Men’s Health “Open relationships require so much communication just to survive,” says Kevin. His previous monogamous relationships, by comparison, were on nonverbal autopilot. “We didn’t feel we needed to talk about things, because all of our lessons came from TV shows and pop culture. Everything was just on a default setting.” Antoinette agrees: “The moment we chose to step off the relationship escalator, we had to say, ‘Okay, what are we doing?'” 