Non-monogamy has a PR problem

“You know the polymentor? He’s a legend.”

It was my first date with a guy whose OK Cupid profile stated that he was a polyamorous man in a long-term relationship, and without even trying, I had impressed him by mentioning my former colleague, a man I thought of as very principled and intelligent, who happened to be polyamorous. Apparently, he was also a niche celebrity in Portland’s ENM (ethically non-monogamous) community. My date explained that my former colleague was considered an exemplar of ENM, a tactful advisor and go-to guy who put a lot of energy into talking with others about best practices in open communication and transparency.

I asked my date if he thought that some people have a talent for polyamory, the way they might have a talent for basketball or songwriting. He answered immediately, “You have to have really good social and organizational skills. You can’t be conflict-avoidant. You have to be really okay with yourself.” Also, he said, it helps to know Excel. I changed the subject and asked about the dog in his profile photo.

In a lot of mainstream narratives about polyamory, you would find out that a few months later, there was a huge scandal that exposed the polymentor as extremely problematic in some unethical way — as coercive, or manipulative, or even abusive, and we’d have to revisit our previous opinions and experiences and wonder, should I have known? What actually happened is that my date and I split a vegan BBQ plate, talked about dogs for an hour, then shook hands and said, “It was great to meet you,” and by the next day each of us had forgotten what the other person looked like. But I would bet at least a few people are reading this and thinking, maybe even hoping, that it’s only a matter of time before the polymentor’s ugly truth comes to light.

It would make sense if you were thinking that: Recent years have seen the rise of a media narrative suggesting that a self-satisfied wave of upper-middle-class polyamory is sweeping the nation in a bid to make monogamy obsolete. The numbers of non-monogamous Americans have actually remained steady for well over a decade: An ongoing body of research that began in the early 2010s puts the percentage at 2– 3% of the roughly 70% of Americans in relationships overall.

But though monogamy remains the gold standard, media and pop-culture counternarratives are flourishing in the form of books, movies, prestige streaming series and reality shows. These are still far outstripped by the number of fictional and nonfictional texts with monogamy at their relational centers. But if we judge solely by snarky examinations of the growing sub-genre, non-monogamous relationships are a new offshoot of woke progressive doctrine that exist mostly to infuriate legacy-media columnists.

It might be more accurate to say that non-monogamy and polyamory are experiencing something of a reputational crisis at the moment, with a number of high-profile spaces in which plural relationships are not covering themselves in glory. ABC recently pulled Taylor Frankie Paul’s season of “The Bachelorette” from the network’s spring schedule amid domestic-violence accusations against Paul; shortly afterward, the 5th season of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” — Paul’s first reality showcase, born from the barrel-curled flames of #MomTok influencers–turned–swingers — was suddenly suspended. Since then, Jordan Ngatikaura, the husband of Paul’s castmate, Jessi Draper, confirmed that the two of them were divorcing and allegedly filed a restraining order against Draper.

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The men repping non-monogamy in Louis Theroux’s buzzy Netflix documentary “Inside the Manosphere” aren’t acquitting themselves much better; two of Theroux’s interviewees assert that their practice of “one-sided monogamy” is their birthright as alphas, basking in the cloud of Axe body spray that obscures their partners’ knowing glances into the camera.

Then there’s the new HBO Max dramedy “DTF St. Louis,” whose dark, twisty plot is spiked with non-monogamy (ethical and otherwise), kink, homosocial love and shame — along with the subtextual intrigue attached to star David Harbour, whose ex-wife Lily Allen‘s last album teemed with lurid accusations. And finally, there’s the ongoing saga of author Lindy West’s new memoir, which continues to generate discourse that underscores polyamory’s inextricability from norms about gender, race, anti-fatness, money, mental health and authorial obligation.

But while the chaotic juiciness of polyamory and non-monogamy tends to grab headlines, each is part of a broader reconsideration of entrenched codes of sex and romance. And none of it can be separated from its political context: A powerful minority that, in grasping for ideological control and crawling with masculine anxiety, seeks to impose fear and punishment on a majority that doesn’t want to be controlled.

“I’ve definitely felt more scrutiny” in the past several years, says Kam, a self-described “queer ruminant poly” who decided last December, in the aftermath of a long-term relationship, to make 2026 a deliberately solo year. “There’s a belief, and it’s baseline conservative but not always politically conservative, that polyamory is a trend that people get caught up in, that there’s a cultural cachet to it, and that’s not my experience at all.” Such accusations mirror ones that have always been used in talking about queerness and genderfluidity, she thinks. “It’s ‘we recruit‘– type propaganda all over again, with religious leaders trying to convince parents of a campaign to trans all the kids and outlaw monogamy and shape the whole world with our subversive agenda. And it’s like, No, we just want to not be demonized.”

