Dan is rather distressed: “I just broke up with Sarah,” he confessed. “We talked it out last night. We had break up sex this morning. I’m really depressed.”

Getting my head around sleeping with someone you’ve just broken up with has always been a bit difficult for me. That aside, Dan’s break-up is further complicated by the fact that his “girlfriend” is in fact simultaneously dating another man – and has been for the past ten years.

“We realised we still really love each other,” he lamented. “But she fell in love with me, and that was a threat to her other relationship.”

Dan had been seeing Sarah for a few months. They have a great time together, similar interests, they fell for each other hard. Meanwhile,Sarah has been with Paul since high school and last year, following a rather traumatic breakup, they decided to reconcile under the proviso that they could sleep with other people, with one condition: don’t fall in love.

Breaking that rule with Dan, Sarah decided to end it weeks ago,confessing her “sin” to Paul and begging forgiveness, but two days later, she was back in bed with my mate Dan. “We couldn’t help ourselves,” Dan told me. “She just ended up cheating with me.”

Trying to reason out the complicated politics and regulations of an“open relationship” like Sarah and Paul’s I had to ask, what is cheating when the rules are so blurry?

Clearly cheating, taken literally, just refers to the breaking of rules that govern that particular situation. In this particular instance,Sarah was forbidden from falling in love, but this seems at odds with the basic human condition.

You cannot expect that one “external” sexual relationship would not, at some point, offer the possibility of an emotional attachment, and where is the line? If an outsider admits they are in love with you, does that count? If you feel like you might love the outsider but never say so,does that count? You can pick who you sleep with, you can’t choose  whether to fall in love.

On the other hand, a poly-amorous situation presents a completely different set of guidelines. Rather than privileging one relationship over another, you can conduct multiple, simultaneous relationships of varying natural intensity, physical and emotional components without the same romance-killing hierarchies that, in my mind, doom “open relationships” to failure.

In theory, in a poly-amorous situation, the addition of another partner does not threaten the continuation of a pre-existing relationship (so long as all participating parties are clear on this arrangement, I hasten to clarify).

In the end, Dan’s lady was faced with the decision to break off her second relationship or vacate her first relationship in favour of the more traditional version offered by my friend. The fate of this situation remains undecided, but I wonder how many other relationship arrangements are trucking along out there and I truly question if “open” is ever the way to go.