My partner has recently come to me in significant emotional distress with a reinvigorated want to open our relationship as he feels he needs more “love”. We are actively trying for a child after a few years of infertility and this new [wish] is not doing anything for the stability of our relationship. How do we navigate becoming parents if we struggle with monogamy?

Eleanor says: One of the weird things about 21st century love is the way we select partners first for dating and sexual attraction, and then segue those relationships into partnerships of parenting and household. These are very different kinds of relationships to have with another person. The things we look for in a romantic or sexual partner often aren’t the things we look for in a co-parent.

If I’m understanding you correctly, your question is about how to manage the transition to the parenting partnership while there’s tension or uncertainty in the romantic one.

For whatever it’s worth, I think the monogamy question matters less than the question of how much confidence you have in each other, whatever you decide about who you sleep with.

Say you open up the relationship. Are you confident he’d still be available to you in the ways you’d need from your co-parent? Do you have enough trust in how he feels about you that this could be a way of bringing you closer, or do you suspect this would be a way of distancing or regressing right when you most need stability? Are you confident that there would be a fair balance of who feels overwhelmed and overtired during new parenting and who feels sexy and invigorated by new dates?

Say instead you don’t open the relationship. Does he trust he’ll be able to get what he needs in other ways? Does he feel confident in your ability to have that frank conversation, to reckon with what he feels he’s not getting, his persistent distress about this?

How you arrange the sexual-romantic side of your relationship is only partly a question of who you sleep with. It’s also a question of whether you can be on the same team even when you have radically different wants. That isn’t a question you can isolate to the sexual part of your relationship: you have to be on the same team to be good parents. The first few years of your child’s life are not the time to learn you don’t each take the others’ wellbeing as seriously as your own, that you keep score of resentments, or that you’re each privately banking on the other changing their mind about their stated desires.

Put another way: are you confident that there’s a version of this relationship that can make you both happy and united enough to be good parents to this brand new person? Numbers can be helpful. Don’t just say “I’m sure”. Say I’m 80% sure, 60% sure.

If you do open your relationship around the same time as becoming parents, I think there’s an imperative to use help and guidance. Those are two big emotional changes right on top of each other. Each by itself can sink a relationship. To try to manage them without professional help or community involvement or counsel from other couples who have done the same would in effect be deliberately taking a higher-than-necessary risk that your child is raised in an unhappy environment.

Sleeping with other people is for some couples a fantastic form of fun and excitement, a way of growing closer and sustaining feelings that can die ignoble deaths in long relationships. But even if you stay in a closed relationship, I think you face an important question of whether you can be on the same side.

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