![]() An estimated 23 percent of respondents said their relationships were already non-monogamous, echoing breakthrough 2017 research published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, which found that more than one in five single Americans in their study had tried consensual non-monogamy. The Bhatias are not alone: In a national survey conducted by data analytics firm YouGov in 2020, only 56 percent cited complete monogamy as their ideal relationship style, a 5 percent drop from 2016. Megan nodded him on, and soon after, was kissing the woman herself. ![]() Things escalated when Marty found a private party organized through a local swingers group: The Bhatias’ behavior there was “vanilla,” Megan says, with Marty seeking her permission to kiss another woman. ![]() The couple had always shared their crushes with each other-“we realized, just because we were married, it didn’t mean that we didn’t find anyone else attractive,” Megan says-but they started fantasizing about inviting anonymous people, or even people they knew, into their bed for shared sexual experiences, a practice long known as “swinging.” “Part of what’s sexy about it is how open you feel,” Megan says of their conversations. They went on dinner dates in which they pretended, for hours, not to know each other: “I got to see him in that ‘new person’ light,” Megan says. By 2018, Marty started to notice, as he told Megan, “your heart is off.” Determined to reawaken his wife’s deadened spirit, Marty suggested splashes of novelty. However ironically, it was that pledge that began cracking the long-closed door of their union. “I felt like everything was possible.” In the years that followed, that unbridled part of her faded into a rarely seen alter ego that she and Marty referred to as “Barcelona Megan.” Both children of divorce, Megan and Marty committed to monogamy, vowing-especially after their children were born-that their marriage would last forever. I was learning new languages, meeting people,” she recalls. Megan was driven by wanderlust, living in Belgium for a year at 17, then in Spain during a year of college, where she dated men during breaks in her on-and-off premarital relationship with Marty. ![]() Marty remembers a traumatic early childhood and his late mother’s alcoholism, and grew up wild and hard-partying. Throughout the course of their marriage, Megan and Marty buried the rebel-heartedness that initially bonded them. “The life that started as a wide-open slate can become this little pinhole.” But the traditional roles of worker, wife, and mother subsumed her: “We shut a lot of ourselves off as we live,” she tells me. Getting married, having children, and striving in corporate careers, the Bhatias “bought into that American dream,” says Megan, now a fresh-faced 42 with long, beachy waves. After the Bhatias’ jointly-owned real estate business collapsed in the 2008 financial crash, Marty hatched a digital training consultancy but eventually grew disillusioned with the work Megan was traversing the country as a full-time executive-leadership coach while a nanny logged 50 hours per week watching the twins. Megan underwent three rounds of IVF in three years to welcome their twins, Kira and Sebastian. In 2018, the Bhatias, 38-year-old college sweethearts, were following the prescribed path that sex researchers call the “relationship escalator.” They met at the University of Illinois at Chicago, married in 2004, and bought a house they could scarcely afford in the West Loop. It had been 15 years since Megan Bhatia had sex with anyone but her husband, Marty.
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