It’s late afternoon, and Lucy texts her husband’s girlfriend. The sound of cartoons plays somewhere in the living room, and she absentmindedly wipes a smear of jam off the countertop.

A few minutes earlier, Lucy’s phone buzzes with a school email: a parent-teacher event for Thursday evening. She’s been attending these events alone, but pauses this time. She wants her husband, Oliver, there.

When she glances at the shared Google Calendar, she notices that Thursday is already accounted for. Oliver has a date with Cecilia.

Lucy opens WhatsApp. She doesn’t text her husband. She texts Cecilia. Cecilia replies quickly: they can find another night. A few minutes later, the color-coordinated shared calendar updates.

Later, Cecilia described it simply: “The organizing aspect is very gendered.”

In the group chat between the two couples, she said, the messages tend to come from her and Lucy – scheduling, adjusting, confirming.

The men, she noted, rarely initiate these exchanges.

When asked about this dynamic, Oliver put it more bluntly.

“I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a disproportionate amount of domestic labor that my partner takes on,” he reflected. “That is … men being shit,” he said simply.

Oliver, 38, and Lucy, 40, live in London with their two children. For the past several years, Oliver has been in a committed relationship not only with his wife, Lucy, but with another married woman, Cecilia – whose husband, James, is dating Lucy in turn.

Like many couples exploring consensual non-monogamy – an umbrella term encompassing relationship structures that fall outside sexual exclusivity – they initially understood themselves to be in an open marriage: one that allowed for physical encounters and casual relationships outside the marriage, but where emotional intimacy and romantic love between the two were still expected to remain centered within it.

Over time, though, the boundaries shifted. What began as openness evolved into something closer to polyamory: not simply having sex with multiple people, but sustaining multiple loving relationships at once.

Relationships like these are not as rare as they might seem. Recent research suggests that at least 5% of Americans are now in a consensually non-monogamous relationship, with roughly one in five having tried it at some point. And yet the cultural script remains remarkably narrow.

Open marriage is often imagined as something men want: driven by male desire, engineered for male freedom and reluctantly tolerated by women. But that’s not the case. Women also make this demand, and the motivations are rarely singular. They are shaped as much by boredom, curiosity and autonomy as by dissatisfaction.

In practice, the transition to non-monogamy – and sometimes into polyamory – can be destabilizing for men and, at times, liberating for women, though the emotional and logistical realities are rarely so cleanly divided.

Lucy had been drawn to non-monogamy for as long as she could remember.

“It was my idea,” she said of opening the marriage. “It’s honestly something I’ve always wanted since I was 18.”

After a few years living in California, she began to see non-monogamy as increasingly “normative”. Their social circle was part of a broader milieu that questioned traditional relationship scripts – open relationships, polyamory, fluid boundaries between friendship and romance, and a general ethos of experimentation in spaces such as Burning Man. By the time she and Oliver decided to open their relationship, many of their friends already had. “It was in the water of our friendship group,” she said.

Oliver resists the idea that non-monogamy is some last-ditch effort to save something broken, or a kind of sexual free-for-all to “fill a lack”. He described it instead as an extension of what is already intact. “Because we have this foundation of love between us,” he said, “we get to go off and experience these things from a place of safety.”

Cecilia’s story began differently.

She and her husband met in their mid-20s and had been dating only a few months when she got pregnant. The timeline compressed quickly, before either of them had decided what kind of life they wanted.

“We got thrown into having a child together much earlier than we probably would have planned,” she said. Even then, she resisted the idea that one event should determine the rest of their lives.

When they eventually married, they assumed monogamy despite their ambivalence. However, it was with a clear awareness of what they were giving up. “There was a sense that it was a loss for both of us,” Cecilia said.

Years later, during the pandemic, the structure of their life intensified: two children under three, her mother undergoing chemotherapy, his parents divorcing.

“Life was just a huge slog,” she said.

And then something shifted.

“I fell in love with someone from my work,” Cecilia said. “It wasn’t planned. Having this shiny, bright new thing outside did make it easy for my attention to shift away from our marriage.

