My warning to midlife women about open marriages: It’s not sophisticated and modern to let your husband sleep with other women, it’s a sanctioned affair – and I should know after what I saw in the ’80s: JANET ELLIS

1983 and the school gate at my child’s primary school was alive with gossip. A father had been seen with another woman. We took it in turns to hold this hot news, no one daring to hang on to it long enough to tell his wife. Everyone knows the messenger goes down in flames.

Finally, one brave woman told on him.

‘Oh, I know,’ the wife said. ‘It’s what we do. Our marriage isn’t confined just to each other.’

Cue even more gossip – this time tinged with several unexpected emotions. An open relationship? Would that work for us? How could we find the time, we asked, while searching through lost property for our child’s errant gym shoe.

How can you be sure the other person is as committed to ‘no strings’ as you are?

And, we agreed, we all felt sad for our friend, the wife in the open marriage.

Which is probably why I suspect there wasn’t a woman of my generation, Baby Boomers, who did not shake their greying heads and murmur ‘not again’ when they heard Lily Allen’s brilliant heart-breaking new album West End Girl.

In eye-opening lyrics, Allen details the fallout from the collapse of an open relationship, widely thought to refer at least in part, to her marriage to actor David Harbour.

Janet Ellis (pictured) has issued a warning about open marriages after seeing various affairs and relationship struggles while raiding her family in the 1980s

Janet’s warning comes after the release of Lily Allen’s album West End Girl that follows the break up of her marriage to actor David Harbour (pictured together in 2022)

This sounds like a tale as old as time. A woman falls for a charismatic and successful man. Who knows what conversation ensues that makes her agree to his request for an open relationship. In the first flush of love – indeed, in the cold light of day – perhaps it seems sensible and grown up? Who wants their partner to feel pinned down?

Negotiations take place that appear to protect both parties from potential jealousy or insecurity. Who could imagine their other half would ever (i)really(i) fancy anyone else to the extent they’d make plans, then make hay?

If that sounds naïve, it was countered with the argument you were ‘free’. Or so the advocates of open marriage would claim. Because, of course, the version of wedded bliss undertaken by our mothers and grandmothers women certainly weren’t.

Being handed over by your father to your husband, with no financial independence and no real means of leaving should it all go wrong (at least not without heavy stigma) feels as anachronistic today as using a mangle or renting a video.

No one disputes that the advent of the permissive society, which followed easy access to reliable birth control, was anything other than a good thing for women. Not having to worry about getting pregnant was an amazing freedom. Choosing to have sex if it felt right? Also good.

Unlike our parents, we Boomers grew up thinking sex could be fun and spontaneous.

But did it all go too far? When the tide of the Swinging Sixties (which probably only happened in one street in Chelsea) became a wave in the Seventies, it changed not only women’s freedoms, but male thinking too.

The new orthodoxy said that if a woman could have sex without being married and there was no risk of pregnancy, surely every one of us would be up for it? And if we weren’t, we must be ‘frigid’ or ‘unliberated’.

The former presenter’s first experience of an open marriage was at the school pick-up where she’d heard one of the other parents had been spotted on a date and the wife knew (pictured with her children)

Of course that wasn’t true either.

Asking your spouse to let another person into your relationship – to share not only your bed, but your headspace too – imposes a heavy duty on her. Be everything to me, you imply, otherwise I’ll carry on adding others. And how can that be fair, in the end?

Besides, intimacy is a learned response. It’s not just the sexual side of things, it’s the accumulation of years of shared jokes, attitudes, disasters or triumphs. Most of the things that happen between two people in a marriage would be of no interest to anyone else.

Once you start to share even a small part of yourself (no pun intended!) with someone else, your spouse stops seeing all of you. You risk hiding things.

Indeed, the secondary relationship may begin to dominate in some key areas. Unless it’s purely transactional and money has changed hands, isn’t there always even the tiniest emotional connection? It’s then that you enter the danger zone and it’s no longer just an open relationship, but also a yawning chasm of unknown depth.

If you stay close in a marriage, you are each other’s mirrors. And there’s nothing like being seen by – and seeing – someone who really knows and treasures you.

Whether you’re an A lister on the red carpet, or a mum in charge of the school tombola, at some point it’s going to be just you, your partner and an empty evening with nothing on the telly. Unless you’ve worked together, you’ll be driven apart.

My children’s and grandchildren’s generations take longer to choose long term partners than we did. When I was in my teens and twenties, it was vital to have a girl or boyfriend. At school, we even lined them up so there was no gap between ‘chucking’ and ‘going out’.

Janet (pictured in 1983) explained that while a situationship may seem the way forward, they all end in tears and Lily Allen’s high profile open arrangement won’t be the only one to end in disaster

These days, a so-called ‘situationship’ is the way forward, at least at first. For those who don’t know – and why should you – this is a way of exploring a relationship without emotional commitment. Young couples can discover shared values and try different ways of being themselves and seeing how they interact with each other without sending out wedding invitations.

Let’s face it, they’re going to live a lot longer than us and if they can avoid an early, often immature, relationships then it’s all to the good. Been there, done that. I got married very young to Sophie’s dad and – as everyone annoyingly predicted – we grew apart. We have a wonderful daughter and both went on to have long and happy marriages with other partners, but I still warm to my children’s ‘wait and see’ approach.

It’s also interesting to note that, once they have whittled the choice down to just one significant other, a great many of them formalise the union. There’s still no better way to say (or shout!) to the world that you’re happy together and plan to stay that way. As far as I know, none of them have added Open Relationship to their wedding lists or included it in the vows.

The fact is, the person – let’s face it, often the man – who wants an open marriage is probably exactly the kind of person who’d have had affairs in days gone by. But affairs have become harder logistically than they used to be, what with technology and tracking and all that. So here comes a ready-made solution for the opportunity to stray. It’s not infidelity, they cry. It’s open. Sophisticated, smart and modern.

And yet it will probably still involve lies, as it appears it did for poor Lily Allen.

I’m truly sorry that Lily seems to have discovered, like so many women before her, that an agreement she reportedly made in good faith, that seemed to promise no emotional fallout, has ended so badly.

It’ll be hard to explain to her two children (whom she obviously adores) and it’s to be hoped they only pin blame on one man. Not mankind.

If you think open relationships work, you do you. But us old timers know how it pans out. We’ve seen it before. We’ll wait.