Opening a Relationship: What to Think About Before You Do
By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
I've written more broadly about what consensual non-monogamy covers as an umbrella term, and separately about what separates an open relationship from polyamory once you're already navigating one or the other. This piece is about the stage before that, the conversation, or more often the string of half-conversations, that happens when opening up first becomes a real possibility rather than an abstract idea. Most of what determines whether that goes well isn't the structure you eventually choose. It's the thinking that happens, or doesn't happen, before you start.
This piece exists because that thinking is easy to skip, particularly when the idea arrives with some urgency attached, a specific temptation, a difficult patch in the relationship, a friend's situation that's made the option feel suddenly available. The pressure to move quickly is understandable and usually counterproductive. Couples who take the time to think this through properly before talking to each other tend to have a very different conversation than couples who arrive at the conversation still figuring out what they want, sometimes discovering mid-sentence that they hadn't fully thought it through themselves.
Why isn't a small question
The single most useful piece of research here comes from a study that followed people over time, comparing those who opened their relationship with those who didn't, and tracking what changed. People who opened up saw a real, measurable increase in sexual satisfaction, but specifically when they'd opened with the explicit goal of addressing a sexual incompatibility in the relationship. The same study found no evidence that opening up improved overall relationship quality or life satisfaction (Murphy, Joel and Muise, 2019). In plain terms, opening up can be an effective, targeted solution to a specific problem. It doesn't appear to be a general-purpose fix for a relationship that's struggling more broadly.
This matters because the two motivations get confused constantly, sometimes by the same person at different points in the same conversation. Wanting more sexual variety, or wanting to address a specific mismatch in desire, is a concrete, answerable goal. Wanting the relationship to feel different, closer, more exciting, less stagnant, is a much vaguer hope, and opening up is a poor tool for it. The research suggests these two starting points tend to lead to quite different outcomes, and being honest with yourself about which one you're starting from, before the conversation with your partner happens, tends to matter more than anything said in the conversation itself.
This distinction matters more the longer you sit with it, because the vaguer hope is often the harder one to notice in yourself. Wanting a relationship to feel more alive is rarely stated in those words. It tends to show up disguised as something more specific, wanting more sex, wanting more excitement, wanting a particular kind of attention, when the underlying wish is closer to wanting to feel like the relationship still has somewhere left to go. Opening up can occasionally deliver that feeling as a side effect, but it isn't built to produce it directly, and expecting it to tends to leave both the disguise and the real wish unaddressed, sometimes for a long while.
The stereotype the research doesn't support
There's a persistent assumption that people only consider opening up because something in the relationship is already broken. A large qualitative study asking people directly why they'd pursued consensual non-monogamy found something different, reasons clustered around autonomy, personal growth, values, and wanting more from life and love generally, not primarily around fixing an existing deficit (Wood, De Santis, Desmarais and Milhausen, 2021). Plenty of people who open up are doing so from a place of curiosity or genuine desire for more connection, not desperation. If that's closer to your own situation, it's worth not importing a narrative of crisis onto a decision that doesn't need one.
This cuts both ways, though. The same research doesn't say that fixing a struggling relationship is never part of the picture, only that it isn't the whole picture the stereotype assumes. Being honest about your own mixture of motivations, curiosity and hope for repair can coexist in the same decision, tends to produce a clearer conversation than picking whichever explanation sounds more acceptable to say out loud.
There's also a practical reason this stereotype matters beyond how it feels to hear it. If you go into the conversation already bracing to defend the relationship's health, or already apologising for wanting something that sounds, to your own ear, like a symptom of a problem, that framing tends to shape the whole conversation before either of you has said much. Starting from curiosity or desire rather than crisis changes the tone of what follows considerably, and it's a framing you have some control over before the conversation begins.
A specific pattern to watch for in yourself
One further finding can be uncomfortable to consider about yourself, and deserves honest attention rather than being waved away simply because it feels unflattering. Research on attachment and non-monogamy has found that avoidant attachment, a general discomfort with closeness and dependence, predicts being more willing and interested in consensual non-monogamy, without necessarily predicting whether someone goes on to do it (Moors, Conley, Edelstein and Chopik, 2015). This doesn't mean wanting an open relationship is a sign of avoidant attachment. Most people drawn to it aren't avoidantly attached, and plenty of securely attached people want exactly this. But asking yourself honestly whether part of the appeal is more connection, or a comfortable, well-justified way to keep a partner slightly further away, tends to be more useful than assuming the answer. Those two motivations can look identical from the outside and require very different conversations with yourself before they reach your partner.
One reasonably honest way to check is to notice how you feel about the emotional side of a hypothetical outside connection, not the sexual side. If the appeal is mostly about having somewhere to retreat from closeness, the idea of an outside connection becoming important to you in its own right may feel unwelcome or even threatening, in a way that sits oddly alongside wanting the arrangement in the first place. If the appeal is closer to wanting more connection generally, that possibility tends to feel less alarming, even if it also feels complicated. Neither answer is wrong, but noticing which one is true for you changes what you're asking your partner to agree to.
Plenty of people who open up are doing so from a place of curiosity or genuine desire for more connection, not desperation.
What a stable foundation looks like
Opening up tends to go better from a relationship that's already reasonably secure, not a perfect one, but one where both people can have a hard conversation without it turning into a crisis, where trust hasn't been recently and significantly damaged, and where both partners are choosing this rather than one partner reluctantly agreeing to avoid losing the other. None of these are strict pass or fail conditions. They're closer to weather conditions, workable in most states, considerably harder to navigate in a storm, and better assessed honestly before setting out, rather than discovered the hard way partway through.
