Why I’m Breaking Up With Non-Monogamy
And why you should do whatever the hell you want!
Love is strange. I mean, there is literally a woman who married a rollercoaster (#same). Love is everywhere but it’s almost impossible to describe. It’s something we long for, seek and cultivate from the moment we’re born until we take our last breath. It’s infinitely abundant, but many of us feel like there’s never enough of it. There are endless types of love, and romantic and sexual love are no less strange and complex than any other manifestation.
This essay is NOT an indictment of nonmonogamy or polyamory. Nor is it a glorification of mainstream heteronormative, romantic toxic monogamy culture. This is partially a disclosure of my own process with the intention of possibly providing insight for others contemplating similar subjects, partly a healing self-reflection, and mostly an invitation to a conversation about love, structure and existence. I don’t have the answers; I’m sharing my experience and I want to know what resonates with you and how others are perceiving and experiencing these aspects of the human condition.
The first time I heard about polyamory was six and a half years ago. I had been in a serious car accident and started getting massage therapy from a quintessential Seattle Burning Man hippie kind of dude (minus the white dreads, thankfully). One day, the massage therapist was regaling me with tales of his tumultuous love life, and when he explained that he had multiple long-term, live-in girlfriends, I thought he was joking. The most exposure I’d ever had to anything resembling this kind of arrangement was watching a few episodes of Big Love.
My brain exploded. I was floored learning about this culture that existed outside the monogamy paradigm my whole life had been shaped around. I had so many questions; what did the existence of this kind of relationship structure mean about jealousy? About family planning? About compromise? About relationships in general? About living without ever questioning the most fundamental structures of our lives? About human nature? More than anything, I was confronted with the preponderance of my own judgment and closemindedness.
In time, for varying reasons and with fluctuating intentionality, I began to practice nonmonogamy, although “polyamory” never felt like something that fit me. One significant factor in my own foray into nonmonogamy was mere convenience — the practice of dating multiple people became increasingly common with millennials over the last decade. By no means have the millennials killed off monogamy, but if you opened a dating app right now, you’d see a strong representation of people seeking arrangements outside of monogamy.
DEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP
Before we get into further details, let’s do a quick glossary of terms just so we’re on the same page. There are so many designations of relationships that exist outside of the terms I’m leaning into here (this chart has a good overview), but I’m going to focus on monogamy, nonmonogamy, and polyamory.
Monogamy generally refers to being married and/or partnered to and/or practicing a sexual relationship with only one person at a time. Nonmonogamy — specifically ethical nonmonogamy is basically anything outside of monogamy that is not cheating. It involves consensually and communicatively fostering multiple sexual and/or romantic partners. That could include open relationships, casual dating, and many other arrangements. Polyamory could be considered a form of nonmonogamy, but there can be some significant differences between the two.
Polyamory has no single flavor from one person to the next (it can involve dating multiple people as an individual, as a couple, an entire large group of people dating each other, and all kinds of permutations within that structure), but it often involves an egalitarian, non-hierarchical approach to developing and maintaining partnerships. A poly person may still have a primary (or two or three or however many) partner, but there generally tends to be more of an openness for multiple intense emotional, romantic and/or sexual connections.
My perception of the distinction between polyamory and nonmonogamy is that nonmonogamy allows more space for subtle romantic and/or sexual connections outside of a core romantic relationship without having the same kind of depth or commitment as a “conventional” monogamous relationship. Polyamory, however, is more like having multiple committed partnerships (or more committed than purely sexual ancillary connections).
Even within the space of monogamy and nonmonogamy, connections can be extremely variable. You could be aromantic or asexual and have partnerships across the spectrum. You can have any number of romantic and sexual orientations that shape your relationships.
You can even have romantic friendships, which I lean strongly towards. These are extremely intimate relationships where you might bear your entire soul to friends and love them as or more deeply and loyally as you would any romantic connection — you could even be touchy with them in a way that might seem romantic — but it is never sexual in the way that a more traditional romantic relationship would be.
The world of nonmonogamy and polyamory is rapidly becoming more common, but it’s also still relatively niche. Not niche in terms of the number of people practicing it (one 2018 study reported about 1 in 5 people had participated in a non-monogamous relationship), but in the sense that it’s still culturally stigmatized, and many polyamorous communities are still overwhelmingly white.
