What "The Wire" Can Teach You About Open Relationships ?

Most women don't believe that you can make an open relationship anything other than an open relationship. What's the purpose of dating a man, if you're going to let him do his own thing on the side?  If he does that, than he might as well be single and leave you alone. Or you think, "damn he doesn't like or love me enough to sacrifice his want to be with more than one woman to be with me"; which is just as worse. However, an open relationship can work, it can work if that relationship has that one basic component of respect.

In this episode of The Wire, an HBO series(quite possibly one of the best series HBO has ever produced), Bunny Colvin, a police lieutenant with the responsibility of giving the mayor results and actually doing effective police, speaks to his officers about the emergence and importance of the "Brown Paper Bag". Watch the excerpt from The Wire below:

Beer is the things that you do on the side. The beer is the fun that you do to unwind at the end of the week. It's the stupor of youth or the unwillingness to give up on your youth, your freedom. You can have fun, but you have too much fun or loiter in the public(in front of your most). If you do drink in public places there are repercussions, you get drama and as far as I know most want to avoid the altercations that come with breaking the law or the unwritten agreement between man and law(woman).

The brown paper bag represents- respect. It's the respect and understanding that you have for your partner to not blatantly disrespect them. The biggest reason open relationships don't work is because people are reckless and like to flaunt their others in front of their most important. They lack the empathy to understand that even though they aren't in a relationship, they can still show the common courtesy and decency of not flashing their outside arrangements in the face of the person that matters the most.

In an open relationship when you learn to respect your S/O you can do real work. The work that makes open relationships grow and flourish into relationships with exclusivity. It takes two mature individuals with respect for one another above all things else to succeed in an open relationship. Open relationships are not impossible, they're just extremely difficult to comprehend.

What do you think about open relationships? Have you ever been in one? Did it fail or succeed? What do you need in order to make an open relationship work?

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