“But at the same time, the way James handled it – and the grace with which he allowed me that release valve from all the stuff that I was going through …”

She paused.

“Motherhood is so all-consuming for women,” she said, “and the way that James understood that I needed an outlet where I wasn’t a mother, and a daughter, and a person with endless, tedious responsibilities.”

“The way he handled that actually made me feel much closer to him,” she said, “and much more committed to him in the long run.”

In her work with heterosexual couples, Marie Thouin, PhD, a researcher and relationship coach specializing in consensual non-monogamy, has observed that women are often the ones who first raise the possibility of opening a relationship for this very reason.

“Women tend to need greater novelty than men to maintain sexual arousal,” she said, something that can be harder to sustain within the predictability of long-term partnership.

Thouin isn’t the only one noticing this trend. The psychotherapist Esther Perel has made a similar argument in recent interviews.

“Women get bored with monogamy much sooner than men,” Perel said in a conversation with Lewis Howes. She challenges the assumption that women don’t care about sex, arguing instead that “women care less about the sex they can have in their committed relationships, which is often not interesting enough for them”.

This pattern appears most often among women who are financially independent and socially embedded in environments where non-monogamy is visible – where the idea feels imaginable, if not entirely stable.

But desire is only one part of the equation.

In theory, open marriage is an equal opportunity endeavor: two people, each permitted to pursue novelty beyond the bounds of the relationship. In practice, they enter a marketplace that is already uneven.

On most dating apps – whether for monogamy or non-monogamy – men significantly outnumber women. The imbalance shows up quickly: women are approached; men do the approaching. One side fields attention; the other waits for it.

Nina, 35, an artist who lives in New York with her husband, described the difference as immediate once they moved from more casual encounters to app-based dating.

“On an app like Feeld, a woman is getting hundreds of likes a second,” she said. “It’s a numbers game.”

But she was quick to qualify the abundance. Most of that attention didn’t translate into actual dates. “There’s a very tiny percentage of these people you would ever be interested in meeting,” she said.

Still, the asymmetry was clear. “I think I certainly found it easier,” she said.

For Nina, the difference was not only logistical, but psychological. “It feels like I’m operating from a space of plenty,” she said, “and he’s operating from a space of scarcity.”

Lucy describes it simply: “It’s just … easier” – for women to meet people, get dates, keep momentum.

Oliver does not disagree. “There are periods where it was just quiet,” he said. “Like, nothing really happening.”

While Lucy’s options multiplied early on, his often stalled.

One married man I spoke to described the experience of putting “open” in his profile as immediately disqualifying. “It reads like a red flag,” he said. “Like you’re either lying, or you’re going to be complicated in a way women don’t want.”

Another was more blunt. “Women have options,” he said. “Men have to justify themselves.”

Nina described the difference as carrying through even once a date is secured.

“It’s a fairly safe assumption that [sex] is on the table,” she said of her own experiences. “If I’m feeling good, cool – let’s go.”

For her husband, she noted, the expectation is less automatic. “As a man, you just can’t assume that sex is on the table,” she said. “There’s more foundation that has to be built.”

Thouin sees this pattern frequently. “There’s often a supply-and-demand imbalance,” she said. “Women tend to have an easier time finding partners.” Over time, that disparity can leave men feeling discouraged, leading to “competition, envy and even resentment”.

Heidi Savell, a sex and relationship therapist, said this is often where asymmetry becomes work. When one partner is struggling – finding fewer dates, feeling more jealousy or carrying more of the logistical burden – the other can end up absorbing the fallout.

“The partner who is having an easier time may feel like their ability to date is tied to whether or not the other person has any luck,” she said.

In heterosexual couples, she sees this dynamic take on a familiar shape. Women, in particular, often become responsible for smoothing things out: slowing their own experiences, offering reassurance and even helping their partner find connections.

Cecilia saw this dynamic in her own relationship, though not always in the way she expected.

