Polyamory is having a moment(s)

It has burbled up consistently over the last 30 or so years. It has wrapped its arms around multiple people and their partners during those decades. Polyamory is the lifestyle people love to love and love to hate. Yet, if the last few months are an indication, the more-love groundswell is currently appreciating in a whole new way. 

Background

Polyamory, or as Merriam-Webster explains “the state or practice of having more than one open romantic relationship at a time,” hit the comparative mainstream with the publication of the now-famous text “The Ethical Slut” in 1997 by Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton, the latter who has been nonmonogamous since 1969. 

In the ensuing years, polyamory became normalized — well, somewhat. “Approximately 1 out of 22 people (4–5%) who are currently in a romantic relationship identify as part of a consensually non-monogamous relationship,” according to a 2021 study published in Frontiers in Psychology. And, as noted in Bedbible, polyamory or nonmonogamy is on the slow but steady rise. The practice has also hit the online dating market: Tinder expanded its relationship types to include such categories as open relationship, polyamory and ethical nonmonogamy in March 2023 in select countries.

The latest

Statistics tell one story about the ascent of polyamory. Its increasing appearance in mainstream news tells another. Nearly once a year NPR produces a story about polyamory. In November 2023, Oxford University Press published the first history of polyamory, “American Poly,” by Christopher M. Gleason. The scholar tracks the movement’s tentative birth during the Roaring Twenties through the present day, while laying out the way the movement threads together both conservative and countercultural stances on religion, politics and sexuality.  

Then, in January 2024, peak polyamory exposure occurred. First, “New York” magazine devoted much of the January 16, 2024, issue to polyamory, with a cutesy, cuddling trio of felines on the print edition’s cover. The issue featured an immersion into the practical minutiae of a polycule (a polyamorous group of interconnected individuals). “What they’re doing is not really new, but it feels utterly au courant as an increasing number of people consider what it looks like to add a person or persons to their relationships,” wrote the profile’s author Allison P. Davis. The issue also included an in-depth user’s guide to how to practice polyamory. 

The same month, The New York Times interviewed Molly Roden Winter, author of the memoir, “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage,” about Winter’s, well, open marriage. As further evidence of polyamory’s comparative mainstreaming, Winter “felt compelled to write about her experience, in part because she felt that non-monogamy is so often depicted as something happening on the fringes, not as a lifestyle that married moms pursue.” Oh, and in January 2024 NPR hopped yet again on the polyamory wagon, interviewing Winter, a therapist, a rabbi and a psychology professor about how American marriages are changing. “The average marriage is getting worse. But those of us who are able to connect in this new way are achieving a marriage that is better than the best marriages of earlier eras,” said Eli Finkel, the psychology professor. 

The reaction

Mainstream media exposure be damned, the ladies of “The View” were not having the January uptick. In a recent segment after the launch of the New York magazine cover story, Whoopi Goldberg cringed as she said the story gives readers a guide to “being in an open relationship or engaging in so-called ethical nonmonogamy.” Then the camera panned to Sunny Hostin making an unamused face. Then Joy Behar exclaimed, “How many orgasms can one girl fake?”

The response from a section of the polyamorous community was pointed. Behar’s joke “implies that the women involved in nonmonogamy are just doing it for the men, you know, doing it for their pleasure,” Leanne of Poly Philia, a polyamory blog, criticized on YouTube. “Which is a very misogynistic and patriarchal viewpoint.”

Then the public intellectuals began spouting off. “Isn’t it at least a little suspicious that polyamory — which is supposedly a “liberatory” corrective to repressive family structures — happens to be exactly compatible with a mode of economic life that has made both traditional marriage and parenthood completely unaffordable?” wrote environmental studies professor and The Atlantic writer Tyler Austin Harper on X. 

He then explained polyamory’s intimate connection to 21st-century individualism and that polyamory, as a movement, is not disrupting any status quo. All fun and intellectual games until X user @full_hearts upended Harper’s seven-post thought exercise with one juicy comedic smackdown.

Welcome to the polyamory discourse, 2024-style.