PicoBlog

I remember sitting on a patch of grass in Golden Gate Park In San Francisco almost a half-decade ago listening to a girl younger than I was tell me about her polyamorous relationship. The term was newish to me and obvious to her: rather than date one person, you could date many. Unlike just plain dating, each of these ‘partners’ would be a bona fide relationship, replete with all the trappings and trimmings. The contours would be bespoke, tailored rather than prefab.

The point was commitment without exclusivity, stability with one person and variety with everyone else. I remember her sense that she was at the vanguard of something exciting. My questions seemed like they were being ventriloquized from a previous generation, worried about things that were either passé or solved for: the point was to be non-monogamous, after all. Why worry about putting things in boxes when someone wanted to live in the wild?

But even the undefined needs a good working definition. The phrase most en vogue these days to describe these new developments is “Ethically Non-Monogamous (ENM).” These are relationships that allow partners to have multiple romantic/ and or sexual partners at the same time. A CBS News article explains that “unlike swinging or casual sex, consensual non-monogamy is typically a long-term lifestyle with committed partners that requires its own set of rules.”

The same year I sat in that park, the New York Times published an article entitled “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?,” a lengthy profile of couples who decided to stay wed but sleep with and date other people. Two years later, the Times published another piece, “Polyamory Works for Them,” that took a similar approach, introducing the haute bourgeois to the newest frontiers of the sexual subculture.

The numbers back up the prose. Data from 2016 revealed that one fifth of adults had been part of a non-monogamous relationship. A YouGov poll from last year found that 43% of millennials report that their ideal relationship is non-monogamous, as do more than one third of all U.S. adults. Only half of those under 30 want their ideal relationship to be monogamous.

But the tale is told by much more than just survey data. Anyone who hangs out on dating apps these days can testify to the rise of romantic candidates who identify as ENM. It is no longer really controversial: just a lifestyle preference that you can swipe left or right on. It is right on the cusp of going mainstream, but still vibrates with the energy of the margins. ENM is at a cultural sweet spot. It is still interesting, but it is no longer insignificant.

First, is it really that new? Marriage has been flexible from the very beginning: Abraham had two wives, Jacob had four, organized by seniority and rank. Both aristocrats and the working classes have long innovated a range of marriage arrangements, from unions of convenience to common law shack ups. Infidelity has often been domesticated, and even normalized, and the gap between what people showed the street and what they did behind closed doors was inevitably wider in more censorious times. Gay people, for whom traditional avenues of relationship affirmation were long unavailable, pioneered their own menu of arrangements.

But just because a phenomenon has ancestors doesn’t mean that it also can’t make news in its own right. And the reality is that the surging popularity of ENM is a far greater revision to traditional marriage than transpired when the Supreme Court guaranteed the constitutional right to wed in Obergefell. It touches on the arithmetic of the number of people in a relationship, not their identities. It speaks the language of commitment but vibes to the prerogatives of choice.

To get a better handle on this cultural revolution, Better Thinking did some reporting. I talked to a couple of people who are ENM committed or ENM adjacent in an attempt to get a firmer handle on what this all means (names and some details have been changed to protect privacy).

The first woman, we’ll call her Julia, met her now husband during college, and they got married soon after. So far, so traditional. Then, during the pandemic, they mutually agreed to experiment with polyamory, or date other people while still staying partnered. Self-reported early returns have been very positive, with both thriving under a set of rules that governs the time they can spend with other people and one another. Julia told me that crucially both her and her husband have enjoyed the experience, although to such an extent that making time or one another is sometimes a challenge. Both of their circles of intimacy have multiplied: her marriage provides clarity rather than constraint in governing these additional bonds.

Another woman, let’s call her Rebecca, has had a different experience. She got married in her late 20’s and lived with her husband abroad. He wanted to be ENM almost immediately, she was lukewarm. Nevertheless, they started seeing other people. Things quickly disintegrated, but for a somewhat interesting reason: Rebecca fell in love with one of the people she met while she was dating men besides her husband. Her conclusion is that she’s naturally monogamous: if that option was not available within her marriage, she sought to find it elsewhere. A divorce soon followed, and Rebecca is wary about entering into a similar arrangement again.

What seems difficult to tease out is whether Rebecca’s experience underlines ENM’s weakness, or its success. Because she was looking elsewhere, she found something else. Julia’s contentment argues for moving from an “or” mindset to one predicated on “and,” but I wonder about where that leaves the old virtues, the ones that sometimes feel like a straitjacket and sometimes like a life preserver. The English poet Percy Shelley talked about exchanging easy pleasures for more difficult ones. Where is the line between doing the hard things, and making life harder than it needs to be?

This is a story about romance, relationships, and sex, but it is also one fundamentally tied to the internet, where everyone has a profile and a brand and options are endless. Old ways of choosing are more difficult than they used to be. We struggle to figure out how all of these choices and options and freedoms cash out in terms of being, you know, happy. The whole world is an endless supermarket aisle, and the shopping cart of our heart can only carry so many boxes before tipping over.

When all that is solid melts into air, it can be a challenge to know if you are flying or in free fall.

Have a great weekend,

ARH

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