“There were definitely moments where I was like, ‘Oh – this is very different for me than it is for him,’” she said. She hesitated, searching for the right phrasing. “I think as a woman, you’re just … received differently.”

Among the married men and women I spoke with, the idea of a man alone at a bar claiming to be in an open marriage seemed, almost universally, cringe.

“A man saying he’s in an open marriage can just feel kind of … ” Lucy pauses.

“Icky,” she admits.

But for married women seeking novelty – and, let’s be frank, sex – the marketplace is flush.

The attention can be flattering and energizing for women who are consumed by the roles of good wife, attentive mother and devoted daughter.

Savell described this as one of the most common fault lines in open relationships. “Asymmetry is inevitable,” she said. “One person is going to have an easier time getting dates.”

Women, she noted, often find themselves managing not only their own relationships, but their partner’s response to the imbalance – offering reassurance, downplaying experiences and softening the asymmetry.

“You don’t want to make your partner feel bad,” Cecilia said, echoing Savell’s sentiment. “So, you’re holding both things at once.”

What she describes is not simply empathy, but a kind of redistribution. The imbalance that begins in the dating market does not remain external. It becomes emotional. Men who find themselves with fewer options are often asked to process that disparity – to manage jealousy, maintain a posture of openness – all while receiving less of the external validation that might make those demands sustainable.

For James and Lucy, this surfaced in a moment they hadn’t planned for.

It was early evening, and the four of them were sitting together in the living room. The children were out with the nannies. There was a sense, at first, that this was another check-in – until Oliver and Cecilia told her and James that they were in love.

“That wasn’t in the agreements. But you can’t really control for feelings,” Lucy said when asked about this moment.

The agreements, as she described them, were never meant to be exhaustive. Rather than strict rules, Lucy described them as an attempt to operate from a place of trust. She was less interested in drawing hard lines around what was permitted, and more about protecting the integrity of the relationship.

In that framework, falling in love wasn’t explicitly forbidden. It simply hadn’t been considered. And once it happened, the dynamic shifted. What had felt open and abundant began to feel, in her words, like “the wild, wild west”.

And yet, this is not how Oliver describes the dynamic at its best. He spoke instead about something often cited as a cornerstone of polyamory: compersion – the ability to feel genuine happiness for a partner’s connection with someone else.

“I believe compersion is possible because I’ve experienced it,” he said. “Feeling happy that your partner is getting to have this connection with someone, and grateful that they’re supporting you to have one too.”

But that version of the arrangement – expansive, mutual, grounded in gratitude – depends on the ability to remain in that mindset even when the dynamics shift. To absorb moments of jealousy without letting them calcify.

Research suggests that while people in non-monogamous relationships often report lower levels of sexual jealousy, they face greater demands when it comes to emotional processing.

Over time, the work becomes less about reacting and more about anticipating. Non-monogamy requires tracking not just one relationship, but several – and how they intersect.

Thouin describes this as the challenge of rebuilding the structure of the relationship. When exclusivity is removed, couples have to “reinvent what loyalty looks like”. What emerges is not a replacement, but an addition. The original asymmetries of heterosexual relationships remain: childcare, domestic labor, emotional maintenance with other layers added on top: more people, more logistics, more feelings to process.

What follows is not just an expansion of freedom, but a redistribution of difficulty: the demands of emotional openness, resilience and relationship management fall unevenly, just as the rewards of the dating market do.

Across the women I spoke with, the point was not that open marriage offers escape from those tensions. It is that it brings them closer to the surface.

When asked to summarize her open marriage in one sentence, Lucy paused.

“It’s an opportunity to disintegrate what you know,” she said, “as an opportunity for infinitely more integration.”

That integration, though, is not automatic. It has to be scheduled, negotiated, spoken aloud and absorbed – often by the women who first made the freedom imaginable.

So the question is not whether open marriage works, but what it reveals – and, once revealed, what women are left to hold.

The names of the people interviewed as case studies for this piece have been changed to protect their privacy.