MONOGA-ME
Modern dating fucking sucks. If you’ve spent any time at all on dating apps, you’ve observed the same brand of addictive, robotic dehumanizing behavior that causes anxious parents to scorn and modulate their kid’s internet usage. We’re all in this together.
From unsolicited dick picks on Instagram, to invasive requests from strangers on online dating apps to getting doxed on Twitter because of existing as anything other than a cisgender white man, the digital spaces we occupy have created (or mutated and surfaced in new ways) some relational frictions that are strange and difficult to navigate. It’s a weird and interesting time to be alive.
So how did I go from balking at nonmonogamy to dating multiple people? Internet gamification, in a way. Choice fatigue if we want to get a little more meta. Uninvestigated fear of dying alone if we’re being super honest.
People have different ways of navigating the endless swipe. The expectation in the sea of potential suitors that cross your screen is that the vast majority won’t work out. You’ll get some matches (validation!!! Maybe tru love is real!), and a fraction of those will yield superficial interactions unlikely to transcend the tantalizing bewitchery of “Hey.”
Some will escalate into conversations buzzing with possibilities and jadedness, and a tiny proportion of these faces will show up IRL for a 3D meet n greet. Most won’t work out after the first few dates. The cycle continues. The cycle is exhausting. And after so much disappointment, it seems natural to start juggling a few options at once.
We’re all entertaining so many prospects while we’re in the process of seeking — there’s sort of a default non-monogamy that happens in these incipient phases of seeking, but there’s this ambiguous line around when you “should” focus on one if you’re after a monogamous connection. After the first analog date? After a deliberate conversation about monogamy? I’d presume the latter, but the moral grey area has as many shades as Tinder does faces in a big city.
“Modern dating fucking sucks.”
My journey into nonmonogamy was concocted from a blend of pragmatism and cynicism. Statistically, most people you go on dates with are not going to work out. May as well have a backup there to keep the pursuit hot (okay, and maybe to buffer my ego a little if there’s any disappointment from the last thing that didn’t work out). But what even is the pursuit?
For me, the lines only got blurrier in time. I was in an abusive monogamous relationship. I had some long-overdue identity crises. I came out five years ago and was eager to explore my queerness. I wasn’t entirely opposed to dating heterosexual cisgender men ever again, but the prospect of being monogamous with one felt untenable.
Dating multiple people was an exploration in my own identity, a way to forge new connections and communities, a tool for learning about my desire, boundaries, insecurities and limitations. It planted seeds for healthy communication, for self-preservation, and for deeper self- inquiry. It was messy and sometimes beautiful, and I made a lot of mistakes. Sometimes I hurt people and sometimes they hurt me. Most connections didn’t last more than a few months.
Paradoxically, I love being alone. I live alone and spend an enormous quantity of time doing things alone that feel life-giving and nurturing to me. I’ve had vast stretches where I didn’t date at all. And I’ve had long periods of juggling multiple casual relationships that typically felt like throwing a bone at an inner, gnawing loneliness without really dealing with it.
Being a relationship dilettante meant I could give myself a gold (okay maybe silver) star for effort without going all in. I could maintain a semblance of openness to something more serious without actively seeking it out. And that’s not a bad thing — for many years, this is exactly what I needed. But over the last few years, things have changed.
I’ve grown more into myself and become more acutely aware of my own contradictions. Being a people-pleaser while being unintentionally domineering with sometimes abrasive delivery when I’m extra passionate about something (usually social justice or judging baked goods). Being a sensitive optimist and being acutely aware of the violent politics of this white supremacist patriarchal world (and being committed to destroying those structures while also self-preserving and practicing lovingkindness). Being eager to forge healthy relationships after a lot of accumulated trauma and recognizing that a part of me still doesn’t even feel like I know how to love or that I actually deserve it.
Learning to hold space for the spectrum of my being has rendered it less threatening to shed light on some of my behavioral and relational patterns that don’t serve me. And in this space, it became only recently possible for me to finally admit that nonmonogamy isn’t right for me anymore.
