By Josie De Leon
With divorce rates increasing because of cheating, “falling out of love” and other reasons, faith in marital commitment is decreasing. However, the need for security in relationships still lingers, which has caused many couples across the United States to experiment in satisfying a roving eye while maintaining a secure marriage.
A married couple that willingly consents to having extra-marital relations to help strengthen their relationship sounds a lot like the plot from an Oxygen original movie. However, this new “open marriage” trend is quickly becoming socially accepted as an alternative to marriage counseling or divorce.
In a recent interview with ESPN The Magazine, the wife of Utah Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko, said she agreed to give him a once-a-year allowance of having sex outside of their marriage. Her reasoning?
“If I know about it,” she told the magazine, “It”s not cheating.”
It”s true that professional athletes are constantly bombarded by women of all ages. However, this trend is spanning farther than just the fabulous life of celebrities. With an increasing acceptance of non-conventional families, more couples are beginning to set their own marriage rules and a guideline for what defines fidelity and adultery. But with the creation of these rules, couples often forget about possible consequences such as jealousy and emotional damage.
“Couples who make this agreement are often na?ve about the emotional implications,” said Professor Michael Buxton, a counselor in the BYU counseling and career center. “A person who is considering cheating is afraid of saying something important to his or her spouse. Often the best course of action is to start communicating about the sources of dissatisfaction that is leading one to wander.”
Sexuality among adults is closely linked to attachment, Buxton said. Variations can happen within that attachment if couples are involved with new partners posing competition and threats to the relationship. Buxton also said even though couples that do this make their own rules, following them is very difficult once the cat is out of the bag.
“Usually one of the partners has used a lot of persuasion or coercion to get the other person to go along,” he said. “The other person may feel like it is his or her only chance to save the relationship.”
People also tend to feel some degree of insecurity about themselves as sexual partners, Buxton said. The comparison that would re-enter the marriage would likely cause a lot of damage to one of the partners.
In a recent New York Magazine article entitled “The New Monogamy,” open marriage couples expressed their satisfaction and grief about their “swinger-like” lifestyles. Photographer Clayton James Cubitt, an interviewee in the article, said his current open relationship choice was based on a previous relationship that had ended when both he and his partner cheated. His current fianc? was also a victim of a cheating partner and willingly consented with Cubitt to have an open relationship based on their past negative experiences.
In a review of the New York Magazine article, best-selling author and relationship specialist Cathi Hanauer commended couples for their courage and creativity in adjusting their lifestyles to fit their marriage needs.
“We already know that monogamous marriage is far from a raging success in this country,” she said in the review. “In my opinion, if couples want to try veering slightly from the contract by creating their own rules, more power to them.”
But according to religion professor Randy Bott, trying to hold back emotions of jealousy in these kinds of relationships is disastrous, not only emotionally but spiritually as well.
“Couples who engage in this sort of activity only think they pick up the pleasurably, in-the-moment end of the stick without realizing they pick up the whole stick,” he said. “The other end is jealousy and broken trust that comes as consequences.”
In his experience as a member of both bishopric and stake presidencies, Bott said no couple he had ever counseled with had a successful marriage while engaging in consented infidelity.
“You can get over the physical actions of adultery,” Bott said. “It is the trust and the covenants that are broken that destroy the marriage. We did not create the rules for an eternal marriage, so therefore we cannot change them.”
