Women Initiate Most Open Marriages

Is it because women get bored with monogamy?

Two-thirds of open marriages are initiated by women says a survey from OpenMinded.com, a website for open marriage dating that polled 64,000 couples. Brandon Wade, the CEO of OpenMinded explains this percentage by reasoning that women are trying to save stagnating marriages by asking to add in other lovers, but I think this is old-school thinking based on hackneyed stereotypes.

Many women are way more sexually adventurous than the cultural narrative would have us believe and women have also been shown to get bored with monogamy even before men do. Most women desire being desired and crave the feeling of being sexually adored. They want chemistry and sexual excitement — something that isn’t always easy to maintain in a long-term monogamous relationship.

But opening up a shaky marriage is way more likely to end it than anything else. Just like you can’t save a marriage by having a baby, you can’t shore up a faltering relationship by bringing in other lovers. The initial stages of opening up can be stressful and a bit scary as both partners deal with their societal programming around committed relationships. Although it’s also an exciting time, relationships that aren’t already strong, with good communication and trust already in place, are unlikely to survive the transition. I don’t know that Wade truly knows his market, but I’m not surprised by the numbers.

I don’t know the “origin story” of every polyamorous couple I’ve ever met, but I have heard several where it was indeed the woman who first broached the subject and that was the case as well in our relationship. One night I told my husband James about a fantasy that I’d had for a long time about having sex with him and another man. We whispered into each other’s ears how we imagined it might go as we made love. In the morning he said, “You know, if you want to do that for real, we absolutely can.”

James also wanted to be able to have a threesome with a woman, and in the course of looking for partners, we ended up playing with couples sometimes as well. We started spending time at a swinger’s club and many of the couples that we met there told us that it was the wife who had first brought up the subject.

Of course, in order for any kind of open marriage to work, both partners need to be equally on board. If one of them is doing it to try to make the other one happy, it’s not going to work long term. Even if women are the first ones to bring up the subject of adding in other lovers, both partners have to be equally receptive to the idea.

However, I do think that women respond well to the things that open marriage potentially has to offer. If you are willing to do the work to communicate at a high level, be completely honest, and work on your own insecurities, open marriage potentially offers the best of both worlds — the companionship and stability of a long-term partnership with the novelty and excitement of new lovers.

If you are embracing open marriage maturely and responsibly, there is frequently a new level of freedom and non-co-dependency that arises. I’ve heard more than one such couple say that it not only brings them pleasure but that it actually brings them joy, both as individuals and as a couple. This is about more than just getting sexual variety — it’s about embarking on a lifestyle that tends to be egalitarian and where partners co-create a relationship that works for them both, rather than adhering to rules made by others.

Not all open relationships are the same. In fact, there are probably dozens of ways to go about them. Swinging, where married couples swap partners, is primarily about sex and may still maintain more of the power dynamics that can go with traditional marriage. We met one such couple on vacation last Fall, and he went on and on about how he’d caught his wife at the club giving a friend of theirs a blowjob without his express permission. This was not the kind of couple we were interested in getting more involved with.

Polyamory is about having intimate connections with more than one person at a time and although many of those relationships have a sexual component, that isn’t necessarily the case. Partners do have ground rules, although they tend to be more like guidelines than “you need to get my permission” strictures. This means that women in these kinds of open relationships tend to have a fair amount of autonomy and personal freedom.

Even though James and I only see other people together (in a threesome or a foursome), I still feel like I have the best of both committed deep connection and a lot more personal autonomy than I had when we were in a monogamous relationship. James has more freedom and independence as well. Our relationship was not patriarchal before, but it is currently more open all around, not just sexually.

All relationships of any style are a result of what the particular people in them bring to the table, but it makes sense to me, on a variety of levels, why some women would be interested in opening up their relationships. But it still doesn’t explain why women are overwhelmingly the ones to ask to move in this direction. Perhaps it’s simply reflective of more women wanting to reclaim their authentic sexuality from a society that has put a stranglehold on it for too long.