I can imagine an entirely fulfilling life that doesn’t include a long-term romantic partner. And I’m also open to a life that includes one (or many — probably not at the same time, but I also happily reserve the right to change my mind about any of this at any time). I’ve admitted to myself that my efforts in nonmonogamy have fueled my avoidant tendencies to diminish the vulnerability, hope and effort that usually accompany very serious and committed relationships. This doesn’t mean you can’t have serious or committed non-monogamous relationships, but my body has told me that is not the right path for me right now and I am ready to listen.
My own process of sitting with and healing from my trauma has asked me to look at my unwillingness to commit to a single partnership and examine whether the parts of me dominated by fear (of not fitting in with sex-positive, poly and queer communities, of missing out on “better” options, of not being enough, of dying alone, of losing myself in someone else, of getting hurt, of having a sexual/romantic creed that seems to go against my egalitarian politics) can start letting go.
MONOGAMY NONMONOGAMY RAINBOW — WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
I want to talk about monogamy and nonmonogamy and dissect some of the merits and disadvantages of both. First, I want to reaffirm again that A) I’m not an expert, B) I am not wholly denouncing or endorsing any relational structure — I acknowledge everything is complex and imperfect, C) there is no single, universal “right” relationship and D) you should pursue exactly what feels right to you without shame — as long as you are not causing others harm.
Toxic Monogamy
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “toxic monogamy.” There’s a lot of great content out there that describes far more thoroughly and eloquently what this is, but here’s the hot take: Toxic monogamy is the expression of monogamy that looks like what you’d think of in your run of the mill romcom or Disney movie. That is, very much based on white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender, patriarchal/paternalistic, classist, Western standards of what love “should” look like.
This can be manifested in things like the idea that a man is “supposed to” provide for a woman; that relationships are linear and marriage is the end goal; that a woman must bear children for her husband; that a man must purchase a wedding ring with a certain monetary value in order to deserve his future wife; that a person ever owes their partner sexual acts at any time simply because they’re partnered; that your romantic partner is supposed to be your whole world, your best friend, your therapist, the best lover you ever had, etc.; that you should sacrifice core parts of values and your identity in order to be with someone else; that you are incomplete without another person; that anything is better than being alone.
Toxic monogamy gets socialized and normalized early and often. It’s seeing Snow White unconscious for her entire movie until she’s non-consensually kissed by a stranger who “saves” her. It’s Halle Berry falling in love with her white captor in Monster’s Ball. It’s all of Hollywood. It’s children’s stories. It’s happily ever after™. It’s the echo and building blocks of all the institutions and systems and hierarchies that comprise our capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist American culture.
When free love isn’t so liberating
A huge part of what attracted me to non-monogamy was the idea of sexual and romantic liberation. I’d grown so frustrated with the tired, gendered, heteronormative, rigid structures that defined so much of modern romance that the annihilation and circumvention of those became deeply appealing. Rarely does operating from sheer opposition to something that you don’t like produce a fulfilling or authentic outcome. And I had no clue what my personal version of sexual and romantic liberation would look like.
I’ve never been motivated or enthused by the idea of having multiple sexual partners at the same time. That may be an inborn personality trait that affects my inclination (or lack thereof) towards nonmonogamy; for a long time I pathologized this — what’s wrong with me that I don’t want to be more sexually “free?” Is it because of my sexual trauma? Because I’m boring?
Or is it because of how much it hurt each time I felt used and then discarded by people I dated and became sexually involved with, only for them to conveniently change their minds about having any desire to pursue something emotionally deeper? Each time this has happened (and in most of my casual sexual encounters), I had the disturbing feeling like I was a hollow vessel; I felt a piercing rejection of my non-corporeal self and a harrowing disembodiment. I need and deserve to be loved as my whole self.
Lack of desire for what is now perceived as “sexually liberated” relationships doesn’t make you asexual, unliberated, undesirable, prude or insecure. The tendency towards this self-deprecation is something that can easily happen when a concept as sweeping and amorphous as nonmonogamy/polyamory becomes de facto accepted as the pinnacle of liberation.
“Free love” is not new; much of the “radical” sexual and romantic culture that defined the 60s and 70s — the heyday of the Free Love movement as we know it — was notoriously rapey. Ultimately, “free” can look very different to different people. And that is OKAY!
