Every person I’ve ever met who participated in an “open relationship” became the target of profound jealousy, or became jealous themselves.
I think it sounds appealing; 🌈my partner and I love each other but our hearts are too big to only enjoy one person’s company🌈 then their partner sleeps with someone else and they get all shitty and bitter.
My experience has always been “Are you sure your partner is ok with this?” --> “Yes definitely” --> The partner becomes a shitty rage machine. I had a guy corner me at dinner with my friends and yell in public because he was so jealous. He agreed to the open relationship. He was a hypocrite. All three of us suffered because he couldn’t handle it. He should not have been in an open relationship.
That was the worst one but I think it applies to most people. It’s a pipe dream that they don’t have the emotional maturity to actualize.
I have known long term swingers (not polyamory just recreational sex) and settled threesomes, and friends who swapped but only with one couple who were friends. Also guys who just really liked their wives to fuck others, one-way swingers, sort of.
But agree with the consensus, it’s really hard to go from monogamous to anything else, like it’s possible to HAVE an open relationship but maybe not to open an existing one.
I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion. The ENM community is small and most people when approached with the idea give a polite “Oh, well if that works for you”. Most people don’t have multiple partners which implies they’d agree with you
Personally I’m tempted to agree, I think relationships are where I draw the line. There are plenty of people who have sex outside their relationships and they work just fine. Once you start dating other people is where I’ve seen issues appear
It takes a certain type of person to accomplish this successfully. I’ve seen it, but it’s admittedly rare. You’re right that this is the sadly more common outcome, but you’re wrong if you think it’s impossible.
Yeah open relationships are probably often one-sided. Cant say I’d ever tolerate it with my wife, even if I would love to go have some ‘fun’ while I’m still young and now more confident
I’ve had a couple female friends who were at one time in “open” relationships. In order to stay with and make their male partner happy, they had to agree to an open relationship. When they did, the inevitable happened. Another man found them attractive and was willing to have an unshared relationship with them. Their current male partners got jealous, and quickly became their former partners. The women went on to have better exclusive relationships. Their former partners complained that they were taken advantage of even though the women never wanted the open relationships in the first place. Even the gay couple - that were open from the very early stages of their relationship - only lasted 5-6 years before finding someone else each wanted to be with more. One of them is still with his ‘new’ guy. Lost track of his original partner. My takes: 1) unless you know when you are starting a relationship that you want it to be open and put that out there front and center so that the person getting into a relationship with you knows and agrees in advance that it is open, don’t try to negotiate it after the fact. 2) isn’t an open from the get go relationship just dating and not being exclusive? 3) men think that open relationships are their “fuck around for free” passes and can’t believe that their female partners would ever want another man.
Your last sentence is the way I have seen this play out most of the time. Man is restless, wants variety. Says “let’s try open” Cannot find a date but wife has multiple choices of dates. Husband gets mad because wife is living the life he wanted and even if it makes her more into her husband, he doesn’t see that benefit, it’s not what he was after.
Yep, I caused jealousy in a dude because his gf gave me her phone number at a party. They were in an open relationship and I saw them both kissing other people all night. I was not interested but she showed interest in me so I played nice and took the number down. Her bf saw and gave me shit as soon as we met outside the house party.
I have another somewhat story about a girl that told me it’s totally ok with her bf if we spent the night, that they were in an open relationshio, but the more I scratched the surface, the more I got from her, to the point she told me “yeah, he doesn’t like it, at all, but he loves me… but really hates it”.
Open Relationships/Polyamory can work. I know, I’ve done then.
They take effort, and communication, and boundaries, and respect… and most importantly of all, emotional maturity…Its something you generally have to have mutually in mind from the very beginning of the relationship.
Most of the time when they crash and burn in catastrophe, is when a monogamous relationship tries to go Open/Poly… because, at least in my experience, Mono trying to go Open/Poly is almost always because one partner pushes for it, because that one partner has found someone they’re gonna fuck/try desperately to fuck regardless, but they at least want to try and engineer permission for it (either before or after the fact). and that shits always doomed to failure.
Not to say a Mono can’t successfully convert to Open/Poly, or that there arent Open/Poly that fail even if its Open/poly from the start… Theres always gonna be exceptions and outliers.
But the biggest factor in the success/failure of any relationship, whether it be Mono, Poly, or Open… is mutual respect, open communication, healthy and respected boundaries, and effort.
Worked well for me. My sex drive is much, much higher than my wife’s, and our relationship has been open the entire time, over 10 years. We’ve never had a problem. Not only does she not get jealous, she actively wants to hear about it and if anything gets a bit annoyed when I haven’t had any side partners for a while.
Maybe you’re right for most people, but successful open relationships definitely exist.
