The Rise Of Non-Monogamy

What I read: Is Monogamy Over? Inside Love’s Sharing Economy by Michelle Ruiz. Published in Vogue on April 5, 2022.

Anyone who knows me is aware that throughout my life my relationships have not operated within the confines of social expectation. I’ve attempted to avoid the restrictions of labeled relationship boxes into which people wanted to place me and others around me.

Coming out gay at a young age helped. I know younger people today can more easily come out somewhere on the queer spectrum and find support, but in the early 1970s when I proclaimed I am gay to family and friends, coming out was a tough endeavor.

However, I credit my early awareness of my queerness with helping me formulate a sexuality and relationship identity that has generally served me well. Once I realized that society was not going to support my identity and accompanying sexuality, it gave me the freedom to construct my own path.

Rather than kowtow to my Catholic upbringing, relatively conservative family, and other external pressures that nudged me toward being heterosexual, getting married to a woman, having some kids, and living forever in faux monogamous bliss, I instead chose to craft something different.

To wit, I reveled in my newfound gayness and the personal path I chose made me decide to not embrace monogamy as the gold standard.

I don’t say that with any particular pride or arrogance. I don’t think non-monogamous people are better than monogamous people. I don’t think queer people are better than heterosexual people. I don’t think my childless life is better than those who bear and raise children. My life is simply different and in alignment with my needs. I believe everyone should be allowed the freedom to discover and create an identity and way of moving through the world that works for them, and that includes their relationships and sexuality.

That’s my main point in this post. Everyone should be living the life they want to live to the greatest extent possible. In some instances, that will mean eschewing the constraints of monogamy and considering alternatives.

When I read the article, the opening story about Megan and Marty sounded similar to so many stories I’ve heard throughout the years. As part of my work within the LGBTQ and alternative sexualities communities, I’ve heard countless stories from people who lived what would be considered a traditional relationship and sexual life only to discover years later, sometimes heartbreakingly decades later, that it never synced with how they felt on the inside. Many of those stories include the acceptance of non-monogamy or polyamory as their truth.

The queer culture in which I function does appear to lend itself to more frequent forays into non-monogamy. Per the article, research shows that “gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities are twice as likely to practice consensual non-monogamy (CNM) than their heterosexual counterparts.”

I don’t claim expertise in much, but I do accept that because of my own lived experience and those of the people around me, I can speak somewhat authoritatively about viable alternatives to monogamy.

Some might say that since I’ve never experienced a monogamous relationship, I can’t speak to the comparisons between that life and a non-monogamous one. Perhaps true. But that also means someone who’s lived entirely within a monogamous relationship can’t necessarily speak to non-monogamy with any granted authority either.

Exactly why I felt like an erotic rebel and maverick from a young age is a mystery. It was just my reality. I always knew I was different even though I didn’t have the word gay to attach to it at the time. Sexuality was also something I always enjoyed and celebrated in all its consensual forms. This was my early worldview and it’s stuck with me to this day.

Throughout the course of their marriage, Megan and Marty buried the rebel-heartedness that initially bonded them. Marty remembers a traumatic early childhood and his late mother’s alcoholism, and grew up wild and hard-partying. Megan was driven by wanderlust, living in Belgium for a year at 17, then in Spain during a year of college, where she dated men during breaks in her on-and-off premarital relationship with Marty. “I felt so free. I was exploring. I was learning new languages, meeting people,” she recalls. “I felt like everything was possible.” In the years that followed, that unbridled part of her faded into a rarely seen alter ego that she and Marty referred to as “Barcelona Megan.” Both children of divorce, Megan and Marty committed to monogamy, vowing—especially after their children were born—that their marriage would last forever.

One of the cornerstones of non-monogamy and polyamory is the realization that often one person can’t fulfill us entirely. If you’re reading this and one person does meet all your sexual and relationship needs, awesome. That’s great and I’m happy for you. But that’s not the case for everyone. Some of us need or want more.

“One person can’t be everything for someone else. It was clear that my all was not good enough,” Marty would later explain on Megan’s podcast, Amory. “There was something missing, and I couldn’t provide it.”

Lately, articles are regularly published about non-monogamy and polyamory. Perhaps the topic hasn’t gone entirely mainstream, but it’s certainly headed there if the trend trajectory holds.

I’m not equating queerness with non-monogamy or polyamory, but I contend that such open mindedness signals an overall improved environment in which people can discover their true orientation, sexual, and relationship identities and needs. In a recent global survey one in five young people self-identified as non-heterosexual or non-cisgender.

Those results are remarkable and point to a seismic shift in attitudes. Young people are growing up in a world that is allowing them to better discover themselves. Ultimately, this is about questioning all the social paradigms that may no longer be working for everyone. It’s asking questions about whether the rules, structures, and systems we’ve lived with still serve us optimally. We are writing our own rules when the old rulebook no longer makes us happy.

