Bottlenecks — why open relationships rarely work
During a podcast I was listening to the other day, German couple’s therapist Ilka Hofmann-Bisinger brought up an interesting concept to explain why open relationships rarely work. The German word she used is “Engpass”, meaning bottleneck.
Let me summarize her point:
Open relationships are often characterized by an urge for optimization. An optimization of the overall satisfaction one can get out of one’s romantic relationships by picking and choosing the best traits from a number of partners. This, of course is driven by one partner’s all-too-human inability to meet the highest expectations across a number of characteristics. It’s like portfolio management of partner traits.
If the people involved are extremely mature, this can work for more than a while.
However, the reason the optimization arithmetic usually breaks down is because it prevents any of the relationships from growing.
Relationships run into bottlenecks, phases where things are challenging. It’s when both partners mutually agree to address the bottleneck face-on that growth and even transcendence of the previous relationship state can occur.
In open relationships this rarely occurs because when bottlenecks do arise, the temptation to simply shift more attention to another partner is just too great. As a result, none of the bottlenecks are addressed and relationship growth is stunted. This eventually leads to frustration and tears in an intricately woven mesh of relationships.
