«Sex with others saved our marriage»
An apartment block in a Lucerne neighbourhood, Wednesday evening. Stefanie is in the bathroom putting on her make-up. Tim is sitting at the kitchen table writing his pirate story. His mother leans over her son and kisses him on the forehead. «Bye, dear, I'll see you tomorrow lunchtime after school.» Then Stefanie says goodbye to her husband Jacek and makes her way to her lover. The two have been seeing each other once a week for four years.
Stefanie shares her life with several men. She and her husband Jacek have known each other for 14 years. Six years ago, they decided to live out their eroticism with different partners, agreed on dates and communicated transparently. They both meet up with regular or changing partners for sex and eroticism. They spend most weekends as a couple and with their eight-year-old son.
«We are happy,» say Stefanie and Jacek. «The fact that we live out our sexuality with third parties has saved our marriage.» Fixed partnerships with several sexual partners, intimacy according to a schedule or a relationship without sex at all: individually negotiated arrangements are increasingly determining the lives of many couples. «Love practices that have long been stigmatised as a decline in morals are moving from the margins of society into the mainstream,» says Andreas Steinle, Managing Director of the German Future Institute in Frankfurt. «Obligatory moral concepts, as formulated by the church, are diminishing with the individualisation of society.»
Only very few people can imagine officially allowing their partner and themselves to have an affair: This form of cohabitation is too risky, too complicated, too costly and too hurtful. Stefanie and Jacek have found a way and let their child, family and friends in on their relationship model. The reason for their separate love life is their unsuccessful attempt to have a second child. The pressure they both put on themselves to have a sibling for Tim eventually became so great that nothing worked in bed, Jacek recalls.
The friendship between us was stronger than the eroticism right from the start.
Stefanie
«At the beginning of our relationship, the eroticism was right for both of us,» says Stefanie. «But even then, the friendship between us was stronger than the eroticism. When we tried to get pregnant a second time, everything came together. My frustration at not being able to live out the kind of sexuality I wanted and the pressure in our marriage bed. I was at a complete loss,» says the 38-year-old. «I thought I was no longer feminine, no longer attractive enough for my husband, I longed to be desired, no longer felt comfortable in my body. Yet I was in the prime of my life. I envied the ease of other women's relationships and wished I could live life to the full.»
When Stefanie and Jacek read in a newspaper article about a couple who love each other but have sex with others, they started talking about whether this was a possibility for them too. Today, they are convinced that their open relationship has saved their partnership. «Attractiveness and wild sex give way to trust, security and the togetherness of living together after a few years,» says Thurgau psychologist Gerhard Dammann.
This is in the nature of things: «Erotic attraction requires strangeness and a certain form of uncertainty. The price that comes with a closer partnership is a gain in closeness and a loss of strangeness.» The paradox here is that the desire to spend a lot of time with a particular person and to take advantage of opportunities to undress each other as often as possible is the foundation of most love relationships in modern societies.
Nevertheless, sexuality goes from being a matter of course to a problem over the course of a couple's life: one of the main reasons for the breakdown of relationships is sexual frustration. A study published in 2017 by the online dating agency Parship found that the frequency of sexual intercourse decreases rapidly after five years. The proportion of couples who only have sex every few months or never at all is 19 per cent after five years, 26 per cent in relationships lasting more than ten years and even 35 per cent after 20 years.
Wife and husband become mum and dad
There are also evolutionary biological reasons why sex in marriage is becoming less frequent. When we first fall in love, the happiness hormones dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin are released - with the aim of getting together as often as possible to ensure offspring. Once this goal has been achieved, the harmonising, calming messenger substances such as oxytocin and vasopressin come into play: attraction gives way to nurturing. Woman and man become mum and dad. Sex becomes a minor matter, raising the children takes centre stage.
«Marriage becomes particularly binding when there are children,» says Valais generation researcher Pasqualina Perrig-Chiello. «But keeping the promise of «till death do you part» is something that no generation has ever had to honour in this length of time. We need to redefine marriage.» Living out your sexuality with someone else - known in the trade as polyamory or polysexuality - is one possibility. The idea behind this is to separate sexuality from love in relationships.
The Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz is the mastermind behind this concept. Illouz urges us to try to separate romance from partnership in families, i.e. to raise children with friends and live passion with other partners. She says: «I don't want to completely abandon love as a concept either. Families must continue to rely on it. But does it have to be this very narrow form of romantic love? Our society is too fixated on heterosexual love. For the ancient Greeks, love was a much more open concept. We should consider that too.»
When Stefanie and Jacek were at the height of their listlessness, there were two options: bite the bullet or break up. The latter was never an issue. «Why would it be? Everything else is going well between us.» Outsourcing eroticism doesn't mean the end of the relationship, says Stefanie. «Especially not if love, tenderness and physical closeness are still being experienced.» There were many trials and errors, contracts and countless conversations before the two found a way out of the crisis together. How many nights were they each allowed to spend away from each other? What goes too far? «It wasn't easy,» remembers Stefanie. «Especially when friends and family realised what an experiment we had embarked on.»
Neighbours became suspicious when another man came in and out of Stefanie and Jacek's flat. Acquaintances asked whether the couple had split up after they had been seen in the arms of another man in the city, says Stefanie.
