How Couples Decide to Open Up Their Relationships

Treat it like an experiment, and evaluate your progress.

Key points

• If you want to make a polyamory-friendly therapist happy, schedule your first session before you open up your relationship.
• Start by treating opening up your relationship as an experiment.
• Once you decide on your first relationship experiment, set a date to evaluate how it went.

If you want to make a polyamory-friendly therapist happy, schedule your first session before you open up your relationship.

Most of my polyamorous clients come to see me later when they’ve run into some bumps in the road. That’s perfectly fine, and I love working with these clients-but I often notice that I could have saved them a lot of trouble with an earlier consultation.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t open up your relationship without seeing a therapist (in fact, a lot of my work is about developing resources and tools for polyamorous people who don’t have access to therapy or don’t want it). It also doesn’t mean you can’t come to see a therapist later on in the process. But if you come to me before you open up your relationship, it’s a real treat.

One piece of advice I give all my clients who are looking to explore ethical non- monogamy:
Start by treating opening up your relationship as an experiment.

What does it mean to treat something as an experiment?

• It means staying open to revisions. There are infinite ways to structure an open relationship, and it’s hard to know exactly what will work for you and your partner(s) without some real-life experience under your belt. Opening up your relationship pretty much always leads to some surprises. As you learn more and experience more, you’ll probably want to revisit whatever agreements you and your partner(s) have made. Stay flexible and open to reevaluating.
• It means paying attention to what’s working and what isn’t. Everyone has their weak points when it comes to relationship skills. Whatever challenges you have-whether you struggle with being honest even when it might make your partner feel uncomfortable, with holding steady when you hear something challenging, or with looking inside to understand what you truly want and feel-you’ll probably find that opening up brings those challenges to the fore. Ultimately, that can be a very good thing because it gives you a chance to stretch and build some skills that will serve you well no matter what happens in your relationship. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be some sticky spots. View it as an opportunity to learn a lot about yourself and your partner(s) and potentially access some serious personal growth.
• It means cultivating curiosity. Cultivating an attitude of curiosity can make a huge difference in tough conversations with your partner(s). It’s the difference between saying, “Why can’t you make this work?” versus “My beloved, I see that you’re struggling. What’s this experience bringing up for you?”
• It means keeping the stakes low. A lot of the conflict I see in partners exploring early open relationships comes from a feeling that the stakes are very high: “If we don’t figure this out now, we might as well give up!” Whoah. That’s a lot of pressure. The more you can avoid putting unnecessary stress on yourself and unnecessary pressure on your partner(s), the better off you’ll be. Opening up a relationship can be a big emotional stretch, and an emotional stretch is a lot like a physical stretch: If you try to force it when you’re feeling tense and tight, it’ll hurt, and it might do damage, but if you do it a little bit at a time when you’re loose, relaxed, and comfortable, you might find that you’re more flexible than you ever imagined. Keeping the stakes low helps create the emotional safety that allows for big stretches. Opening up your relationship can lead to a lot of great things, but it’s not an emergency, so don’t let your excitement turn into pressure.

Once you decide on your first relationship experiment, I suggest you set a date to evaluate how it went, rather than just waiting for a crisis or difficult feelings to precipitate your next conversation. Set a date and time, settle in with a cup of tea, and have a chat about what worked, what didn’t work so well, and what your next experiment might look like for you.

Finally, since you’re here, I’m guessing you’re thinking about opening up your relationship or know somebody who is, and I’d love to offer you some more resources that can help. If you’re feeling a little bit nervous about saying, “Hey, I might want to try an open relationship,” or you don’t know where to go next with the conversation, I’ve written a step-by-step guide to starting the discussion about ethical non-monogamy with your partner.

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Originally published at https://www.psychologytoday.com.