Open Relationship Failure

Harris Telemacher: You must have a boyfriend?
SanDeE*: He doesn't care. He can't care. He gave me this big speech, how even though we live together, we should be able to see other people. I said ok. But it backfires on him sometimes.
Harris: Where is he now?
SanDeE*: He's at the bar.
Harris: What?!
SanDeE*: This was his idea. (yells to the boyfriend, who looks annoyed) This is him!

— L.A. Story

To some people, polyamory and other forms of nonmonogamy can seem like a convenient midpoint between singlehood and monogamy. But not everybody is as comfortable with the idea as they first think they might be. This trope deals with situations where open relationships go internally awry for causes directly related to them being open relationships.

One common variation, which overlaps the Original Position Fallacy, is that one partner says they want an open relationship but then balks when their romantic partner actually does hook up with other people. This is frequently played as a man looking for permission to step out on his female partner, only for him to then become an Emasculated Cuckold when she turns out to be better at getting dates than him.

There can also be cases where an Alice wants to be polyamorous, while her partner Bob does not, but he knows that if he asks for monogamy that will end with Alice breaking up with him. Accepting polyamory as a condition of continuing the relationship, Bob reluctantly agrees to it and tries to put on a happy face and convince himself and those around them he's actually okay with it, with varying degrees of success.

Subtrope of Polyamory and related to Love Triangle. Contrast the Ethical Slut, who is promiscuous but deliberately works to avoid hurting people they're involved with by being so.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Girlfriend, Girlfriend is about a boy who manages to start a relationship with his childhood friend right before another girl who was hoping to earn his affection confesses to him. Unable to decide which girl to date, he decides to try and convince both girls to date him at the same time. This quickly leads to one problem after another, and it only gets more complicated as other girls start trying to get in on the action.
• Discussed in Rosario + Vampire. Tsukune's Unwanted Harem gradually becomes more cognizant of the fact that despite their pursuit of him, he really is a one-woman man and prefers Moka, and if he ever manages to put his foot down about it, their group is likely to collapse. Subverted when the manga actually ends on a Marry Them All note.

Fan Works

• Defied in Advice and Trust. Shinji, Asuka, and Rei all have heavy Threesome Subtext between them, but both Shinji and Asuka shoot down the possibility of a polyamorous relationship because neither thinks that they're emotionally healthy enough to handle it. Rei also shoots it down, but her reasons are more along the lines of not wanting to interfere with Shinji and Asuka's preexisting romance.

Film — Live-Action

• Discussed in Chasing Amy: When there's growing tension between Holden, Banky, and Alyssa, Holden proposes that the three of them have sex together; to Holden, not only would it resolve the tension between the three of them, but it would also help Banky deal with his latent homosexuality, and it would make Holden feel less inadequate compared to Alyssa (as she's had a much more adventurous sexual history than Holden). However, Alyssa outlines several reasons why it's a terrible idea (and even tries to shoot down the idea before Holden finishes outlining his proposal); specific reasons she lists include the possibility that Banky would do something to her that would either make her love him more than Holden or make Holden jealous, and the fact that she loved Holden and couldn't stand the thought that he'd want to share her with anyone else. The three ultimately end up going their separate ways not long afterward.
• Ex-Lady: Helen and Don have a sexual relationship which eventually leads to marriage despite Helen thinking that marriage only costs the partners their autonomy. Eventually Helen insists that she and Don separate. She says she wants an open relationship, even telling Don not to get jealous after admitting she's accepted a date with Nick. Nick agrees. But of course neither of them really mean it, as he's obviously jealous of her and Nick and she gets jealous on the same night after seeing Nick going out with Peggy. Both Nick and Peggy make sexual advances to their respective partners, but neither Helen nor Don can go through with it, and naturally they wind up back together.
• L.A. Story: Harris starts a casual relationship with SanDeE*, a ditzy clerk at a clothing store, who tells him her boyfriend doesn't want to be exclusive so they can keep dating other people—before pointing him out to Harris during their date at the Hard Rock Cafe. Late in the film, she says the boyfriend wants to go exclusive, she suspects because he wasn't able to get any other dates.