Over the years, I’ve grown fairly reserved about how and when I’ll share my sexuality with people I’m dating, and this is anomalous. A massive number of millennials engage in sex liberally. And there is nothing wrong with having sex. Everybody should have exactly how much sex makes them feel happy.
But when I say “liberally,” I don’t mean millennials are even having a lot of sex. I mean that there are many people who have sex very early on with new partners (which, if done intentionally is awesome), and a disconcerting number of these connections are pursued mindlessly and/or out of obligation — in a way that is divorced of any kind of deeper connection.
Perceiving more sex (without regard to the quality of sex) as equivalent to liberation is the exact kind of obtuse thinking that characterizes neoliberalism. More does not equal better, and therefore the freedom to garner such is not inherently radical. If it doesn’t engender a sense of personal autonomy, joy, belonging, connection and safety, what’s fundamentally radical or liberating about it?
I want to be extremely clear here that not all sex needs to have deeper emotional connection. It’s okay for people to consensually engage in sex that is as intimate as a wrestling match. That’s still pretty intimate. Get it! But if the majority of sex that most people are experiencing is devoid of any deeper level of connection, and especially if it’s sought after mindlessly (or worst of all out of obligation), then it can be more problematic.
Everything is sex, except sex, which is power.
Over the years, I have generally started holding off on becoming sexually involved with partners until I feel completely safe, committed to them, and have known and built trust with them for a longer period of time. That could be six months, it could be a year — it’s not about a rigid parameter of time, but a feeling.
Multiple times, when I’ve disclosed to friends that I had dated people for months without being sexually involved with them, I’ve been met with shock. Some (specifically femmes) have responded with things like “I didn’t even know that I was allowed to wait that long.” This is an undertone of “free sex” culture that deeply unsettles me. I had the same reaction before I started this practice of waiting; I broke down after realizing I’d been offering sex like a chore after a requisite number of dates with someone I didn’t even like.
Sex is such a personal and vulnerable thing; our sexuality is directly correlated with our sense of self and usually our sense of power. Under rape culture, women and femmes especially are used to having their sexuality commoditized and exploited without their consent. When society constantly tells you that your value is only as good as your sexuality, and that achieving an elusive “ideal” sexual expression is the only way to maintain an aspirational toxic monogamous relationship (“Keep him satisfied!” “Don’t be a whore!”), some part of you internalizes those messages.
It’s virtually impossible to exist as a woman or femme in this repressed and paternalistic society without being impacted by the countless attempts to undermine femme sexual empowerment and agency — including being allowed to assert boundaries and say no. I’ve been prude-shamed by people of all genders and I’ve been slut-shamed (mainly by cisgender people). It’s all relative. At a certain point, we need to own our path to understanding what expression is “right” for our individual truths, but that usually requires a lot of work.
There are many people practicing polyamory and nonmonogamy who are extremely intentional about all forms of sexual and romantic boundaries — being very sexually active with multiple partners and having boundaries are not mutually exclusive. But I find it interesting how many people are engaging in surface-level sexual relationships without having done some of the extremely vulnerable self-work to understand emotional boundaries, traumas, fears and desires.
The opposite can certainly be true of people who are pursuing monogamous relationships or no relationships at all — avoiding self-work and processing is not unique to any group of people. I feel comfortable proclaiming that avoidance of unpleasant feelings is part of human nature, so the delaying or deliberate eschewing of that work is intuitive. No one *has* to do this work either, but we’d probably have a significantly more fulfilled and less violent society if we all did.
Free sex for me means feeling safe. Having survived various traumas and having a history of dissociating during sexual experiences, waiting until I feel safe and fully embodied with someone is the personification of sexual liberation. But not everyone who wants monogamy or limits sexual expression is traumatized (any more than any non-monogamous person is).
Movements and ideologies that center sexual liberation need to do better to include the full spectrum of expression — ranging from asexual folx to demisexual folx to sex workers and everything in between. We can respect and hold space for the differences between our expression and interrogate how culture and norms shape them.
Sugar and spice and boundaries and vices
There’s no right or wrong in how you express your sexuality, romantic desires and partnership aspirations — as long as you’re not harming someone. But how does anyone know or actively choose what’s right for them? Lort I have no clue! But right now, I’m working with my instincts, which are still informed by pragmatism, but now also some optimism and idealism! Doing self-work can shift your perspective at least a little, as it turns out.
