5 essential things to know about opening up your marriage
This is for you if you have spent even one second wondering about this.
You may be here because your spouse brought it up at some point or you have been wondering what it could look like for you to open up your marriage.
One persistent hangup is that keeps nagging at you is this question:
Is something wrong with me?
Whether it’s you who wants to open up the marriage or your spouse who wants to open up the marriage, nobody did anything wrong. You have simply been programmed to believe that what you want or what anyone else wants is a bad thing.
We have all been duped to believe there is a right or wrong to our desires.
You did nothing wrong that prompted your spouse to want to open up your marriage.
You did nothing wrong that prompted you to want to open up your marriage.
Let me break this down to five essential things to know when opening up your marriage.
Let’s get right into it.
You do not need a “legitimate reason” for opening up your marriage.
First of all, who would be the judge of whether you have a good or bad reason? Nobody. Because there is none.
(Nope, not even your mom. Or my mom. Or your priest. Or your boss. Or your friend. They are all just as human as we are.)
Here are some of the possible reasons you may want to open up your marriage, all of them equally legit:
You just want to.
Your spouse wants to, and you’re curious and you want to be prepared.
You and your spouse have a huge gap in libido, and you want to meet your sexual needs without requiring it from your spouse.
You have a crush on someone. Even though you may not want to pursue it, you want to know what it looks like to have the freedom to do so.
You have a crush on someone, and you are intent on pursuing it.
You’ve always felt like something was off in your marriage, even though you love your spouse very much. Maybe it’s the institution of marriage, maybe there is something about your spouse that doesn’t quite “get” you. (Even though you love them from the bottom of your heart!)
You wonder if opening up your marriage is going to be the panacea for all your marriage problems. Even though you don’t think it’s going to work, you want to at least explore it.
You have a feeling that opening up your marriage is not just going to be about sleeping around with people but actually having open conversations with your spouse about things that matter. Things you have been avoiding for a while.
You want to be prepared when your spouse suddenly wants to open up your marriage out of nowhere.
You think it’s kind of ridiculous that you’re supposed to have sex with one person for the rest of your life.
You want to have feelings for other people without feeling like a dirtbag.
…and so much more. I boycott this culture of requiring a “good” reason to do anything. Who is the determinant of this imaginary moral high ground?
The only requirement in opening up your marriage is that the desire exists. That is all. Whether you have a tiny spark of curiosity or whether you are raging with desire, whatever degree of desire you have is sufficient.
You do not need to “work on yourself” before opening up your marriage.
I don’t know who’s been telling us to “work on ourselves,” but this is the biggest lie. We need to uproot this weird attachment to “working on ourselves” before we do anything in our lives.
What does “working on ourselves” even mean? This assumes that there is some sort of destination of self-actualization that we need to arrive for us to pursue any kind of desire. There is no destination. Just like there is no destination in the entire universe. Nobody even knows where the depths and stretches of the universe even ends.
There is no end to our humanity.
And one of the most generative and informative ways to explore those depths is by relating through our differences. We are forced to do this when we open up our marriage. When we talk through all our fears, wants, and needs, we see more parts of ourselves and we become skilled at holding the parts of ourselves that we’ve been told to hide and suppress.
The reason we shame others in their differences is that we shame ourselves in our differences.
In opening our marriage, we confront those parts of ourselves that we’ve been told to hide. We become skilled at loving those parts. We become skilled at having those parts loved by other people.
Shame takes a back seat because we become so skilled at love.
So here is my invitation: if you are stressed about “working on yourself,” stop. Stop working on yourself. There is so much to love and know about you right now, especially the parts that you feel are “broken” about you.
(Because, if no one’s told you, we fall in love with imperfect humans. Not perfect humans. Because they don’t exist.)
You are not “too early” or “too late” to the game.
This is a juicy one because there is no such thing.
Let me start with those who think they are “too early.”
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but polyamory is, like, everywhere now. Just in the past month, we’ve had major platforms offer opinions about the increasing popularity of polyamory (Washington Post, The New Yorker, New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, etc.).
People are annoyed with it, threatened by it, intrigued by it, whatever. The conclusion is that people are having feelings about it.
And when people have feelings about something, it means that they are digesting the idea through their systems. Which means that it is a possibility that they will consider it at some point in time. People are already considering it as a possibility, even as they are outwardly muttering the words “I could never.” You can only arrive at the conclusion of “I could never” after having entertained the possibility to a measurable extent.
