Dhru Purohit

First of all, the reality is that being in a consensually non-monogamous relationship today

is about as common as people who own a cat.

So it is, there are a lot of people out there who you may not know that they're in open relationships or consensually non-monogamous relationships, but they are.

And here's the thing, we don't have to say to ourselves, okay, in order to be a happy person, this means I need to go be in an ethically non-monogamous relationship, right?

I absolutely don't want that to be the message.

But learning about ethical non-monogamy

it can teach you about some of the inherent challenges to monogamy.

Because we aren't taught how to do monogamy right when we're growing up.

We don't get that education.

We don't learn about the fact that if you look at anthropological evidence,

we did not grow up in these tribes as hunter-gatherers who were in these long-term monogamous relationships for 50, 60, 70 years, right?

And so that doesn't mean that you can't have an incredibly fulfilling

sexually connected marriage for that long, I certainly hope to, but it means that you're up against certain challenges, right?

Like specifically, a lot of people come to me confessing, oh my God, what happens if I feel attraction to someone outside of my marriage?

What happens if I have a sexual fantasy about someone who I'm not married to, right?

That's human, that fantasy, that's what's going on in your head.

That's just part of what leads our desires to be able to ignite us.

And those fantasies are okay.

Now, what you do with those fantasies in terms of coming to your partner,

whether it's role play, whether it's something that you just keep to yourself, but it's something that just needs to be normalized because it's an inherent challenge.