Couples come to me at every stage of this question. Some are curious about opening up and don’t know how to bring it up. Some opened up years ago, and it mostly works. Some opened up last month, and now one partner can’t sleep. If you’re a gay couple thinking about non-monogamy, living it, or trying to understand what went wrong, this is for you.
Here’s where I stand on open relationships for gay couples: opening up is not a solution, and it isn’t a sign that something is broken. It’s a choice. Like every choice in a long-term relationship, it will eventually ask more of you than you currently have. That isn’t a problem. That’s the point.
Monogamy isn’t the safe choice. Non-monogamy isn’t the free one.
Gay men inherited fewer scripts about what a relationship should look like. That freedom is real, and it’s one of the gifts of our community. It also means you have fewer defaults to lean on when things get hard.
In my office, monogamous couples and open couples struggle with the same things: desire that fades or doesn’t match, jealousy, feeling unseen, and fights that loop without resolution. Monogamous couples sometimes use exclusivity to avoid hard conversations about what they want. Open couples sometimes use outside partners to avoid hard conversations with each other. Neither structure protects you from yourselves.
So I don’t start with “Should you be open?” I start with a different question: what is this relationship asking each of you to become?
Every long-term relationship reaches the edge of its capacity
The late David Schnarch, author of Passionate Marriage, described committed relationships as people-growing machines. In his view, the pressure a relationship creates, through gridlock, conflict and sexual frustration, works like a crucible. It pushes you to grow, or it keeps you stuck.
I think about this as capacity. Every couple has a current capacity: how much honesty, closeness, difference and uncertainty you can hold without panicking, shutting down or attacking. Early on, a relationship asks very little of that capacity. Over the years, it asks for more. When it asks for more than you currently have, you hit an edge.
Harvard developmental psychologist Robert Kegan spent his career on a related idea. In his book In Over Our Heads, he describes how adult life keeps making demands that outgrow the way we currently make sense of ourselves. Growth isn’t learning a few new communication tricks. It’s becoming someone who can hold more.
Hitting an edge feels like failure. It isn’t. It’s information.
Desire problems are a signal, not a verdict
Sexual desire issues aren’t a rare complication of long-term relationships. They’re built in. One of you wants sex more often than the other. The sex you do have has become predictable. Desire has quietly moved somewhere else: to fantasy, to porn, to other men.
Marty Klein‘s work on sexual intelligence makes a point I come back to constantly. Satisfying sex has less to do with performance and technique, and more to do with three things: accurate information, emotional skills, and awareness of your own body. Those are capacities, and capacities can grow.
When desire stalls, it usually means you’ve reached the edge of what you can risk with each other. That might mean saying what you want out loud, hearing “no” without collapsing, or letting your partner see you when you’re aroused and exposed. Your relationship is asking you to grow.
Opening up can be one response to that signal. Sometimes it’s a healthy one. Sometimes it’s a way to turn the signal off without ever reading it.
What opening up asks of you
Emotionally Focused Therapy, developed by Sue Johnson and Les Greenberg, rests on a simple insight from attachment science. Underneath most couples’ fights is one question, which Johnson summed up as “A.R.E. you there for me?” Are you accessible, responsive and engaged when I reach for you? Opening up raises that question vividly. A partner coming home late from a date can set off an alarm that’s older than your relationship.
Schema therapy, developed by Jeffrey Young, helps explain why. Many of us carry deep patterns formed in childhood: a fear of being abandoned, a sense of being defective or unlovable, a belief that our needs don’t count. For gay men who grew up hiding who they were, these patterns are often loud. In an open relationship, jealousy is frequently a schema talking, not proof that the arrangement is wrong.
Then there’s differentiation: holding on to yourself while staying close to your partner. The idea comes from family systems pioneer Murray Bowen, and Schnarch made it the center of his work. It’s the core skill underneath everything else:
- Can you tolerate your partner wanting something you don’t?
- Can you ask for what you want without needing him to make it comfortable for you?
- Can you calm your own anxiety instead of needing constant reassurance?
Monogamous couples need these same capacities. Opening up just tests them faster.
Signs it’s time for couples therapy
You don’t need to be in crisis to start. These are the moments when gay couples most often reach out to me:
- One of you wants to open up and the other doesn’t, and the conversation keeps stalling.
- You opened up, and agreements keep getting broken or renegotiated after the fact.
- Jealousy or anxiety is taking over for one or both of you.
- Sex with each other has faded, and outside partners have become the main source of desire.
- You’re considering opening up to fix a problem neither of you has named.
- You’re monogamous, and you keep having the same fight about sex.
How therapy helps: a crucible, not a referee
I’m not there to decide whether you should be open or monogamous, and I’m not there to rule on who’s right. Therapy is the place where you build the capacity your relationship is asking for. In practice, that means:
- Slowing down the fight so you can see the cycle underneath it, and how each of you gets pulled in.
- Tracing jealousy and shame to their roots, so old wounds stop running the present.
- Practicing hard truths: saying what you want, and staying steady when your partner does the same.
- Talking about sex directly, specifically and without shame, as a sex therapist can.
Some couples leave therapy more open. Some become more monogamous. Some close their relationship, and some end it with care. The goal isn’t a particular structure. It’s two people who are larger than when they started, and who can choose their relationship instead of falling into it.
Frequently asked questions
Do open relationships work for gay couples?
Some do and some don’t, just like monogamous relationships. Structure predicts less than you’d think. What matters more is each partner’s capacity for honesty, self-soothing and renegotiating as you both change.
Will a couples therapist try to talk us out of non-monogamy?
A good one won’t. I work with monogamous and non-monogamous couples, and I’m not invested in which you choose. I’m invested in whether you can choose it together, with your eyes open.
Can therapy help if only one of us wants an open relationship?
Yes. It’s one of the most common reasons couples come to see me. The goal isn’t to convince anyone. It’s to understand what each of you wants, and what the desire to open up, or the fear of it, is telling you.
Ready to grow together?
If your relationship is pressing on you right now, that pressure is telling you something. I’m a gay, AASECT-certified sex and couples therapist, and I work online with gay, bi and queer couples across New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Florida.
Book a free 15-minute consultation or learn more about gay couples therapy.
