When my husband and I opened up our marriage after 20 monogamous years together we had a lot of these kinds of conversations — dozens of them, in fact, before we ever had a date. He told me about the woman at work from 10 years ago that he’d been really attracted to and I told him about the threesome I’d had in college. Before this time, that time of honesty felt scary and “out of bounds” for what married people share, but as we went into this time where we were redefining and co-creating our relationship to be something that we designed, rather than plugging into a box someone else created, we found something remarkable. Our relationship, which was already very good, deepened. There were no zero secrets, no hiding, no masks of any kind worn around each other.

Things went pretty well until I met someone that I was in love with, but then we just went even deeper in this process, taking a look at whether we truly believed that love was a pie (we didn’t) or an infinite thing that did not diminish no matter how much was given, delving deeper into what was societal programming and what was actually true for us. We have a happier and healthier relationship than we’ve ever had and that is saying something. Vulnerability is absolutely the “magic sauce” as Brene’ Brown calls it, for true intimacy and deep love!