Women's Lifestyle July 7, 2026 0 Comments

When Open Relationships Go Wrong: The Shocking Betrayal I Never Saw Coming

Heartbreaks come in all shapes and sizes, but have you ever wondered: can you actually be cheated on in an open relationship? It sounds like a paradox, right? Like trying to play chess where the rules keep shifting beneath your feet. A few years back, I faced one of the most gut-wrenching chapters of my life—betrayed by someone I thought was “the one” in a relationship supposedly built on radical freedom and trust. But freedom without boundaries? Let me tell you, it’s a slippery slope. Growing up, my ancestors never had words for this kind of heartbreak. They were tied to traditions where choice wasn’t really a choice, and love came wrapped in arrangements—not agreements. Yet here we are, navigating a minefield of new relationship models—polys, throuples, relationship anarchists—that challenge everything we thought we knew. The thrill is in the unknown, sure, but what’s the price when the unspoken rules get broken and jealousy rears its relentless head? My story is messy, raw, and deeply human—a reminder that no matter the label, love can still hurt like hell. Ready to dive deep into this wild terrain of open relationships and emotional survival? LEARN MORE

10 min read

A few years ago, I went through one of the most devastating heartbreaks of my life. I was cheated on by someone I thought I was going to marry, someone I was in an open relationship with, someone with whom I had deliberately crafted a life that allowed for other people to be in it. The relationship brought up a question: Can you be cheated on even when you agree to being in an open relationship?

“My ancestors had no words for the specific textures of heartbreak I feel,” one of my closest friends once said to me about navigating jealousy in her open relationship. We both came from lineages of women who had been in arranged marriages, where as far as we knew, the idea of creating extramarital agreements was not spoken about openly. The idea of men taking multiple wives, particularly in Islam, is common. But not for women, not for femme people. Men did what they did; women swallowed it. Queer people were nonexistent in our (spoken) family histories. For a femme person, the idea of free will in choosing your own partner, as well as free will in choosing if you wanted to cultivate multiple relationships at the same time, was monumental, unheard of in what I knew of my ancestry. But there is also something about being a willing participant in these relationships that holds a double-edged sword; since we had signed up for this, it felt like we were not allowed to feel jealousy or hurt because of things that happened in these relationships. There was loneliness in pretending that we were okay, pretending that things didn’t hurt, when they did.

I had been in open relationships since I was 17. I suppose it isn’t surprising that after generations of arranged marriages and people not choosing their loves, I became insistent on not only choosing my love but also questioning the very structures of relationships that had been taught to me as “normal.” I flung myself in the opposite direction as my ancestors.

When I first started exploring polyamory and open relationships, these terms were not in any kind of mainstream conversation. I felt a deep loneliness in that—not being able to see structures of relationships that looked like mine in media. Never seeing people navigating the specificity of what my heartbreaks and loves felt like. Now, nearly 15 years later, the entire landscape of our modern dating life has changed. Our relationships look so different from what has come before us—a minefield of situationships, open relationships, throuples, kitchen table polyamory, solo polyamorists, relationship anarchists, and a whole bunch of shit many of us have never heard of. Especially in queer community, structures of relationships are constantly being reinvented, rebuilt, interrogated, and rewritten. Like all things queer, there’s a thrill to it: standing at the edge of what is known and going into the vastness of what could be.

There was loneliness in pretending that we were okay, pretending that things didn’t hurt, when they did.

But there’s also the heartbreak of it: the specific and textured heartbreak of charting a structure of love where the rules are so different than the molds that we have mainstream reference points for, where the heartbreak is so specific and complicated that it can feel impossible to explain—and thus survive.

When I started dating my ex, after years of being in open relationships, I decided that I wanted to be monogamous. At that point, being in open relationships had taken a toll on me. Balancing too many people’s needs and too many conflicting rules, over-processing everyone’s feelings while simultaneously not getting my needs met, had run me ragged.

