Summoning all my willpower, I ease myself from my lover’s arms and slide out of bed. I pick up my discarded underwear and scoop up my dress from the living-room rug. Then, in the dim light, I slip on last night’s clothing like a ninja: practised, silent, quick.

After a night of wild abandon, it’s time to head home to my sleeping husband and child. Marcus and I have been together for 21 years now, and married for 17. We have a young daughter and a life of cosy domesticity.

But it’s also a life of extramarital trysts and thrilling sex. And I can honestly say that, rather than weaken our relationship, agreeing to an open marriage eight years ago has strengthened our bond and connection, not to mention given a spark back to our love life.

For me, our arrangement is liberating. Throughout the week, I belong to my family. But for a few hours each weekend, I am off the hook. I can stop being a mother and a wife and just be myself.

On my Tinder profile, a careful selection of words describes what I’m looking for: ‘Cocktails, conversation, dancing, kissing… Oh, and my man knows I’m here.’ I’ve never run short of offers. Men leap at the promise of no-strings-attached sex with an uninhibited woman whose emotional needs are taken care of at home.

Deepa Paul says that agreeing to an open marriage eight years ago has strengthened her bond and connection with her husband

Deepa Paul says that agreeing to an open marriage eight years ago has strengthened her bond and connection with her husband

Her secret sexual reawakening nearly ended their marriage

Her secret sexual reawakening nearly ended their marriage

My husband goes off on his own casual adventures too, and I let him.

Sleeping with other people has given both of us the space to explore our sexual curiosity without pressuring each other.

It’s not that I am against monogamy. Nor am I trying to convince anyone it’s a sham we’ve all been sold. But having grown up in the Philippines, which is staunchly conservative and fiercely Catholic, I’m aware of how stifling and hypocritical beliefs about marriage can be, particularly when it comes to sex. For my parents, loyalty to each other transcended all else – though my dad had flirtations and my mum knew about it.

Growing up, I heard enough sly jokes among husbands and saw enough silent suffering among wives to understand that the success of a long marriage often depends on what one can get away with, and how much the other can bear.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone say ‘as long as they come home’ or ‘as long as they are a good provider’ or ‘for the sake of the children’ to justify marriages that are intact on paper but rotting in secret. My husband and I are honest with each other about our needs and desires. We give each other permission to realise our fantasies while still nurturing the special bond we share.

I had never even heard of an ‘open marriage’ until I came across a personal ad on the internet – a post on a community site by a Swedish man who said he and his wife were ‘open’ and active in ‘the scene’. He was looking for a woman to go to a swingers’ party with.

My curiosity was instantly piqued.

 Marcus and I had been married for four years by then, and our sex life was good if a little predictable. I certainly wasn’t ready for a swingers’ party, but I emailed and asked the poster how his relationship worked, and he was happy to tell me.

They had lovers on the side. Partner swapping. But what impressed me was that this couple were in it together. They were a team and they seemed to have it all: a solid union, children, mature and honest communication and a scandalously indecent amount of fun. It made me wonder why Marcus and I couldn’t have this too.

Having met at university, we both had limited sexual experience. Yes, we had vowed to be partners for life. But did we really want to have sex exactly the same way, every single night, for the rest of our lives?

Marcus has always been more cautious than me but I thought he would see this as an adventure we could embark on together. But when I worked up the courage to suggest it, he exploded.

‘Go to a swingers’ club? Have sex with other people?’ he shouted. ‘Why are you thinking about these things? We’re married! Married people don’t do that. Decent people don’t do that.’

Thrown off by his vehemence, I scrambled for an appealing counter-offer. A threesome with two women? Wasn’t that every man’s fantasy?

‘Never,’ Marcus declared. Other men might fantasise about such things, but he would never. He was a good husband. A decent man.

‘Do you want someone else?’ he accused me. ‘Isn’t sex with me enough for you?’

I tried to backtrack. But everything I said only made him angrier. So I stopped bringing up the idea – but that didn’t mean the longing went away. Instead, it boiled over not long after our daughter was born, more than a year after that first conversation. Becoming a mother was wonderful. But it also changed the way I felt about myself.

Fatherhood left most of Marcus’s life, career and friendships untouched, but motherhood decimated mine. By the time our daughter was two months old, my curiosity won. One evening, Marcus suggested I have a much-needed night out on my own. I found myself meeting up with a man I’d met on the internet.

His name was Thomas and his gaze made me feel as though my body hadn’t just been laid waste by pregnancy and childbirth. He knew I was married with a young baby and he didn’t care. Sex had become a distant and unreachable pleasure at home, through the fog of sleeplessness that comes with round-the-clock care of a newborn.

With Thomas, I could be as playful and sexual as I wished. We didn’t sleep together that first time. But we kept in touch by email and a year later we met at a hotel.

I will never forget how Thomas brought me to stand in front of the mirrored wardrobe doors. Then he caressed me from head to toe, complimenting each part of my body as he stroked it. It made me feel alive again.

At no point did I consider leaving Marcus – instead, I longed to bring the new playfulness and freedom I’d found into my life at home. Nonetheless, my secret sexual reawakening nearly ended my marriage.

Two years later, Marcus found emails I had written to Thomas on my laptop. He was devastated and said our marriage was over. It was only with the help of a relationship coach that we were able to unpick the hurt and betrayal.

