There are three main aspects:

• keeping the promises you make
• avoiding making promises that you don’t think you will be able to keep
• renegotiating your promises rather than breaking them

All three are essential.First of all, if you break a promise you’ll be hurting someone, whether it’s just by inconveniencing them or more seriously by shaking their faith in your trustworthiness. Promises between partners are particularly important because they have chosen to rely on each other more than on other people. If your long-term partner, who you’ve chosen to spend your life with, turns out to be someone you can’t trust to keep their promises, you are going to be pretty upset.

But if anyone says that you should keep every promise, whatever it was and however long ago you made it, they are being very unrealistic. A promise is a prediction of the future. It expresses an intention that you will do something or not do something. None of us can accurately predict the future, though. Circumstances change, and even if you fully intended at the time to do whatever it was, it can become impossible.

Acting honourably involves keeping your promises as far as you can. But when a promise becomes difficult to keep, what can someone do then? They can break the promise and make the excuse that it would have been too difficult to keep it. Or, better, they can renegotiate the promise: say that they are finding it difficult to keep and suggesting an alternative.

But that isn’t all. Someone who promises the world but keeps renegotiating out of their commitments just annoys everyone they deal with, even if they don’t, strictly speaking, break their promises. This situation can be avoided by not makeing promises you don’t think you will be able to keep.

Promising monogamy

This might all seem obvious. But one very common promise is to be monogamous, and we all know how often that is made and broken. It is a promise implied (and sometimes explicitly stated) in the marriage vows, and it is also often implied when two people start to go out with each other and act as a couple.

I have always found it hard to understand how people can promise to love and have sex with only one person for the rest of their lives. Only around half of the people who make this promise go on to break it according to various surveys, so why promise it?

When I was quite young I decided that I was never going to get married, and I think it was because of this issue. Why make a promise I know I probably won’t be able to keep, and thereby risk my own happiness and that of the person I promise monogamy to? I seem to be unusual in this: most people who are lucky enough to find someone they love, who loves them and whom they are legally allowed to marry seem to manage to get married. Why not just swallow my qualms and do the same, Anna?

Well, I for one don’t want to ignore my reservations. I don’t believe I should make a promise I don’t mean to keep, and I don’t think I should try to kid myself that I can definitely be monogamous forever, however wonderful my partner is.

The reason that some people get married or otherwise promise to be monogamous, I suspect, is that it is conventionally required if you want to be with the person you love, get the rights that come with legal marriage and have your relationship sanctioned by society.

But those of us who want to commit to a long-term relationship don’t have to go along with this implied requirement. You can avoid legal marriage, either by not having any kind of ceremony by having a commitment ceremony. Or, if you want to get married and your marriage vows include the word faithfulness, you can make sure it is clear in the ceremony what you mean by this and whether it includes monogamy.

A promise of faithfulness could mean that:

• you will always take your loved ones’ interests into account in your decisions
• you will be honest with them
• you will put them first
• you will tell them whenever you have difficulty keeping any agreements you have with them
• you will renegotiate rather than breaking promises
• you will listen to them, communicate with them, be tolerant and accepting, and to try your best to act lovingly.

All these are things that you can make an effort to do. But promising not to fall in love with someone else, not to be attracted to anyone else, not to fall out of love, never to stop finding your partner sexually attractive – these are things you can’t control, so any such promise

For all those readers who find monogamy difficult: will you join me in refusing to promise it? To do so will be not an admission of weakness but a statement of integrity.

At the age of 20 I met my future partner of 9½ years. Sylvia was an arty type and we fitted well together. The relationship was good – in fact the sex was excellent and there was lots of it. It was other stuff which got in the way of our relationship continuing in a smooth progression of lifelong monogamy, mainly lack of trust, jealousy and a low self esteem on her part, and a lively, excitable, fun-loving persona on mine.

I’ve always found it easy to talk to people and am not bothered about appearances, so I’ve lots of friends and contacts. Sylvia wasn’t so outgoing and I often went socialising by myself. Sylvia would sometimes ask if I fancied other women, or if I’d told her I’d had a coffee with a female friend with whom I wasn’t sexually active, Sylvia would ask things like did we ever hold hands, or if I kissed my friend goodbye, was it on her cheek or lips?

