When Olivia met up with an ex for coffee last year, she wasn’t thinking of it as a date. Both of them had young kids, and years of breastfeeding and co-sleeping had killed her sex drive. She was also married.
Olivia and her husband, Will, had been nonmonogamous before, but in the seven years since becoming parents, they’d been too exhausted to see other people. When her ex asked if she and her husband were still open, Olivia laughed. “I was like, Who has time for that?,” she says. But after that coffee, something shifted. Soon, she was sending her ex flirty texts. “I suddenly felt like a sexual person again,” says Olivia, who, like most of the parents I spoke to for this story, requested a pseudonym. When she asked Will if he’d want to reopen their marriage, he didn’t hesitate. At the time, they were barely having sex: “He was just like, Yep, sure.”
These days, it’s no longer shocking to hear parents negotiate who will handle homework and bedtime while the other meets a crush for drinks. Even momfluencers in Utah are posting about their throuples. The most obvious perk of an open marriage is getting to hook up with other people. But the more poly parents I meet, the more I hear ENM framed as a co-parenting hack. These moms aren’t venting about being stuck at home with the kids while their husbands woo other women. They don’t seem to be stuck keeping score of who handles the grocery shopping and takes the most days off when the kids are sick.