“We are in a time of questioning institutional structures like health care, education, and, yes, monogamy,” she says, referencing the rise of a vocal, progressive political movement demanding sweeping structural change. The swelling impulse to challenge the status quo, from systemic racism and criminal justice to #MeToo’s reckoning on sexist abuse, had crept into her sex life and relationship style: “I think people are disillusioned with life right now and really starting to write their own rules,” Megan says.

What has emerged is a social discussion often labeled with the term “consensual non-monogamy.” I happen to ascribe to a perspective that views consensual as me being open about what I want and need and living the life I need to live with other people in my sphere coming along for the ride or letting me go my own way. But no one gets veto power which is a tough pill to swallow for some who don’t see it that way. I self-identify most strongly with solo polyamory and relationship anarchy to inform my own sexuality and relationships, but those are admittedly more fringe mindsets than more mainstream non-monogamy circles embrace. But I digress.

Contrary to my own opinion of myself, I’m not all that unique. Increasingly, people are exploring new ways to partner and new ways to experience sexuality.

In a national survey conducted by data analytics firm YouGov in 2020, only 56 percent cited complete monogamy as their ideal relationship style, a 5 percent drop from 2016. An estimated 23 percent of respondents said their relationships were already non-monogamous, echoing breakthrough 2017 research published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, which found that more than one in five single Americans in their study had tried consensual non-monogamy.

Also…

Nor is aspiring to monogamy any longer the societal default: When asked about their relationship ideal, from completely open to completely monogamous, the number of people who replied “I don’t know” more than doubled in the 2020 YouGov study, leaping from 5 percent in 2016 to 12 percent. “More people are starting to question,” says Zhana Vrangalova, Ph.D., an adjunct professor of human sexuality at New York University, who researches non-monogamy. “There are a couple of cultural shifts that are really making monogamy—complete, strict, lifelong monogamy—a very difficult thing to pull off.”

One of the things the non-monogamous and polyamorous have to deal with is the assumption we’re all alike. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’re all incredibly different in how we manifest our orientations, sexualities, and relationships. It’s tempting to lump us all together because we tend to commune and socialize with others of like mind, but the landscape in which we do that tends to be welcoming of a diverse range of sexual and relationship expressions. Many of us see how we function as a type of orientation more so than just practice.

Sex scholars studying CNM are beginning to explore the possibility that the desire to be non-monogamous is a “relationship orientation” unto itself, or may be part of sexual orientation. Creating a more nuanced definition of sexual orientation could mean asking: “Do you want no partners, or do you want to be exclusive in sexual and/or emotional ways to one partner, or open with multiple?” Moors says. As with gender and sexuality, relationships can exist on a spectrum, Vrangalova argues. “We’re not dealing with a binary world of ‘Oh, you’re monogamous,’ or ‘You’re totally open.’ There’s lots of different things in between.”

It was nice to see people I know quoted in the article expressing the modern reality that non-monogamy and polyamory are beginning to seep into mainstream inquiry. Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton wrote the book, The Ethical Slut, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love, a work many consider seminal in non-monogamous and polyamorous culture. Justin Lehmiller wrote Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life which I wrote about in Everyone Is A Little Bit Kinky.

These public policy moves are “an early indicator of a very significant shift in public attitude and opinion,” says Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D., a social psychologist and author of Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire. “This is the next wave of inquiry,” Moors agrees. “This is going to be up for national discussion in the coming decade, if not sooner.” It all amounts to a migration to the mainstream: At Hardy and coauthor Dossie Easton’s earliest book events for The Ethical Slut, in the late ’90s, “audiences were mostly geek culture—Renaissance Fair, science-fiction conference attendees, old hippies like us,” Hardy said. Now, the crowds are much more diverse: “When I speak in cities, and I look out over the audience, it’s much younger and more materially successful. We get a lot of young professionals and people who would never have considered this back in 1997.”

The entire article is excellent. There have been numerous articles published in recent years that discuss non-monogamy and polyamory, but this one strikes a nice balance between the numerous perspectives since views on these topics are not monolithic. I also learned something about pineapples and Adirondack chairs I never knew before (you’ll have to read the article).

Again, non-monogamy and polyamory aren’t for everyone. Nothing is. But that we live in a world where these options are more openly discussed, explored, and experienced makes me happy. I know configuring my own sexuality and relationships in ways that work for me have made me happier and more fulfilled. Perhaps they will for you too, or they already do. Or perhaps you’ll simply better understand a friend or family member when they mention that they’re having sex outside their relationship and their partner is on board with it or they’re dating someone new other than their usual partner. It takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round, including those of us who march to the beat our own sexuality and relationship drums.

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