prescriptive offer for who you’d be having sex with and how everything would work? What would happen if it didn’t work out?
What kinds of narratives are you relying on to assume that this closed, four-way couple is the only way this could work? What kind of feelings or security are you expecting a four-way couple arrangement to provide? What led you to believe that arrangement would provide those? Could you get those from another arrangement?
Check here for more resources on people established relationships trying to ‘add’ partners.