Movie Spotlight: Open: A Journey Through Love

A podcast came on during a long road trip. Roderick E. Stevens II had no idea what “lifestyle” meant. He kept listening. Within a few episodes he wasn’t titillated. He was radicalized. Not toward a lifestyle, but toward a conversation he hadn’t realized was happening at scale, mostly beneath the surface of mainstream culture, and mostly misunderstood by the people not having it.

Stevens spent the next several years making Open: A Journey Through Love, traveling over 40,000 miles and collecting more than 100 hours of interviews with individuals, couples, polycules, therapists, psychologists, an anthropologist, and advocacy organizations across every variety of ethical non-monogamy. The question he refused to answer in advance: is there something most people fundamentally misunderstand here, and if so, what does it cost them?

Sex Is Not the Point

Stevens describes it this way: “Sex is the shiny object that gets everyone’s attention, but the reality is far more complex and profound for many people and relationships.” What he found, across wildly different forms of non-monogamy, is that the practice forces a kind of self-examination that few other life experiences can match. People dig into their insecurities, their history, their belief systems. The act of even discussing non-monogamy openly does something to a relationship that going through the motions cannot.

For many people in the film, the elements they value most are not sexual. They are the deep friendships. The community. The sense of being known without performance.

The Consistency

The most surprising thing Stevens encountered across 100 hours of interviews was not how different everyone was. It was how similar. From swingers to those in polyamorous relationships, across gender, race, and sexual preference, nearly everyone cited dramatically improved communication as both a necessity and a benefit of exploring non-monogamy. Jealousy came up constantly, as did the word compersion, the feeling of joy at a partner’s happiness with someone else. Both were discussed with more nuance and compassion than Stevens expected. Boundaries, people told him again and again, are not fixed. They evolve.

Finding Home

Making the film changed Stevens personally. As someone with autism, he describes living in a world that relies heavily on performance and social veneers, one he has long struggled to fit. Among the broader ENM community he found something he hadn’t anticipated: “I found many people who value authenticity in themselves and those around them and it has felt like ‘finding home.’” The experience, he says, helped him learn to embrace who he is more unapologetically and to let go of the expectation that one other person should fulfill all of his relationship needs.

One conversation that stayed with him more than most involves Jim and Pam, an elder couple who discovered alternative relationship styles, and their own bisexuality, late in life. They are in their 70s. They are living more authentically now than they ever have. Stevens counts them among his favorite of hundreds of conversations.

Seven and a Half Hours

The first rough cut of the film was seven and a half hours long. It took four months of editing, with feedback from people both inside and outside the ENM community, to bring it down to a single feature. Cutting people out was painful. Because so many interviews covered the same themes in consistent ways, Stevens chose to limit the cast rather than overwhelm the audience with voices. He hopes to eventually release the full interviews for those who want to go deeper.

What to Know Before You Press Play

Stevens made this film for a specific viewer: “curious but cautious people.” Not advocates. Not the already-converted. Open is designed as a primer, an entry point for people who are intrigued but kept at a distance by stigma or stereotype. Some of his favorite feedback has come from couples who kept pausing the film mid-watch, to talk about their own desires, their own fears, and what they actually want from each other. “More than anything,” he says, “it is meant to spark conversation.”

Documentary

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Streaming now on Relay.