Every so often, a client asks me a question that sounds straightforward but turns out to be about something else entirely.
He does not begin by asking whether he and his partner should have an open relationship, or some form of consensual non-monogamy. Instead, he tells me they have not had sex in more than a year. He mentions, almost in passing, that his partner still scrolls through Grindr at night “just to look.” Another man tells me he hooked up while traveling for work, that it was not emotional, and that he is not sure why he feels guilty because his partner has said, “If you need something sexually that I can’t give you, I understand.”
Someone else describes what has quietly become a “don’t ask, don’t tell” arrangement, although neither partner ever proposed it. It simply happened. Their relationship structure evolved passively instead of being discussed and designed in a way that both men could genuinely accept.
By the time we have talked for a while, the question has changed. It is not really about monogamy or openness. It is about whether they are still living a relationship they consciously chose—or one they gradually drifted into.
If you recognize that uncertainty in your own relationship, Couples Therapy for Gay Men or Coaching for Gay Men Worldwide can provide a confidential setting to understand what has changed. The goal is not to impose a particular relationship model, but to help both partners speak honestly about the relationship they want now.
There Is No Single Right Way to Structure a Gay Relationship
After more than thirty years of working almost exclusively with gay men, I have become convinced that we often ask the wrong questions about long-term relationships. Public conversations tend to frame the issue as whether couples should be monogamous or open, as though those were the only meaningful categories. Many couples I see fit comfortably into neither. Their relationships have evolved into something more ambiguous, and the ambiguity itself becomes a source of distress.
There are as many variations on open gay relationships as there are couples who create them. What works for another couple might not work for you. Their example may offer inspiration, but you and your partner still have to develop agreements that reflect your own values and emotional realities.
You have the right to choose some form of consensual non-monogamy. You also have the right to choose monogamy without apologizing for it or defending yourself against accusations of being “heteronormative.” The same principle applies to throuples and polyamorous relationships. Adult, consenting partners get to choose their relationship structure; the meaningful question is whether that structure is honest, mutual, and workable for the people living it.
The Relationship That Changes Without Anyone Noticing
Most relationships do not transform overnight. They evolve so gradually that it can be difficult to identify exactly when things became different.
One partner may develop erectile difficulties and begin avoiding sex because every encounter feels like a performance evaluation. The other may stop initiating because repeated rejection has become too painful. Work may expand to fill every available hour. A family-of-origin problem, depression, a medication, substance use, body-image concerns, weight changes, health issues, or political and economic pressures can alter the emotional and erotic life of a couple.
None of this is unusual. Life changes people. Bodies, careers, finances, health, desire, and local culture all change. Relationships that once felt effortless eventually require negotiation, adaptation, and compromise. That work can be part of the investment required to sustain a reasonably happy relationship over many years.
The difficulty is that couples often adapt behaviorally long before they adapt emotionally. They make practical adjustments on the fly without acknowledging what those adjustments mean. Sometimes they need to reclaim their agency and create a relationship suited to who they are now, even if it differs from the relationship they began with.
Long-lasting couples around us can be reassuring. Our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings may have survived changes that were invisible to us: middle age, demanding careers, parenting, illness, grief, and the many transitions of a shared life. Their examples are not blueprints for modern gay male relationships, but they can offer useful lessons when translated for differences in time, gender, and culture.
The old stereotype that gay relationships do not last is a tired, homophobic trope. My own relationship with my husband is now twenty-four years. I do not pretend it is perfect or suggest that other couples must do what we do. I do believe in using the tools I teach: talking directly, responding thoughtfully to change, and remaining willing to renegotiate the relationship as life evolves.
Couples cannot control every event, but they can influence what follows by how they respond. Instead of periodically asking, “What kind of relationship are we creating now?” many partners simply adjust. They lower expectations, stop raising uncomfortable subjects, and begin living parallel emotional lives while remaining devoted in almost every other respect. Years later, they wonder how they arrived there.
Permission Is Not the Same as Emotional Acceptance
One of the most important dynamics I encounter is the difference between intellectual permission and emotional acceptance.