«The parents were worried about our son, about me, who had lost all reason in their eyes. But I blossomed, which brought me closer to my husband again, albeit on the level of a deep friendship.» Today, the arrangement has settled down. Both of them meet up with others one or two evenings a week and allow each other weekends with their outside partners. Meetings in their shared flat are also permitted.
The couple are shaking up one of the last taboos in our society: physical fidelity. Fidelity is one of the ten commandments that we can still keep, we are very attached to it," writes Stephanie Katerle in her book «Seitensprünge». Almost all women and men still want a sexually faithful partner, even if they don't always take fidelity very seriously themselves. According to estimates, more than half of all men and women cheat on their partners in the course of their long-term relationship.
Should children be initiated?
In her book, Katerle advises couples to talk more openly about the topic of fidelity and to ask themselves from the outset what fidelity actually means. «What it means to stand by each other, what common values are, what you stand for together, what the relationship is about apart from sexual exclusivity.» Because that is only a very small part of a relationship. The other parts are much bigger and more important. «There's a shared history, shared children. You go through joys and sorrows together. Is all this suddenly supposed to be worth nothing because one person has slept with another?» writes author Stephanie Katerle.
Stefanie and Jacek are parents. They want to explain to their child why mum often stays out at night and why dad meets other women. How does a child deal with this situation and what is the best way to talk about it?
Children should feel free to ask questions and tell us what interests them or what is on their minds.
Karin Frei, couples and sex counsellor
In her practice, Bern-based couples and sex counsellor Karin Frei advises couples who want to open up their relationship. «In my experience, the success of an open relationship stands and falls with the attitude of the parents,» says Karin Frei. «The clearer they are about their chosen form of relationship and have developed coping strategies for stressful situations, the more stability the child experiences in this structure.»
Frei recommends that children should not necessarily be told everything from the outset, but should wait until they are interested and ask questions of their own accord. After all, children are not generally interested in their parents' sexuality. «On the contrary. The less they need to know about it, the better. When the time comes that the parents want to live their sexuality with other partners, it is important that the parents agree clear rules together and take the child's well-being into account,» advises Karin Frei.
However, if the parents themselves are still unsure, it is advisable to wait with honesty and give the children a different explanation as to why they are away on some evenings. «A good communication culture,» says Frei, «is particularly important in this type of relationship model. Children should feel free to ask questions and tell us what interests them or what's on their minds.» This in turn requires a trusting relationship between parents and child.
An open couple relationship does not necessarily lead to psychological stress for the child. The child needs the security of knowing that the family system will last, regardless of the type of relationship the couple has. Parents should come to a mutual agreement about what and how much they want to confide in their children and their environment. This helps to prevent misunderstandings. The children may know that things are different with their parents than with other parents. But as long as they are sure of their parents' love, they can deal with it. Karin Frei is convinced: «Children whose parents are constantly arguing suffer more than children whose parents live their sexuality differently and treat each other with respect and love.»
According to most relationship counsellors, the problem with an open relationship lies elsewhere: in the heart.
Karin Frei is one of the few counsellors who believes that an open relationship does have a chance under certain conditions. Most people are rather sceptical about this form of relationship. This is because, according to the tenor, the problem with open relationships lies elsewhere: in the heart.
Sexual interaction in long-term love relationships is above all a way of fulfilling basic needs for acceptance and belonging. «As a rule, people want to be recognised for their uniqueness, especially when it comes to sexuality,» says sex therapist Gabriela Kirschbaum from Brugg. Jealousy is also the main problem when trying to open up the relationship to third parties. «An open relationship is a delicate experiment,» says Kirschbaum. She has never met any couples who have had good experiences with open relationships, even if the partnership was designed for this from the outset.
Ines Schweizer, a couples therapist from Lucerne, also sees many couples in erotic crises in her practice. However, this is «not just about the desire for sex that has dwindled over the course of a relationship. Many experience a kind of powerlessness in their relationship in the face of different sexual desires. It's usually about finding a balance between satisfying your own needs and desires and respecting those of your partner.» This requires a «good us», says Zurich-based couple and family therapist Doris Beerli. «Eroticism and sensuality need space and nurturing, without this they disappear. Couples are often completely full with work and children and leisure activities, succumb to their duties, are puppets of themselves, lose themselves and contact with the other person.»
According to Beerli, nurturing a relationship means spending time together, talking to each other regularly to strengthen the bond, opening your heart, sharing how you are feeling and listening to how your partner is feeling. «This creates depth and closeness and therefore emotional intimacy.»
Meeting each other again and again
Such encounters can take place at home, on a walk in the woods, while hiking or in the high mountains, while experiencing adventures together. It is important, says Beerli, that there are moments when there are only «the two of them» and that «the third», i.e. the relationship, can emerge between them again and again and be revitalised by them. After all, we all want «a person to whom I can show all sides of myself and who recognises and knows me at my very core.»
Such encounters are needed again and again. So that the relationship, the bond remains, even if the normal chaos of life takes place in between. When Tim comes home from school the next day, Stefanie is in the kitchen preparing lunch. «Will you read me your pirate story later?» she asks, stroking his head. Sometimes, she admits, she wonders what Tim will think of her when he has a better understanding of how his parents organise their relationship. She hopes that he will take with him what is so important to her: «To go your own way, even if it is unconventional, and to lead a life that you can affirm from the bottom of your heart.»