Neither I nor my ex was a cis man; as queer people, we both had our myriad of experiences with creating relational structures outside of monogamy. I remember my friends laughing at me for being conservative when I said I wanted to be monogamous. And for a while, my ex and I were monogamous. Then they wanted to open it and put a lot of pressure on me to do so. We would talk about it ad nauseam; I was clear I wanted to be monogamous. I said that if we didn’t want the same structure of a relationship, perhaps we shouldn’t be together. They would say that they didn’t want that but then bring up the idea again a few days later, saying that it was part of their spiritual path to pursue something that was in a more open container. Over time, I felt worn down and guilty that our relationship was limiting them. I caved, and we made up a list of rules that we could both agree on.

The rules were relatively simple: Don’t hook up with anyone in our home; use protection; if something feels like there are romantic feelings for someone versus just something physical, we have to talk about it; and if anyone is considering doing something with a mutual friend, we have to check in about it before it gets physical.

Like all things queer, there’s a thrill to it: standing at the edge of what is known and going into the vastness of what could be.

As we started to navigate openness, I knew that something wasn’t quite right. My ex exhibited jealousy over my close friendships, including comparing me leaving a private voice note to a friend as the same as them having sex with someone down the street and not telling them. They would get mad at me if I admitted to having a crush on someone, culminating in a dinner with friends where they lashed out at me because I was wearing a bracelet that a teacher had given me. They constantly would comment on how my friendships were inappropriate, convinced that everyone had a crush on me, magnifying small details to make me doubt my friends’ intentions. This started a pattern in our conversations of me trying to navigate a warped logic system where they were increasingly demanding more freedom for themselves while limiting mine, including isolating me from my friends.

When a friend had alluded to a threesome with them and their lover, my ex said it was “disgusting” and how if it was something I was seriously considering, they would find me less attractive. In the moment, I felt that what they were saying was true: that I had somehow done something wrong, that I was dirty for entertaining this idea. I didn’t tell any of my friends about this. I understood that all relationships came with learning curves, and I wanted to keep our discussions private so we both could have the space to make mistakes. But fundamentally, after every conversation I was left feeling confused, that I had done something wrong, that I was a bad person.

In our discussions, I repeatedly pointed out to my ex that they had to work on their jealousy and control issues, and they promised to. But since this was such a small part of our dynamic, because so many other areas of our life and love were lush, it was easy to overlook. My ex was creative, they were captivating, we made art together, they made me feel alive. I knew they were human and navigating their own jealousy and their own wants to be free. I saw where their reactions came from their past, and I held it with gentleness. It also didn’t seem like an urgent problem because they frequently confessed that they couldn’t imagine starting a romantic relationship with anyone else because they were already pressed so thin with work. And in general, with open relationships, I found that they worked best when you trusted your partner rather than trying to control everything that could potentially happen. While I knew we had issues in communication, I trusted they would not act in a way that would deliberately hurt me and that they were actively working on their own control issues and jealousy.

Because so many other areas of our life and love were lush, it was easy to overlook.

During our relationship, I went on a writing retreat for a week. It had been a tumultuous time: I had a ridiculously busy schedule and desperately needed time to write. I had been craving this week to myself, to build a container where I could deep-dive into my work. When I came home with Covid, I wore a mask while they told me that they had hooked up, and fallen in love, with a friend of mine during the week I was gone. This friend had been someone that I had been friends with for six years; my ex had met her through our mutual friends six months prior.

Right after talking to my ex, I wrote a journal entry: “X cheated on me. They’re saying they didn’t, but I know they did.” I kept repeating it to them, to myself: We made a rule. We said we would check in. You didn’t check in. They insisted it didn’t count as cheating because I had agreed to be open, that there was no word for my pain, and that I needed to just get over it and stop making it a big deal.

Frankly, I don’t know that I understand cheating. Even now. On the phone with my manager the other day, he said, “Cheating is about lust.” I don’t think that’s true. Cheating is—like all things violating—about power. About what’s forbidden. About what you can do in secret that hurts someone else, how some of the thrill happens because you’re doing something that hurts another person, about making someone else feel small, about making them bend to you.

