Designing Our Relationship

How my husband and I decided we might open up our relationship

My husband and I got married four years ago and entered a monogamous marriage happily, if not blindly, because societal norms dictated that’s what two people who were madly in love did after being together for as long as we had been.

Together, we had already navigated many difficult life patches. We’d checked off the “in sickness and in health” box before we even got off the ground, and we had an intimate understanding of the traumatic baggage the other was bringing into the marriage. This was a second marriage for each of us, and while his first wife wasn’t abusive, he wasn’t labeling the experience as happy and healthy. My first marriage, on the other hand, did fall under the abuse title, and I still had a lot of lingering emotional trauma related to that experience.

But for almost a decade, we’d been living together blissfully. We shared a happy life, filled with plenty of love and intimacy. If you’d asked me, I wouldn’t have said anything was missing.

So when my husband came home one day and told me about a podcast he’d been listening to that featured a throuple, I listened with mild amusement and not much else.

My husband is a tradesman and spends his days with his AirPods firmly in place. He binge-listens to podcasts, and his Spotify playlist has as much variety as an all-you-can-eat buffet. He bounces from professional development to erotica and everything in between. I wouldn’t even begin to guess how the algorithm makes suggestions for him.

We discussed the relationship in this podcast, and then started other conversations about the next podcast the algorithm led him to, one about a couple in the Swingers Lifestyle. One thing we’ve always prided ourselves on is how well we communicate. I didn’t think there could possibly be levels of our relationship we hadn’t explored. But as we discussed these podcasts, our conversations turned to topics we’d never tackled before.

As a bisexual woman, I’ve had fantasies about having a threesome with my husband and another woman. But, as a monogamous couple, I never thought to share these fantasies. Despite the fact that having a threesome with two women is often touted as every man’s dream, it felt sacrilegious to suggest it to your husband. Besides, how could that be healthy?

But as we talked, I realized that maybe there was nothing wrong with these fantasies. And it turns out my husband wasn’t opposed to the idea. And the more we talked, the more we realized there might be more we were willing to explore.

Together, we started to question the societal concept of monogamy. Maybe it really was just a made-up thing that we’d been sucked into because we’d been told it was the only acceptable option. Maybe the only reason bringing up a threesome with my husband felt taboo was because society said it should feel taboo.

I purchased and read the book Designer Relationships by Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson, and found that many of the concepts really aligned with us. The idea that a relationship could be anything you wanted it to be as long as you and your partner were on the same page was freeing.

We weren’t ready to just rush into an open relationship. He listened to more podcasts. I read more books. We spent a lot of nights talking about what we wanted and how we wanted it to look. We’ve actually had some really great sex just thinking about the idea of opening up our marriage.

One thing we’ve both agreed on is that just the decision to have these conversations has led to such a deeper level of connection between us. I think it seems counterintuitive on the surface, but the idea that discussing potentially opening up your marriage can bring you closer together seems to be the consensus among people who do it consciously.

I personally like the idea is that it can be anything we want it to be. It doesn’t have to look a certain way. We can move at our own pace and decide, together, exactly what the right thing for us is. The idea of designing our relationship around what feels right to us is really appealing.

So I thought I would document our exploration: the things we’re learning, the things we’re trying, and the things we’re finding hard. If nothing else, it should be interesting!