Suzanne Noble discusses opening up long-term relationships and different non-monogamous arrangements like swinging and soft swap. She contrasts ethical non-monogamy with polyamory, where emotional involvement develops outside the primary partnership, and warns that jealousy, constant communication, and gendered dynamics in heterosexual relationships create real risks of hurt.
Chapters
Let's talk about opening up your relationship. There are so many different ways to open up your relationship and so many different ways of describing how you open up your relationship. And I know that for many people, when they've been in a long-term relationship and it gets a bit stale, they might consider going and having sex with other people and just, you know, enjoying just that new adventure, that new kind of first date energy that you get when you're with somebody new. But of course, opening up your relationship, in my experience, is not always that easy. It's really easy for jealousy to get in the way, and if you don't communicate what's going on, it's really easy for somebody to get hurt. Now, there's so many different ways of opening up your relationship. You can, for instance, open up the idea that you and your partner are going to have sex with another couple and you're all going to be in the same room together. You can do what's called soft swap, which is when you're both in the same room but you're not actually having sex with the other people. Perhaps you're just watching and enjoying just being intimate in front of other people. Or full swap, where you will possibly have penetrative sex or sex with the other couple, um, on that, and you're each having sex with the other person's partner. Of course, then there's also various ways that you can be polyamorous. You can decide that— for me, polyamory is about actually falling in love, getting emotionally involved with somebody else while you're in a relationship. Usually the established relationship that you're in is called your primary partnership, and when you step outside that to be intimate with somebody else, that's— could be potentially called ethical non-monogamy or polyamory. Polyamory to me is when you actually agree that you can fall in love with somebody else. To me, that's really challenging, and all of this requires a huge amount of communication because it's so easy for somebody to get hurt. Not just your primary partner, but of course the person that you've stepped outside the relationship to be with. And the other challenge I find is that often in heterosexual relationships, it's the woman who tends to get more attention than the men, and therefore it's easier for the men to get, you know, hurt because the woman's getting all this attention and maybe the man is feeling a bit left out. Whatever you decide that you want to do, Really, it's all about discussing it with your partner, making sure that you're happy, and not just at the outset, but also while you are exploring, while you are developing this idea of opening up your relationship. Whatever you do, just be kind and, um, you know, be aware that it's not always that easy, but when it works, it can be a whole lot of fun.