A relationship that's recently weathered a betrayal, a major loss, or a long stretch of unresolved conflict is not automatically disqualified from opening up successfully, but it usually needs the original difficulty addressed on its own terms first, rather than folded into the same conversation as a separate, unrelated decision. Trying to rebuild trust and negotiate a new relationship structure in the same breath tends to overload both processes, and it becomes hard to tell afterward whether a given difficulty came from the betrayal, the new structure, or the fact that neither had space to be worked through properly.
A useful, honest check is whether you could have this specific conversation and hear a partial no, not right now, not in that way, I need to think about it, without either of you treating that as a relationship-ending answer. If the conversation only feels safe to have because you've already decided the answer needs to be yes, that's a sign worth paying attention to before you have it. A conversation that can only survive one outcome isn't much of an open conversation, whatever the topic turns out to be.
Questions worth answering before the conversation
A few honest questions tend to do more good before you talk to your partner than during the conversation itself, since they're easier to answer without an audience. What specifically do you want that you don't have now. Would you be satisfied if only the sexual side changed, or are you also hoping for new emotional connection. How would you feel if your partner wanted this more than you did, or considerably less. What would need to be true for you to feel this was working, and what would tell you clearly that it wasn't.
A harder version of the same question is what you'd want to happen if your partner said no, not right now, or not like this. A conversation you've only prepared for one outcome tends to go badly the moment the answer differs from the one you hoped for, and thinking through a genuine no in advance, what you'd do, what you'd need, whether the relationship survives that answer intact, tends to make you steadier in the room regardless of which answer you get.
None of these have a single right answer, but having your own honest answers before the conversation tends to produce a much more useful discussion than working them out in real time while also managing your partner's reaction to hearing them for the first time. Structuring the conversation itself, rather than hoping the right moment arrives naturally, matters here specifically, since this is rarely a conversation that goes well when it happens by accident.
What tends to go wrong when the thinking gets skipped
The most common regret couples describe isn't the decision to open up itself. It's the speed. A single conversation, often prompted by a specific moment, a passing comment, a drink too many, a wave of frustration, leads quickly to an agreement neither partner has tested against their own honest motivations. The agreement then meets its first real challenge within weeks, and there's no shared foundation to fall back on beyond the original, thin conversation.
A slower version of the same decision looks noticeably different. It usually involves more than one conversation, spread over weeks rather than a single evening, with room for either partner to change their mind, add a condition, or admit something uncomfortable without the whole plan collapsing. This isn't the same as endless deliberation that never resolves into a decision. It's the difference between a decision that's been pressure-tested and one that's been rushed through before either person had time to notice their own doubts, let alone name them out loud to someone else.
This is where the earlier distinctions pay off practically. A couple who opened up specifically to address a named sexual incompatibility has a clear reference point when things get hard, did this address what we opened it to address. A couple who opened up vaguely hoping the relationship would feel more alive has no such reference point, and every difficulty risks being read as evidence the whole idea was a mistake, when it may simply be an ordinary difficulty any new arrangement produces at first. The distinction between open relationships and polyamory matters here too, since a chunk of early difficulty comes from discovering the two of you were never quite picturing the same structure in the first place.
How therapy can help
Some couples come to this work already certain they want to open up and looking for support putting it into practice well. Others are still undecided, and the more useful work is slower, less about planning logistics and more about each partner getting honest with themselves about what they want, separately from what they think they should want or what they suspect the other one is hoping to hear.
Where one partner is more enthusiastic than the other, the work isn't to talk the reluctant partner into it, or to talk the enthusiastic partner out of it. It's to get both people's honest positions clearly enough on the table that whatever gets decided is a real decision, made with full information, rather than a compromise built on one partner's unspoken resentment or the other's unspoken relief, either of which tends to surface eventually regardless.
This is also useful work for couples who've already opened up and are finding it harder than expected, not because the decision was wrong, but because the thinking that should have happened beforehand didn't. Going back and doing that work retroactively is entirely possible, and often clarifies far more than trying to solve the immediate difficulty in isolation, since the immediate difficulty is frequently a symptom of the earlier conversation being skipped rather than a problem with the structure itself.
If you feel like now might be the right time to talk this through with a therapist, I offer a free 30-minute consultation in person (in London) or online. You're welcome to come whether you've already decided and want support getting it right, or you're still working out whether this is something you want at all.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist working in person across central London, from rooms in Pimlico, Kensington, and Angel. He works with couples, individuals, and polycules on relationship issues including jealousy, affairs and betrayals, sex problems, and considered separation. His practice is integrative, sex-positive, and affirming of all relationship structures and identities.
References
Murphy, A. P., Joel, S., & Muise, A. (2021). A prospective investigation of the decision to open up a romantic relationship. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12(2), 194–201. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619897157
Moors, A. C., Conley, T. D., Edelstein, R. S., & Chopik, W. J. (2015). Attached to monogamy? Avoidance predicts willingness to engage (but not actual engagement) in consensual non-monogamy. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 32(2), 222–240. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407514529065
Wood, J., De Santis, C., Desmarais, S., & Milhausen, R. (2021). Motivations for engaging in consensually non-monogamous relationships. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 50(4), 1253–1272. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01873-x
