• a couple in a long-term committed relationship in which one or both of them have ongoing secondary relationships with another partner, with everyone’s knowledge and consent;
• three people who form a committed relationship between all (I call this a triad);
• four people in who form a committed relationship between all, or in which all are linked to all the others but aren’t necessarily romantically or sexually involved with everyone else (a quad);
• larger groups in which each person has a romantic relationship with at least one and mostly more than one other member.

These would probably all be classified as polyamorous relationships by most people familiar with the term (do you disagree? Add a comment!). They all involve romantic relationships and long-term commitment, and generally sex as well, with more than one person.

Polyamory is also often seen as an identity: someone might describe themself as a polyamorous person, that is, someone who is capable of polyamorous relationships and would like to be in such relationships, regardless of whether they have one, two or more or even no partners at the moment.

But there are other types of open, honest, responsible nonmonogamous relationships that some wouldn’t include within the concept of polyamory. For example:

• couples who otherwise behave monogamously but sometimes go together to sex parties or swingers’ clubs and have sexual encounters with others, in each other’s presence;
• couples who have agreed that they can each have sexual encounters with other people but don’t want these other encounters to develop into romantic relationships and have agreed rules to keep the relationships with others casual;
• people who aren’t in a committed relationship at the moment and who date (or plan to date) several people in parallel, explaining to each new date that they are also seeing (and perhaps having sex with) other people.
• people who would prefer to be monogamous but who are in a relationship with someone who finds this difficult and have therefore agreed to allow them other relationships as long as they are honest ones.

This blog is called Open Fidelity rather than Polyamory because I aim to show that the ideas of polyamory can be useful to anyone, including people who don’t identify as polyamorous themselves. Most people are interested in long-term relationships with only one person at a time, even if they don’t want to be strictly monogamous. So polyamorous relationships are probably always going to be a minority pursuit. I believe everyone can find these ideas useful, even those who fully intend to be monogamous, and even perhaps those who intend to cheat on their partners.

So what is Open Fidelity? It is being open about your attractions to more than one person and how you act on these attractions, and it is being faithful to any promises you have made to your partner. Before explaining this in more detail I will look further into the problems with the currently accepted way of doing things.

Here is Nell describing her experience of being unfaithful:

“I was monogamous for seven months with one boyfriend. When an opportunity for sex arose with a close female friend, I was very happy to go with it. But now I knew I was supposed to be monogamous, and so this was clandestine. She knew of him, but he was unaware. For the following year I was increasingly sexual with others. My boyfriend remained mostly unaware, though I sailed close to the wind several times. I understood that the status quo was supposed to be monogamy, and I simply saw myself as destined to be unfaithful. I knew that I didn’t love my boyfriend any less because I was sharing sexualness with other people, in fact some of these others offered things that he never could, and maybe it helped us remain together. I rarely had guilt at my sexual relationships with other people. I knew he would find it hard to know, but I was becoming increasingly aware of my own discomfort at this dishonesty.

“It seemed wrong that the person I professed to love most was not the person I could share everything with. It’s not the practice of deceit – I’m exceptionally good at deceit, and always have been – by nature I was secretive and I found the act of dishonesty very easy. However, emotionally, it had stopped making sense. I needed to be able to share the fullness of my life and relationships with the person I was having my most important relationship with. Yet I didn’t know how to do this without destroying that relationship. Already, several times, I had had to admit to being sexual with another, and twice, he had broken off the relationship because of this, though only for a matter of weeks. He had also asked me to be monogamous, and I had said ‘yes’, because I didn’t know how to say anything else. Each time, shortly afterwards, I had broken that decision and given myself a hard time about my inability to trust myself to remain faithful. And yet knowing, still, that I didn’t love my boyfriend any less.

