A Concise List of Models of Partnered Adult Relationships
Below is my working list of the types of adult partnership relationships. It’s based on a combination of life experience, clinical observations, and sex history research.
When I work with clients, understanding the basis of their relationship(s) helps me assess if they are in the kind of relationship(s) that brings them comfort and peace (and good sex too) or whether they need to re-think their life choices.
An agreement or legal vow of sexual fidelity between two intimate partners (whether single, domestically partnered, or married). In the case of legal marriage, the vow of monogamy is for life and is legally enforceable (adultery is grounds for divorce).
Although strict monogamy is the most widely-upheld form of monogamy, people are still people. This means that even for those whose over-arching structure is monogamous, either or both partners may have outside experiences. The most common forms are:
Open Marriage with disclosure: some acknowledgement that one or both partners are sexually active outside the relationship.
Example: Don’s business kept him on the road almost half the year. His partner, Lou, knew that Don probably fooled around. As long as Don kept it separate from the marriage, and didn’t bring home diseases, Lou accepted it as part of their lifestyle. He occasionally hooked up too when Don was away.
Open Marriage with non-disclosure: a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to infidelity.
Example: Bert discreetly enjoyed short-term but friendly affairs when the opportunity arose. He suspected his wife did the same but they never discussed it. They made an agreement early in the marriage not to tell if they cheated, and he felt that gave him lifelong permission to safely explore other relationships.
Open Monogamy: some couples occasionally walk on the wild side together.
Example: Mara and Hugo were trust-fund babies with lavish lifestyles. During one notable drunken escapade, they brought home two strippers from a dance club, paid them for private sex shows, and ending up having sex with them..
Fluid-Bonded Monogamy: an agreement that flirting, playing and eroticism are okay outside the marriage but that all acts involving sexual fluids (i.e., oral sex, penetrative acts) are strictly preserved for the marriage bed.
Example: Meena and Gene were BDSMers who loved going to bondage events, both because of the neat toys and the chance to tie up or be tied by interesting new people. Their agreement was that as long as nothing directly sexual occurred, they could each play and experiment with other bondage enthusiasts.
As noted in my little history section above, polygamy and polyamory have had a long and rich historical tradition. That doesn’t mean those traditions are better or worse than ours. Just as people of today don’t question monogamy, people raised in polygamous cultures may not question their traditions either. My guess is that every polygamist society has unhappy monogamists who just want to be with one true love, just as today’s monogamist society has unhappy polygamists who need variety to feel satisfied.
So when I talk about polyamory (as below), I’m talking about 21st century Western polyamory, which is its own new tradition and not the product of foreign cultures or religious traditions. In our culture, polyamorists are people who make the conscious choice to negotiate relationships that allow them some measure of sexual freedom. Usually they are, by nature, people who never felt monogamy was genuinely that important and who are aroused not only by having multiple partners but (depending on the relationship) pleased or aroused by knowing their partners have other partners.
What’s the Difference Between
Polygamy and Polyamory and Swinging?
Polygamy is usually the product of a particular tradition or religious teaching (such as with some Moslem sects). If you’re raised in a polygamous culture, its values and its model for adulthood are as normal to you as monogamy is to Europeans and North Americans. Polygamy usually implies multiple formal marriages, often entailing inter-family negotiations, particularly on property and inheritance issues. In most non-Western cultures, parents and other elder relatives may be the ones who engineer and assist in ensuring their children make important family and financial connections through polygamous marriages.
While polygamy involves a formal (religious and/or legal) marriage to several opposite-sex partners, polyamory simply means “many loves.”
Most contemporary polyamorists are either bisexual or bi-flexible (willing to perform with a same-sex partner, even if an opposite-sex partner is more desirable). Some polyamorist units are strictly gay or lesbian. Some polyamorous units are heterosexual, with the same-sex partners “sharing” the opposite sex partner separately, and not engaging in threesomes or same-sex relations. Many men in the swinger community (a significant subset of the polyamorous world) identify as heterosexual even though they enjoy group sex situations with other naked men. Frankly, the more polyamorists one talks to, the more variety one finds in the particulars of how their minds and their relationships operate.
