Imagine a college student is talking with their friends about a new but ongoing sexual relationship with another person. The group of friends are talking about this new relationship because the couple has been seen together at parties and has gone on a few dates. One of the friends asks, “Is it serious or are you just hooking up?” The student says, “I think it’s serious.” Another friend jumps in and says, “Are you sure you want to be in a committed relationship while you’re in college?”
As you imagine this scene, what is your interpretation of the words “serious” and “committed”? We use these words often to refer to relationships and assume that their meanings are straightforward and understood. “Serious” and “committed” could mean many things, but generally, they are tied up with sexual exclusivity or monogamy. Why do we assume that committed, serious relationships are monogamous and that nonmonogamous relationships are casual? What are the effects of these assumptions, not just on our relationships, but also on social relations more generally? Is this assumption inevitable or could we think about intimate and sexual relationships differently?
These are the questions I will try to answer in this chapter. What we will find is that, although we often conflate commitment with monogamy, many people are in committed relationships that are consensually nonmonogamous or polyamorous. I will begin by discussing polyamory as a relationship structure that includes more than two consenting adults. I will then explain why we tend to conflate commitment and “good” relationships with monogamy and the effects of that conflation on social life beyond interpersonal relationships. Finally, I will conclude by discussing polyqueer kinship and its political possibilities.
Polyamory refers to emotionally intimate and sometimes sexual relationships that include more than two people and everyone involved is aware and consents to the relationships. The word polyamory is relatively new, but multi-adult relationships have been around for as long as we have records of how people do intimate relationships. Polygamy, polygyny, polyandry, and free-love movements are examples of other types of multi-adult intimate and sexual relationships. Polygamy refers to legal marriage between more than two people, polygyny is marriage between a man and multiple women, and polyandry is the term used for marriage between a woman and multiple men. Because the label polyamory does not refer to legal marriage, it is important that it is not conflated with the different kinds of polygamy.
Contemporary forms of polyamory in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe have some characteristics that are particular to this time and these places. First, unlike many forms of multi-adult relationships from the past, contemporary polyamorists have relied heavily on digital media to develop a relationship subculture through how-to books, podcasts, blogs, and social media platforms. By relationship subculture, I mean a set of shared beliefs, practices, and meanings for intimacy and relationships that differ from the dominant or mainstream culture.
One of the main features of contemporary polyamory subcultures that distinguish it from others is that polyamorists place a great deal of emphasis on gender egalitarianism. Specifically, all genders are able and encouraged to have multiple sexual and emotionally intimate partners. In other words, contemporary polyamory subcultures reject the sexual double standard that says that men’s status is enhanced by more sexual partners and women’s status is compromised by multiple sexual partners.
This subcultural emphasis on gender egalitarianism can have a profound impact on the gendered self and the gender organization of intimate relationships. For instance, in one of the first studies of gender and polyamory, Elizabeth Sheff found that the women in her samples reported a stronger sense of sexual agency and autonomy, and they reported that one of the best parts of being polyamorous was developing friendships with other women, including their partner’s partners (Sheff 2005). Men in Sheff’s studies generally fell into two main categories. Most of the men she interviewed reported that their sense of masculinity had changed significantly because of being in polyamorous relationships with women. They said that to do polyamory well, they had to question jealousy and possessiveness, which are often assumed to be natural prerogatives of masculinity. These men also stated that they had to let go of the idea that they should control their partners’ sexual lives and be competitive with other men. The other kind of polyamorous man exhibited what Sheff calls the alpha male syndrome. These men reported feeling more masculine because they were able to have multiple women partners at the same time. Having more than one lover, they said, enhanced their status as “alpha males.” Often, these men were in relationships characterized by what Sheff calls a “one penis policy” (Sheff 2006). That is, the men who reported feeling more masculine were often in polyamorous relationships with multiple women, but their partners were not in relationships with other men.
In addition to placing value on gender egalitarianism (even if not practiced by all polyamorists), polyamory subculture includes new and innovative norms for how to experience and do intimate relationships.