I started thinking about polyamory when I saw that someone else was practicing it proficiently. So I learned from them how I can practice that in my own life.
Because we are interdependent beings, the chances of us practicing our desires become much more likely when we see other people doing the same thing well.
Which means, even if you start dating or marry someone monogamously, you never know if/when they are going to start considering polyamory. Thirty-three years of my monogamously oriented brain did not stop me from finding my home in the practice and identity of polyamory.
So the question is: how do you want to be prepared?
Now, let’s move onto the thought that you are “too late.”
“Too late” often means “the damage is already done.” Underneath this statement is often the assumption that the damage is irreparable.
I don’t know what you have tried. May be couples therapy, nonviolent communication, spicier sex, sweeping things under the rug, going on more dates with one another, and even some fruitful conversations. And perhaps you are wondering about the parts of your relationships that still have yet to be addressed.
You may have tried opening up your marriage and feel like you failed. You may have an open marriage already and feel like things are not going very well. Neither case is any indication of whether you are “too late” to try opening up your relationship in a different way.
When you feel like you are “not cut out” for something, it rarely means that you are actually cut out for it. Nobody is ever cut out for anything in particular. What actually happens it that you decide that you want to do something, and you stumble your way to proficiency.
Now, if you feel like opening up your marriage feels too stressful and traumatic, that is a different story. We do things only at the pace of our own body.
But if you feel like opening up your marriage feels exciting but you don’t know if you’re cut out for it, that is a different story because your body is already there, and your brain just needs to catch up.
So here, the question is: what am I waiting for?
Your ability to hurt people by opening up your marriage is limited.
We often think that we are going to hurt our spouses and our children when we open up our marriage. The thought often is: I am so selfish for wanting something different, and everybody is suffering because of it.
Here’s what I’ve come to realize: we overestimate the power we have other others, and we underestimate the power we have over ourselves.
Let me give you my example, starting with my spouse. When I first told Dan that I wanted to open up our marriage, these are his words: “I am devastated.”
So at first glance, it looks like I totally destroyed his world. I mean, I did.
His values of love, commitment, and family - and his ideas of monogamy, jealousy, fear, resentment - everything - was put to the test. He needed to look at this relationship with all of those concepts under a microscope.
It was devastating because it meant that he needed to confront the truth of what he really, truly wanted from the bottom of his heart, and it was different from everything he was taught his entire life. It meant that he needed to be wrong about things he was so sure he was right about his entire life. (And same for me, too. I was right there with him.)
To say that it is painful to be wrong would be an understatement. Especially in our 30’s, 40’s, and beyond, where we have grown to become so sure of everything we’ve been practicing for ages in our lives.
But I don’t think about this as being wrong. I think of it as coming back home to ourselves after being taught to abandon ourselves for the longest time.
We got really good at practicing love the way we’ve been taught because that was just the default. And now we are choosing courage to dismantle those false paradigms so that we can finally practice love on our own terms.
So when I chose to make my truth known, Dan had the option to pick the easy route and file for divorce. It was an option he actually contemplated for the first time in our marriage. (And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with this option if it is an accurate reflection of his truth.)
But he decided to confront his own truth, which allowed him to see that what we really wanted was more space for more love. We became really good at honoring each other’s desires, which freed us from the chains of jealousy, resentment, and fear that often clouded our judgment in our relationship.
Dan’s experience of hurt was more of a reflection of the magnitude of how much he had to question his own paradigms and less of a reflection of my ability to hurt him.
By taking responsibility for his experience of hurt, he arrived at his own truth in response to encountering my truth.
So the question here is: am I hurting people with my desires, or are they processing their own discomfort in encountering their own desires?
Next up, our children.
I get this a lot:
“What if they are bullied at school because you are polyamorous?”
“How could you abandon your kids for your own selfish desires?”
“How jarring is it for them to see both of you have multiple partners?”
Which are all reflections of their own projections of what needs to be true in this world.
We are afraid of the new because we doubt our ability to experience the new.
This has nothing to do with our children’s ability to experience the new. They are experiencing new things all day every day. They have been on the planet for way fewer years than we have.
We’ve had Dan’s partners visit the home and grow closer with them every time. Just yesterday, one of his partners Kirby held my 4-year-old Rhea in her arms and whispered, “I love you.”
