When Oprah Winfrey aired an episode about open marriage in fall 2007, it made headlines.
Print and online articles asked questions. Did Oprah endorse open marriage? Was she afraid to condone it? Or is open marriage not so taboo anymore? "However you slice it, it's pathetic, it's perverse, it makes marriage into a joke...and why exactly is the patron saint of yentas and bored housewives promoting this sort of garbage? Are ratings getting bad?" asked RightWingNews.com, after the Oprah episode debuted on Sept. 25, 2007.
Tamara Cosby wondered about the issue on her blog,
CosbyFamily.WordPress.com. "What about an open marriage is a marriage? I believe a marriage is something you do to be with one person for the rest of your life," Cosby writes. "How can you say your wedding vows and then say, 'It's OK if you want to have a relationship with someone else. I will be here while you do this and when you finish…I'm not sure I understand."
When looking for an alternative to divorce, open marriage is unpopular because of personal and health reasons. "People usually get territorial about the people they're sleeping with, and then of course, there's [sexually transmitted] disease," says Ky Resh, a social worker in Tuscon, Ariz. "Personally, I don't understand why a lot of people get married," he says.
Ric Wailes, a social worker in Salt Lake City, Utah, uses his own marriage as an example of why he disapproves of open marriage. "My wife and I have been married almost 10 years now. She does things that are very irritating at times. When she's done, most things that irritate me turn out nice," he says. "And if I don't do anything it turns out nice. Painting the room pink, for example. I didn't like it, didn't want to do it, but it turned out nice.
Wailes says that disagreement doesn't translate to a situation of an open marriage. "If she was to go out and find a boyfriend, that would be another story, because that's a violation of our contract we had when we spoke our vows," he says.
A much healthier option, experts agree, is either staying together, or in a few cases, a trial separation. "I don't think it [trial separation] always leads to divorce, but it's not something that I personally recommend," says Wailes. "It appears a lot of people who get separated do get divorced, because they get used to living on their own again and aren't ready to share again. It depends on how much people are ready to put into the relationship."
Another suggestion is to remain in the same residence but divide the home. "Living in the same house separately is an idea. I've heard of one person living upstairs and one living downstairs," Resh explains. "People do keep everything the same, so they don't have to lose their health insurance and lose their property," he says.