I was honest about how lonely motherhood made me feel, how hard it was to feel sexy at home. We live in a flat. Our daughter sleeps in the room next door. There was just no escape from being Mum.

Marcus, in turn, was honest about his sense of hurt.

‘You put your own needs above my feelings,’ he said. ‘You only cared about what you wanted.’

I didn’t set out to have an open marriage, and I certainly didn’t plan on cheating my way into one. But through our couple sessions, we agreed to allow each other to explore new sexual terrain with other partners. I didn’t want to force Marcus, but he said that if this was what I wanted, he wanted us to do it together.

With the choice made, we tried to imagine what our open marriage might look like. How would we meet new people? We were parents of a toddler, with no family close by to help. Without the luxury of time to visit bars and go to sex parties together, we decided it was more practical to find lovers separately – so one of us could stay at home with our daughter.

I met my first lover on Tinder, an older man in his late 40s. His profile photos showed bright, deep-set eyes, close-cropped hair and a subtle smoulder that seemed both mysterious and inviting. From the moment we took our seats in a crowded taco bar, I could tell how much he wanted me. He was turned on by the idea of meeting a married woman whose husband knew and agreed to it.

And I had my husband’s permission to share my body with a stranger. It felt electric.

Then there was Theo, and 23-year-old Lucien, from Paris, who ran his fingers through my hair while whispering how hot I was. On Tinder, men rushed at me like an avalanche. Being in an open relationship made me seem liberated. Sexual. Cool. I became a magnet for men I thought would never give me a second look in real life.

It took Marcus longer to take a lover. His first Tinder date was with a redhead who lived in the neighbourhood. At first, I was relieved.

‘She’s cute,’ I said, inspecting her profile when he held out his phone to me for a look. Then my eyes fell on her age and I felt a stab of something irrational in my chest. She was 22. We were both 36.

‘A bit young, isn’t she?’ I said. But I regretted the words as soon as they escaped my mouth. I sounded so petty. As I lay in bed that night, waiting for Marcus to come home, I realised I was insecure.

No matter what I did, I would only get older, my skin would wrinkle and lose elasticity, my breasts would deflate and sag. If young was indeed Marcus’s type, I would never win. But only if I saw it as competition. Whatever insecurity I felt faded into the background when I saw how transformative the experience was for my husband.

‘I had fun. Really, I did,’ he told me the next morning. ‘But when it was over, it didn’t change how I feel about you. I was still excited to come home to you.’

From then on, our lovemaking took on a new intensity.

Marcus and I knew every inch of each other’s bodies intimately. Together, we’d tried new things that felt naughty the first time, but they’d lost their spark after many years. Becoming parents had also taken its toll.

Dating other people introduced new influences into our sexual dynamic. I discovered that the crackling electricity of a new experience, once savoured, could be channeled into our own bedroom.

By far the biggest transformation, though, was the way we talked about sex. I don’t just mean likes and dislikes. I mean allowing each other – without judgment or resentment – to become curious about who we were as sexual beings.

That’s not to say jealousy hasn’t been hard to navigate at times. Marcus has particularly found this challenging.

I like hearing about his lovers. Details fan the flames of my lust but they extinguish his. In the beginning, it almost felt like a betrayal to enjoy myself so much while the person I loved struggled. The first night I returned home after having sex with someone else, he couldn’t even look at me.

‘While you were out, all I could think about was what he could be doing to you,’ he said. His disgust hurt.

Over time, he worked through his feelings. The sceptics will say I am a skilful manipulator who is holding my husband emotionally hostage somehow. But every relationship requires some level of compromise, and we both stick to the rules we have agreed.

We always tell each other where we are going and who with. We both insist on safe sex and have agreed not to bring sexual partners into our home.

There’s no sex with colleagues or with friends either – it’s too close to home. And only one date a week, max.

There’s no sleeping over, either. Or at least there wasn’t until I met Robert just before lockdown, at the end of 2019.

Robert is a photographer, a handsome Irishman. And our chemistry was instant. With him I discovered that I can be in love with two people at the same time.

But that doesn’t undermine the bond Marcus and I share – our deep comfort in each other, our compatibility, our physical affection, and the lifelong project and shared joy of raising our daughter.

While Marcus continues to go on dates with strangers, I am content just seeing Robert at the moment, though the option for more is always open.

At my 40th birthday, both men were there. They knew it was important to me and they have actually become friends. I floated between the two of them, everything flowing like wine in the warm glow of candlelight.

‘What do you tell your daughter?’ you might ask. Well, she’s 12 now and she knows that Mummy and Daddy go on sleepovers. She’s met Robert and she knows Mummy is writing a book about our very special relationship.

What matters most, though, is that she knows we love her. She’s the centre of our world.

But there’s also more to my life than being a wife and mother. After a night away, I return home without any feelings of guilt. I’ll slide into bed beside my husband and take time to connect with him.

When I reach for Marcus, he rolls towards me, eyes still closed. He pulls the curve of my body to his, enveloping me in his familiar warmth. And I feel tethered: to him, to us, to my life and ours.

  • Adapted from Ask Me How It Works by Deepa Paul (Viking, £18.99), to be published on May 1. © Deepa Paul 2025. To order a copy for £17.09 (offer valid until April 24, 2025; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

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