Rhea smiled. She kept being goofy. I got to watch her receive more love from more humans in our whole ecosystem of love and support.
Here’s my question: where are we deciding for our children how much love they can receive because of my own stories around how much love humans are capable of giving and receiving?
Each day, I get to witness just how unlimited our capacity is in love when there are no restrictions around how we can love.
And when my children experience such profound depths of love from multiple adults in all kinds of ways, chances that they are capable of handling any hate and bullying goes up because they know how to love through differences.
So if my selfishness means they get to love more deeply than I ever have, I don’t know who is experiencing the hurt here.
Yes, there is a potential that you will lose your marriage.
Let’s not sugarcoat things here. There is always a potential that we can lose our relationships.
Now, there is a difference between accepting the potential of losing the marriage and being terrified at the thought of losing the marriage.
When we are terrified about losing our marriage, we allow fear take the driver’s seat. When we allow fear to drive us forward, we tend to suppress ourselves and focus on pleasing the other person.
I am willing to bet that that experience has been exhausting because you never get to experience your own pleasure. It’s always a constant debate on whether your decisions will be good enough for the other person, and you end up finding no room for yourself.
So the question here is: are you willing to lose yourself first before you lose your marriage?
This is a question I grappled with myself. Before opening up our marriage, I noticed that I was trying to manage Dan’s emotions and his own experience of his humanity, and I became resentful when I never found satisfaction in the way I was loved.
Even though I loved him more than anything in the world. (Which is a stark paradox. But as my teacher Simone says, “I distrust anything that isn’t a paradox.”)
That paradox got me curious about what it would look like to stop being so terrified of losing Dan and to start maximizing my experience of love with him. And where I arrived at was that my fear was rooted in my belief that I have any control over his experience of his humanity.
In love, there is no room for control. There is only room for care and support.
When I want control, I ask: how can I “make” him “feel better”?
When I want to care, I ask: how can I be a resource the way he wants, and do I have the capacity for it?
When I want control, I ask: how can I “make” him want me more?
When I want to care, I ask: how can I trust his desires?
Incidentally, those are the questions I get to practice asking myself.
Instead of trying to make myself feel better, I ask myself how I can be resourceful for feeling more supported.
Instead of trying to force my own desires, I start practicing trust for the desires I have right now.
When we open up our marriage skillfully, we get to honor the other person’s experience of their humanity.
When we honor them as they are, the chances of losing the relationship plummets dramatically.
Often times, marriages fall apart because of the need to control our feelings and the other person’s feelings. We try to fight against the current instead of witnessing the current. That kind of friction is what results in irreparable incompatibility.
So ultimately, it is not non-monogamy that destroys the marriage. It is how we use monogamy or non-monogamy to relate to the person we are in partnership with.
So the more relevant question here is: what is the relationship orientation that supports how spacious I feel in our relationship, and how can I use it to relate to the other?
There is always risk of losing relationships because our desires, capacity, and preferences change over time. Do we want to carry that risk skillfully by relating through it with the other, or do we want to carry that risk incompetently by trying to manage the other person’s feelings?
***
It is possible to open up your marriage to find that you are more in love with one another than you’ve ever been. In fact, that outcome holds the greatest possibility when we learn to relate skillfully through our differences.
You may find yourselves no longer arguing about whose turn it is to make dinner or do the dishes for the night.
You may also find that you get so much more work done because you don’t find jealousy, resentment, or disappointment interesting anymore.
You may also find yourself feeling all giddy, excited, and surprised by the kinds of relationships you get to build (romantic or otherwise) because you know how to relate to anyone so skillfully.
This is what we practice in The Opener, where I teach you everything you need to know to open up your marriage the way you want to.
It is a virtual speakeasy where we get to open up our marriage and practice love on our own terms…outside the prying eyes of the outsiders who have no idea what it’s like to love freely because they are so busy following all these rules around how we ought to love.
You get to bring your own signature cocktail. Your own feathered hat.
You get to experience your own sexiness because you decided to show up for all of your desires.
There is no topic that is off limits in The Opener.
It is also where we practice consent at the highest level.
We honor each of our capacity to be known in our uniqueness and to know the other in theirs.
There is no other place like this on the planet.
In here, we can finally let our hair down and dare to love differently.
Join here: angela-han.com/opener