Time is infinite, but ours is not. There is an inherent hierarchy baked into all the ways you spend your time and the people you spend it with. Every single choice you make each day informs your identity, relationships and overall being. And a prerequisite for building relationships is investing time. You can’t have infinite partners with completely equal affection and investment any more than you could responsibly and independently take care of 250,000 puppies for a week.
I want to emphasize that I can be anti-hierarchy in my politics and have a committed monogamous partnership. That doesn’t make me inherently greedy or selfish or bitchy or bad. And even if it is a little hypocritical, SO WHAT? You can be an environmentalist and have used a paper cup for coffee when you forgot your to-go cup at home last week.
To live is to be involved in a constant give-and-take with the rest of the living world; you are not a hypocrite if you don’t live your ideal values 100% of the time. And you know what else? Jealousy is normal. I know several polyamorous people who do not and have never experienced the emotion of jealousy. To them I say, hell yea!!! Get all the partners and live your best life with all the consent and boundaries and good communication and joy or whatever!! But for most of us, jealousy is a (pesky) reality.
There are so many things about us that we can “work on.” But is an instinctual emotion like jealousy inherently “bad” or something to be overcome? I’ve tried to be really careful as I heal from my wounds not to fall into the trance that I’m inherently broken and/or need to be “fixed.” And in that mindset, it becomes more difficult to reconcile attempts to do away with jealousy.
Of course, many polyamorous relationships healthily navigate jealousy with grace through strong and open communication. But if my body’s expression of jealousy makes me feel actively uncomfortable and potentially unsafe with someone when there isn’t a closed sexual boundary around our relationship, why should I attempt to shut that down? Why is my body not worthy of being listened to?
I believe all of us, if we allow ourselves to trust our own voices, are very capable of discerning which primal instincts are harmful to ourselves or others, and which voices are asking us to honor our truths.
I do not believe that monogamous relationships are innately more successful or stronger than non-monogamous ones. The divorce rate speaks for itself. I’m conscious that imposing spoken sexual parameters around a relationship doesn’t ever mean that one or both partners won’t ever stray. And yet, there’s still something to me about the symbolism of that sacrifice that I feel drawn to.
Polyamory and nonmonogamy can honor and destigmatize sex in a way that can be extremely liberating; there’s a lot of potential in the idea that loving someone means not asking them to constrain something as integral to their basic needs and sense of self as their sex drive.
It makes sense to me how this can be conveyed as an unsavory or even dangerous possessiveness (which is common in toxic monogamy — that idea that you own the person you’re with). On the other hand, we make sacrifices to the pleasure we can experience literally all the time. At what point is the drive to experience unboundaried sexual pleasure different than the drive to only eat cake (which we could do, but we probably shouldn’t in order to care for ourselves long-term)?
What I mean by this is that there is a VERY subjective value each of us holds about how much and what kind of pleasure we need and deserve and at what point we must make sacrifices in order to nurture the things that certain forms or overemphasis of pleasure (hedonism) might challenge or diminish.
So much of our collective and individual pain and grasping — aka possessiveness, comes from a scarcity mindset. But all relationships require compromise, and our reptilian survival brains are a part of us whether we like it or not (see: being hangry). Depending on the context and the participants, asking a partner to eliminate other sexual partners may not be any different than asking a reluctant partner to please watch sports with you every week. Or it might be the most oppressive, unreasonable request in the universe. It’s all relative. But being more or less boundaried in a sexual and/or romantic relationship doesn’t intrinsically mean you are more or less “evolved.”
Maybe it’s all that fucking Disney, but I want to feel chosen. I want to feel special, and I want to feel safe. Maybe it is irrational, but I find something tender and magical about believing that someone could choose YOU –first! As the emergency contact! As the lover even when you’re gross! As the companion to open a goat cheese farm with in the middle of nowhere even when you’re lazy and sometimes obnoxious — and continue to choose you even though there are so many other options.
And since for most people, sexuality is something that wanes as we get older (or, at the very least, our sexual appeal from an ageist societal lens declines, which by osmosis makes us feel less sexy and thus less inclined to prioritize sex), I want to believe in a romantic and sexual love that doesn’t center free sex first. That might be paranoid, idealistic or plain ridiculous, but I don’t really care. It’s what I want.