Rachel Krantz, author of the 2022 memoir “Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy,” experienced this firsthand when she first began writing about ENM as an editor at the feminist website Bustle. “Part of the benefit of being open about your life is that you’re creating a container for people to have certain conversations [within],” she points out. “People [are] not necessarily biologically monogamous animals, and we all struggle with the social contract of ‘I want the security of a monogamous agreement, but maybe I’m feeling like my marriage is sexless, or maybe I’m feeling super restless, or maybe I have a crush on someone else.’ And when we see people trying these different models, we’re going to be really sensitive to whether or not it’s working. We’re potentially going to want to say, ‘See? It’s terrible,’ or ‘See? All these scary things I’ve been telling myself, it’s not worth it to try. I’m right.’”

That judgment falls most heavily on heterosexual women. After all, the idea that hetero men are instinctually, naturally non-monogamous is culturally normalized, while the anxiety about non-monogamous women that radiates off Theroux’s manosphere interviewees is that they will compare them unfavorably to other men, an insecurity that’s also the frame of “body count” debates portrayed in “Inside the Manosphere.” The belief that polyamorous relationships are overwhelmingly initiated and steered by heterosexual men who manipulate them for their own benefit is an extension of an existing assumption that all hetero men want multiple partners. Even where monogamy isn’t a given, double standards usually are: women whose dating profiles contain the phrase “non-monogamy” get a very different reception than men whose profiles include the same phrase. And conventional wisdom about the viability of plural relationships maps onto what we already know to be indelibly gendered dynamics of power and control.

“Heterosexual men have mistresses, that’s always been normative,” says Eddy, a queer therapist whose clients tend to come from queer/poly/kink communities. “Men being able to cheat and get away with it is normal. I’m not saying that men cheat more than women. But consent can be really complicated if there’s an intrinsic power difference, and polyamory is an attempt to make it all aboveboard and consensual for everyone.” This is where non-monogamous and polyamorous relationships overlap with monogamous and heterosexual ones: Sometimes the people who benefit from an asymmetrical power dynamic — say, manosphere guys preoccupied with their status as alphas — have no interest in being on equal footing with their heterosexual partners. This, says Eddy, is why poly relationships work well among queer people: “We’re used to being non-normative. We don’t have the same scripts. All bets are off.”

And it might be that, culturally, the stories of the people for whom polyamory and/or non-monogamy works well aren’t the people whose stories have the normative sex appeal media outlets look for. “People joke about the Dungeons and Dragons–to–ENM pipeline,” says Kam, “And, you know, here are people who do spend a lot of time defining and plotting out the connections between them and deciding how they want to build that part of their world.” Eddy concurs, adding, “The people who often have successful poly relationships are neuroatypical people to whom processing structures and routine are very important.”

Krantz isn’t convinced that non-monogamy does need better PR. “For the 10 years that I’ve been non-monogamous, I’ve been hearing ‘non-monogamy is having a moment!’ I just think the interest is always there at the same time as the repulsion is there.” The relationship she chronicled in “Open” had the manipulative, coercive dynamic that many people are convinced is also part of West’s, and she recognizes parts of her own experience in it. “There hadn’t been a mainstream book about non-monogamy as an instrument of coercion,” she says. “There was pressure to only show the happy outcome, so there could be some level of acceptance. But I got so many letters from women saying, ‘I was in the same situation, and I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater [either]. I don’t blame non-monogamy, I blame the relationship that was a poor introduction to it.’”

And though Krantz sees more room for this nuance now than she did when she began writing “Open” in 2018, she’s aware that, in a world where monogamy remains the norm, anything that challenges it will be treated as a threat. “I looked back to the Bible with ‘Open,’ and even there, you have Sarah being jealous of Hagar. It’s never not been a difficult thing to share your partner. But how are we going to be seen as human if we don’t have complex narratives?”

For Kam, now is a moment when monogamous and non-monogamous people need to focus on their similarities. “Monogamous relationships fail just as often as poly ones. More people sharing an intimate relationship means more variables and more ways it can fail. But it has an equal number of chances to succeed. I don’t want to look down on my monogamous friends, and I don’t think they want to look down on me. That’s a media narrative that we should push back on together.”

“Look at [depictions of] monogamous marriage in literature or cinema,” Krantz says. “Most of those are also about things falling apart, or people cheating — inherently, the dramatic stuff is what’s depicted, because that’s how plot works! If all the non-monogamous relationships people see are perfect ones, that’s probably not going to lead to more acceptance either.” Peering closely at relationships of any kind reveals their fissures and flat spots — the things that make a story, however it ends, worth telling.