And that’s what I was doing: bending. My body, there, on the floor of the bathroom, curled up, having had my third panic attack in a day. My ex, refusing to bend, refusing to stop, their urgency around how I was being dramatic, how they couldn’t be expected to remember rules, how it was my fault because I hadn’t written them down. As a writer, I felt that there was a specific cruelty happening, because I hadn’t thought to write something down, that the breakdown of communication was being blamed on me rather than their actions.

Cheating is—like all things violating—about power.

Immediately after we broke up, my ex moved in with my former “friend.” They flaunted their relationship to everyone we were mutual friends with. They both tried to convince me that I was at fault. The former friend, who is a celebrity, called everyone we had in common to say that I wasn’t being “radical” enough, that if I was truly liberated, I would be okay with this. Through this campaign, it felt like they were trying to pressure me to be in a relationship I was desperate to leave. It was a distinctly modern problem: a side bitch getting on her soapbox about revolutionary love. An ancestral problem: losing a love to someone else and being convinced it was your fault.

A few weeks after our breakup, the two of them left the country together, my ex taking her to all the places that they had taken me in Europe just a few months prior. My ex called my friends, trying to convince everyone that they were in “spiritual alignment” and on their correct path and that this was their destiny calling them. They took this new girl through all of our old memories, the places where we had frolicked together, the places where we had prayed together, had made promises to each other, had held each other. After a month or so, they broke up. And both of them attempted to reach out to me, disparaging the other one. When I refused to entertain either of them, they both lashed out at me, once again, saying that I was the problem.

It should have been funny. God bringing me deliverance. God showing me how lucky I was to no longer have these two people in my life. The poetic chaos of the disillusionment of their relationship. But it wasn’t. My body emptied slowly. I lost 15 pounds in three weeks. I was so skinny. My idea of love, broken in my hands. Their unraveling untethered me. In my hands: nothing. In my hands: my little life that I had built, completely gone, picked open, for the world to see. There was no ground under me.

Right now, people are talking about this openness a lot more. I’ve seen the conversations about Lindy West’s new book, Adult Braces. I’ve seen articles where people talk about whether they are or aren’t polyamorous, about what structure works for them. I don’t inherently believe in polyamory or monogamy. Both of these concepts are, fundamentally, neutral. They are structures that work for different people. But, like all relationships, structures are only as good as the people behind them. If someone is invested in control but preaches freedom, then control will seep through everything. If someone is abusive but preaches love, then abuse will stain all they love.

The ways of my ancestors relying on arranged marriages limited freedom, agency, and choice. But I found that even the most seemingly progressive structures, when in the hands of the wrong people, can also limit freedom, agency, and choice. Out beyond these confines, I am praying for something else: a love that I know won’t limit that, a love that will feel like freedom.

I had gone to that writer’s retreat working on a novel. After, I put the novel away; poetry overtook me as I tried to sort out what I was feeling, what had happened, the betrayal of being cheated on by someone I thought I was going to spend my life with and someone who I had considered a friend. The poems moved through me, quickly, spilling into a book called Daughter of the Mountains, as I tried to grapple with forgiving myself, surrendering into spirit, into what could hold me, into what could carry me through this grief.

Out beyond these confines, I am praying for something else: a love that I know won’t limit that, a love that will feel like freedom.

A few months ago, I listened to Lily Allen’s album West End Girl. The album explores Allen being pressured into an open relationship with her partner, then simultaneously cheated on as she realizes the scope of lies her partner has contorted around her. The whole album shook me to my core. I felt like I was finally listening to someone voice an adjacent heartbreak that I had experienced, one that had been tucked close to my heart, one that I felt like I was on Bambi legs trying to express. I don’t know that I’ve ever listened to an album like that—that feels like a biography of a specific time, with characters and places, that charts what happened. And because art is a kind of spell-casting, I can’t imagine what it’s like for her, performing that album to the world, going through the pain of what happened.

There it was, in her album, a small tether that linked my heartbreak to the world. There it was, in my book, spilling out. There it was, in snippets of conversations from my friends, in their words of advice, in the ways they passed down their knowledge to me. There it was, making the world feel less alone, less strange, more real, the ground still ground, and under me, once again.