My wife wanted a secret open relationship and our sex lives have got better

Don’t let others dictate your marriage, or rather sex life. And my wife and I learnt this in a very interesting way. Open relationships have always been a topic for debate; often compared to infidelity. But what people don’t realise is that it is completely consensual. My wife and I opted for an open relationship when our marriage was only going downhill. To our surprise, opting for an open relationship saved our marriage.

My wife and I have been married for over six years now. I am a successful engineer and my wife has been working as a social worker for an NGO. We both are quite busy with our own lives and truth be told, we hardly have any time for ourselves, even though we try to go on occasional trips and dates. We love each other very much; our marriage has been great but our sex life, well, not so much. By the end of our third year of marriage, we hardly had any sex. It bothered us, but we weren’t very vocal about the problem. There was a huge communication gap that we weren't able to solve. And as a result, our marriage started suffering. We talked less, stopped going out for frequent trips or dates. I had been unable to understand if she didn’t like the way we had sex, or was there some problem with me. Every time I mustered up some courage to talk about this, she brushed it off and blamed it all on work pressure.

My wife probably had also been feeling the same pressure because she also seemed anxious and irritated all the time. I could see that she wanted to talk but was unable to. And by the middle of our fourth year of marriage, we didn’t have sex, at all. We just stopped. It bothered us greatly.

But one day my wife burst out her emotions explaining how eager she was to get intimate with me again, but somehow her body didn’t react to her wants. I felt the same but then she blurted out, “I fantasised about another man.” At that moment, I felt my entire marriage came crumbling down, but my wife suddenly suggested we get into an open marriage for some time. I felt as if she was spitting out nonsensical words, but as I got to thinking, I realised that I wanted to get my sex life back. I was sexually curious and wanted to feel sexual pleasure because it had been long enough. I didn’t disagree with my wife and so, we both got into an open marriage where we could see and have sex with other people, as long as it was safe.

We started having fun, we discussed our experiences with other people to each other. Soon enough, my wife began approaching me with her decision to have sex with me, and so we did. After a span of over a year and a half, we had sex. It was passionate, fiery and extremely pleasurable. It seemed as if we had learnt new things from our open relationships with others and were inculcating them in our sex regime. We finally felt as if our intimate life was back. We started yearning for each other more and tried talking openly about our feelings. Turns out, the time we spent apart from each other, indulging in sexual activity was tough on us. We missed each other way too much. It’s like we understood each other’s value by being with other people. But during all that time, I was glad me and my wife didn’t nudge from our love for each other. Our love had been strong, as ever.

Open relationships and sex with other people may be a controversial matter, but it faired well for me and my wife. It’s safe to say that it actually saved our marriage from breaking apart.