The best part is, we can be honest about how we feel without judgement. No more hiding crushes or sexual tension. We are madly in love, and have a daughter together. I know it’s not for everyone but it works for us.
Other couples used these kinds of arrangements to facilitate long-distance relationships. One woman, who had been seeing her musician boyfriend for a few months, told me about the agreement they made when he went away on tour. She understood that he was on the road for months at a time, and in the interest of maintaining the relationship, she would let him have some leeway while on tour—up to a point. They created “tour rules” that he had to follow. “No sex, just blow jobs. That’s as far as it could go,” she said.
And she didn’t want her boyfriend maintaining contact with anyone this stuff happened with. “I don’t want to be in bed and look over and seeing him texting some girl from Cincinnati,” she explained. “And while he’s away, I have the same privileges.”
We also met a woman from Brooklyn who had just starting dating someone who made it clear that he wanted to occasionally hook up with other people. They entered into an agreement where they could have sex with others, but only under the following conditions: The person had to be at least two degrees outside their friend group (a friend of a friend), it was “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and if they were out hooking up with someone else, they had to make a good excuse that didn’t let on that they were out messing around. It was an “out of sight, out of mind” type of arrangement, and it was working.
In her case, however, having an open arrangement was not exactly ideal. When we asked why she and her partner did it, she explained that it wasn’t because she wanted more variety and sexual adventure in her own life. It was more of a protective mechanism, so that she didn’t risk her boyfriend straying from the relationship because of his interest in sleeping with other people. “I feel like he’ll probably cheat anyway,” she said, “and at least this way I’m controlling it.”
We met other people who had entered open relationships in which the two partners were not equally enthusiastic about the arrangement. A gentleman on the subreddit told us that he had agreed to an open relationship with a woman who wanted one because he didn’t want to lose her altogether. But, as he explains, that just turned out to be a long, painful way to get hurt:
I was so into her that I decided that being with her in an open relationship was better than nothing. Because I wasn’t really interested in anyone else it was mostly me being with her, and her being with a few other guys until she found someone she liked more than me. It was a weird situation. I’d call her up and be like, “Hey wanna go see a movie or grab dinner?” and she’d be like, “Oh. Awkward. I’m actually with Schmitty Yagermanjensen tonight.” Or she wouldn’t answer at all, which was even worse, because then I had to guess what she was doing . . . Being a placeholder sucks, and that’s pretty much how it was for me.
Another woman wrote that entering into an open relationship was “the worst decision I’d ever made.”
“When the going got tough, I was the one who got screwed over. Under the guise of ‘we all love each other and care about each other, primary and secondary come first,’ he slept with a third woman that I wasn’t comfortable with yet, and basically told me to f--- off. We don’t talk anymore,” she said.
Sometimes both parties are equally into creating an open arrangement—at least in theory. In practice, though, they soon discover that sleeping with other people can be a messy affair.
We met Raina, a woman who tried to strike such an agreement with her new husband. They moved to Hong Kong after getting married and agreed to allow outside sexual partners with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. They both were enthusiastic about entering an open relationship, but at a certain moment Raina found things had gone far beyond her expectations:
I thought I was being realistic. So I once had a conversation, and said I’m not gonna divorce you if there’s an indiscretion or two, but you have to be like the CIA about it. I don’t want to know about it. I don’t want to sniff it. You’ve got to be that level, so that it’s invisible.
But we had the secondary policy that if I ever wanted to know, that he had to tell the truth.
And so, we were on vacation for my birthday in Kyoto, and I asked.
He said, “I don’t think I want to tell you this on your birthday.”
And I thought, “Okay, so now I know that he’s doing something.”
And I said, “Well, why don’t you just tell me how many people?”
And then he said, “Give me a second.”
He needed to calculate it.
He came back with the following number.
And I want you to notice that at this point we’re 13 months into our marriage.
26.
26 individuals.
I was expecting one, maybe two.
I did not expect 26.
Well . . . happy birthday, Raina!