Do open relationships work? What Indian couples are learning 

A young couple – Photo Credit: Internet

With rising acceptance of ethical non-monogamy in India, couples are testing whether openness strengthens relationships

There is a particular modern-world anxiety that clings to the idea of an open relationship: that it is either a sign of the evolution of a romantic equation or a prelude to collapse. In India, where the language of desire still struggles to keep pace with the reality of it, the question feels especially loaded: does opening a relationship save it, or simply delay its end? Or, more practically, does it just turn a two-person problem into a scheduling exercise to satiate their sexual and, sometimes, emotional cravings.

The numbers suggest we are, at the very least, willing to entertain the possibility of having an open relationship. A 2023 study by dating app Bumble found that nearly 60% of Indian singles are open to ethical non-monogamy, while a 2025–26 survey by Gleeden, the dating app for discreet encounters, in partnership with market research firm IPSOS, reported that 69% of Indians believe such arrangements are becoming socially acceptable. What, exactly, are we agreeing to, and who, precisely, has read the fine print.

Who’s going to tell them?
A psychologist I spoke to in 2023 said we tend to treat the suggestion of an open relationship as a verdict rather than a conversation. In psychological terms, this reflects a kind of normative monogamy bias — the belief that any deviation from exclusivity signals failure. “People hear ‘open’ and assume ‘ending,’” she told me. “So they refuse to engage with what’s actually being asked.” It is a curious reflex: we would rather preserve the appearance of stability than examine its contents.

What complicates this further is the role of shame. In a culture that associates marriage with aspiration and expectation, the space to articulate sexual variance is limited. We are, as she put it, “conditioned into a script before we have the vocabulary to question it.” Many people enter long-term partnerships before they have fully understood their own desires; exploration, then, arrives belatedly, layered with obligation and the occasional existential audit. “I would never advise someone to open a relationship,” she added, “just as I would never advise someone to get married.” Both, she implied, are decisions people make with great confidence and very little rehearsal.

For a close friend of mine, that fluency was hard-won. Four years into a relationship that had begun to feel, in her words, “politely stagnant” — the kind of stagnancy that looks perfectly functional from the outside — she and her partner arrived at an impasse. “He is affectionate, deeply so,” she says, “but not particularly adventurous. And I realised, slowly, that I was.” The discrepancy did not present itself as conflict so much as absence — a sense that something unarticulated was shaping the edges of their intimacy.

What followed was a series of negotiations. They spoke about desire, at first, almost clinically: what was wanted, what was not, what might be possible without destabilising what already existed. Eventually, they agreed to open the relationship, but with a structure that resisted secrecy. Encounters would be shared and nothing would occur in isolation. “So we decided if we do this, we do it together.” Not so much an open relationship as a group project with unusually high stakes.

The arrangement did not so much transform their relationship as recalibrate it. A period of inertia gave way to something more playful. They have now been together for 10 years. Marriage, they say, is beside the point. “We’re not trying to fix something broken,” she adds. “We’re trying to keep something alive.” Which, in long-term relationships, is no small feat.

If my friend’s story comes across as a carefully managed expansion, a former colleague’s arrangement is a reminder of how easily the language of openness can be misapplied.

“My partner at the time proposed an open relationship with the assurance that it would strengthen what they had.” She hesitated, but agreed. “There’s a certain performance to being ‘okay’ with things now,” she notes. “I think I confused that with actually being okay.”

A confusion that exists alongside another performance — the reflexive allegiance to monogamy as the moral high ground. We are taught early that exclusivity is a virtue, and permanence, success. Against that backdrop, anything that strays begins to look more like a compromise, even when the reality is less binary.

At first, the arrangement was framed as mutual exploration. But the symmetry did not hold. “I realised that what we had wasn’t openness,” she says. “It was permission granted very unevenly.”

Her critique is not of non-monogamy itself, but of the conditions required to sustain it. “People assume it’s easier,” she says. “In reality, open arrangements demand more communication and more honesty than most couples are used to.” In India, she argues, this difficulty is amplified by a broader discomfort with desire. “We don’t talk about what we want, not without shame. So when you introduce a structure that depends entirely on transparency, it exposes how little practice we have at telling the truth.”

The relationship did not survive.

A same-sex couple I was introduced to, married for three years, approach openness as a framework they revisit infrequently. One identifies as bisexual, the other as a lesbian; their relationship, they say, has always contained within it a recognition of difference.

“We don’t treat it as opening the marriage,” one told me. “We treat it as acknowledging that no one person can be everything, all the time.” Consent is explicit, not assumed. Encounters outside the relationship are occasional, almost incidental, and always disclosed. “The conversation is the structure,” the other partner tells me. “Not what happens after.” Which is to say, the talking is the work; everything else is, at best, a subplot.

If monogamy has long functioned as a default, it is perhaps because it allows certain questions to remain unasked. Non-monogamy, by contrast, insists on articulation. It demands a level of emotional literacy that cannot be outsourced to convention.