It was only when we opened up our long term monogamous marriage that we truly began to understand how many roles and externally devised paradigms we’d unconsciously bought into when we said, “I do.” There’s a lot of societal programming around what marriage is, what it looks like, what it means, what it’s rules are….. Someone can throw all of those out the window and start actively co-creating your marriage (as we did), but that’s probably easier to do if you’ve never entered into that dynamic in the first place.

That isn’t to knock marriage. Mine works great for me. If that’s what someone truly wants, then great, but I think more people should ask themselves why they want it beyond “that’s just what you are supposed to do.”