What Happens When a Couple Opens Their Relationship?

Source: Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

Consensual non-monogamy (CNM) is fairly common, with about 1 in 5 adults saying they’ve been in some type of sexually open relationship. Interest in CNM also appears to be on the rise, with internet searches pertaining to polyamory and open relationships increasing significantly over the past decade.

As research has begun to shed light on the prevalence and popularity on CNM, researchers have focused more attention on understanding how these relationships work, including how they compare with those of people who remain monogamous.

What Happens After Opening Up?

Surprisingly little work has explored what actually happens over time when a couple decides to open their relationship, but a study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science offers some insight. A team of US and Canadian researchers explored the trajectory of couples that did and did not decide to open their relationships over a two-month period.

The researchers sought to test conflicting popular beliefs and assumptions about open relationships. On the one hand, some argue that opening up can be a helpful way to address relationship challenges because CNM offers more opportunities to have one’s sexual and non-sexual needs met. Advocates of this perspective would argue that opening up should therefore improve a relationship.

On the other hand, some argue that CNM is like opening up Pandora’s box: It can only lead to conflict, trouble, and heartache. From this perspective, opening up should lead to a decline in relationship quality.

Putting these ideas to the test, the researchers recruited a sample of 233 adults in relationships (80 men, 143 women, 10 non-binary) who completed two surveys about their relationship, separated by about two months. To participate in the study, individuals had to already be considering opening up their relationship in some way.

At the start of the study, participants had been in their relationships for 8 years on average, most (55%) were married, and almost half (45%) identified as heterosexual.

At each time point, participants reported on their relationship satisfaction, life satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction. During the first survey, they were also asked why they wanted to open up in the first place.

How Opening Up Affects Sex, Life, and Relationship Satisfaction

In the end, 155 participants (67%) did open their relationship over the course of the study. These openers were more satisfied with their relationships than non-openers at both points in time, which suggests that rather than people opening their relationships because they were struggling, it was actually the ones who were happiest who decided to do it.

Interestingly, however, relationship satisfaction did not actually change over time for people who opened up; instead, those individuals appeared to maintain their already high levels of satisfaction. The story was similar for non-openers: They didn’t experience any changes in relationship satisfaction over time on average.

In addition, there were no changes in life satisfaction for either group.

What did change was sexual satisfaction: People who opened up experienced an increase in sexual satisfaction over the two-month period, whereas non-openers experienced a decline.

Further, the researchers found that people who said they were interested in opening up because they were sexually incompatible with their partner on the initial survey were more satisfied with their sex lives later on to the extent that they actually opened up, suggesting that CNM may have provided a solution to their sexual incompatibility issue.

In short, what the results of this research suggest is that couples who open up don’t necessarily see a change in overall relationship satisfaction, but they do tend to see a boost in sexual satisfaction.

Takeaways and Implications

The fact that openers’ overall feelings about the relationship didn’t change might just be because they were already very happy with their connections. In other words, there just wasn’t a lot of room for their relationship satisfaction to increase further.

Relationships Essential Reads

Is Divorce the Answer?

How Do Couples Really Deal With Money Behind the Scenes?

By contrast, there was more room for sexual satisfaction to improve, and that’s where the movement happened. So perhaps opening up was driven more by a desire to increase sexual satisfaction than relationship satisfaction.

It’s important to note that this study is far from the final say on how opening up affects a relationship. It only spanned two months, which might not be quite long enough to capture the full range of relationship effects.

Also, only one half of each couple was surveyed and participants were predominately female-identified. It’s important for future research to capture both partners' feelings, as well as to assess whether opening up might have different implications for people based on their gender and sexual orientation.

It’s also possible that different kinds of CNM—polyamory vs. swinging vs. open relationships—have different trajectories, which is another important direction for further work in this area.

That said, the results of this research suggest that people who open up their relationships tend to do so from a position of strength. Their relationships are usually already in a good place, and they seem to maintain the quality of their relationships, at least in the short term.

While opening up does not necessarily seem to increase or decrease the overall quality of the relationship, it does seem to offer a boost to people’s sex lives.

Facebook image: Pau Novell Aran/Shutterstock