What you'll know after reading this
- Opening up only works as genuine consent if a "no" is just as welcome as a "yes" between both partners.
- Compersion isn't a requirement or a test, it can grow slowly and sit alongside jealousy at the same time.
- Knowing your core erotic theme and where your relationship sits in its arc helps you tell whether opening up will genuinely suit you both.
This guide helps couples reflect honestly on whether they're ready to open their relationship, rather than offering a how-to manual. Written by a somatic sexologist, it walks through compersion and consent, an honest readiness checklist, a journalling practice for couples, and the core principle that real consent requires both partners feeling free to say no.
If you have found your way to this article, I’ll make an assumption: you are part of a couple, currently in a monogamous agreement, and a question has begun to stir between you — or perhaps inside just one of you. What would it mean for us to open up?
It is a tender question, and a brave one. Over my years as a clinical somatic sexologist (a sex therapist trained to work with the body, not just talk through issues verbally), I have walked alongside many couples as they moved into ethical non-monogamy, and a few who, after honest reflection, chose not to.
What I have learned is that the couples who thrive are rarely the ones who simply decide to “try it.” They are the ones who first do the quiet, embodied work of asking what they hope to gift to themselves, to each other, and to the relationship by opening it.
So this is not a manual for how to open a relationship. It is open relationship help of a different kind: a guide to reflecting honestly, as a couple, on whether you feel ready — complete with a checklist, a mapping practice, and the two principles I return to again and again.
Two words worth defining first
Before we go further, let me define two terms that sit at the heart of this work. They are not the same — and the difference matters.
Compersion. Not compassion: compersion. The word was coined in the early 1990s by the Kerista community, a polyamorous group in San Francisco, and it has stayed in the language of the ethical non-monogamy and polyamorous world ever since. Compersion is the warm, genuine feeling of joy you experience in your partner’s pleasure, satisfaction, or fulfilment — even when you are not the one providing it. It is often described as the opposite of jealousy. The researcher Marie Thouin, who wrote the first book on the subject, describes it as a wholehearted participation in another’s happiness, even when their experience does not involve or benefit you directly. It has a close cousin in the Buddhist idea of mudita, or sympathetic joy.
Consent. In the framework I work with most — Dr. Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent, a model for understanding the roles of giving, receiving, and asking in any interaction — consent is not mere permission. It is an agreement between two or more people about who is doing, or not doing, and who it is for. That second question — who is it for? — is where so much clarity lives. When we know who an act is for, giving becomes a genuine gift rather than quiet self-sacrifice, and receiving becomes a gift we are allowed to enjoy rather than something we simply allow to happen.
Consent is a co-creation. It depends on both partners feeling that their limits — their no — are welcomed and valid.
Hold both of these words as you read on, because they point to the real question underneath everything else: what is the gift that opening this relationship would bring to each of you?
Are you ready? An honest checklist
This is not a pass/fail quiz. It is a map of where to place your attention. Sit with each of these, ideally out loud and together.
- Your current agreements. Have you ever named your existing relationship agreements explicitly — or have they simply been assumed? How is your emotional hygiene as a couple: can you repair after a rupture, speak an uncomfortable truth, and hold a clear container when things get charged?
- Your track record. Has either of you been in an open, polyamorous, or ethically non-monogamous relationship before? What did you learn from it — what nourished you, and what hurt?
- Compersion. Do you recognise compersion in yourself, even in small ways? When you imagine your partner finding pleasure or connection with someone else, can you feel any genuine gladness for them — not as a duty, but as a flicker of real warmth?
- Your motivation. What do each of you hope to enrich, deepen, or add by opening up? And — gently — is this a move towards something, or away from something?
- The full spectrum of yes and no. Does each of you feel, honestly, that a no or a limit would be genuinely welcome here? (More on this below — it may be the most important question of all.)
A mapping practice for couples
Here is a practice I often give. Do it separately and quietly, then come together to share.
Set a timer for three to five minutes per question. Write in the first person — I want… — without editing or softening. Let it be honest, even messy.
Question one: What is my desire and hope in opening this relationship?
For example:
- I want more excitement, range, and diversity in my erotic expression.
- I want the freedom of new connection while staying rooted in us.
- I want to see my partner more fully met and fulfilled.
- I want to be witnessed and desired by more than one lover at a time.
Question two: What do I hope to bring to the relationship by opening it?
For example:
- I want deeper honesty and intimacy between us.
- I want more varied experiences to bring home and share with each other.
- I want us both to feel free — and still chosen.
Question three: How do I feel about this, in my emotions and in my body?
For example:
- I am nervous I might lose you.
- I want us to stay open and honest, even when the answers are hard to hear.
- I want you to feel free to tell me if this stops working for you.
- I want us to get real support — a consent course, an experienced practitioner — so that this brings us closer rather than driving us apart.
When you each have your pages, meet and read them to one another slowly. From what you share, you can begin to design a pathway: which workshops, which practitioner support, which peer or community spaces would help you move forward well.
Consent is a co-creation: the full spectrum of yes and no
Here is the principle I would underline above all others, and the one that makes non-monogamy genuinely ethical.