I loved her – enough even to decline the offer of sex with someone at a party. This event (or non-event!) was some kind of fulcrum in our time together. I told her that I could’ve gone upstairs with the woman but had declined because I was in a relationship with someone who couldn’t cope with that kind of thing, and I loved her more than a quick fun bonk with a stranger. I felt good being faithful at the party, as I believed I was being honourable and behaving in the right way.

Her reaction was unexpected – she flew off into a rage. I think the supposition was that I’d done something to encourage this woman. When I told her, I wished I’d actually done the deed! If I had done it I would have either told Sylvia or been ’seen through’ if I’d tried to hide it. And I’m fairly sure that would have been the end. It really made it clear to me that she had a problem with her feelings about me, that she was possessive and damaged.

So, smarting from a punishment for my honesty and integrity, I started ‘lying by omission’ i.e. I decided not to mention the occasional coffee dates as it only seemed to stir up trouble.

Trying to be monogamous

I should say from the beginning that I have talked to Russell but not to Sylvia, so I only have his side of the story. However, I don’t think his experience is unusual. He is the kind of person who thrives on getting to know new people, and on flirting. He says that many women find him attractive and he gets an offer of a sexual encounter fairly regularly. Someone with his kind of personality will always find monogamy difficult.

Russell is also a person who hates being dishonest or breaking trust. When he was with Sylvia he tried hard to stay faithful, in a relationship where this meant staying monogamous. When offered the chance to have sex with someone he found attractive, he said no because he knew Sylvia would be upset by it. This seems to me to be exactly the right thing to have done.

As usual, I’d like to ask what you would have done in Russell’s situation. I wouldn’t recommend lying by omission, the route he chose at the time – and I’m sure he now wouldn’t recommend it either.

One possible way forward might have been for the two of them to have a long discussion about what their different expectations were, and how they might get round their differing needs and personalities. Perhaps with the help of a counsellor, they might have worked something out.

Another possibility might have been for Russell to continue his ‘occasional coffee dates’ but mention them to Sylvia each time. But this would have been very difficult without first having that long discussion and it would have caused a lot of conflict. I can see why Russell didn’t do this.

And I suppose the other option might have been for Russell to decide that he was unable to continue in the relationship, given the differences between his and Sylvia’s outlook on monogamy.

When your partner admits being tempted

What about Sylvia’s options? I don’t know exactly why Sylvia reacted negatively to Russell’s admission – although again, I don’t think her reaction is unusual.

What would you do if your partner came back from a party and told you that they had been offered sex but refused because they wanted to be faithful to you? ( This is assuming that you have an agreement of monogamy, whether spoken or unspoken.) You could feel angry or hurt if, as Russell suspects of Sylvia, you think that they might have encouraged the other person. Or you could thank them for being honest and for thinking of your wishes even when tempted to break their promise.

It is clear to me that Sylvia’s reaction was most certainly counterproductive in this case. By giving Russell the impression that he was being punished despite his honesty, she was giving him no incentive to be honest again. Perhaps she thought that she had to give him a reason not to even flirt with other women again, never mind be honest about his flirting. With Russell or someone like him, this was never likely to work. Reacting angrily to your partner’s honest admission that they have refused an offer of sex is just encouraging them to lie in the future.

For some people who have experienced this situation, they’ve discovered that actually they didn’t mind their partner being interested somebody else, and the experience has opened up a whole new world of Open Fidelity. It didn’t happen this way for Russell and Sylvia, although the experience shaped the way Russell felt about monogamy and later helped him to work out a more honest way to have several lovers.

In the next post, I’ll tell you how Russell and Sylvia’s relationship developed.

Yes – it’s called Open Fidelity.

I think it’s time for an overview of what I mean by Open Fidelity. The following statements sum it up.

