Negotiating an open relationship
While talking to your partner is essential for both monogamous and open relationships, ‘communicate!’ is advice that is easy to give and much harder to actually do. Where do you even start with negotiating an open relationship? Often, the process of deciding to be non-monogamous with a partner isn’t the most difficult bit – it’s defining what your new relationship will look like and ensuring that all parties have a common understanding of the types of assurances and freedoms they will need in order to make it worthwhile.
An exercise Dr Powell recommends to couples who want to open their relationship is to “take everything about your relationship, lay it out and decide what you actually want.” This can be a process of writing down – on paper or on your Notes app – the practices, standards and fun couple activities that will ensure you will feel safe to explore. Powell advises couples to do this separately, so people don’t just make choices based on what they think their partner wants. In an exercise like this, it’s important to check in with yourself and be honest about what you want.
For Sarah and her nesting partner, their first step was to discuss what they needed, wanted, and didn’t want. “We discussed safer sex practices, scheduling of dates versus time for us as a couple, what we thought we would want to hear or not hear about the other’s relationships.”
It’s important to schedule in solo time as well, rather than keeping your schedule jam-packed with time with a partner or out dating. Powell says that due to how pervasive mononormativity (the presumed social default of monogamy) is, couples often have an assumption that “any time that their partner does not have other plans is automatically time that they are entitled to or that their partner will want to spend with them.”
Powell advises couples to plan for what they will do if their partner has a date and they don’t have plans. “There’s this tendency to try to have something fun scheduled whenever your partner has a date, but if one person’s thing falls through, the other person still has to figure out how to deal with it.”
Breaking up to build new relationships
When opening up your relationship, Powell says it can be helpful to think of it “as though your previous relationship is ending, you’re breaking up, and you are starting an entirely new relationship with non-monogamy at its core.” This allows you to start from scratch, and decide what you want your relationship to look like, rather than what the traditional relationship escalator says it “should” look like.
One of the biggest mistakes couples can make when opening their relationship is simply not unpacking mononormativity. Jo thinks it is important not to get “bogged down in the minutia of ‘rules’, but make sure you understand what ‘opening up’ looks like to each of you.”
Keely and their partner initially drew up rules that they would both to follow if either of them saw another person, but they found that “the first few times my partner saw new people, we found that the initial rules we’d outlined for interactions were not realistic, and we had to reassess how to make the arrangements feel okay to everyone.”
And while the idea of your partner developing feelings for someone else is also scary, Powell thinks that making rules about having sex but not being allowed to have feelings rarely works in reality. “As humans don’t tend to be particularly great at being able to not develop feelings for someone with whom we have a close connection.”
Emotional risks and vulnerability
Increased risk of STI transmission often comes up when discussing the challenges of non-monogamy. However, research in 2015 found that while having an increased number of sexual partners increases the potential for STI transmission, people engaged in non-monogamy were more likely to use condoms during sex and more likely to get tested for STIs regularly, so the risk level wasn’t found to be greater.
Additionally, Powell believes that anxiety about STI risk is often misplaced. “The majority of the time when people say that what they’re upset about is STI risk, what they’re actually upset about is emotional risk.” They believe that people tend to move towards not using barriers with partners because we care about them, not because they have great safer sex practices. It’s important to own our fears related to intimacy and emotional connection.
For Cay and her partner, their biggest challenge was needing to accept that while they care deeply about each other, they each had needs that were not being met and could not be met by the other. “It’s incredibly difficult to accept one’s own shortcomings, but it is instrumental in understanding any form of non-monogamy.”
You shouldn’t let the potential challenges of non-monogamy put you off opening up your relationships. In fact, Powell believes that focussing on your fears when negotiating the boundaries of your new relationship can “drive you to make a lot of decisions and agree to a lot of things that you then are not going to feel good about.”
And that is the aim: to build a relationship you feel good about. Non-monogamy isn’t a plaster you can stick over issues in your relationship, it’s an entirely new relationship that requires work and care. It might not be easy, but it can be incredibly rewarding to create a relationship that works for you and your partner – or indeed your partners.