“In the end what happened was it seemed to be that if I said I would be monogamous, almost immediately I’d be sexual with someone else. It was like I was proving to myself that I couldn’t keep that promise. Apparently I didn’t want to even try. Reading my diaries, I had written something like ‘I can’t even trust myself, I only promised last week that I wouldn’t be sexual with other men, and here I am, this has happened, and I can’t keep my promise’.”

Have you had an experience like this? Have you had a secret affair and felt guilty? Have you promised yourself that you would never do it again, and then broken that promise? There is a solution.

Nell later discovered for herself that it was possible to be nonmonogamous in an open and honest way. Many other people I have interviewed have also discovered this. She learnt about polyamory, which means having honest, loving and/or romantic relationships with more than one person. I’ll write more about polyamory in the next post: it is not exactly the same as open fidelity but has a lot in common with it.

I am using the word ‘monogamous’ in this blog to mean ‘having sex with only one person over a period of time’. A person who is monogamous is someone who, over the course of, say, a year, has sex with only one person. I will usually mean ’sexually monogamous’, that is, if someone has a romantic attachment to more than one person but has sex with only one, they are strictly speaking being monogamous. Of course there is plenty to discuss in all this, but this definition is where I am starting from.

Helen Fisher, in Anatomy of Love: a Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce, defines the term differently, as ‘having only one spouse’ regardless of any short-term sexual relations with other people. This is more of an anthropological definition, used in discussions of forms of marriage in different cultures.

I think the definition I am using is the more widely used one in general western culture, and so will make more sense to people. Besides, we need words that distinguish people who have sex with only one person from those who have sex with more than one person.

Partner

I generally talk about partners in all my writing, rather than about husbands, wives, girlfriends or boyfriends, for two main reasons. Firstly, what I am talking about applies just as much to same-sex relationships as it does to relationships between men and women. And secondly, whether a couple is married or not is not usually relevant to the argument, as nowadays many couples live together (or even separately) without being married but the same issues surrounding monogamy still arise, just as they would if the couple were married. I am aware that ‘partner’ can mean ‘business partner’, but here it won’t mean that.

The problem with the gender-neutral approach is that you can end up with lots of ‘they’s and confusion about who is being referred to. I don’t think it is useful to use ‘he or she’ all the time, and grammatically I don’t have a problem with using ‘they’ in the singular (it is very commonly used). If you talk about a husband and a wife, you can they say ‘he did this, she said that’ and it is clear, but with two partners, ‘they did this and they did the other’ is not. I will try to make it as clear as possible, sometimes by using examples with names when no other method works. Please add a comment if a particular sentence isn’t clear to you, for this or any other reason.

Infidelity

One of the main arguments I will be making is that ‘fidelity’ shouldn’t mean the same as ‘monogamy’. For the purposes of the next few posts, however, while discussing the status quo, I will use ‘infidelity’ to mean ‘having sex with someone who isn’t your partner without your partner’s knowledge or permission’. Someone who does this could be called a ‘cheater’ and their partner has been ‘cheated on’. These terms are not ideal but I choose to use them because they are generally understood.

In mainstream British society nearly 21st century, as in many other countries today, it is expected that it person will fall in love with someone, ‘go out’ with them for a while (and not go out with anyone else during that time), and either split up or go on to marry them or at least stay together long-term.

(It is most common that these relationships are between a man and a woman, and in some circles this is the only accepted option, although in many places now same-sex relationships are also accepted. But whether same-sex or opposite-sex, it is expected that each person has only one relationship at the time.)

However, it is also widely acknowledged that people in relationships or marriages often get tempted to have sex with other people. When this happens, this is meant to be kept a secret. And if someone find out that their partner is having an affair, they are expected to be devastated, to lose faith in the cheating partner and to end the relationship.

This way of having relationships seems to be accepted by the majority of people. But is it the only way? Is everyone happy? How else could we do things?

I suggest a solution called open fidelity: a way for partners to be faithful to each other while leaving open the possibility that each of them could have other lovers or other partners at some point.