One of the first questions I am asked about being polyamorous is “Aren’t you jealous?” The question implies that (1) if one’s partner has sexual or emotionally intimate relationships with others, jealousy is inevitable; (2) jealousy must be avoided; (3) because jealousy is inevitable and intolerable, it makes sense to actively prevent a partner from having emotionally or sexually intimate relationships with another person; and (4) monogamy is the best way to avoid jealousy. One relationship innovation of polyamory is that polyamorists reject the idea that jealousy is always legitimate, inevitable, and avoidable only through practicing monogamy. First, jealousy is not an inevitability. According to polyamory subculture, it is possible to experience positive feelings when a partner is intimate with another. As an innovative alternative to jealousy, polyamorists have developed the concept of compersion to describe feeling happy when a lover or partner is experiencing pleasure and intimacy with another person. Jealousy, polyamorists suggest, stems from fear of loss and feeling insecure. Compersion, in contrast, comes from a feeling of joy when someone you love and care about is happy. As Ritchie and Barker (2006) describe, the existence of a new word for positive feelings when a partner is involved with another person introduces the possibility of experiencing joy rather than fear or anger.
In addition, polyamory subculture rejects the idea that monogamy is the best way to avoid being jealous. If your partner does not have to choose between you and another person, which is the case in a monogamous relationship, then polyamory might be an antidote rather than cause for jealousy.
Finally, polyamorists reject the assumption that jealousy is a legitimate reason to control a partner’s behavior or limit their relationships with others. Polyamorists make the case that, although jealous feelings are real, they might not be grounded in a real threat of loss. Instead, feelings of jealousy could stem from insecurity, so rather than demand changes in a partner’s behavior, it is better to cultivate compersion and work on building one’s own self-confidence. In sum, for many polyamorists, although jealous feelings can and often do result from partners forming intimate relationships with others, feeling jealous is not inevitable, and more important, it is not an excuse to control the behavior of others. The subcultural emphasis on compersion as an alternative to jealousy could offer one explanation for Sheff’s findings that polyamorists often experience a transformation of the gendered self and the gender dynamics of their relationships. At the same time, however, these are norms and ideals and therefore do not always manifest in the reality of doing polyamory as evidenced by the “alpha male syndrome,” which can exacerbate gender inequalities or allow “alpha males” to avoid feeling jealous by controlling their partners’ sexual options.
Another relationship innovation that has emerged in polyamory subcultures is the label metamour. A metamour is a partner’s partner. That is, if I am in a relationship with someone, and that person is in a relationship with another person, that other person (my partner’s partner) is my metamour, and I am their metamour. The sociological significance of the label metamour is that it has become a role in polyamorous relationships. As a role, it comes with norms and expectations about how to relate to each other. By forming a relationship with my partner’s partner, or my metamour, I open lines of communication between us and, ideally, we can articulate our needs, desires, and expectations. This is meant to avoid triangulation through the shared partner, but as is the case with all kinds of relationships, the norms and expectations are not always followed. Again, the significance of the role metamour lies in the existence of norms and generally shared expectations, so when they are violated, individuals have a language and set of strategies for addressing the violation. This subcultural innovation could explain why the men in Sheff’s sample felt less competitive with other men and the women in the sample reported positive relationships with other women, especially metamours. It could also explain why the “alpha males” in the sample set up their relationships so that they did not have to deal with other men as metamours and could maintain a sense of control in their relationships with women.
Polyamory is not inherently more egalitarian or progressive than monogamy, as the different approaches for doing polyamory adopted by the men in Sheff’s sample suggest. Despite the subcultural norm for gender equality, polyamory can be as masculine dominant or racist as any other kind of relationship depending on how it is done in practice. This is why it is important to distinguish between polynormative and polyqueer relationships. Polynormativity refers to ways of doing polyamory that reproduces social inequality. Polyqueer relationships, in contrast, are relationships that include more than two adults and, in practice, challenge or diminish social hierarchies based on gender and race (Schippers 2016).
