Mating Season
Why the open relationship works exactly as nobody seems to expect.
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You must admire the confidence of a man who signs a dotted line into an open relationship. It’s like volunteering to be the third wheel on your own bicycle.
According to The Guardian, open relationships are enjoying a moment. The ménage à trois works like so: Your girlfriend or wife enjoys a host of sexual suitors, and you do the same—in your head and with your dominant hand.
The premise of an open relationship is simple. It’s much like Marx’s famous dictum envisioning a communist paradise: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The problem: the man vastly overestimates his ability to satisfy his needs.
Last week, Louis Theroux’s viral Manosphere documentary introduced the achingly modish term, one-sided monogamy. Manosphere disciples revere that concept. It’s the liturgy of the Very Online. The gospel of superior men who prove their superiority by desperately seeking the fleeting approval of other men.
The open relationship commands acres of online space. The crusty upper class call it swinging. The enlightened middle class call it polyamory. We council-estate kids call it shagging about. Apply whichever definition, therapeutic or otherwise, to suit your tastes, preferences, or tribal affiliations.
It all means one thing. The open relationship plays out as a tragicomic performance of asymmetrical desire. In plain English, the open relationship is more one-sided than a North Korean election.
Women watching that Netflix documentary spat battery acid at their screens. What? He shags his way through Soho whilst I stay here in Penge, artfully arranging the organic celery in little Poppy’s Instgrammable lunchbox? Not bloody likely.
Not bloody likely, indeed. Here on Planet Reality, immutable laws of nature keep the male half of the species attached to a short biological leash.
Consider the Desire Disparity Principle. Generally speaking, a woman has options. She may sleep with whom she wishes. A man sleeps with one of the few willing to be disappointed by him. Nature designed this law to avoid the obvious: if men could sleep with whomever they wished, we would still be thousands of years from discovering fire.
If you don’t believe me, conduct an experiment. Or just sign up for a dating app. With every swipe right, a woman will gain another admirer. Her inbox pings like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl. Inside are enough snoozy openers to sedate a sack of Xanax.
Every open relationship diarised in The Guardian follows a James Patterson formula. A middle-class Islington couple agrees to an open relationship. Their heads flood with expectation. She shortlists ten promising applicants from a pool of hundreds, if not thousands. He scribbles their names on the whiteboard in the garden office. She splurges a small fortune on Honey Birdette. He obsessively checks his barren Hinge inbox.
“It’s okay,” he assures himself. “The old world is dying. The new is yet to be born.”
And yet, a new world is born—audibly—at least in one bedroom of four. Meanwhile, our revolutionary man checks again whether he’s turned off his notifications.
He has options. None of them good. He could advertise his need only for reality to dawn: his ability to meet that need doesn’t quite match up. His need is the planet Venus resting on a golf tee of ability. Stocks in his sexual market value collapse like the value of NFTs.
He takes a silent vow of celibacy. Just for now. At least until the nympho hordes finish whatever is keeping them so occupied. He develops an interest in West Ham United. Why let one person break your heart each Saturday when eleven footballers can do the same?
The groans of carnal rampage cut through his AirPods. He scours online. Sex Addicts Anonymous holds a weekly meeting in a discreet hotel lobby just down the road. No, he thinks, too desperate. His Fitbit buzzes. Sarah has burned 707 calories in her latest workout. He almost taps the ‘Kudos’ button. Best not disturb her post-coital bliss.
With an empty inbox, Utopia descends into dystopia. He Googles ‘sex robots near me’. Not for his own gratification, of course. The plan is much more practical: By introducing ‘Candy’ to the strangers forming an orderly queue at the front door, he can at least whittle that line down to the most committed of guests. Male nature being what it is, culls just three from the line snaking past Gail’s.
He presses the nuclear button. In a long and thoughtful WhatsApp, he explains: We are on different carnal journeys. In my present space, I think it’s time I took a breather and focused on my self-care.
The Siamese blue ticks of doom confirm the worst: message read. He pleads for the three dots of redemption. No avail. He checks Hinge one last time: tumbleweeds enjoy more company.
The open relationship is the only system in history designed by men and won—decisively—by women. Men may have invented it. Women perfected it in practice.
The only mystery is why anyone thought it would turn out otherwise.
I'll have to look up that honey thing.
All of this is only true of course if the woman is under 35 years of age. And of course once she hits 50, she becomes invisible. Although folk should beware - women in their 50s are dangerous. They know so much and care so little....
This is very funny and captures the reality of a great deal of open relationships, but in my experience you are mischaracterizing the attitude of the lonely man. In most cases he is, if not exactly happy for his wife's carnal successes relative to his own, then at least firmly convinced he has no exclusive claim to her. In other words, he didn't open up the relationship strictly for the pussy, he did it because he sincerely believed that's what open-minded tolerant people should do.