A partner may genuinely say, “If you need to have sex with someone else occasionally, I don’t want to stand in your way.” Sometimes he means exactly that. Sometimes he says it because he feels guilty about his diminished desire or sexual functioning. Sometimes he fears that refusing will eventually cost him the relationship. A man can feel held hostage by a form of non-monogamy he does not really want, then become resentful while grieving the relationship he hoped to have.
The words of an agreement tell us very little about the emotions underneath them. We can love a partner deeply while grieving the loss of our sexual connection. We can sincerely want someone we love to be happy while fearing what it will mean if some of that happiness comes from someone else. We can consent to an arrangement that makes sense logically and still feel hurt when it becomes real.
This is why opening a relationship is a process, not an event. The reality may feel very different from the theory. Agreements often need to be revised after a couple has lived with them for a while. The head can arrive long before the heart, so reaching an agreement is often where the deeper conversation begins.
If this sounds familiar, therapy or coaching can offer a place to examine the difference between what each partner has agreed to and what each partner actually feels. These conversations are not evidence that openness has failed. They are part of learning whether an arrangement is genuinely consensual, sustainable, and emotionally respectful.
Living in the Space Between
Over the years, I have come to think of many long-term relationships as existing in “the space between”: between monogamy and openness, contentment and dissatisfaction, honesty and avoidance, erotic vitality and emotional security.
This is where couples can quietly live for years. There may be occasional hookups that neither partner examines too closely. There may be endless browsing on hookup apps without any real intention to meet. There may be flirtations that stop short of becoming affairs. Sometimes both partners know what is happening, but an unspoken agreement develops that preserving emotional equilibrium matters more than complete transparency.
I do not mean that these arrangements are inherently healthy or unhealthy. My concern begins when important parts of a person’s emotional life become impossible to discuss. Silence can preserve peace for a remarkably long time, but it rarely creates intimacy. I encourage couples to adopt a shared principle: “In this house, we have the difficult conversations, and we make that okay.”
Why Quiet Ambivalence Is So Difficult
If long-term relationships were only about sex, these dilemmas might be easier to solve. A relationship of fifteen, twenty, or thirty years is an entire ecosystem. It contains shared history, financial commitments, friends, family traditions, inside jokes, holiday rituals, caregiving during illness, losses survived together, and the comfort of being known by someone who has witnessed the story of your adult life.
That attachment deserves respect. It also helps explain why so many people remain quietly ambivalent. When clients tell me they feel conflicted, I do not assume they are conflicted only about sex. Often, they are conflicted about risking everything else. The relationship is not merely where love resides; it is where home resides, and home can feel extraordinarily difficult to place at risk.
Erotic Grief Is Still Grief
One theme that emerges repeatedly in my work is something we do not discuss often enough: erotic grief.
We tend to reserve the word grief for bereavement, but meaningful losses take many forms. We grieve careers, health, youth, dreams, friendships, and identities that no longer fit. Why should our erotic lives be different?
Many people feel embarrassed to acknowledge that the gradual loss of a satisfying sexual connection can be painful. They tell themselves they should be grateful for everything the relationship still provides: love, loyalty, stability, companionship, shared purpose, emotional safety, experiences, joys, gains, and losses. Those are not small things. But gratitude and grief are not mutually exclusive.
I have worked with many men who deeply love their partners while mourning aspects of themselves that no longer feel fully alive. They do not necessarily want a different partner, or even a different relationship. They miss feeling like fully sexual men. That longing is not shallow, and dismissing it with “that happens in every long-term relationship” does not make it disappear. Minimizing grief only makes it harder to discuss.
What the Apps May Actually Be About
It is easy to assume that every hour spent on Grindr, Scruff, Sniffies, or another app represents a search for a sexual partner. Sometimes it does. Often, it does not. As I have written in “Gay Men and Sexting: Relax, It’s Just Texts,” digital sexual expression can have meanings beyond arranging an in-person encounter.
Clients have told me they browse profiles for hours without intending to meet anyone. They may be looking for evidence that they still exist, that someone could find them attractive, that they have not become invisible after forty, or that aging has not erased their desirability. The app gives them a way to imagine themselves as sexual beings.
Those emotional needs deserve to be understood before they are judged. Otherwise, we reduce complicated experiences to questions of willpower or morality. A mature value system requires self-awareness: knowing what matters to you, how your behavior affects your partner, and whether your choices align with the relationship you claim to want.