White, middle-class, and highly educated polyamorists have been most of the participants in published research on polyamory and most authors of how-to books. For this reason, understanding and questioning racism within polyamorous relationships and communities has not been a central focus of research or how-to books. In response, polyamorists of color have developed communities and online content specifically for polyamorists of color. For instance, there is a Facebook group “Black and Poly,” and several bloggers who identify as Black and polyamorous have posted on websites like blackandpoly.org, blackandpoly.wordpress.com, and blackandpolydating.com. Kevin Patterson’s book, referred to earlier, Love’s Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities (2018), focuses on the ways polyamory subcultures engage in racist practices and how to do anti-racist polyamory. Kim TallBear’s blog site, criticalpolyamorist.com, focuses on her own experiences of being Indigenous and polyamorous. Michele Hy’s website polyamorouswhileasian.com features writing about her experiences of polyamory from the perspective of a Chinese-Taiwanese American. In other words, digital media content creators are challenging polynormativity despite the continued lack of empirical research on polyamorists of color.
Building on the idea of heteronormativity, mononormativity refers to the ways in which social life (including our collective beliefs, interactions, relationships, and social institutions) are set up to systematically privilege people who are or appear to be in monogamous, couple relationships and disadvantage those who are not (i.e., are single or polyamorous). By systematically privileged, I mean that social life is structured based on a set of assumptions about what is a good, moral, and natural way to do emotionally and sexually intimate relationships, and those who do not adhere to being “good” or “moral” by being single or having more than one partner are denied resources, authority, and prestige because of their relationship status. These assumptions include but are not limited to (1) monogamous coupling is a sign of mature adulthood, and an inability or unwillingness to “settle down” into a monogamous couple is a sign of immaturity, selfishness, and/or immorality; (2) long-term monogamous coupling is the key to living “happily ever after”; (3) most people are or aspire to partner with one person (your “one and only true love”); and (4) children are better off if there are two and only two parents in the household.
These assumptions have a significant and negative impact on polyamorists. For instance, in the United States, there are no legal protections for relationship status. Polyamorists living in the United States can and do lose jobs, custody of children, housing, and other material and immaterial resources with no legal recourse. Class and race privilege can buffer certain groups from harsh social sanctions, however people who lack economic resources, are racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, queer, or gender nonconforming are particularly vulnerable to mononormative sanctions. This could explain why class privileged, white, heterosexual, cisgender polyamorists are overrepresented in research samples (Sheff and Hammers 2011).
The most significant institutionalized form of mononormativity is marriage. In the United States, a person can only marry one person and is violating the law if they enter a legal marriage with more than one person. This is significant because legal marriage offers a host of privileges and securities that polyamorous people are denied. For instance, inheritance, child custody, insurance, and so on, are often granted only to legal spouses. Although most polyamorists are not seeking legal recognition of their relationships through marriage, anti-polygamy laws have been enforced harshly against religious minorities including Muslims and Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS).
The origin of anti-polygamy laws in the United States lies in the US government’s effort to expand settler colonialism in the nineteenth century. Mormons had established themselves in the Utah territory and were organizing a theocratic state separate from the US federal government. To legitimate the US takeover and annexation of the Utah state, a propaganda campaign was initiated to portray Mormons as primitive, exceptionally patriarchal, uncivilized, and non-white because they practiced polygamy (Ertman 2010).
Although FLDS members are no longer considered non-white, they continue to be portrayed as exceptionally patriarchal, criminal, and uncivilized. For instance, in my own research I found that contemporary journalists’ portrayals of FLDS polygamy claim the women and children are victimized by the practice of polygamy. That is, journalists blame polygamy rather than men and gendered power relations for women’s and children’s victimization and exploitation within the context of polygamous marriages. When journalists write about abuse and exploitation in monogamous families, they rarely if ever blame monogamy despite high rates of violence in monogamous marriages. By assuming that polygamy is the main cause of abuse, journalists ignore how, in most cases of abuse, gender structures power dynamics and the distribution of resources, and gender inequality is an important causal factor for abuse in monogamous and polygamous, heterosexual marriages. Moreover, in the context of mononormative marriage laws, polygamists in the United States are forced to go underground and isolate their families to avoid prosecution. Because of anti-polygamy laws, abusers can abuse and exploit without fear of repercussions because other family members are not willing to go to authorities outside their communities or seek resources because of their legitimate fear of legal repercussions for practicing polygamy.
