Open Marriage

Now here's something interesting: You don't have to married to know about marriage. Why? Because you have been the son or daughter of a married couple and your best friend may be married along with the hundreds of other acquaintances and relatives that you have. The institue of marriage is all around us. And if you're not married what do you know about marriage?

Most single people know that on the surface marriage looks like something that will give us happiness, save us from lonlinless, is something to strive to have some day, and something that will be a major mile-marker in our lives.

Single people may also have a best friend who is married or a mother and father who have or had less than a perfect marriage. In that case, if you've been lucky enough to see the full spectrum of marriage, you know that it is not something to take lightly, that it is not a gift that keeps on giving (if you make no effort on your behalf), and it is something not to take for granted.

If you are married, then you have a deeper understanding of marriage from your personal experience. Not only do you know about happiness and sadness, but you have felt it at a gut level and grappled with the fickleness of controlling these elements in your own marriage.

The traditional concept of modern marriage in the West has some basic elements that we westerners are all aware of. They are:

I call this the Disney Marriage. The Disney Marriage is basically the marriage that almost every single romance movie sells. It's the romantic build-up and it goes like this:

I call this the Tiger Woods Marriage. The Tiger Woods Marriage is the marriage that every newspaper, magazine and celebrity show likes to exploit. The formula is pretty simple:

Social monogamy refers to two persons/creatures who live together, have sex with each other, and cooperate in acquiring basic resources such as food, clothes, and money.

Sexual monogamy refers to two persons/creatures who remain sexually exclusive with each other and have no outside sex partners.

Genetic monogamy refers to two partners that only have offspring with each other.

Marital monogamy refers to marriages of only two people.

• Unless you have only been with ONE person in your entire life, you are categorized as a Serial Monogomist.

• A Serial Monogomist is defined as someone who has a series of long or short-term, exclusive sexual relationships during their lifetime.

• Serial Monogomy is one type of Polygamy!

• That makes you a Polygamist.

•Monogamous marriage traps women in a life of unpaid domestic and childrearing labor.

• Humans have never been a sexually monogamous species, and cultural expectations of sexual monogamy place enormous burdens on individuals to fulfill all the sexual needs of their partners.

• These expectations are quite unrealistic given how much variety exists in people's sexual desires and sex drives.

• Sexual desires and sex drives can change over time due to circumstances (e.g., periods of high stress or poor health) and due to normal aging (e.g., changes in hormonal levels). Loving partners can find themselves mismatched in terms of their current sexual desires or sex drives.

• The failure to live up to unrealistic expectations of lifelong sexual monogamy causes people needless suffering.

• Monogamous marriage nurtures equality and the quality of life for women compared to polygamous marriages where the man may have multiple partners or wives and the woman is seen as a second-class citizen.

• Many people claim that sexual monogamy promotes security, intimacy, and stability in relationships.

• Sexual non-monogamy provokes jealousy and insecurity in most couples. Conversely, sexual monogamy reduces jealousy and builds the kind of trust and intimacy that makes relationships stable.

• Some people feel that nonmonogamy is too time consuming, takes too much energy, or is too complicated.

• Having people pair off in monogamous relationships ensures that everyone can mate. In contrast, polygamy means some men will fail to find wives, and promiscuity results in mating inequality based on attractiveness.

Open marriage refers to a marriage in which the partners agree that each may engage in extramarital sexual relationships, without this being regarded as infidelity. There are many different styles of open marriage, with the partners having varying levels of input on their spouse's activities.
Definition provided by Wikipedia.