Making an open relationship work

We protect monogamy like some sacred cow, but for me it has always felt like a dictatorship.” Alexandra Salafranca, 27, and her husband had a year of “theoretical discussions” about the rights and wrongs of monogamy. She brought it up first. “I have never understood why you can have lots of friends but only one lover. When I was younger, I was always cheating on my boyfriends, either emotionally or physically,” she says.

Things changed when she met her husband. “He was my soul mate, my angel, but after we had been married for two years, I started to feel an itch again.” She went straight into therapy. “I have a dysfunctional family, so I assumed it was all something to do with my upbringing, but as time went on, I realised that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with me. That was when the dialogue with my husband opened up. At first it made him sad, but then he started to say, ‘So I can see other girls?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As long as we tell each other everything beforehand… and that we are always each other’s priority.’”

The transgressions of Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser, the sexual forces of nature that are Warren Beatty and Tiger Woods, the tabloid fascination with other people’s infidelity, not to mention the number among our friends who we know or suspect are “at it” with somebody other than their designated significant other — it is a wonder that we don’t consider open relationships more seriously.

Life’s statistics make a mockery of our cultural dedication to monogamous relationships. Monogamy is expected by 95% of couples, yet a survey, by the Social and Economic Sciences Research Center at Washington State University, of sexually active Seattle residents aged 18-39 found 27% of men and 18% of women reported that during their most recent sexual relationship, they had had sex with at least one other partner. Is this shocking? If you’re a regular tabloid reader, probably not.

More astonishingly, in the 1990s, Robin Baker, then an evolutionary biologist at Manchester University, discovered that 8% of children are conceived when a woman has recently slept with another man. Another statistic reveals that 10% of children in Britain don’t belong to the men they’re supposed to. This, says Baker, “is normal behaviour for a mammal”. His novel, Primal, explores what happens when humans revert to their instincts, away from societal restrictions. “It’s nurture, not nature, that makes us monogamous,” he says.

Despite this, open relationships remain, in the public perception, something that a certain type of free-spirited bohemian does. Will Smith, Jade Jagger and, most recently, Angelina Jolie have all spoken publicly on the illogical dedication humans have to monogamy — garnering screaming headlines in the process. As Jolie told the German magazine Das Neue: “I doubt that fidelity is absolutely essential for a relationship. Neither Brad nor I have ever claimed that living together means being chained together.”

When I started researching this story, I mentioned it to an acquaintance, a straight man who is a senior executive. “I know a few things about that,” he said. Describing his own relationship, he confirmed what I suspect is true of a lot of marriages: that blind eyes are turned and certain things never discussed.

But wouldn’t it be better to be open and honest with each other? “There are far more open relationships than you might think,” says Tristan Taormino, the author of Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. While half the couples she interviewed for the book were, indeed, committed to being “alternative”, the other half were “just living their lives, and didn’t consider themselves anything out of the ordinary”.

Graham Nicholls has always had open relationships, and they generally have been successful. “My first advice to anyone considering one would be to do the ‘opening process’ together,” he says. “People often go off and find someone else, then bring it up with their other half, and this is basically just cheating. The starting of an open relationship can be an issue if it’s not done with both parties fully involved.”

For Salafranca, “total openness and my husband always being my priority” were the foundation stones of their open marriage, along with the obvious rule of safe sex. At first, Salafranca and her husband would sleep with people they found stimulating and, importantly, were equally open with their own lovers. “We met writers, academics, designers, lots of interesting people, but the whole thing had to be strictly a sexual thing. The first time he wanted to go for dinner with a girl, you know, go on a date, I was furious. I said, ‘If you want her body, fine, but this looks like the start of a relationship.’”

Jealousy is a huge issue in open relationships. Diana Melly, who had an open marriage with the musician and writer George Melly, has said, “When people learn that most of my 42-year marriage was ‘open’, they ask if I was jealous. People seem to have a particular interest, as if the arrangement is something they quite like the idea of, but the jealousy makes it seem too much like hard work.”

By all accounts, an open marriage is hard work. Yet the sort of people who go about an open relationship in a sensible manner will devote themselves to unpicking possessive and jealous instincts as much as they can. “Our automatic response is ‘You’re mine and nobody else is gonna have you’, even if your higher motives are: I want freedom and I want you to have freedom,” says Taormino. “I have been in a committed relationship for nine years, and it’s open because I do not want to restrict the freedom of someone I love. Personally, though, I’ve struggled with jealousy — everyone does.”

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article7037676.ece

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