The mononormative conflation of monogamous coupling with a happy, fulfilling, responsible, and mature life is significant because living a “good life” is tied up with ideas about morality and citizenship. Good and moral citizens, the narrative goes, form families that include two monogamous parents and dependent children. Mononormative narratives about living a good and moral life have negative effects on people who are in consensually nonmonogamous and polyamorous relationships as discussed earlier. However, mononormative narratives are also invoked to support other systems of inequality such as gender, race, class, and colonial imperialism. The settler colonial expansion of the United States described earlier is an excellent example of how mononormativity is deployed to legitimate denying some populations the rights of citizenship to serve other interests having little to do with marriage. Colonial discourses often claimed that a particular kind of gendered monogamy is more evolved and civilized than polygamy (Song 2016; Willey 2016), thereby casting colonized populations that practice polygamy as less evolved and uncivilized.
Although the treatment of Mormon polygamists is a stark example of mononormativity in the law, contemporary US culture is rife with mononormativity. In addition to analyzing journalists’ portrayals of FLDS polygamy, I have also analyzed historical biographies, social science research on campus hookup cultures, and popular culture including film and television. With few exceptions, the idea that monogamy is moral and multi-adult relationships are immoral is an unstated but prevalent theme. For instance, I conducted a close reading and discourse analysis of Jill Lepore’s biography, The Secret History of Wonder Woman in which she describes the life of William Marsten, the creator of Wonder Woman. She describes how William Marsten lived most of his life in a long-term relationship with two women, Olive Byrne and Elizabeth Holloway. They lived in the same home and raised their children together. Olive Byrne was the main caretaker of the home and children, and Marsten and Holloway pursued careers as a psychologist and attorney respectively. Holloway, Byrne, and Marsten were feminists and politically active in “the rights for women” movements of their time. After Marsten’s death in 1947, Byrne and Holloway continued to live together until Holloway’s death in 1993.
Though Lepore provides an interesting and well-researched historical biography of Marsten, Holloway, and Byrne, she also reveals her own mononormative biases when discussing the Marsten-Byrne-Holloway family. For example, Lepore assumes that the women must have been unwilling to be in a polyamorous relationship and that “having two wives” is inconsistent with Marsten’s feminist politics, with no evidence to support this assumption. In fact, the evidence Lepore provides suggests the opposite. It appears that they worked out a division of labor to deal with women’s difficulties balancing career and family, and the women lived together for several decades after Marsten’s death. This suggests the women certainly got something out of the arrangement and perhaps Holloway had a wife and husband as did Byrne, rather than Marsten had two wives. Not able to see polyamory as a viable and attractive option, Lepore relies upon and reinforces the stereotypes of polygamy discussed previously and casts Marsten as perverted and controlling and Byrne and Holloway as compliant and victimized by Marsten’s selfishness.
Not every historical biographer I researched approached their subjects through a mononormative lens. Some biographers jettisoned mononormativity and wrote positively about their subjects’ commitment to consensual nonmonogamy as embedded within and consistent with their broader political activism and commitments. For instance, in my analysis of Alexis De Veaux’s biography of feminist poet and theorist Audre Lorde, I found that De Veaux placed Lorde’s commitment to nonmonogamy centrally in her life story as an anti-racist, feminist activist (see Schippers 2019).
One of the most pervasive mononormative assumption is that children are better off in families with two monogamous caretakers or parents. Quite often, people will assume that polyamory is bad for kids. But is it? Elisabeth Sheff has been researching polyamorous families with children for decades. She talks to the adults and children, and she spends time in polyamorous homes to observe the goings on. She has consistently found that children in polyamorous households fair as well or sometimes better than children in two-parent households (Sheff 2013). For example, in multi-adult households, physical and economic responsibilities do not fall on the shoulders of one or two people. Instead, it is spread among the adults which means that children have access to more emotional, physical, and economic care. In one of the few studies specifically on Black polyamorists, Christopher Smith found that his participants consistently talked about shared resources as one of the important benefits of being polyamorous (Smith 2016).
