Open marriage reportedly invigorates some relationships. But what’s in it for the women who are so-called secondary partners?
BACK IN MARCH, the New York Times Sunday Styles section published a story that created such reader interest that, two days later, the paper ran a comment-filled companion piece online. Called “The Secrets to an Open Marriage According to Mo’Nique,” the original story featured the actress and her husband, Sidney Hicks. “I wanted to continue to see the gentlemen that I was seeing, and I felt comfortable telling my best friend,” Mo’Nique told the paper. (Her best friend being her husband; the duo have a podcast about their marriage called Mo’Nique & Sidney’s Open Relationship.)
Despite the minor battle waged over monogamy’s pleasures and perils in the comments section, this story wasn’t a surprise. It seems like many of us have been discussing open relationships much more, well, openly these days. A few days after the Mo’Nique story ran, DirecTV debuted a new show called You Me Her, about a married couple in Portland who start seeing a woman; it was quickly renewed for two more seasons. The rise in interest in open relationships has been chronicled in countless print and online outlets over the past five-plus years (Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Slate, Salon, The Guardian). In 2012, Showtime debuted the reality series Polyamory: Married & Dating, which involved a handful of Californians endlessly processing their feelings about their partners’ outside sex lives; it aired for two seasons. Last July, a Times article asked, “Is There Such a Thing as ‘Ethical Cheating’?,” featuring the dating site OpenMinded.com. (For a paper that famously lags on spotting social trends, the Times is really into this nonmonogamy thing.)
This story is from the October 2016 edition of ELLE.
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This story is from the October 2016 edition of ELLE.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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