• People can love more than one person at a time.
• There are people in honest, responsible relationships between three or more partners, and/or who have opened up their relationship to other lovers. It can be done.
• You don’t have to be monogamous to be faithful.
• Faithfulness means keeping your promises, whatever they were.
• Sometimes it is hard to keep your promises to your partner; it is better to renegotiate than break a promise.
• Being monogamous can be great if it works for you; better to choose it out of the range of responsible options than to assume it is the only ethical choice.
• Honesty is crucial in any relationship, especially if you have more than one partner or lover.
• Jealousy can often be overcome, or lived with, or used to add excitement to a relationship.

She has interviewed over a hundred people who have had no-strings-attached sex while married, without telling their spouses, and concludes that this is becoming more and more common in the UK. She also concludes that many of them don’t feel guilty about it. Women are no longer much less likely to have affairs than men, and age isn’t a barrier either.

Like so many journalists writing on this subject, Levin completely ignores the idea that someone might be honest about having sex with someone else. None of the interviewees seem to have considered for a moment the idea of telling their partners about their need for more sex, or about the fact that they are having sex with someone else. As usual, the choice seems to be between monogamy and cheating. The third article talks about what happens when the other spouse finds out, though this never seems to be through a confession.

Interestingly, there seems to be a consensus among the people interviewed that this extramarital sex keeps them sane and happy and therefore saves their marriage. To some extent I would agree with this: sex with others can enliven a relationship, as I have found myself and heard again and again from the people I’ve interviewed. But Levin does point out that “the partner who chooses to have a fling has to live a life of subterfuge and always be on the alert in case he or she is found out”. Yes, it is a big price to pay. I would go further: I’d say it the deceit that causes most of the problems, rather than the extramarital sex itself. In fact, if there is no deceit, sex with others has a much better chance of enlivening the relationship.

I want to say loud and clear to people in this situation: there is another way. You don’t have to be monogamous and you don’t have to cheat. But it requires talking to your spouse and telling them about your needs.

Here are some thoughts from an Open Fidelity perspective for someone who is married and considering having, or has had, a no-strings-attached affair, and who wants to stay in the marriage.

The ideal time to talk to your spouse about this issue is when you’re starting to feel unhappy and are tempted to cheat but before you have done anything concrete to find another sexual partner. It will be much more difficult to try and find a solution if you have already broken your original promises. But even that can be done. The longer you leave it, the more difficult it will be, either to keep the secret or to come clean. And the secret is almost bound to come out at some point.

Tell your spouse that you are having problems being monogamous. Tell them you have considered looking elsewhere for some sex, or that you have done so if that is the case. Also tell them how much you love them, how committed you feel and that you don’t want to leave them. Say that you would like to work out a way in which both of you can be sexually satisfied while still managing to stay together.

Then wait for the suggestion to sink in, for your spouse’s anger to die down, and for them to consider their options and the alternative options (the two of you splitting up; you having an affair behind their back; and you being unhappily monogamous). If your having sex with someone else with no strings attached will really not affect your love for your spouse or your relationship with them, it might be possible to convince them to accept this too (but make sure you are certain of it first!).

If you have been unhappy, the chances are they have also been unhappy, so they might be glad for the opportunity to talk about their difficulties. Who knows, they might also have been wanting something different in their sex life and have been wishing they could tell you. They might even have already guessed that you’re thinking of an affair. This will be an opportunity for you to work out what you both want and find a way in which your probably differing needs can be made compatible.

Then try, tentatively and gently, to negotiate with each other a solution that involves you getting some sexual fulfilment while staying with your spouse. I can’t say what the solution will be – each relationship is different – but I can, over the course of this blog, give you examples of people who have tried this solution and what they have learnt from the experience. Are there some rules that you can agree that will make it easier to cope with each other’s liaisons? Practising safe sex is an obvious example. Perhaps a period of strict monogamy would be a good idea while you find ways to make non-monogamy possible. Are you prepared for your spouse to have lovers too? If you find this idea difficult, ask yourself why. Look for support from others who have tried honest non-monogamy, perhaps via this blog and the links from it.