Still, mononormativity tells us that family should be defined by legal marriage between two monogamous adults, genetic ancestry, and biological offspring. Single parents and couples are assumed to be the sole providers of kids, which means everyone else is off the hook when it comes to taking care of “other people’s children.” I think that the monogamy part of heteronormativity plays a significant role in maintaining this way of thinking about family and that this way of thinking has significant political implications.
In sum, marriage laws, social beliefs and customs, and most cultural texts send a message that anything other than monogamous coupling is suspect, and people who cannot or refuse to partner with one person in a monogamous, long-term relationship are dangerous, immature, perverted, irresponsible, selfish, or pathetic. In other words, mononormativity in all its forms reinforces the idea that monogamous relationships are “real,” “serious,” and the key to living a happy and fulfilling life, and nonmonogamy is either a temporary step on the way to mature adulthood or it is immoral, irresponsible, or impossible.
Polyamory is a way to do relationships that does not conflate “serious” with monogamous coupling and “commitment” with sexual exclusivity. Within the context of polyamory, expectations for how to do “serious” and “committed” relationships do not hinge on being sexually exclusive. Instead, relationships are (ideally) an ongoing process of self-reflection and communication with others about needs, desires, and expectations. For this reason, I believe there is potential for what I call polyqueer kinship to have broader implications for more than just our intimate relationships.
Polyqueer kinship refers to networks of belonging that are based on mutual interdependence, care, and responsibility instead of monogamous marriage, genetic ancestry, and biological children. The monogamy part of the heteronormative, nuclear family equation establishes an us/them binary between those in the family (monogamous couple and biological children) and those outside the family (all other adults and their children). This defines who is inside the family circle and who is out, and it also determines how resources and responsibilities flow. Monogamy ensures that resources flow down genetic lines, reinforcing class inequalities. It also ensures “racial purity” in a white supremacist society, and in the context of a gendered division of labor, it leaves the caretaking responsibilities on the shoulders of one parent, usually the woman.
Polyqueer kinship, in contrast, is based on building affective ties, care networks, and resource-sharing responsibilities with more than two adults and their children. Rather than being closed off by marriage or genetic lines, polyqueer kinship is permeable and can grow horizontally and stretch to accommodate more adults and children. Of course, this is not a new idea. The idea of fictive kin in Black communities (Stack 1983), chosen family in queer culture, and dyke anti-monogamy in lesbian culture (Willey 2016) emphasize building networks of belonging and care outside of the heteronormative family. I do think, however, that because polyamory as a concept and structure for doing relationships emphasizes building intimate relationships horizontally by bringing in more adults rather than reproducing genetic family trees, it offers an interesting model for thinking, not just about families, but also about our relationship to the world in general.
Could cultivating a sense of belonging through mutual care and responsibility (regardless of how many sexual or romantic partners we have) break open us/them binaries, not just based on definitions of family, but also perhaps, in terms of our identities and our political alliances? By cultivating a polyqueer orientation to belonging and care as an acceptable, desirable, and supported way of building kinship, could our sense of responsibility extend from heteronormative families altogether – to all adults, all children, all species, even? bell hooks (1984) argued that feminist politics are important for everyone because, in the heteronormative family, we have our first experience of gender hierarchies and domination (36). Following in her footsteps, I want to suggest that it is within monogamous families that we get our first training in us/them inside/outside binaries and a mononormative culture nurtures and endorses closed monogamy within the context of couple relationships. In times when us-against-them borders are drawn through white supremacist, heteronormative, and nationalist logics, perhaps cultivating polyqueer belonging instead of romantic or sexual monogamy as the “good life” could be one part of a broader transformational, progressive politics to deal with the daunting social and environmental problems we are facing in the twenty-first century.
Mimi Schippers is Professor of Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Tulane University, USA. Her research focuses on empirically documenting and theorizing masculinities, femininities, sexualities, and culture. She is author of Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams: The Stories We Tell About Poly Lives and the Cultural Production of Inequality (Routledge, 2019); Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities (New York University Press, 2016); and Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock (Rutgers University Press, 2002).