What Is An Open Relationship – Explained In A Way You’ve Never Heard Before

Watch the video on youtube instead: youtube.com/watch?v=7Ula4NLsYyg

Explaining Open Relationships

There are a few ways that I go about explaining an open relationship. First and foremost, I’m the only person that you’ve probably heard say this: an open relationship, very simply put, is one that is not a closed relationship. A closed relationship is what most people practice in our culture and in our world internationally. In their relationships, they have it as a closed relationship without ever calling it that or recognizing it as a closed relationship because of tradition and convention. Social convention means it’s socially accepted, commonly practiced, and presumably unquestioned. You practice it without question; you believe it without question. That is what convention is.

A “Closed” Relationship

An open relationship and a closed relationship are exactly the opposite. The word “relationship” is one of the most misunderstood words in our language and misappreciated words. When you imagine a relationship, people often imagine something that’s more monogamous, more long-term, more serious, or any of that sort. But it’s not actually appreciated in its actual definition.

Recognizing this definition of what a relationship is will help you tremendously in building your relationships, and I’ll explain to you why in a few seconds. A relationship is how you interact and interface with entities around you. If the world were an entity, my relationship to the world would be that I’m an inhabitant of it. But more pragmatically and practically, my relationship to my cat is that I am its master, and it’s my pet. It presumes to be my pet without our having to exchange words or say those words exactly.

Different Relationships

My relationship to my friends and people and businesses is completely unique to each individual because, by definition, they are individuals. And because they are individuals, they will offer a different dynamic as they interface with me. In other words, my relationship to my friend A, friend B, friend C, friend one, two, three, whichever the case, my relationship to them is unique to them. If you were to talk about it in different levels of significance, some are not very significant, and some become insignificant. Some become more significant, some become very significant, and some become so significant that they become intrinsic and essential to me. Their happiness becomes essential to me, which often comes with love, adoration, respect, and cherishing for that person and wanting their actualization.

Levels of Significance

Now, those levels of significance may come with being sexual, whether they’re not very significant and they become sexual, or they become very significant and are sexual, or they become or they’re not significant and platonic and very significant and platonic. Do you understand? The sexual aspect of that relationship is unique to the person, despite their significance.

So, this is what I refer to, and this is what you can refer to as the dynamic between persons in the relationship between persons, how you interact and interface with entities. Entities are just another word for something that is recognized as, if it’s not a person, it’s a replacement for a person—an entity such as an LLC or a business corporation. You don’t refer to Apple as Steve Jobs or this fellow or this gal; you refer to Apple as Apple. “I got this from Apple. This thing that I have is from Apple.” Apple is an entity recognized by the government as an entity, kind of like a person but not necessarily biologically a person. So, it’s a concept, and concepts are something that we humans uniquely possess, our ability to create concepts.

Fundamentals

Leaving that alone, now we develop relationships with people, and the common and most commonly accepted and conventional format of a relationship is one that is closed. A closed relationship is any relationship which does not possess what I refer to as the three fundamental aspects of an open relationship: openness, unconditional love (which is your wanting for your beloved’s happiness intrinsic to your own), non-judgmental acceptance (accepting the person for who they are and facilitating that person and each individual in the relationship, their ability to feel that they can be themselves because it’s facilitated), and open communication (each person’s ability to communicate openly about anything without fear of remorse or fear of emotional or psychological or even actual physical blackmail).

In a closed relationship, you’re not able to interface with other people in a sexual manner because that would betray the arrangement of sexual exclusivity. That is actually the aspect of a closed relationship, the primary aspect, the primary purpose of the closed relationship model: sexual exclusivity. And that came about for many different purposes.

Evolution of Sexual Relationships

I like to say that we humans did not evolve to be monogamous. If we evolved to be monogamous, we would not have a need for the word “marriage.” We would just pair bond with one partner for the rest of our life. When we discovered agriculture, we discovered the idea of ownership and property. Just like we plant seed in the fertile soil when we receive a product, we plant seed in a fertile woman who receives a product like a baby, which, if we grew, tended, and raised, would inherit the land, which was our property. So it was very important for people to know that their child, especially their firstborn, was their own. And so they created things like chastity belts, chastity, or harem guards to prevent their wives from copulating, having sexual intercourse with other people who would have children with them.

In other words, there were many different reasons for sexual exclusivity, none of which was because we evolved to be monogamous; we did not. And so, sexual exclusivity is the primary reason you have closed relationships. Even people who consider themselves as “polyamorous” actually are polygamous, meaning they are married with multiple partners, whether it’s polyandrous or polygynous. And they are in a closed relationship where sexual exclusivity remains within that group of people. And so, a betrayal to that relationship would be if you were to sexually interact with somebody outside of that relationship.

Happy Open Relationships

An open relationship is one that’s very unique, a relationship practiced correctly that entails unconditional love (your wanting for your beloved’s actualization, so anything that makes them happy denies jealousy and denies the ideas of property, ownership, and possessiveness), non-judgmental acceptance (accepting them for being them, accepting the man for being a man and doing man things, and a woman for doing woman things and connecting with people in woman ways), and open communication. None of these can be practiced in a closed relationship.