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Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were very candid about their open marriage in their joint autobiography. With the risk of HIV and AIDS the couple said they wouldn't recommend open marriages today and eventually found that "in all of the deep profound, fundamental ways, we really, really only wanted each other." Source

Stevens claims that the current marriage paradigm in the African-American community is so broken, it’s time to think differently. “I do not own my husband. I do no own his penis,” she says. However, she does admit the idea of a polyamorist marriage didn’t come to  mind when she and her husband made their wedding vows. It wasn’t until 11 years later that Stevens’ husband came to her with news that he was having “feelings of love” with a woman at work and was interested in acting out those feelings on a physical level. Initially upset by the idea, her husband tabled it until Kenya met a man at a convention that she felt “feelings of love” for and rushed to tell her husband. He encouraged her to pursue those feelings and ultimately the three of them planned for an opportunity for her to have a sexual encounter with her husband’s blessing.

It was through their personal experiences that they founded Jujumama, and together they counsel married couples about their newfound notion of “harmony.” I asked Stevens about what might happen if they counseled a couple where one partner desired to pursue an extramarital relationship and the other partner was resistant. I frankly asked, “Who wins? The “yes” or the no?” She told me that the “yes” partner must be patient and the “no” partner has to “go through a learning curve, and explore why they respond negatively.

Dr. Gilda Carle, a licensed educator,with a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from New York University, congratulates the Stevens couple on their ingenuity on how they have parlayed their open marriage into a money-making enterprise, yet she remains doubtful. “[Open marriage] may sound wonderful as a make-believe fantasy, but I have never seen it work in the real world.” Dr. Carle has authored over 15 books, including 99 Prescriptions for Fidelity: Your Rx for Trust. ” You have to wonder about people who are willing to be so passive.”

I asked Stevens about the possibility of these relationships becoming complicated through pregnancy or STD’s. She mentioned the rigorous use of birth control to prevent such occurrences, but she said that if by chance she were to get pregnant by a love partner, she and her husband would welcome that child as a blessing and raise the child together with the involvement of the birth-father. But, Dr. Carle sees a problem with this scenario: “Who do they identify as the mom and the dad?”

Dr. Carle adds that the common problems with these arrangements is the aspect of jealousy, which she says is hard-wired into the brain. Stevens, however, believes that jealousy is a childish emotion that should be chided. I mentioned Stevens’ response to Dr. Carle and here’s what she had to say:  “Well she can proselytize that lifestyle all she wants to the people who follow her, and then they can come to me for therapy after they’ve given away their bodies along with their marriages.”

Those are just two opinions; but what do you think, are open marriages viable solutions to sustaining a relationship?

Christelyn D. Karazin is the co-author of Swirling: How to Date, Mate and Relate Mixing Race Culture and Creed (to be released April 2012), and runs a blog, www.beyondblackwhite.com, dedicated to women of color who are interested and or involved in interracial and intercultural relationships. She is also the founder and organizer of “No Wedding, No Womb,” an initiative to find solutions to the 72 percent out-of-wedlock rate in the black community.