Open Marriage: For When One Person Disappointing You Isn’t Enough (Gay Men Excluded From This Disaster)
Tuesday night, six PM. My husband and I sit at our kitchen table with three-ring binders, dividing up throuple boundary categories while our kids eat frozen perogies in front of Netflix. Tab one: Emotional Boundaries. Tab two: Sexual Boundaries. Tab three: Time Management. We’re building a relationship constitution like corporate lawyers, except instead of quarterly earnings, we’re negotiating who gets to sleep where on weekends. The kids argue over whether the perogies are too hot while we debate whether oral sex with the third person counts as “sexual intimacy” or just “physical contact.”
The day you need parliamentary procedure for your sex life is the day you should probably just get a cat.
And then we realized something that cut through all the bullshit: we would have failed anyway. Not because we didn’t try hard enough. We would have failed because we filled the roles of a straight couple, and straight people approach love like a broken washing machine that needs more parts to function properly.
Americans will turn anything into a business plan, including fucking.
Here’s what nobody wants you to know: open marriages have a ninety-two percent failure rate. Ninety-two percent. That’s not a success rate, that’s a goddamn apocalypse with a marriage license. But gay male couples? Fifty percent make it work. While straight people are building relationship constitutions thicker than tax code, gay men figured out something the rest of us missed entirely.
It’s like watching someone solve a puzzle you didn’t know had a solution.
*** The brutal truth about why straight couples were doomed from the start, and what that reveals about every relationship you’ve ever been in… ***