[sereneiders]

Folks, everyone of us knows what works for us and what wouldn't work, and this correlates with each one confort level about the way we deal with privacy and honesty. But from there to deem something that wouldn't work for us as something that WONT work for anyone else, there is a huge step that, IMO, we should avoid.

For example, I strongly disagree with the ones saying an open marriage are doomed to failure, just because (I agree) it's more prone to lead to problems than swinging. Following this line, someone may say swinging is doomed to failure because it's more prone to lead to problems than a vanilla relationship, and this is an argument most of us would be up to challenge.

The fact is, in both cases to be succesfull you need a lot of communication and a strong relationship. You'd require more of this as for you to play on your own with a playmate, and even more for an open marriage.

However, I agree in this scenario an open marriage would be much like wanting to learn to swim in the deepest part of the swimming pool.

Back to the OP: In this particular scenario, where you both haven't enough time to devote to your current relationship, an open marriage would lead to finding even less time, and it may happen that one of you end up having more time to devote to a playmate than the time required to devote to your marriage, and THIS is something too risky unless you two have a very well settled relationship.

In the other hand, if you were wanting to play togheter with playmates (i.e., to "properly" swing), you'd be devoting this time to your relationship as well, at least until gathering enough experience as to be able to tell for sure the relationship is stong enough as to be an open one.