Relationships,CouplesAPR 30, 2026

Wife Shares The Moment Her Open Marriage Fell Apart — And It Started With His Girlfriend Wanting A Baby

Mindaugas Balčiauskas and Rokas Laurinavičius

A relationship can be whatever people want it to be, as long as it’s consensual. For one woman and her husband, their marriage had reached a point where they felt they needed to be intimate with others.

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They set boundaries, communicated clearly, and for a while, it seemed like they had found a balance that worked for both of them.

But things shifted when the man’s lover asked for something the couple hadn’t even talked about before. It turns out she wants to have a child with him now! Unsure what response would create the least problems, the wife turned to the subreddit r/nonmonogamy for advice.

This wife gave her husband the option to open up their marriage

Image credits: Toa Heftiba / Unsplash (not the actual photo)

But now she thinks it has gone too far

The husband’s lover doesn’t just want him to impregnate her; she also hopes he can be involved in raising the child

Image credits: Getty Images / Unsplash (not the actual photo)

Image credits: anon

While open relationships are becoming less taboo, many people pursue them only to revert to monogamy after a short amount of time

Image credits: Getty Images / Unsplash (not the actual photo)

According to Dr. Justin R. Garcia, the executive director of the Kinsey Institute, a research institute at Indiana University that focuses on sex, gender, and reproduction, even though there’s been a surge of interest in polyamory since the mid-2000s, many couples quickly find out it’s not for them.

“People were talking about ... [it] in the 60s and 70s, but the language and the amount of attention to it changed, particularly over the last decade," Garcia tells Business Insider, citing Amy C. Moors, a scientist who noticed a steady increase in people searching for terms related to polyamory between 2006 and 2015.

Of course, showing interest and actually engaging in the activity are two different things. In his new book, The Intimate Animal, Garcia explains that research from his lab found that one in five single adults in the US, out of about 8,700 studied, have had some kind of consensual, non-monogamous relationship at some point in their lives.

However, when looking at the past five years in another study, Garcia noticed that the number dropped significantly, suggesting that “more people try it than decide that it is a lifelong relationship structure for them.”

And the reason for it might be simple — our biology

Image credits: Getty Images / Unsplash (not the actual photo)

So if the woman behind the post had wanted to stop their arrangement even before her husband and Sarah asked her the big question, that would have been absolutely fine. A relationship is constantly changing depending on what’s happening in people’s lives, and if some aspect of it no longer works, you don’t need to cling to it just because it did in the past.

“It’s similar to ‘What's the right amount of sex that we should be having?’” Garcia adds. “It’s as much as you want.”

The fact that a polyamorous relationship doesn’t work out even if people thought it would isn’t that surprising, either. “We have such a fundamental, evolved drive to form intense pair bonds,” Garcia says, ones that biologists theorize helped us thrive as a species over time. In his book, he explains that “our brains don’t appear particularly well-suited to processing intimacy with more than one partner at a time,” be it another romantic partner or a fling. Even fantasies about going to bed with more than just one person, Garcia says, more often than not involve an existing partner.

Garcia says one of the prevailing rationales for consensual non-monogamy is having “too much love to give.” However, he writes that the opposite is true. “Most people don't have the biological, psychological, and social tools to love more than one person at a time.”

Which is probably why a 2023 Pew Research report found that only about 33% of Americans believe open marriages are acceptable (it’s important to note that the figure is also heavily influenced by young people [18-29], of whom 51% say it’s okay).