August 28th, 2007 by SexyGal
It is difficult to determine just how many married people are involved in open marriages. A study from the 1980s suggested it could be as many as 6 percent of all couples, but most experts believe that number is excessively high.”At least 95 percent of married and cohabitating Americans expect sexual exclusivity,” said Judy Treas, a sociology professor at the University of California at Irvine.
As for the success of open marriages, “there have been no scientific evaluations of how well open marriages work,” Treas said. “The jury is still out.”
Despite the small niche, there is a thriving industry built around the polyamorous. Self-help books, specialized marriage counselors, and retreats, which include everything from courses in Eastern philosophy to the chance to hook up with strangers, are targeted at people in open marriages.
Traditional marriage counsellors typically tell polyamorous couples who are having problems with their marriage that it is the sex with other people that is causing their problems, but therapists like Dossie Easton who co-wrote”The Ethical Slut,” disagreed.
Easton said polyamorous marriages were no more or less successful than marriages, but at least the polyamorous were never surprised to learn their spouse was cheating.
She said openly married couples saw her “for the same problems that traditional therapists deal with. Only traditional therapists tell polyamorous couples if they gave up being polyamorous, then they’d be happy.”
Problems, she said, occur when spouses have different ideas about how polyamory should work.
“Sometimes one wants to have sex with strangers, and the other wants more meaningful relationships outside the marriage. Others want to join groups of like-minded people, [which] I call pods or constellations, where sometimes child-rearing responsibilities are shared.”
Technorati Tags: open marriage, polyamorous, polyamorous couples, , polyamory
Posted in Articles, Open Marriages, Swingers
August 24th, 2007 by SexyGal
To many, “open marriage” is a phrase so laden with 1970s nostalgia that the idea can’t be considered without imagining its practitioners leering at each other across shag-carpeted conversation pits, their chest hair spilling out of maroon polyester leisure suits.While many of today’s adherents are aging swingers from the old school, a new generation — well organized and committed to legitimizing a lifestyle — continues to push traditional notions of marital fidelity by having sex with people other than their spouses.
But do marriages — fragile institutions traditionally built on the fidelity and sexual intimacy of two people — work when the doors of the bedroom are thrown wide open?
“That’s like asking if monogamy works,” Deborah Anapol, a psychologist and author of “Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits” told ABC NEWS.com. “Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. It depends almost entirely on the people involved and their willingness to tell the truth and do the work.”
“Polyamory,” which literally means “many loves” is a new name for an old practice.
“There were a few studies on open marriage in the early ’60s and ’70s, but the phenomenon seemed to die out and it was just called cheating after that,” said William Doherty, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota.
“It resurfaced as polyamory, and some groups have imbued it with a spiritual side. They see it as a pathway to personal development. They see it as a high road; it’s not cheating, it’s growing their relationship,” he said.
Technorati Tags: open marriage, fidelity, Polyamory, cheating
Posted in Open Marriages, Swingers, Swinging Lifestyle
August 17th, 2007 by SexyGal
The biggest challenge polyamorous couples seem to face is [tag]jealousy#.
Open marriage differs from polygamy in that it is legal, except in those states with extremely rigid anti-adultery laws. Unlike polygamy, in an open marriage both spouses agree to allow each other to have extramarital affairs and relationships can extend to people outside of a formally bound group.
In the open marriages of the 1970s, couples would often set rigid rules about whom they would allow to engage in sex with their partners.
Couples would meet in sex clubs or private parties and swap partners. These relationships were almost always purely sexual, and temporary lovers were rarely introduced to spouses.
Contemporary practitioners of polyamory have changed the rules, and in many cases thrown them out all together, said Dossie Easton.
According to Easton, polyamory is as much a reflection of changes in ’70s-style open marriages as it is a reflection of broad changes in attitudes about casual sex. “There has been a real change in attitudes,” Easton said. “We used to make a huge notion that if you picked up someone at a singles bar and didn’t want to marry them in the morning you shambled out of their house.”
“Nowaday, we have all kinds of open sexual connections with people that we call friends that we are not auditioning for marriage.”
Technorati Tags: polyamorous, Open marriage, polygamy
Posted in Open Marriages, Swingers
April 18th, 2007 by SexyGal
By WebMD At Fox News
He knows your birthday, your favorite food, worst fear, and deepest, darkest secret. No, it’s not your husband, the man you promised to love and cherish until the day you die. It’s your office spouse — a phrase coined to describe the new relationship phenomenon that’s developed as Americans work longer, harder, and in closer proximity with colleagues of the opposite sex.
“An office spouse meets emotional needs, going beyond the requirements of the job,” says Willard F. Harley Jr., PhD, author of His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-Proof Marriage. “If you are in a bind, here is a co-worker — someone of the opposite sex — who will care for you, who you can depend on, and who you can confide in.”
Maintaining a healthy and nonsexual relationship with an office spouse can be tricky and sometimes detrimental to your real marriage. From walking a thin line between friendship and adultery, to avoiding a workplace husband or wife altogether, to keeping it strictly platonic, experts give WebMD the rules of engagement when it comes to the office spouse.
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Technorati Tags: office spouse, relationship
Posted in Articles, Open Marriages
