@AlternativePerspective
Surely you’re just living a promiscuous lifestyle and shagging whoever you want whenever you want.
It’s madness to dress it up as having multiple “partners” other than that the term partner is used in a different context.
Essentially, someone in an open relationship is just sexually promiscuous. Nothing wrong with that if that’s your thing, but people who think that their husband who has multiple partners is actually just their husband and in love with them are kidding themselves.
Open relationships are just a green light to shag around without it being considered as cheating.
You obviously know so little about it but are very keen to dismiss and judge.
There are numerous forms of different relationship set up and one of the first things people do who open their relationship is establish their specific way of doing it. That might be total long term faithfulness to two separate partners (sometimes partners of different genders - a kind of bimonogamy), or when the extra partner is shared fully like a throuple, or when one partner has multiple permanent partners, who are not sexual with one another - like polygamy. In these cases it is very much about deep partnership and the model of your life, not promiscuity.
Sometimes it is that the couple only ever 'play together' so they have 'friends with benefits' relationships that they share (Eg a single woman/'unicorn' joins a married couple in their home over the weekend for companionship and three-way sex, or two couples who get along really well together meet up to play or 'full swap'. This is often more about exploring a deeper kind of intimacy and freedom with your existing partner - opening up to helping your partner and yourself meet different or deeper needs, growing together.... protecting each other as you go through new experiences, breaking down societal limitations to have a more honest relationship and communication about the complexity of desires.
Others are more about casual, consenting sex, when you go to sex parties and/or are totally open and each partner can do whatever they want sexually. Another model is the 'hot wife' in which the man often is faithful but allows (and is turned on by) his wife having sex with other men. (There seems to be a lot of assumption on this thread that it's the man with multiple partners getting all the sex, and I'm not sure that's true). These very open forms are a lot about liberation and might fit with your perception closest, but your use of the word 'just promiscuous' still sounds judgemental and dismissive.
In all of these cases, the people in the relationships, and any single people getting involved need to be really clear on the boundaries that work for them and respect each others boundaries and communicate very well
People are actually right, I think, that it is tiring! It forces you to confront all kinds of issues around what sex, intimacy, consent, boundaries etc really mean... rather than sleep walking through your relationship, as many of us do after a few years and everything is basically 'static' and 'nonexploratory'. It often challenges body confidence and means being much more assiduous about protecting your personal safety etc... and you are constantly at risk of judgement. You often have a split life - between 'vanilla' friends and your play friends because of this judgement.
Some folk on this thread seem to think that you have to go to the 70s to see evidence of this stuff- but it's happening all around you in a pretty wild and big scale! More of you than you realize may know people who are leading this split life!