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.

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.

• 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.