Common misperceptions
Polyamorous relationships are a hell of a lot more common and more open than they were when I first started exploring non-monogamy. You can find polyamorous people in movies (though still generally in small indie movies, for the most part), there are books about polyamory at mainstream bookstores, and every month there are more media articles about polyamory.
None of that would even have seemed possible back when I first started writing the content on what eventually became this website.
That said, people still have a lot of...um, downright goofy ideas about what polyamorous relationships look like. and man, can you tell a lot about a person’s fears and insecurities by how they imagine non-monogamous relationships look.
Common misunderstandings about open relationships
- Open relationships are for men. Women don’t want them. Women want to settle down with a provider; they have no interest in open relationships, and go along only to make their man happy.
- Open relationships are for people who can’t commit. (If you’re afraid of commitment, then having multiple relationships isn’t for you…)
- Open relationships are for people afraid of intimacy, because of course you can’t really be intimate with more than one person at a time.
- Open relationships are for sex addicts. (Never mind that many asexual people are in open relationships.)
- Open relationships are a phase. Everyone really wants monogamy when they settle down.
- Open relationships can fix a broken relationship. (Unless the problem is specifically lack of a specific kind of sex, this is unlikely to work. The time you want to open a relationship is when everything is going well, not when things are going poorly.)
- Open relationships always mean a couple both having sex with a third party.
- Open relationships always start with a couple.
- Open relationships never last. (“My neighbors were in an open relationship, and they broke up! That proves open relationships don’t work!” Yeah? My neighbors were monogamous and got divorced. Does that prove monogamy doesn’t work?)
- Open relationships mean more STDs. (In fact, multiple peer reviewed studies[1] [2] [3] have shown the incidence of STIs among people in consensually non-monogamous relationship is the same as or lower than baseline, because people in open relationships tend to talk openly about sexual health and exchange test results without fear or shame.)
- Open relationships mean anything goes; people just running around having sex with whoever they like.
- There’s no point to being married if you’re going to be open. (This weird obsession monogamous people have with sex is baffling. You mean of all the 1,400 or so legal rights and privileges that go with being married, of all the reasons like love and sharing that people might want in their marriages, the only thing that matters to marriage is sex?)
- People have open relationships because something is wrong with their partner. If their partner were good enough, they wouldn’t want anyone else.
- People in open relationships are immune to jealousy.
- You have to be bisexual to be in open relationships.
- You have to have no morals to be in open relationships. (As George Bernard Shaw famously said, “Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.”)
- Being in an open relationship shows you don’t know what you want.
- Only perverted, kinky sex maniacs want open relationships. (In fact, many sexually vanilla and, as I mentioned before, asexual people are in relationships.)
- Being in an open relationship proves you don’t love your partner. If you’re in love, you never want anyone else. (This might be true of some people. It’s not true of all people.)
- All people who like open relationships enjoy group sex. (I know people who’ve been in open relationships for decades who’ve literally never once had group sex.)
- Open relationships are the same thing as swinging. (Swinging is one type of open relationship; there are many others.)
- People in open relationships have to divide up their time between different partners. (You can spend time with more than one partner at the same time. Some people in open relationships live together.)
- You have to be rich to keep taking multiple people out all the time. (Not everyone in open relationships goes out on dates; and people in non-traditional relationships are less likely to obey conventional gender roles like “the man always pays.”)
- Only beautiful/handsome people can be in open relationships, because the only way to get lots of partners is to be hot; or
- Only ugly people can be in open relationships, because if you were attractive enough to find a partner of your own you wouldn’t need to share. (Yes, I’ve heard both. In fact, people in open relationships have the same variety as monogamous people.)
- People in open relationships come from broken homes. (No. Just no.)
- You have to be an extrovert to be in an open relationship.
- If you’re monogamous, you need to keep your husband/wife away from people in open relationships. They’ll try to take your partner away. They hit on anyone.
- People in open relationships don’t have time for anything else. You can’t ever get anything done if you’re in an open relationship.
[1] A Comparison of Sexual Health History and Practices among Monogamous and Consensually Nonmonogamous Sexual Partners.
[2] Re-examining the Effectiveness of Monogamy as an STI-Preventive Strategy.
[3] A Comparison of Sexual Health History and Practices Among Monogamous and Consensually Nonmonogamous Sexual Partners.