Sex
Opening Your Relationship? You Can Learn From Male Couples
Instead of reinventing the wheel, borrow from gay mens' experiences with open relationships.
Posted June 9, 2025 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Key points
- Opening up relationships is a delicate and emotional process.
- There are agreements that can make the process smoother.
- Gay men have been doing it for a long time; straight couples can learn from them.
- Consider working with an experienced couples therapist.
In recent years, there’s been a flurry of interest from heterosexual couples in “opening up” their relationships and exploring ways of being sexual and emotional with people other than their partner. In particular, Molly Roden Winter’s 2024 memoir More seemed to entice readers to be daring—yet I felt it lacked any fundamental joy in the practice.
Men have had open relationships and experienced polyamory long before there was a term for it. It’s not accurate, of course, to say that we can simply translate the experience of gay men to straight couples, but there still may be some things we do that others could find useful.
Before that, though, there are two caveats:
Putting it in context: It’s important to understand, first, the history of gay sexuality. It’s only been a few generations in the United States (and less still for people in many countries) since gay men were arrested, traumatized, mistreated, even killed. It’s easy to see why their sexual practices became secret—and were the source of shame.
What this inevitably led to, in terms of survival, was the compartmentalization of gay men's lives. Sexual and emotional interests were driven underground. And in the years since homosexuality has become better tolerated in our culture, some of the shame and fear has gone—but for many of us, the compartmentalization has survived.
Male and female sexuality aren't identical: If we say that transferring gay men’s ability to open their relationships to heterosexual couples is a smooth transition, we’re starting with a faulty premise. The reality is that women tend to be more relational and communicative, on average, than men are. Men are, in general but not always, better able to separate sexuality and sexual practices from emotional attachment. Thus, some members of heterosexual couples, and women in particular, may find it difficult to make an open relationship work.
What Works for Gay Men Who Open Their Relationships
What makes some gay men particularly tolerant of open relationships tends to be a combination of factors: an ability to compartmentalize, an ease about sexuality, the ability to stretch boundaries, a resiliency in being able to listen to their inner drive rather than external pressure, and, of course, the capacity and often preference to see sex as a purely recreational activity. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the successful part of many open relationships is the agreement that “sex is sex and fun is fun.”
But gay men also usually have a distinct advantage over straight people in that their community is by and large supportive of having open relationships—even often expects it. “The scene” is highly sexualized, often competitive, and accepting of casual, group, or public sex. Because the act of coming out can be traumatic, gay men are often more experienced in self-exploration than others. Talking about sex, hook-ups, kinks, and fetishes therefore tends to be easier and more common.
Finding community can be a challenge for heterosexual couples who don’t have the support of groups of people normalizing and discussing casually an open arrangement. Young and fluid couples may have more support than traditional ones, and more and more heterosexual couples are dabbling in opening up their relationships.
How an Open Relationship Could Work for You
There are some challenges in making an open relationship work. While for many gay men, the point of sexual encounters outside a committed relationship is not to end the relationship, but to have sexual enjoyment in a number of different scenarios. But if an “external” sexual encounter becomes too emotionally intense, it can in fact threaten the primary relationship.
What all this means is that you need to be very intentional and deliberate about how you enter into this new phase of your relationship.
There are no hard-and-fast rules for opening up any relationship, though if it came down to one thought, that would be communication. In other words, if you want to establish boundaries and parameters within opening up your relationship that will make you both feel safe, then you have to be extremely clear about communicating—and agreeing upon—those boundaries.
What might they include? Here are some guidelines that many of the couples I see in my practice have found useful:
- “The bed is sacred.” In other words, the relationship must always be prioritized over other encounters.
- Decide how much to share. Do you want to know about your partner’s dates? Do you want to meet your partner’s dates? Or is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy best for the two of you?
- Stay healthy. Get regular STI testing.
- Expect a bumpy road with a lot of challenges.
- Try not to use external dates/encounters as a tool or a punishment.
- Agree whether you’re OK with your partner seeing all the texts you receive, sharing social media, etc.
- Communicate with each other about what is and isn’t working for each of you.
Open Relationships Aren’t for Everyone
I've found that one of the quirks of gay life is dinner-party conversations with friends during which various “conquests” are discussed. This is a way to reinforce the normalcy of open relations and, in some ways, grounds us. Heterosexual couples can benefit from this too, by finding people who can be available to you for confidences or even just sharing some of the fun moments.
And if you find that opening your relationship is not working for you, there is no shame—it’s not for everyone. However, it can be a long road to return to monogamy, and you’ll need help. It’s better by far to work out some of the potential issues before you open your relationship. Think about what various scenarios might mean to you. Talk about them.
My strongest advice—whether you’re at the beginning of considering opening your relationship or already in it—is to work with a couples therapist who has training in sexuality and has dealt with consensual non-monogamous relationships.