Literature

• It's not actively shown to fail, but in The City Who Fought, Channa Hap gets something different out of her relationships with Simeon and Amos. She's Simeon's brawn and after a rough start has a close Pseudo-Romantic Friendship with him, and will prioritize him over anyone else when the chips are down. Amos is the beautiful leader of a faction of Space Amish, who's condescending to Channa as a woman but is of great sexual and romantic interest to her. While he's jealous at first and tries to sabotage their relationship, Simeon accepts that Amos makes Channa happy. When Amos storms out after a Wrong-Name Outburst Simeon takes him to task - among other things, Amos had taken the name "Simeon-Amos" for several weeks to fool invaders - and makes him take Channa back. For his part Amos is convinced that Simeon, who Can't Have Sex, Ever, has a prurient interest and considers Amos as a kind of sex toy. He begrudgingly accepts that Channa is devoted to Simeon, but it bothers him. Ten years later in The Ship Avenged Amos is convinced that Channa will leave Simeon for him but has never actually discussed this with her - and we know from the first book that she hates when people don't think she takes her career seriously.
• In The Cynic's Dictionary by Russell Ashe (essentially a Setting Update of The Devil's Dictionary), the phrase "open relationship" is defined as "I sleep around, she doesn't".

Live-Action TV

• Arrested Development: In season two, Lindsay and Tobias try an open marriage to see if it can salvage their strained relationship. As it turns out, Lindsay is frustrated that her attempts to flirt with other men go nowhere, and Tobias is too busy jealously stalking Lindsay on her dates to do anything else. Both of them brag about how much they're sleeping around, though.
  Tobias: You know, Lindsay, as a therapist, I have advised a number of couples to explore an open relationship where the couple remains emotionally committed but free to explore extra-marital encounters.
  Lindsay: Well, did it work for those people?
  Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might... but it might work for us.
• Bones:
  • Played for laughs in "Man in the Outhouse". Bones dates two men at the same time, arguing that one provides her with intellectual stimulation and the other with physical. She neglected to actually inform either paramour that she would be pursuing this arrangement, and therefore both men promptly dump her when they find out about each other, leaving Bones to ruefully "consider the argument for monogamy."
  • In "The Sin in the Sisterhood", the Body of the Week is the husband in a polygamous marriage to three sisters. Although the investigation encounters plenty of drama around this marriage, including a fundamentalist neighbour and a fourth woman on the side, the murderer turns out to be the wives' father, who killed their husband for cheating on them.
• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: This comes up time and again in various episodes.
  • "Swap Meet": A murder reveals that a neighborhood has been holding swinger parties amongst the adults, with four rules: No photos. No videos. No affairs (the swinging at the party not counting), and the children must never know. All of those rules are broken, resulting in a murder of a woman by her jealous daughter who had also been seeing the same man.
  • In another episode, a man is left hospitalized, and he has a wife and a lover visit him in the hospital, both well aware of the other. The attempt was made by the wife, who was incensed that her husband never made love to her first in their trysts with the other woman.
  • A husband and wife pair of killers invite couples to join them in a foursome, then force the husband to kill his wife to spare her from rape and torture before death, then kill the husband themselves. One couple is spared because they began bickering before things got started, and breaking up unhappy couples wasn't the motivation of the killer duo. The killer couple turned out to be trying to save their own marriage; the wife was getting off on it or something.
• CSI: NY: In "Stealing Home," a dead man found shot through his right eye on his doorstep turns out to have been killed by his wife, who was jealous that he always made love to the woman they'd formed a "committed threesome" with first (even after they'd added another guy to the mix as well), and had laughed at her and told her to get over it when she'd explained how it made her feel.
• In the Family Law (2021) episode "Three's Company", Abby and David take on the case of a young artist who was in a three-way relationship with a married couple. While he and the husband got on quite well, his relationship with the wife turned exploitative, as she increasingly used him for free labor for her blog, which got in the way of his career as an artist, making him increasingly dependent upon the couple.
• In the Friends episode "The One with the Butt", Chandler dates a polyamorist woman named Aurora, who already has a husband and a boyfriend. Chandler accepts being the third guy for a while but when she admits she's started seeing a fourth man, he decides it's too much for him and breaks up with her.