If the impulse to open up comes primarily from one of you, and the other does not feel they have full permission to express a limit or a no, then there is no embodied consent for this decision. None. Saying “yes” or “going along with it” become the only options on the table — and that is not the same as choosing freely.
If no is not in the room, then yes is not really a choice.
Many of the clients and professionals I support struggle with people-pleasing. This is not a character flaw; it is a state in the nervous system that keeps us in belonging. Belonging is one of our deepest human longings, and being rejected or exiled is one of our oldest fears. So we suppress our no, soften our limits, and endure — because challenging our partner feels more dangerous than betraying ourselves.
Betty Martin’s work names this clearly. When we give without genuine agreement, we slide into self-sacrifice; when we allow without genuine agreement, we slide into enduring — being, in her words, a doormat. The way out of those shadows is always the same: get clear about who an act is really for, and check that you have both truly consented to it.
This is why I work with the full spectrum of yes and no — from a “hell no,” through “maybe,” and “I’m willing to,” all the way to a “hell yes.” The Wheel of Consent practices build two muscles at once: our resilience to hear a no without collapse or punishment, and our confidence to voice one without guilt.
If we cannot trust our partner’s no, we cannot fully trust their yes.
There is real room in the middle. It can be entirely healthy to say, “I am willing, because I can see how much joy this brings you” — as long as that willingness does not override an authentic resistance that would cost you emotional or mental wellbeing. The art is telling the difference.
What I see in my practice
A few patterns recur often enough that they are worth naming.
For some people, the wish to open up turns out, on reflection, to be driven by something like FOMO — a fear of missing out, a sense that there is more for me out there that a monogamous relationship simply cannot satisfy. That is not wrong to feel, but it is worth examining the strategy beneath the desire before acting on it.
For some couples, an ethically non-monogamous framework suits both partners down to the ground, and opening up is a genuine flowering. For others, one partner is far more eager than the other — and, as we have explored, the quieter partner can end up living at that painful edge of willing, but not wanting, agreeing in order to keep belonging, while their deeper needs and resistances go unexplored.
Two further enquiries can help you tell which couple you are.
The first is your core erotic theme — a concept from Jack Morin’s The Erotic Mind, referring to the recurring pattern of conditions, fantasies, or dynamics that make sex most satisfying for you specifically. I explore this at length in my companion guide to conscious kink for couples ([linked here]). The practice helps you identify the kinds of relational and erotic experiences that most satisfy your particular blueprint for connection. If spontaneity, novelty, and the charge of the taboo show up again and again in your peak erotic experiences — and you have done the work on consent, compersion, and honest limits — then opening your relationship may well suit you both beautifully.
The second is where your relationship is in its arc. In that same companion article I describe four levels of conscious relating, including a phase of co-independence — where you may share a home, finances, children, or pets, and are looking to open up in order to satisfy curiosity and invite spontaneity and freedom while staying committed to your primary partner. It is worth asking, too: do you want to explore always together, as a couple, or are you agreeing to separate exploration without your primary partner present? There is no right answer — only your answer.
Designing your container — and getting support
When you have done the reflection, I invite you to envision together, with enthusiastic consent, the kinds of experiences and the relational container that hold both your desires, both your learning edges, and both your concerns.
Then keep that consent alive. Take any limits or no’s seriously, and update your agreements moment to moment, experience to experience, as you dip a toe in and move more fully into this exploration. A container that never changes is not a living agreement — it is a rule waiting to be broken.
Two kinds of support make all the difference here. The first is education: a consent course, and in particular the Wheel of Consent workshops listed for cities all over the world on the School of Consent website. These practices help you embrace the whole spectrum — from the hell no to the hell yes — so that hearing a partner’s limit feels less like rejection and more like trust.
The second is a skilled practitioner who can offer what I think of as emergency empathy: someone who can translate between strategies and needs in the heat of a difficult conversation, and help you revise your agreements so that a wobble becomes a deepening rather than a rupture.
A final word
Whatever you’ve uncovered in this reflection, the point was never to arrive at a verdict.
Opening a relationship is not, at its best, about escaping what you have. It is about discovering what gift this exploration might bring to each of you — and whether you can offer one another the freedom and the safety to find out.
If both of you arrive at an enthusiastic yes, with compersion flickering into life and a no that is genuinely welcome between you, then ethical non-monogamy can be richly rewarding. If one of you is reticent while the other is doing the convincing, I would gently encourage you to walk through every step in this article before going any further. That, too, is embodied consent — and it is the most loving thing you can do.
If you would like support, you are welcome to reach out to me through my profile below.
Book a session with Julian Marcus
Embodied confidence. Deeper connection. Fully alive sexuality.
And if my approach is not the one that speaks to you, I would encourage you just as warmly to explore the other practitioners on Sensuali and reach out to whoever most inspires you, for an opening session to navigate this rich and rewarding territory together.
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— Our picks All practitionersExplore more experiences for couples on Sensuali.
Sources & further reading.
- Marie Thouin, PhD. What Is Compersion?. origin traced to the Kerista community, San Francisco.
- Dr. Betty Martin, (2021). The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent
- Jack Morin, PhD,. The Erotic Mind
