I am Sorry, Open Relationship Is Not For Everyone
Because just putting on a spacesuit costume doesn’t make you a fucking astronaut.
So I guess you have just finished reading Sex at Dawn by Christoper Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, two self-proclaimed experts on basically everything in the world that has even the slightest connection to human sexuality. I can see you masturbating eagerly to the idea of people being inherently promiscuous because you finally have a research-based argument why you have cheated on your partner three times this week.
I suggest you also stress out to your freaking wife questioning your last-night whereabouts that assumingly, our direct foragers — bonobo chimps, used casual sex for strengthening social bonds which means that your cum landing right on the face of your neighbor is, in essence, a very good and well-thought-through investment into your local community cohesion. I bet it’s gonna work just fine.
And now I can hear you arguing that you have both agreed on being open. I get you, it sounds soooooo cool, right?! But do you really remember how you arrived at such a decision? Let me remind you, then.
You haven’t slept together for some time and are getting increasingly frustrated. You consistently complain to your friends and always blame the other half for not being empathetic enough. You wonder why you have lost all the passion after years of missionary sex and no longer get turned on by your matching oversize pyjamas with a floral pattern.
In a desperate search of at least some excitement, you decide to Netflix & chill one night. But instead of skipping the movie just to jump straight into the more entertaining part of the evening, you get stuck at watching a random romantic film with a five-second long scene of a threesome. As you are finishing the second bottle of wine, your imagination goes wild and you start considering what it would be like in reality. And then you say it.
Even though you may think you managed to formulate your question in the most gentle and kind way, let me assure you that what came out of your mouth was far away from the stupidly naive intention of your drunk mind. You spew it out as if you were saying some sort of a lame joke, pitifully hoping the message would come across anyway. It eventually did. Yet it resembled the landing of Apollo 13.
Despite some troubles, it circles the Moon and heads back to Earth. But the moment you heard yourself asking your wife what she thinks of open relationships was like hitting the atmosphere with a totally fucked-up heat shield. The only thing you can do now is to pray you are not gonna die when everything around you is burning and you are effectively turning into one massive fireball.
I know, you are regretting this dumb idea already and I can’t laugh more at you. Because what you are experiencing right now is the longest nerve-wracking three minutes of your so far ridiculously emotionless life. You hold your breath to make sure you hear everything she says. There is absolutely nothing but excruciating silence, though. The signal is lost.
“Whatever.”
The second you hear the one word you have been waiting for like Tom Hanks for the end of the blackout after the re-entry, you immediately finish your glass and pour another one to get celebratorily wasted to commemorate such an important historical moment. What you, bombed loser, unfortunately, miss altogether, is the obvious sarcasm.
What? Is that what you are asking? Oh, yes, you ignorant motherfucker, she doesn’t agree with you. She doesn’t want it. She is scared shit and will probably piss her panties soon. She is concerned about what her friends will think of her. Also, she doesn’t believe you are capable of hitting it off with another woman which is the only reason why she is not exploding with jealousy, too. All of that and much more is hidden behind this coward claim.
I hear you, she is crazy to dare to assume that you would be able to decode it correctly but most of the blame goes to you, my dear, anyway. Which you can see now, when reflecting back, but you were so over the Moon then that it made you consider your mission successfully completed. I find it hilarious that you think of yourself as the second Neil Amstrong despite the only significant surface you touched was your ass when you wiped your shit out of your lunar pants.
In essence, making ANY kind of open relationship work resembles very closely a space project no smaller than the Voyager program.
So are you ready to seriously consider a job in a field that most people only know about from the Interstellar movie? Are you sure that you want to embark on a journey you may never come back from? Cause, there are approximately 7,836,912 different reasons why it will be a colossal fuckup rather than an Instagram-worth achievement…just saying.
Still interested? Fair enough, I will give you a brief intro into the universe of open relationships to help you make a conscious decision whether you want to apply for the hardest job that makes a career at NASA a walk in a park.
Let’s start with the terminology because you’re gonna always sound more serious when you use words no one else understands. In essence, there are quite a few different types of non-monogamous relationships hence saying ‘We are open’ means basically everything and nothing at the same time.
Does it sound complicated? Well, you are expected to understand it as easily as aliens are supposed to digest the contents of the Voyager Golden Record. Oh, you don’t know what this is, either? Ok, let me google it for you because obviously I have nothing else to do than to be your fucking PA.
In simple terms, consensual non-monogamy is the word to remember. As you can tell yourself hopefully, the essential non-negotiable piece is consent. Gently obtained genuine consent, just to be clear. Obviously, you can choose the other path of a professional cheater, yet this can hardly be considered an open relationship when your partner has no idea, would you agree?
Then we have various different forms of transparent and somewhat socially acceptable fucking around. Starting from Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and a 100-Mile Rule going all the way to polyamory or polyfidelity. The most recognizable difference between all of them is the level of openness, transparency, and emotional involvement. Before you start acting like a child in a candy store, stuffing everything into your mouth until you vomit all over yourself, let me give you one advice I wish I had known when I set off for my own journey.