This whole blog is about this alternative to monogamy and cheating, called Open Fidelity, so keep reading if you want more tips.

• ignore the feeling and stay monogamous;
• leave their partner in order to get together with a new partner; or
• cheat on their partner with the other person.

I’ve talked a bit about staying monogamous, though I’m sure there will be more on that in future posts. Leaving the original partner is always a possibility, but often the person does not want to leave, for reasons such as:

• they love their partner
• they feel committed
• they don’t want to be seen to break their promises
• breaking up would cause upheaval (emotionally, practically and/or financially, particularly if they are married or have children).

For those who don’t want to leave their partner but are finding it hard to reconcile this with an attraction to someone else, a secret affair is the only other obvious option in our culture.

So given that other options aren’t obviously available to most people (a situation I aim to change), it isn’t really surprising how many people cheat on their partners. It seems to be almost expected by western society today that many people will enter into ‘monogamous’ relationships (such as marriage) and will then, sooner or later, have sex with someone else without telling their partner or spouse.

If I promised to love only one person until death, I would be saying ‘never again’ to the experience of falling in love.

Never again to wallow in that delicious agony of lusting after someone.

Never again to experience the miracle of finding they lust after me too.

Never to flirt.

Never to kiss lips I haven’t kissed before (or at least only friendly kisses, not proper snogs).

Never to discover a new lover’s body, marvelling in its uniqueness, the way they respond or move or touch.

As I am also a bisexual woman, being monogamous with a man would mean ruling out all future sexual contact with a woman. And promising monogamy with a woman means the even more unthinkable suggestion of never again having sex with a man.

How can anyone volunteer for this? Does anyone really think about it this way when they make a promise to be monogamous? I can only conclude that for many people it is an intention not a certainty. Or even wishful thinking, or blind optimism, or self-deception. Or are some people even lying when they make the promise, knowing they don’t really mean it?

‘Oh no’, you may say, ‘for me it was easy, I knew I would never need anyone but my partner for the rest of my life’. Well, if so, I’m delighted for you and your partner, and good luck with never needing anyone for the years to come. My feeling, though, is that you are in the minority.

For me it is not monogamy itself that is problematic. I have been monogamous in practice for a year or two on several occasions; in other words I have had only one partner, and had sex with only them. But promising to be monogamous is another thing altogether. I tried once and lasted three months before ending the relationship. As long as I know I’m not ruling out possibilities in the future, I can live without these possibilities for the time being. But I couldn’t promise to be the exclusive lover, for the long term, of just one person.

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.

Many people try their utmost to be monogamous. They try to avoid getting tempted into having sex with anyone other than their spouse (or their partner, in other words the person they have committed to). But more fail than succeed.

Yes, there are couples who stay happily together for decades, with no interest in anyone but each other. They are the lucky ones in today’s society – they find it easy to keep to the conventional rules.

But I suspect that many other couples who do manage long-term monogamy struggle with it. They are tempted and resist the temptation, or they avoid situations where they could be tempted. Perhaps one of the two partners struggles alone with their attractions to other people. This person might be afraid of mentioning to their partner how difficult they are finding the struggle to be monogamous, for fear that their partner could be angry or could leave them.

Alternatively, the two partners might struggle together when one of them is attracted to a third person. One partner is suspicious and the other partner makes promises or denies everything.

Looking at relationships this way, we can see that large portions of the energy in a relationship can be used in keeping to the rule of monogamy.

And of course many others don’t manage it. I will go into the numbers in more detail in a future post but, essentially, studies show that in western societies marital infidelity occurs in 40-70% of all marriages. These infidelities can take many forms, from visits to prostitutes, one-night stands and holiday flings to affairs lasting years.

Many of the married people having affairs have vowed to ‘forsake all others’ when they got married, usually with full sincerity, and even when these exact words are not an explicit part of the marriage ceremony they are implied in it. Can we argue that they have changed into different people, suddenly not caring about the feelings of their spouse? If infidelity was a rare occurrence we could treat it as an aberration; but it is not rare, not at all.

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.