Yep, now’s a great time to remember Dr. Brame’s little rules: Rule 1: Nothing in Sex is Black and White. And Rule 2: Diversity is Normal.
Contemporary polyamorists tend to be sexual free-thinkers who consciously choose to structure their adult relationships to allow for what they recognize as their innate need for variety and sexual experimentation. Opening their relationships allows them to explore different roles, different experiences, and different people while maintaining the integrity of a bonded, committed relationship and all the comforts (stability, support, love, companionship) that go with family. Although the conventional wisdom has long been that open marriages and relationships don’t work, the facts tell a different story. The swinger community probably has more people in it who have been married for 20 to 30 years or more than the typical big box church on the highway.
By the way, some people use the terms “swinging” and “polyamory” interchangeably. It is more accurate to see swingers as a subset of the greater world of polyamory. In other words, all swingers are polyamorists, but not all polyamorists are swingers. Polyamory itself takes a multitude of forms and is actually larger than the kind of sex people have or who they have it with. Polyamorists, like monogamists, have full relationships with their permanent partners.
Since all the work on 21st century poly is still so new and fresh, here are my personal working models to help sort out the most common forms poly relationships take.
Structured Polyamory
Usually consists of a primary partnership (a couple) plus one or more long-term secondary romantic/erotic partner. It may also be two couples in a four-way union or any other formally agreed and negotiated relationship structure involving more than three adults.
Some structured polyamorists are Swingers. Swinging, or The Lifestyle, evolved out of the private wife-swapping parties of the mid-20th century (as depicted in the popular TV show “Mad Men”). In the 1950s, suburbanites with a taste for adventure might arrange a “key party,” where the men in the room dropped their car keys into a bowl, and passed the keys to the car (and, by implication, to their wives) around the room.
Today’s swing scene is oriented towards hedonists, not repressed housewives traded randomly over martinis. Swinger women today take an active role in seeking out the experiences they want, with or without male partners at their side. The swing ethos values warm, respectful, no-strings encounters for the sake of mutual adult pleasure.
One thing that hasn’t changed: swinging has a special appeal to people who are in long-term relationships and marriages, so it’s common to find a very high percentage of established couples at parties and events, and common for couples to pair up with other couples for the night.
Another form of structured polyamory is a three-way marriage, or three-way relationship, known as a Triad. Often gay or bisexual, but sometimes heterosexual. Some triads are open or amorphous and may welcome outside partners or allow for casual encounters; others are closed, with all three members faithful to the triad.
Some structured polyamorists are into Cuckoldry, which has become an extremely popular fetish in the 21st century. It is a mostly monogamous and heterosexual lifestyle in which the wife has sex with another man while the husband gets pleasure from watching them. There are overlaps between cuckoldry and BDSM for some people (if the wife is sexually dominant and if the husband is subjected to humiliation) but not for all.
A “leather household” is yet another, albeit less common, kind of polyamorous configuration. Depending on the household, they may engage with outsiders or operate as a family with commitments to fidelity. Leather households often cross gender/sex lines since the emphasis is on BDSM dynamics.
Unstructured Polyamory:
A free-form structure, and a more communal lifestyle, where primary and secondary relationships shift and evolve over time. It is most common among single polyamorists but not exclusive to singles.
Unstructured polyamory in couples can take innumerable forms. A very short list includes
- Partners both sleep with whomever they wish, but keep other people away from their personal relationship
- Partners share new sex partners but don’t form emotional relationships with them
- Partners are open to expanding their household to a third or fourth partner if the right person(s) come along
- One partner exerts more sexual freedom than the other (a negotiated relationship, usually between people with different needs or preferences) and has sex experiences outside the home
Again, these are just a few of the ways people structure their personal relationships to suit their greater emotional needs.