Polyamory: Complicated New Identity or Primarily About Sex?

In an open access article in PLOS One published in mid-2017, a series of psychologists—drawing on a convenience, opt-in survey of 3,530 persons—describe what is known about the community of self-identified polyamorous individuals. Polyamory, for those who aren’t in the know, is actually a collection of practices, all of which revolve around the theme of not wanting to have sex with just one person at a time. The authors, unfortunately, label it as an identity—as if we need one more of those. Some even hold that polyamory may be innate. (Perhaps it should be a protected class.)

Consensual non-monogamy (CNM) is something the PLOS One study authors hold characterizes about 4-5 percent of the population. I disagree. While just under 10 percent of American adults ages 18-60 in the population-based Relationships in America survey reported having experienced sexual relationships that overlapped by at least a month at some point in their lives, very few of those are still ongoing, and most of those overlapping relationships were covert, transactional, or transitional.

Oddly, only 37 percent of the original 3,530 respondents were included in in the PLOS One study. Why did the study’s authors include only a minority (of a minority)? Because they wished to limit their study of polyamory to a more “traditional” type—the one in which participants have a primary and a secondary sexual partner. I thought that that was what polyamory meant. But nearly two-thirds of self-identified polyamorists don’t fit into that box, courtesy of the “vast differences in relationship configuration” the authors report. So out they went, in favor of analyzing only those relationships that emphasize “commitments,” as distinct from swinging, “open” relationships, and all other combinations of concurrent partnerships.

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