Assess your relationship first. Talk to your partner and understand how much you trust each other. What you are both ready for and comfortable with. And even though it is just a theory which may be completely different once you finally start, it is a very important process to go through. Setting clear boundaries and identifying the hard limits at the very beginning makes people feel more secure hence less likely to chicken out at the last minute.
I recall the first conversation with my husband when he proposed we would go swinging. Being proper innocent vanilla at that time, it was a huge step for me to acknowledge that I actually get turned on by the idea of looking at him banging someone else. Speaking of which, this is the most exciting perk that comes for free with non-monogamy — endless opportunities for self-discovery and self-development.
Setting up the right terms and conditions helps to manage expectations. If you are shitting your pants that your ego won’t endure a detailed description of what your partner was doing at their bachelor party, don’t ask about it. Blissful ignorance is also one of the ways to go if you agree on that in advance. Similarly, the other extreme when you decide to share everything and jerk off to it together. Just be honest and choose sincere conversations over playing it cool and faking acceptance while silently crying in the corner. And I can promise you that it’s gonna be pretty tough shit more than once, yet it is absolutely worth having it all outlined at the very start.
We all know that the rules are here to break sometimes and you are welcome to do so provided there is a mutual agreement in place. Take one step at a time and upgrade slowly and patiently if you want to become Neil Amstrong one day. Just FYI, he had been waiting for 10 years upon joining NASA before he got a chance to take his one small legendary step on the Moon, so don’t get too horny too soon. Because at any point in time, you may realize you are simply not ready yet, either as individuals or together as a couple and then you need to go back to the drawing board to see why.
Pushing yourselves into overcoming fears and jealousy that are often only final outcomes of insufficient mutual trust, poorly handled communication, or maybe an overall instability of your relationship, could easily lead to the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster more than anything else. Opening up your relationship is not a way to save it from approaching failure but a manifestation of a strong bond between two people having unshakeable faith in each other.
I know, it sounds annoyingly arduous when the only thing you wanted was to thrust a dick in your colleague’s ass. I am sorry, life’s never easy. Especially when it involves more people, then the total number of challenges grows exponentially. But no worries, I am not here to patronize you too much. My main intention is to save your time and help you avoid mistakes that many people including myself have made already. Cause there is no need to reinvent the wheel, actually the space rocket in this case, right?
The most common journey couples take starts at wild parties, in swingers clubs or on dance floors appropriately dosed with alcohol or drugs to suppress the everlasting doubts about whether going all-in is a good idea after all. Wife-swapping, friends with benefits, and business trip fool-arounds come next as sex without the presence of your other half is getting you closer to the stratosphere in comparison to some land fun during the rocket launch.
When you see the ISS for the first time in your life, you can be proud of yourself because you have come much further than any ordinary human being. That may be installing Tinder in search of another romantic match besides the love of your life. You still practice relationship hierarchy and consider every new crush as the other, less important than your nesting partner. A bit humiliating for the secondary ones, yet pretty straightforward way of showing your commitment and dedication to your primary one.
And finally, when you want to become a real show-off, you volunteer for a human mission to Mars because that is the closest metaphor for a non-hierarchical polyamorous relationship. You prepare as much as you can, yet nothing can really get you ready for it. Leaving all concepts of a standard relationship structure in order to treat each of your partners equally is hard. Telling your wife straight in the eyes that you love another woman as deeply as her is emotional. And planning your future in a shared household sounds to many like a joke than a doable reality.
Even if you eventually make your way there, you soon find yourself dipping potatoes in crushed Vicodin like poor Matt Damon because the reality is much worse than you expected. Your dick is hard because it has just frozen in the average temperature of -125 degrees Celsius and you can’t breathe for the never-ending sand storm at the same time. On top of that, there is hardly any way back because you are approximately 140 million miles far from home.
No matter how terrifying it all sounds, it will be most probably the greatest achievement of your life and also, you will be one of the few people to ever experience such an extraordinary journey. I am not exaggerating, seriously. Let’s look at the facts. I guess you haven’t been told by parents that one day you would find your two Prince Charmings or raise your kids in a polycule of five. You haven’t watched many movies where you would be presented with a version of non-monogamy that doesn’t involve cheating and a dramatic fight with suitcases flying out of a window. You haven’t been set up for success by the society that is relentlessly promoting marriage as the only way to find happiness.
There is hardly any guidance yet a ton of stereotypes when speaking about open relationships. It’s so difficult to seek out external validation on actions which the majority doesn’t understand and tends to disapprove of. Overcoming your own fears is sometimes way less complicated than addressing condemnation coming from your family and friends.
Yet fully acknowledging the pure simple truth that there doesn’t necessarily have to be just one person in your love life to fulfill all your needs is extremely liberating, likening a zero-gravity experience which you have dreamed of as a kid. Maybe it’s the right time now to try on the real spacesuit and see if it’s a good fit for you. I have just filled it up with oxygen.
