What are your thoughts on Open Relationships?
Question submitted by Carlovely.
Seriously? I let the guys at this august publication know that I’m interested in writing a few things for them, and THIS is the first question they throw at me?
First of all, let me tell you this – I don’t really care what people do as long as they’re all consenting adults and also that they’re not furries. As far as I’m concerned, furries are pretty much fair game and if you want to set them on fire, it’s totally cool and no jury in the world would convict you. Not even a jury totally comprised of furries. Even those guys know what’s up. Frankly, those suits are extremely flammable and at best you could call it manslaughter if you had any proof. Which you don’t.
But I digress. You don’t really want to know what I think of open relationships, do you? You want to know if they work, if they’re worth the hassle, and how the hell can you convince your boyfriend/girlfriend/10th level paladin character to let you get some strange without any devastating consequences. Right? Right. I know you. You’re a pervert. I like that about you.
I’m going to jump past a lot of bullshit here and assume you’re not talking about swinging or any other kind of sport-fucking, and you in fact want to date more than one person at a time without living some kind of double-life like my good friend’s dad who had families in Australia and Germany. I tell you, THAT was some odd shit right there. Imagine finding out you had a bizarro-brother named Hörst, and that he got a car for his 18th birthday and you got vouchers for a 50% off dinner at Sizzler. Makes a man go crazy.
Getting back to the question at hand, yes, it is possible. If you listen to ‘received wisdom’ you’ll hear a lot of know-nothing blowhards saying “Oh those type of relationships never work” and “it will all end in tears”, and “I don’t remember saying you could fuck my wife”. Guess what? All relationships are like that. Monogamous heteronormative relationships fail all the damned time too, and nobody ever tells you not to enter into them unless they’re over 40, have six cats already, and live on the ground floor of a cream brick 1970s apartment block. Ignore those people. They have toxoplasmosis and have forgotten what it is like to dream.
The hard part, of course, is finding a partner who is cool with opening up the relationship, or indeed starting it open and never closing it. And I’m not going to tell you how to do that because I’m Doctor Monogamy™, and hell, if you can’t find people on the internet who are down with your particular desires then you don’t deserve to live in the magical future where we all find ourselves. There’s an internet full of people out there who are all theory/no practise and they’re just itching to try polyamoury/group relationships/ whatever the kids are calling it these days. Hint: chicks on free dating websites whose interests include “wicca” are always totally down for it. Reformed Mormons? Even better. Or so I recall. I mean imagine. Whatever.
The other hard part is the bit that you probably never thought about when you were first thinking “hey, how do I get my girlfriend/boyfriend to let me fuck other chicks/dudes”, and that bit is that if you’re not a terrible hypocrite then you have to be cool about your girlfriend/boyfriend also getting a bunch of strange as well.
Still interested? Then do it, you liberated soul, you.
Just be a respectful human being, as you should be in any relationship. Don’t lie, don’t break the ground rules (there will be ground rules) and don’t shit where you eat. It would also be nice if you somehow strive not to become one of those boring neckbeard assholes who calls fucking a lot of people a ‘lifestyle’ or tries to pretend it’s some transcendent act that renders you in some way ‘more evolved emotionally’ than the rest of us. I swear to god I will choke you with your temporary consultant ID lanyard if I so much as smell a waft of that feeble patchouli bullshit coming out of your mouth.
One last thing. If you do become a guy who somehow manages to have two or three girlfriends at once, and they’re all cool with each other, and maybe even you squeeze in the occasional threesome or whatever? Don’t flaunt it. Some guys have no girlfriends at all, and when they see you have more than your share they are going to hate you.
This is not negotiable. Sorry.
