Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock images
Topics: Sex and Relationships
William Morgan
Entering into an open or polyamorous relationship is often seen by couples as an exciting way to spice up their romance, with the allure of meeting other people adding an extra layer to their love life.
Public acceptance of these alternative lifestyles has increased substantially in recent times, with a Hims survey suggesting that as many as 71 percent of Gen Z couples are interested in opening up their relationships.
But a sex and relationships expert has issued a note of caution to any would-be polycules out there as, while the grass might always seem greener on the other side, there are a number of roadblocks and pitfalls on the road to free love.
Executive director of the influential Kinsey Institute, Dr. Justin R. Garcia, told Business Insider that there has been a recent surge in couples interested in exploring polyamory. However, he said many end up returning to monogamy for three important reasons.
Advert
While the prospect of meeting new people might seem exciting at first, in reality, many people do not have the capacity to juggle the emotional turmoil of maintaining multiple romantic relationships with different people.
“Most people don’t have the biological tools to love more than one person at a time,” the sex expert said. This is backed up by recent polling, which suggest only four percent of Americans are in consensually non-monogamous relationships.
In addition to requiring additional emotional capacity, building and maintaining the open relationship can be physically exhausting too, requiring a great deal of effort to keep multiple partners satisfied. After all, one relationship can be enough work already.
Nowhere is this additional workload more apparent than in the most important factor in any open or polyamorous relationship - communication.
Maintaining a healthy and responsible open relationship means constantly asking your partners questions to make sure that they are being heard, or not overlooked while you are pursuing other entanglements.
“Even casual polyamorous encounters take substantial effort and negotiation,” Garcia explained.
The Kinsey expert said that these questions will often include: “Who needs more touch? Less? Who is feeling neglected? Who needs more time with whom? What is the state of things between each member of the polycule and each of the others?”
In a monogamous relationship, these dynamics will often be passively intuited or indicated by behavior. But in an unruly polycule, keeping tabs on how each person is feeling can be a constant task.
Like with any quick fix for your love life, if you are not addressing underlying issues in your coupling with another person, you will just end up carrying that same dysfunction into your open relationship.
Garcia said that many couples return to monogamy after realizing that seeing other people only made their problems worse. Though, he added: “The same issues that plague monogamous relationships — mismatched libidos, jealousy, boredom, and more — tend to surface in consensually non-monogamous ones.”
And while couples wanting to try something new without committing to the ensuing emotional and physical labor will often return to the fold, Garcia pointed out that for millions of people - polyamory is just the way they know how to love.
He explained: “While consensually open relationships might not work for everyone, or even for most people, there are many people for whom they do work perfectly well.”