Even if in the grand scheme of my life the “feeling chosen” is only being chosen by myself (and my platonic romances!), that’s wonderful. But I don’t want to continue settling for a relational arrangement that I think I’m “supposed” to want based on politics or communities, or on an underlying sense that I don’t deserve or couldn’t possibly find what my heart is actually called to.
And who knows, maybe I’ll feel differently some day if I felt deeply safe and stable in a long-term partnership with someone. Maybe not. Also, since I’m essentially a cat in a human body, I still would like to be largely left alone even after I’m chosen. We contain multitudes, y’all! I’m still a work in progress (aren’t we all?).
Where’s the friend zone?
There’s so much to cover with monogamy and nonmonogamy, but there’s one more thing I wanted to shed light on that has turned me off to nonmonogamy. This may correspond to sexual trauma, it may have to do with what my Costar profile refers as my astrological “need to feel wholesome” (?), or it might just be a personality trait, but I don’t like the idea of any relationship holding sexual potential.
It would be flat out wrong to suggest that any and every polyamorous person is constantly sizing up people they meet as potential lovers or partners, but there is certainly a greater openness in polyamorous spaces for the crossing boundaries of friendship and sexual partnership. This makes me very uncomfortable. Again, I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with it or with me for having that reaction — I simply think it’s an interesting dynamic.
Part of me is envious at how seamlessly polyamorous people appear to navigate spaces where everyone is friends, and everyone dates each other, and everyone dates each other’s other partners. Another part of me is terrified by this because it does imply a greater openness to friendship existing on a sexual plane.
Philosophers, kids, people on mushrooms and everyone else can deliberate to the end of time on what the meaning of friendship is. Like most other things that matter, it’s subjective and its meaning is largely in the eye of the beholder. But friendship is unique and precious and essential for our survival as a species. It’s my favorite kind of love.
One of the things I love about friendship is that it can feel so safe. It doesn’t have some of the same confines or demands or even “productive” or reproductive potential that other forms of relationships can have — expectations and needs complicate all relationships. But to me, friendships can be the least bogged down by those projections and therefore be the most empowered, mutually loving, respectful and safe dynamics.
Sex doesn’t undermine any of the characteristics I mentioned in friendships, but it can certainly complicate some of them. I think my greatest wish in friendship is for neutral ground that allows me to be completely myself without infusing any of the performance or power dynamics of sex, so I have difficulty grokking the culture where many friendships can be sexual or romantic prospects.
This concept isn’t that strange; I mean, there’s a reason why the workplace is [supposed to be] a neutral ground. Dating coworkers is often frowned upon because involving sex and sexuality in certain contexts can make environments unsafe (especially when there are larger power dynamics at play — and often affecting certain populations more than others).
Again, just because sex isn’t an open possibility in most conventional relationships doesn’t mean that friends don’t end up boning. There’s both an illusion and a tangible outcome of control in all the boundaries that we create. Ultimately, all things end, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all attempt to pave meaningful paths before they do.
TAKING IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL
I actually don’t know shit about maintaining a healthy monogamous relationship or a healthy non-monogamous one. All I know for sure is that I now do not want a non-monogamous relationship. Maybe one day when I feel really safe and seen in a monogamous relationship, that will be a good time for me to reevaluate. Or maybe I’ll just go on vacation and forget about philosophy and fuck around. But I think we should all be engaging more in conversations and explorations of who we are and what we want and what (if anything) it all means.
Everyone deserves to feel good, whole and safe to be their authentic selves. I believe love is the reason to exist. I believe that each one of us has an essential nature that is pure, radiant love. I believe the expression of that looks different for everyone, and that is a beautiful thing. And I want to live in a world where it’s permissible and encouraged for each of us to struggle (without shame) with what that expression looks like, to discover our truths, and to change our minds as we shift and grow.
That said, I want to know: monogamy, nonmonogamy, polyamory, relationship anarchy, etc. — love it? Hate it? Confused about what any of it even means? Existentially torn about how you feel about it? Let’s commiserate in celebrating, grieving and overthinking the kaleidoscope of love that encompasses the human condition!