  Chandler: Oh, so what you're saying is you're not completely fulfilled by Rick, Ethan, and myself?
  Aurora: No, that's not exactly what I was..
  Chandler: Well, y'know, most women would kill for three guys like us.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac are vampire lovers who plan to spend eternity together. In "Is My Very Nature That of a Devil", Lestat initiates an open relationship because he believes "a little variety" will prevent their romance from going stale (never mind that they've only been together for barely six years when he makes this suggestion). Both men end up being very jealous about their partner's other paramours.
• Intimate: Max is unable to satisfy his girlfriend Isabella in bed, so she declares she wants to open up the relationship and not see him for a while. When they meet up again, Max pretends to have had a threesome to show her he's gotten more adventurous. Isabella is impressed, and delighted when Max suggests visiting a sex club. There, however, Max can't bring himself to get, well, intimate with anyone else, and has to watch Isabella enjoying herself with another couple.
• The Love Boat: In the "The 'Now' Marriage" segment of Season 2, Episode 15, Dr. Todd Gardiner has written a best-selling book by that title which encourages married people to engage in open relationships. Upon boarding, he tells the crew he and his wife Eleanor intend to pursue other partners during the cruise. He meets a swinging single lady and spends all his time dancing, dining, and sleeping with her. Meanwhile, Eleanor remains unattached and becomes more and more miserable by the day. When she finally opens up and reveals her true feelings of jealousy and neglect, the two reconcile and decide to remain monogamous after all.
• Pushing Daisies: Downplayed in "Bitches". When Ned reawakens dog breeder Harold Hundin from the dead to ask who killed him, he says his wife killed him. The team quickly finds out this is not so cut-and-dry, since Hundin had four wives. While the murder turns out to have more to do with the new dog Harold and his wives invented, a Coll-A-Dor-Russell-A-Poo ^note Cross-breed of a Border Collie, a Labrador Retriever, a Jack Russell Terrier, and a Poodle, the dog breeds each of his wives owned named Bubblegum, the murder was still connected to the polygamous marriage situation. Harold's first wife Hilary is revealed to have not been happy that she couldn't be her husband's one-and-only. She put up with it and took solace in the one-of-a-kind Bubblegum, until Harold mentioned his plans to clone the dog with a rival breeder, setting Hilary off.
  Narrator: So Hilary made her own decision. Refusing to subject her baby to the same tortuous, shared existence she had been cursed to live... Hilary poisoned Harold and framed Hallie to take any fall, knowing good Hallie served, but did not drink, caffeine herself.
• Roseanne: After Darlene goes away to college, it's revealed that she's sleeping with a fellow college boy while still dating her longterm boyfriend David. He's aware of the situation and seems initially accepting, since Darlene frames it as wanting some experience other than just marrying the first boy she ever dated, and he believes she'll get it out of her system and choose him in the end. He can wait. Roseanne can't believe any male would accept this and needles David to stick up for himself, causing him to finally snap and demand that Darlene choose between him and "the other guy". She chooses the other guy.
• SOKO Potsdam: In "Let Live", the Body of the Week Sylvia's coworker and girlfriend Mira tells Tamara that they were in an open relationship, but doesn't seem to be happy about it. Tamara suggests jealousy to Henschel as the motive for a crime of passion, though when she suggests it to Mira, Mira says she'd accepted it as the price of being with Sylvia. Subverted: Mira is the killer, but turns out to be lying about Sylvia dating other people in order to send the detectives on a wild goose chase. The murder was really motivated by an ethical disagreement over having their research used to make Designer Babies.
• S.W.A.T. (2017): During season two, Chris goes on a date with a woman called Kira who reveals she already has a boyfriend named Ty, and that the pair of them are polyamorists looking for an equal third. Being bisexual, Chris decides to give it a try and is initially happy, finding it fulfilling and that their personalities complement hers. However, as time goes on Chris begins to realize that due to being initially attracted to Kira she is always going to be closer to her than Ty, whilst despite their best efforts the fact they were already together before they met her means that Kira and Ty will always be closer to each other than her. Realizing it's not going to work out, she breaks up with them.
• Two and a Half Men: Charlie meets the daughter of a woman he was seeing. She mentions that she had been in a three-way relationship with her girlfriend and her girlfriend's boyfriend. According to her, this relationship ended because the girlfriend started acting weird despite the threesome being her idea. Charlie finds this sexy and ends up breaking up with her mother to be with her daughter.

