The media pushes polyamory — but the public isn’t buying it Despite numerous

Feb 20, 2023 by Jill

by Mary Harrington, UnHerd:

Despite numerous columns on the subject, the practice hasn’t taken off.

Is the number of people practising polyamory really growing? London-based millennial journalists seem to think so: I’ve seen three columns about the practice just since December. The New Statesman‘s Pravina Rudra wrote two months ago that a ‘growing’ number of her friends insist ‘monogamy isn’t natural’; earlier this month, again in the New Statesman, Lamorna Ash described how dating a couple ‘set me free’. Now the Sunday Times is on board, declaring that ‘more and more Britons are exploring relationships with multiple partners’ and promoting The Ethical Slut as ‘the ultimate guide to polyamory without heartbreak’.

But is this true? The actual number of people who practise polyamory is unknown, though the Sunday Times reports that this year’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles will ask respondents for the first time about open relationships. YouGov polling, meanwhile, suggests that it’s debatable (to say the least) that we’re opening up our relationships en masse. British attitudes to polyamory are fairly consistent over recent years: 80% are not up for it at all, around 10% might be ‘open’ to it and less than 1% are actually doing it. There is no sign that the number open to it, or actually doing it, has changed over recent years.

Why, then, this perception among London’s media class that this is a growing trend? Perhaps, in their social circles, it is: this is so much so for one of the above writers that she reports that her friends suggest she’s ‘close-minded and conservative’ for not being into it. It’s hardly original to note, of course, that a values gap exists between the media class and the British people more generally. A similar gap, where the EU was concerned, famously produced the ‘surprise’ Brexit vote. And while polyamory hardly has the same political weight as Brexit, it seems at least likely that attitudes to the practice are unevenly distributed, perhaps along similar lines.

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