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Do Open Marriages Work?

August 28th, 2007 by SexyGal

monogamous marriages 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.”