Theatre

• The Boys in the Band has Larry, who wants an open relationship, and his lover Hank, who would much prefer to be monogamous. They try a "menagé à trois" but it simply makes both of them miserable, and Larry continues sleeping around. Eventually they decide that there's never going to be a perfect solution, but that they both love each other enough to try anyway,

Video Games

• Being A ΔΙΚ: Heather and Tommy's relationship is shown to be going down this path from Season 2 onwards. Although the terms of their relationship require them to ask for permission before sleeping with someone else, Tommy routinely and seemingly nonchalantly sleeps with other people without informing her – by the time the story first starts, he is "plus three". This, apart from him just being a Jerkass in general, starts to chafe at Heather in Season 3: after seeing him take Christine to his bed, she can perform oral sex on an unattached MC, and Episode 10 reveals that she slept with Nick.

Webcomics

• Questionable Content: Faye and Sven become Friends with Benefits with the understanding that they aren't romantically involved or sexually exclusive. Nonetheless, when Sven sleeps with someone else, their friends treat him like a cheater and Faye stops seeing him at all.
• S.S.D.D.: Richard as part of his backstory inserted himself into a three-way relationship with a lesbian couple, Crystal and Red. It went wrong when Red started falling for Richard and neglecting Crystal, then tried to dump her which neither Crystal nor Richard wanted and led to the whole relationship falling apart^note when Red recounts it years later she blames herself, but much later Richard admits to Annie that he wanted Crystal and tried to use the bisexual Red to get around Crystal's Incompatible Orientation with him. Meanwhile, in the "present day" of the comic, Richard's current girlfriend Annie screws other men behind his back until an old friend of his suggests they do a wife-swap and she fesses up out of guilt. Afterwards, Richard and Annie decide to be mature about it and work out an arrangement where they inform one another of their casual sex partners.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: In "When a Stan Loves a Women", Stan gets upset over the fact that Francine had multiple partners before they got married, while she's the only woman he's ever slept with. Francine tells him that she never loved any of her other men in the same way she loves him, and agrees to a temporary divorce to give him the chance to have some meaningless sex of his own. But when he meets Joanna and they seem to really hit it off, Francine gets paranoid that they'll fall in love and he'll choose Joanna and stay divorced from her. He does but ultimately goes back to Francine after she interrupts his wedding night with Joanna.
• BoJack Horseman: After Mr. Peanutbutter cheats on Pickles with Diane, he and Pickles negotiate a bizarre way Pickles can make it up to him: she can sleep with multiple other men until Mr. Peanutbutter feels the same shame that she felt when he cheated on her. However, this backfires when Pickles ends up sleeping with Joey Pogo and decides she wants to go on tour with him, dumping Mr. Peanutbutter via text.
• Futurama: In "The Beast With a Billion Backs", Fry falls in love with a new woman called Colleen. It seems to go well until he discovers that she has four other boyfriends and maintains a polygamous relationship. He tries to maintain his side and moves in, but he finds it difficult to maintain a conversation when several other boyfriends are involved and is quickly overwhelmed to the point of breaking up with her.

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