“What is an open relationship? Are you still in love with each other? Are you not in love anymore and you’re just staying together for your daughter?” 

Besides family and friends, Deepa Paul received a lot of queries about her open relationship from other people. Thus, the Filipina based in Amsterdam decided to write her book Ask Me How it Works: A Memoir of Love and Motherhood in an Open Marriage to answer their questions. Among the things she wrote in the book are the lessons she and her husband learned from their open relationship.

“We learned how to be communicative about our needs, because I think in the Philippines, we are taught that love is about sacrifice. So it’s about me sacrificing my needs to make you happy, and if I love you, I will sacrifice what makes me happy to make you happy. But actually we learned that both husbands’ and wives’ needs are valid. Different people need different things. Like for me, part of what makes me fulfilled and happy is having an adventurous life, to be able to discover myself, to be able to make new connections and get to really explore and be adventurous,” she explained.

“And for my husband, he needed security, stability for us to be honest and transparent with each other. So we learned how to communicate this to each other and to find a compromise that honors both sets of rules equally, not just one or the other. I think what’s happened over time is that we are no longer afraid of having difficult discussions. We’re able to talk about everything because, we’re able to talk about things that are normally taboo such as sex, pleasure, we were able to talk about things that made us uncomfortable and there’s a lot of honesty and transparency in our relationship.”

The second benefit that Deepa experiences is having a lot of equality at home. 

“Because I, as the mom, I have my own time for which that I’ve used for dating, for going out, but a time for myself that’s not questioned. And because of that, my husband also has kind of stepped up in terms of the parenting and household tasks. So, my house, like my family, doesn’t fall apart because I’m not there.”

Contrary to popular opinion that an open marriage promotes jealousy, for Deepa, it has even resulted in “a very, very high level of trust” because “there are no secrets between us.”

“I feel like even if my husband dates other people, or he knows that if I date other people, if it became something else, we would still choose each other.”

Open, but not for everyone

An open relationship might sound like fun and playing games, but Deepa clarified that it is still grounded on rules and responsibility.

“I guess time management has always been a struggle,” she professed. “So in the beginning, we had make agreements and boundaries around what was OK and not OK. So I discovered, for example, that as a woman, it’s so much easier for a woman to get dates on dating apps than men. So my calendar could really be full if I wanted to, so we agreed that OK… one of the things we decided was to not date more than once a week, so that we would continue to have lots of our time, lots of quality time with family, quality time also for each other, and then time for ourselves to recharge as individuals.”

She admitted that trying to balance family life with social life, job and dating is tiring, but she is able to juggle all these since she is already in Amsterdam. 

“I don’t live in the Philippines anymore and I don’t get stuck in traffic for three hours a day just trying to get out of my house and get home. So that gives me a lot of time and energy, and I get a lot of energy back from meeting new people and having fun.”

Apart from time management, exposing yourself to different people is another factor to consider in an open marriage. “When you expose yourself to new people all the time, you also can’t control other people’s actions. There will be times when you will have bad dates, you will have bad experiences with people, and no matter how much you try to protect yourself, there will still be negative experiences. So that would be the downside. Of course, you can also have negative experiences while you’re married, right?”

People would normally ask Deepa why she should put herself at risk if she’s already in a secure and stable marriage. “I guess over time I’ve just learned how to filter out… my red flags. I’ve become better at telling, filtering out those people over time.”

For one, she has learned to filter out people with Asian or MILF (mom I’d like to f---) fantasies. 

“There are definitely men who fetishize mothers. I don’t know why, but for me, that’s a red flag.”

According to her, for as long as the boundaries are clear from the very beginning, “There’s no guessing, there’s no ghosting.”

Deepa stressed that an open relationship is not a band-aid solution to a bad marriage, either.

“I would advise anyone who’s curious about this lifestyle to really look at what needs that they want to be served by this kind of relationship. Is it a desire to explore themselves? Their sexuality? More excitement? Adventure? If you’re already in a relationship, is it a desire for something that’s missing in that relationship? Can you fulfill those needs some other way? Can you fulfill them in the relationship? For example, if you’re no longer happy in your current relationship, why don’t you address those things first before seeking something outside?”

An open relationship, she stressed, “isn’t a free for all where everyone can just do whatever they want.”

“It’s also about taking care of your partner, because you will be doing things that are uncomfortable and new and perhaps scary for both of you. So if you’re doing something that’s exciting and adventurous on your own, you should also have the capacity to reassure your partner and to take care of them, as they’re navigating this new phase with you.”

This kind of lifestyle, she said, only becomes a “well-oiled machine” like hers if it is respectful, safe and enjoyable for all.