Open relationships question

[Guest]

It's not for everyone, but if you and your partner are honest and open with each other, you can make it work.  My husband and I have been together for many years, but we both play with the other's knowledge.  We love each other.  We don't love the other guys we have sex with.

[hornybrownbottom]

On 6/6/2019 at 6:55 PM, DannyBoyCMH said:

It's not for everyone, but if you and your partner are honest and open with each other, you can make it work.  My husband and I have been together for many years, but we both play with the other's knowledge.  We love each other.  We don't love the other guys we have sex with.

Its a dangerous road and only a very strong relationship can survive it. 

[blackrobe]

5 hours ago, hornybrownbottom said:

Its a dangerous road and only a very strong relationship can survive it. 

While I understand the sentiment above, that open relationships are hard and take work from everyone in them, the implication that they are somehow dangerous, or of themselves an extinction level event for a relationship is alarmist and not born out by any of the data I've seen, or the open relationships I've known.

A couple of observations I think might be helpful. According to my therapist friends in Seattle, about 50% of gay relationships are open. So about half of gay couples are making it work where I live. One study I found in Germany had a base of 1000 gay men and of them 41% were currently in an open relationship or had been in the past, so we are in the same ball park.

Next, that society has traditionally used similar rhetoric referring to consensually non-monogamous relationships, that they are dangerous, unsatisfying, and less than ideal, but the reality is far from the stigma applied by society. From a recent study "Reasons for sex and relational outcomes in consensually nonmonogamous and monogamous relationships: A self-determination theory approach" by Jessica Wood, Serge Desmarais, Tyler Burleigh, Robin Milhausen (First Published March 23, 2018, in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships):

“We found people in consensual, non-monogamous relationships experience the same levels of relationship satisfaction, psychological well-being and sexual satisfaction as those in monogamous relationships,” said Jessica Wood, a PhD student in applied social psychology and lead author of the study. “This debunks societal views of monogamy as being the ideal relationship structure.”

Finally, it's easy to blame the open relationship when a relationship ends, certainly much easier than acknowledging all the other underlying reasons that it might have ended.  Open relationships, like many other things in our lives, create a crucible that lets us see what's important, what we want, and what we don't want. Once that happens, hard decisions are the next step.