Should Men Have Open Relationships?

Open relationships are an increasingly popular relationship setup. But should you as a man engage in them? It all depends on what you’re after.

I'm pretty familiar with the open relationship.

The open relationship has been linked with the seduction community, which I've been a part of since the tail end of 2005, more or less since its inception in the late 1990s.

Through my connection to it, I've watched countless men begin, engage in, and recommend to other men open relationships. I've seen guys transition their monogamous relationships to open relationships. I've listened to men proclaim that open relationships are the only workable long-term relationship solution and that "monogamy is dead" or "monogamy doesn't work."

Most of the OGs who stick around in the seduction community are open relationship guys -- there's a strong survivorship bias in online seduction community posting for being inclined toward open relationships. Which makes sense, right? If a guy's off in some long-term committed monogamous relationship he's not too likely to keep keeping up with a bunch of rapscallions sharing notes on tagging new tail.

Generally speaking, if you are in seduction, you will not usually get much of an alternate perspective from the open relationships cheerleading you'll see in the space coming from OGs.

It's the same in mainstream media, Reddit, and much of other social media in general. Here's an article in Vogue this month talking about "love's sharing economy" and declaring that open relationships (here dubbed 'consensual non-monogamy') are the next stage of romantic evolution -- a sort of inevitable future we will all be a part of, in a kind of joyously open sexual egalitarian utopia. Monogamy, according to the current sexual zeitgeist, is "boring", "stifling", "patriarchal", and "outdated"; non-monogamy is "progressive", "liberating", "egalitarian", and "modern." Non-monogamy is the way all the cool kids are doing long-term relationships these days! Right? Right?

The thing with open relationships folks don't tell you though is that this relationship configuration is:

• Highly suited to SOME types of people over the long-term

• Fun for OTHER types of people over the short-term only to degrade for them over the long-term

• Simply unappealing altogether for a third chunk of people over either the short- or long-term

How do you know which camp you fall into?

Is the open relationship for you? Is it a joy and a liberation, a temporary dalliance, or a mistake?

Well, it's going to depend -- on you, on what you're after, and the way your life plays out.