So Why Are You Guys an Open Couple ?

A few weeks ago, we happened to change our Facebook relationship status from “It's complicated” (a wink to an xkcd cartoon that many people didn't really know about) to “in an Open Relationship”. While this was more of a coming out for my partner, I was already out of the closet. I have been confronted for several months already to a wide variety of reactions when talking about “being in an open couple”, most of the time rather emotional or centred on the “traditional couple” paradigm. I'd like to take an opportunity to clarify what an open couple is , or rather, what OUR open couple is, since there are several definitions.

The first reaction we get is “Oh, you guys are allowed to cheat on each other”. Now, it introduces the whole topic very interestingly, and it is usually the point where I choke on my drink. In my head it always goes like a big “WOT ?” and then I have to breathe in, because I realize that this is not provocation, it is simply being honestly misled and couple-centred. No harm done, but it usually tells me a lot about how ready that person is to get to the core of the topic.

So let's clarify that right away. We are not allowed to cheat on each other. Cheating is bad – don't do that. Cheating is to deceive people in order to gain personal profit, cheating is to violate the rules, and we would never do that, nor accept that. Well, I wouldn't.

Now try to think of it differently: our game is different, and so are our rules. When I got together with my partner, it was obvious that we had to be in an open relationship because he was looking forward to expanding his sexual and relational experiences. The question was - “Can we do this together, or is it better to remain friends?” It became clear to us that we loved each other and we wanted to expand each others' possibilities, not to restrain them. It was even more important as we were going to be separated for several months. If we wanted to build a healthy relationship while being apart, it would have been very risky to ask sexual exclusivity for two reasons. First, if the relationship would go wrong, we would feel like we'd given up something for nothing, and second, it would give us a rule to fight against, a temptation to fall for. Considering the circumstances and my former experiences with (more) open relationships, it became obvious that we wanted to build something together, but we both didn't want sexual exclusivity. Until here, I think you all follow me: you might have been yourself in a similar situation before – an emerging long distance relationship or even just a dating situation that could deepen slowly into a traditional relationship.

But from there on, we get a few more odd reactions. My mom's one was maybe the most aggressive I've witnessed. She started shouting that she wasn't going to start having sex with other men because she loved my dad. Well, mom, I tell you this just in case you continued reading this post until here despite it being all in English, be reassured, I don't want you to have sex with other people and I'm not saying our type of relationship is better for you than the one you chose. I'm saying it's better for us. I appreciate that we can talk about these things together, and I wish we'd be able to talk about it more, because maybe then you could explain to me WHY you believe that you can't or won't have sex with another man BECAUSE you're in love with dad, because I honestly don't see the link. I can have sex with another man than my partner, and it doesn't affect my feelings for him in a negative way, most of the time to the contrary. When I'm with another sexual partner, I either miss the complicity we share and end up thinking it wasn't worth sleeping with someone else (but believe me, feeling no guilt about it, just being merely disappointed) or I feel even closer to him for giving me the opportunity to live this. And when we meet again... we talk about it together. Or not.It depends.

Next one: “It's okay for you to have sex with other people, but what if one of you falls in love?” That's an überly tricky one, and it can be a place where a lot of bad feelings hide: jealousy, insecurity, possessiveness... And that's something we talked about from the start. No falling in love. It's ABSOLUTELY forbidden.

Wait. Do you believe this? No, you know I'm joking, right? At the very beginning of our relationship (still young now, being less than six months old still), my partner told me that he believed we would eventually fall in love with other people, and that this was unavoidable. Falling in love isn't something you decide to do and it would be an utopia to decide never to fall in love again with anyone else. So what if it happens? My questions were then: “Will we have to break up? Couldn't we try to live that together, with a lot of friendship and love for each other?” and the answers were fairly simple. I want you to be happy and if you choose to live a love story with someone else, I will respect that. I'm also afraid to lose you, and I'm able to ask for reassurance and express my feelings to you openly.

Thinking about it, does one really gets reassured by trying to control the other? I don't believe so. Thinking of jealous people for example, they normally are jealous no matter what the other partner does, no matter what their real behavior is. They are jealous because they lack self-confidence, and they can't trust. They try to control the other one because it reassures them...

Now, I don't want to control my partner – I want him to be happy, by my side if possible. My fears are to lose the trust and intimacy we are building, not to prevent him from feeling something for someone else. As long as my relationship with him is not endangered by the situation, as long as he chooses to be with me, I think can accept it. So go ahead, fall in love!

“Well, this kind of relationship is good for you because you are not jealous.” Say what? I AM jealous. If tells me he's been seeing this girl and they slept together and whatever happened, I AM jealous. It usually lasts a few minutes: I get sweaty, I have adrenaline to my brain and I have to say out loud that I'm jealous. Then I cool down, and I enjoy the reality of it: we love each other, we choose to be with one another, and we choose to go beyond a traditional relationship because it brings us both something interesting.

I've often heard women criticizing open relationships as being a way for the guy (or less often the girl) to have multiple partners without committing, as being hypocritical and insane. It's true that people in open relationships tend to have more sexual partners than those in traditional ones, but actually, it is usually the woman that gets more sexual partners when the relationship is healthy.

You can't force someone to believe in an open relationship if they can only think of extra-conjugal affairs as being cheating, and thus seeing themselves in a couple where they are “allowed” to “cheat”. It is not healthy, and people will get hurt. Though they might learn from that experience and grow, it is a very bad start.

I also often heard the “It's okay, but I don't want to know about it” coming from allegedly “open” couples. While they probably fit with the strict definition of that type of relationship, I feel these couples are missing out on most of the benefits they can get from an open relationship: talking about it. We don't have such strict rules in our couple, but some people find rules beneficial and take the opportunity to discuss about their needs, their boundaries, their expectations and most importantly, their feelings. This goes back a lot to the first reaction: “You are allowed to cheat on each other.” The truth is, nobody allows anyone to do anything – while we try to remain legal in what we do, this isn't the issue. My partner is allowed to do what he wants to and I am allowed the same. But I might refrain from doing something because he told me he wasn't comfortable with it, and would prefer me not doing it. And I might as well be careful when I am doing something new, when I'm crossing a new boundary, because I want to get a cue on his feelings, and avoid hurting him (or myself) in the process.

As you see, it would be difficult to argue that we are not “a real couple” because we choose to be relationally opened. We are committed to each other and see ourselves together in the long run, to form a family, a core unit. There is no further step, and exclusivity wouldn't bring us anything, therefore we choose not to include that rule in our game. And we're happy to talk about it because we believe that in 2010, there is no shame to have about these things, that relationships have to be redesigned to be meaningful at a time when divorces and separations seem to prove a wreckage of the traditional couple. I often hear that “open couples just don't work” and I wonder how people can still believe in apparent monogamy in our era. Come on, don't we all know now that prince charming will have to pay child-support at some point?

And of course, this long post represents a “couple” point of view, but there are many more things to consider in open relationships, and it isn't all simple – other people get involved with us at different levels and have feelings too, and we are generally concerned with them. I'm not saying we took the “easy path”, on the contrary.

If you are curious about this type of relationship in general, look up keywords like polyamory, there is a wealth of resources online.

Oh and one last thing: it's not because we have an open couple that I'm going to have sex with YOU either. Or with your girlfriend. And we do not have group sex and are not swingers. Never say never, though.