Open relationship

What is an open relationship?

Open relationship (Dutch: open relatie) is a committed relationship in which the partners agree together that sexual, and sometimes romantic, contact with others is allowed. It is the umbrella form of which the open marriage is the married variant. The agreements they make decide exactly what is and isn’t allowed.

What an open relationship looks like in practice

Picture a couple who live together but aren’t married. They love each other and want to stay together, but they agree that there is room for sex with others. Around that room they set rules: always safer sex, no one else brought home, and letting each other know in advance when there’s a date. Some couples want to hear every detail, others want none, see DADT. Whatever the agreements are, they only work if they were made together and both partners mean them. If the need changes, the agreement is talked through again instead of being quietly stretched.

Where an open relationship sits

An open relationship is one of several ways to live non-monogamously. In the Dutch professional article Consensuele non-monogamie in de spreekkamer, Roos Reijbroek lays the forms side by side. In an open relationship one couple stays the base, and alongside that there is room for contact with others, usually sexual. That differs from polyamory, in which someone can have several equal love relationships at once, and from swinging, which is more often recreational and lived as a couple within its own scene. At the far end Reijbroek also names relationship anarchy, in which people deliberately draw no fixed ranking between their relationships. The boundaries sometimes run into each other, and a couple chooses for themselves which form suits them. What they share is the agreement made beforehand, with everyone’s consent, which is what sets it apart from infidelity.

Why couples choose an open relationship

The appeal is the combination of security and freedom: you keep the person you share your life with, and you don’t have to hide a desire for someone else. For some it’s a way to bring differences in libido or curiosity out of the taboo zone. What it gives a couple turns out, in research, to be more sober than the reputation suggests. A meta-analysis by Joel Anderson and colleagues across 35 studies with almost 25,000 people found no difference in relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction between consensually non-monogamous and monogamous relationships. The honest flip side is that openness does not switch off jealousy, and that it stands or falls with communication. An open relationship does not repair a bond that is already off balance; it only makes a good bond roomier on one point.

What an open relationship is not

“An open relationship is the same as polyamory.” Not exactly. An open relationship is usually about sexual room around one steady couple, while polyamory is about several love relationships.

“People in an open relationship are less happy.” There is no evidence for that. Anderson’s meta-analysis found no difference in satisfaction compared with monogamous relationships.

“An open relationship is cheating in disguise.” The opposite. The whole base is consent and openness, and that is exactly what is missing in infidelity.

What I see of it

Some of the women who approach me live in an open relationship and have their agreements at home neatly in order. They don’t come in secret but with their partner’s knowledge, and you notice it: there’s no guilt attached, only curiosity. I’m not a relationship therapist and I don’t get involved in your rules. What I do see is that an agreement thought through beforehand gives a very different mood than one born out of discontent. Discretion is a given with me either way.

More reading on the open relationship

Within this glossary, open marriage explains the married variant, polyamory the form with several love relationships, and ethical non-monogamy the whole field.

Beyond this site, the professional article Consensuele non-monogamie in de spreekkamer by Roos Reijbroek lists the Dutch forms, and the meta-analysis by Anderson and colleagues sums up what the research shows about satisfaction.

Where this fits on this site

I don’t get involved in your agreements, and I’m not a therapist either. What I do is meet a woman who, with her own consent and within her own agreements, is looking for room for attention and touch. If you want to know how an arrangement like that goes with me, have a look at my services.

Sources

• Consensuele non-monogamie in de spreekkamer. Roos Reijbroek, Systeemtherapie, 37(2), 2025. Provides the description of consensual non-monogamy as an umbrella for the ways people live non-monogamously and make agreements about it, and the place of the open relationship alongside swinging, polyamory and relationship anarchy.
• Countering the Monogamy-Superiority Myth. Joel R. Anderson, Jordan D. X. Hinton, Alena Bondarchuk-McLaughlin et al., The Journal of Sex Research, 63(1), 130–142, 2026. Meta-analysis across 35 studies with 24,489 participants in total. Provides that relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction did not differ between consensually non-monogamous and monogamous relationships.
• Prevalence of Experiences With Consensual Nonmonogamous Relationships. M. L. Haupert, Amanda N. Gesselman, Amy C. Moors, Helen E. Fisher & Justin R. Garcia, Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 43(5), 424–440, 2017. Provides that more than twenty percent of the American single people surveyed had ever had experience with a form of consensual non-monogamy.

Related terms

The open relationship is the general form within a broader field. The terms below sit next to it.

• Open marriage. The same agreement within a marriage, with the legal and social side that comes with it.
• Ethical non-monogamy. The overarching field of several relationships or contacts with consent.
• Polyamory. Several equal love relationships, where an open relationship usually focuses on sex.
• Swinging. The recreational form, often lived as a couple, with a scene of its own.
• DADT. The agreement to deliberately not want to know the details of each other’s contacts.