Beyond Rules: The Emotional Conversation Couples Avoid
When couples talk about opening their relationship, they often begin with logistics. Do we tell each other afterward? Are hookups acceptable but not dates? Can it happen only while traveling? Are apps allowed? What about repeat partners, mutual friends, overnight stays, or time taken away from the primary relationship?
These questions matter. Every couple deserves agreements based on its own values. After years of doing this work, however, I have found that logistical questions are often the easier ones. The more difficult conversation asks:
- What does it mean to you if I no longer desire you as I once did?
- What are you most afraid of if we become more sexually open?
- When did you stop feeling attractive?
- What part of yourself do you miss?
- What have we both been pretending not to notice?
- What do we hope—and fear—will happen next?
- How will we evaluate what is working and what is not?
These questions require more courage than negotiating sexual rules because they expose shame, aging, inadequacy, abandonment fears, loneliness, resentment, disappointment, and grief. Yet genuine intimacy is often rebuilt in these conversations, not in the rules about outside partners. Chronic suffering usually comes not from the existence of difficult feelings, but from the effort required to keep them hidden.
The Relationship Structure Does Not Guarantee Emotional Health
People are sometimes surprised when I tell them I have no philosophical investment in whether a couple is monogamous or open. I have worked with fulfilled monogamous couples whose emotional and sexual lives remained vibrant for decades. I have worked with open couples whose honesty, trust, and mutual respect were inspiring. I have also worked with lonely monogamous couples and lonely open couples.
The structure itself does not reliably determine emotional health. Assuming that monogamy is inherently healthier often reflects cultural or religious values rather than a fair assessment of a particular couple.
Drift can happen in any structure. It begins when partners stop talking honestly, stop examining the relationship they are creating, or stop asking whether the life they are living reflects the values they hold today.
Wanting More Does Not Make You Shallow
Many gay men entering midlife carry a surprising amount of shame because they still care about feeling sexually alive. They worry that wanting to feel desired makes them immature. They apologize for missing passion, flirtation, excitement, or novelty, as though those longings prove that they have failed to appreciate the deeper gifts of commitment.
I do not see it that way. Erotic vitality is not the whole of life, but neither is it an insignificant luxury. For many people, it is one expression of feeling psychologically alive. Feeling desired can reinforce confidence. Feeling embodied can reconnect us with pleasure. Feeling playful can remind us that we are more than workers, caregivers, patients, or aging bodies.
These longings deserve examination rather than dismissal. Sometimes they point toward changes within us. Sometimes they invite new conversations with our partners. Sometimes they reveal grief that has waited quietly for years to be acknowledged. Sometimes they simply remind us that growing older does not mean we stop wanting to feel fully alive.
Living the Relationship Deliberately
When I think about the hundreds of conversations I have had with gay men over the years, I do not conclude that more couples should become open. I do not conclude that more couples should remain monogamous. My conclusion is simpler: I hope more couples become deliberate.
I hope they keep asking difficult questions after they have been together for decades. I hope they resist confusing silence with peace or resignation with maturity. I hope they give themselves permission to grieve what has changed without overlooking everything that still deserves gratitude. Relationships are not static achievements; they are ongoing conversations.
The goal is not a perfect relationship. There is no such thing. The goal is a relationship that both people continue choosing with open eyes. For me, emotional maturity looks less like perfection or a particular set of sexual rules and more like mutual awareness, honesty, self-agency, and a willingness to keep building the relationship intentionally instead of inheriting one by default.
If this article resonated with you, you do not have to navigate these questions alone. I offer a complimentary 15-minute consultation to discuss whether Couples Therapy for Gay Men, Individual Therapy in California, or Coaching for Gay Men Worldwide might be a good fit. Email Ken@GayTherapyLA.com for therapy, Ken@GayCoachingLA.com for coaching, or call 310-339-5778.
About the author
Ken Howard, LCSW, CST is a psychotherapist and AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist with more than 34 years of experience working almost exclusively with gay men. A former USC faculty member, he is also the host of The Gay Therapy LA Podcast, where he explores the psychology, relationships, and inner lives of gay men—and he brings that same depth and practicality into his work with clients through therapy (California) and coaching (worldwide) via telehealth.