Story | Will We Be Open?

When my Boyfriend Asked Me to Consider an Open Relationship.

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Excerpt from Chapter 1 | The One

We had been dating for only a few months and were already on our first vacation together, walking along the river in a small Austrian ski town. I grinned, thinking about teaching him to ski and the couples' massage we had booked for the next day. That’s when he brought up the idea of an open relationship.

The banks were packed with snow, revealing only a sliver of the river rushing beneath, swirling and spinning before disappearing again, beyond where I could see. The icy air brushed our faces, and our warm breaths mingled in the space between us.

Rich brought it up casually—so casually that I can’t even remember how the conversation started. He was holding my hand, mentioning a friend of his in a polyamorous relationship. We paused at the top of the bridge, and his grip tightened despite his casual tone when he asked how I’d feel about exploring being open.

“What?”

“Open. An open relationship. A relationship where we date each other and other people.”

I looked straight ahead, my features frozen. “Have you ever been open before?” I asked.

“No.” He squeezed my hand. “But when I was with my last girlfriend, I always felt like there was a grenade in the room. If I looked at someone else or flirted, I could ruin what we had. I think I wanted to flirt with other women because I wasn’t allowed to.”

Am I already not enough for him? Is this what I need to agree to stay together?

“Are you already thinking about dating other people?” I asked. I couldn’t look at him. I worried I would cry, freezing permanent tears to my face.

“I’m not,” he told me. He hesitated. “Well, I am. But not anyone specific. And not right now. Of all the relationships I know that broke up or divorced, it was because one person cheated.” He looked at me. “I don’t want to hurt you like that.”

He said it sincerely, but I didn’t respond. I had lost my sense of where we were and looked around. The sun was setting, creating a wash of turbulent pinks and oranges above me, and the rushing and cracking of the river was loud beneath us. I pulled my ski jacket tighter around me against the cold.

“It wasn’t just that a person cheated. It was that they couldn’t communicate until it was too late. And they couldn’t change—not together anyway.” Rich kept talking. He assured me it was my choice, that we could take it as slow as I wanted, and that it wasn't an ultimatum. We didn’t have to try being open at all. He paused. “I don’t know if monogamy works. I want to try something different. With you. With you, I want to try something different.”

I felt a deep hurt. I thought I had found ‘my One’. My soulmate. The person I would spend the rest of my life with and have kids with. Grow old with. His question meant he didn’t feel the same way.

I didn’t speak. I just stared ahead. I felt Rich’s words cut through me like the icy water, taking me with the current somewhere I couldn’t see and didn’t want to go to. But my mind began to tumble, swept along by what he’d said. My friend at work was cheating on her husband. We never said anything when she left office parties early. The woman I babysat for as a teenager was cheated on. She came home early one night, gathered all her husband’s Playboy magazines from the bathroom, and lit them on fire in the kitchen sink.

He turned me to face him. “I’ve never cheated. And I never will.”

“What you’re proposing is cheating! Just being allowed to cheat.”

“I feel like cheating is not being honest. I want to be completely honest in my next relationship.” He waited. “What do you think counts as cheating?”

I ignored his question. “I’ve never cheated either.” What I didn’t say is that I had been tempted before. I told my boyfriend at the time, and he told me I shouldn’t be attracted to anyone but him. It didn’t feel right that I shouldn’t even be attracted to someone else. And I started to doubt what I could tell him if I couldn’t tell him how I actually felt about other people. But I also thought that I could resist temptation. So why are Rich and I having this conversation?

“I just think we should define our relationship for ourselves,” he continued. “If we are going to be together, let’s decide how. Just you and me.”

I wanted to shout. That’s not how this is supposed to work! Suddenly, I was mad. This would be so romantic if we were talking about anything else. We were in Austria, overlooking the water and a sunset behind the Alps. He was ruining it.

I pulled away. He let me go but moved next to me again.

“Do you want to see other people tomorrow?” I demanded.

“No. No.” He put his hand under my chin and tilted my face back up to his. “Not at all. But if we want to be together for a long time, let’s figure out how.” He paused, searching my face and trying to make eye contact again. “I guess,” he hesitated, “I'm asking what you want. What do you want in a relationship?”

I had no idea, but I was hurt, so I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

“Right now, the idea of sex with anyone else sounds gross,” I said.

“OK,” he said as he lifted his arm, opening himself up and offering the space close to him. “I want to be with you forever. So, I want to figure out how. And this isn’t something that we decide right now. And we can decide to be monogamous.” I moved into him, and he held me, but the question rushed and roared in my ears. What did I want in a relationship?

My dad brought my mom a cup of coffee in bed every morning. I wanted that. He gave up his career to support hers, and she gave him space to pursue a career as a professional golfer at 50. Everyone told them they were crazy, but they supported each other unconditionally for over 40 years. I wanted that. But they never kissed. Or held hands. I didn’t want that. One of my best friends always held the door open and pulled out the chair for his wife. I wanted that. But she almost never let him go out dancing with us anymore. He did it anyway and would sleep on my couch, delaying going home the next day as long as possible, mentally preparing for the inevitable fight. I didn’t want that. My only college girlfriend stormed out of my room when I couldn’t admit my feelings. I did want that.

How had I never asked myself what I wanted from a partnership? I knew little things that I did and didn’t want—snippets of observations from other people’s relationships and lessons learned from past boyfriends, flings, and lovers—but I couldn’t articulate what I wanted for myself. Was a partnership even something I could decide, craft, and create? I thought the perfect partner was someone I was supposed to find, sense, feel, and then just know when I met ‘the One’.

And I believed that I had! For the first three months together, I thought I had found him. My One in eight billion! I didn’t want to give up that belief. My person. My better half.

Wait, what am I? An orange?

I’m not now, nor have I ever been, half of myself. Am I expected to give up half of myself and exchange it for Rich’s half to be in a relationship with him? As I think about all the ways people describe their partner, I can't help but notice how many of these terms imply that I’m not really whole without someone else. Significant other, other half—all of them suggest that I’m somehow incomplete until I find the person to fill the gaps. What archaic phrases for a partner! Even if I’m the better half. I never want to be half of myself.

Maybe the part I liked most about the idea of ‘the One’ is that I was ‘the One’ for Rich. That I was perfect for him. That I wasn’t just enough for him, but the half that made him whole. But that didn’t feel right either. I wasn’t attracted to a broken man. Half a man. A man who needed fixing or saving. I was attracted to strength, creativity, and purpose. Even after a few months, I knew Rich to be those things.

So was ‘the One’ more about finding someone to make a life we both wanted together? Was the perfect relationship built, not found? And could we, therefore, create a relationship that worked specifically for us?

I pulled away, just far enough to look into his eyes—the teal blue eyes that had drawn me in from our very first conversation. The sun had sunk lower, casting the last light across the snow in cool shades of blue and silver, and the cold air settled between us, sharp but invigorating. Ideas and thoughts started to form in my head. The magazine flames in the sink. A flash of red hair of my college girlfriend walking away from me. The wedding scenes from movies I watched as a child. Quick, bright, and then gone, leaving a feeling of curiosity. And hope.

Rich’s gaze held mine, steady and searching, as the last traces of daylight faded and the river moved unseen under the ice—flowing, adapting, finding its own way forward in the dark.

“I'm open to exploring the idea of an open relationship,” I said, my breath forming soft clouds between us. “I don’t know how I feel yet. There’s a lot we’ll need to figure out together, questions we’ll need to answer. I have questions. A lot of questions.”