Even when we reject the script, we still want the stage.
Ranveer Joshua Jadhav, Staff Writer
Photo source: MGM/Everett Collection
My first instinct is to blame capitalism for convincing us that we can have it all. But then again, who’s to say that we can’t? (And yes, I recognize my own proclivities when I use the word blame; no, I don’t believe that polyamory is this perverse, moral corruption.) Admittedly, perhaps I just don’t get “it.” For an interpersonal structure built upon the promise of boundless possibility, non-monogamy seems to demand more rules than the liberation it’s supposed to guarantee. Life, as I seem to conceive of it, would be this immovable bloc of Google Calendar hyper-scheduled intimacies: “Tennis at 11:00 with Reece, bed-rotting with Avery at 3:00, dinner and movie with Reese with an ‘S’ at 6:30, and then a ‘U up?’ text from Miles at 1:00.” Come to think of it, this sounds like a pretty ideal weekend, but how do I know that tennis with Reece is just limited to tennis? And more importantly, why does it matter?
The moment I try to imagine myself inside this arrangement, I feel the familiar tug of uncertainty. Sure, I’ll out myself as a jealous person—sue me!—but let’s just say I somehow transcend that pettiness and achieve the emotional enlightenment required to perform this relational choreography: what I think would now burden me is this administrative anxiety of needing to know what everything “means.” Open structures promise freedom, but it seems that they also require a near-constant calibration of expectation; what counts as casual, what counts as intimate, what’s crossing the line—too many “what are we?”s for my liking. Suddenly, the very fluidity that’s meant to unshackle us becomes a site of negotiation, of emotional bookkeeping that I’m not entirely convinced feels any less confining than the monogamous scripts we’re supposedly escaping.
Maybe this is the part I don’t understand: if the goal is to transcend the possessiveness of monogamous structures, why does it feel like we’ve simply rerouted that vigilance into new channels? How we define relationships, navigate boundaries, come to agreements, initiate checks-ins, all the while trying to decipher the relentless parsing of subtext; the labour doesn’t disappear, it just gets better branding.
Let’s look at all the different types of relational structures within non-monogamy. In a hierarchical polyamorous framework, you have your “primary” partner, a partner who is the central romantic interest in your life, often someone you cohabitate with and share long-term commitments. Then you have your “secondary” partner, someone who’s important to you but not centred within your life’s logistics. And then your “tertiary” partner is your casual, occasional, low-intensity rendezvous. The more the merrier, but still deeply structured (and in some cases, replicates the same hierarchies of monogamy, just with extras).
In a non-hierarchical structure, everyone is considered equal in terms of their emotional legitimacy, devoid of any personal ranking, and relationships should, in theory, evolve more organically. However, my skepticism suggests that even in non-hierarchical setups, implicit hierarchy is bound to emerge. Who do we really know that effectively balances their time, money, living situations, and emotional history all at once? Now imagine doing this in more than one relationship. Even in the most egalitarian of frameworks, human habits and natural attachments almost inevitably create de facto hierarchies, whether we name them or not.
Open relationships, a broad umbrella within the broader umbrella of polyamory, manifest themselves in several different arrangements. Some couples choose to pursue a “sex-only openness” approach where couples remain emotionally monogamous, but outside encounters are mostly casual or purely sexual. This system is often rule-heavy: no repeats, no sleepovers, etc. But others might drift towards a “soft” or “conditional openness” where there is limited intimacy outside the couple with pre-approved partners or contexts. And perhaps the most controversial, the “don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT)” couple, where partners don’t share details about their external encounters, adopting an “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” mindset meant to reduce jealousy or complexity. While DADT minimizes emotional labour, it often creates blind spots or unspoken tensions.
These structures don’t even mention polyfidelity (a closed group relationship with no outside partners; think monogamy, but plural), or other common configurations: the “throuple”—three partners, everyone dates everyone—the “V”—one “hinge” has two partners who are not involved with each other—or the ‘“quad”—four partners in a network that could all be connected or arranged in pairs. I would only assume that these setups require enormous clarity of expectations: who is connected to whom, and how.
What is it about monogamy that makes us construct these frameworks to begin with? Why do we yearn for more? Maybe it’s because monogamy, for all of its cultural dominance, has never been as simple or self-sufficient as it pretends to be. We’ve always relied on village-like networks to distribute our load. Dutiful friends pick us up from the airport, our parents take care of us when we’re sick, roommates console us when we’ve had a hard day, and sometimes we even use our ex’s printer. Perhaps non-monogamy merely makes explicit a truth that we’ve long rehearsed in private: no single person can meet every need. But as soon as we try to formalize that truth, we can’t help but build the scaffolding of labels and guidelines to keep the structure from collapsing. The attempt to escape monogamy’s rigidity ultimately borrows its architecture.
Another part of me thinks the yearning is less philosophical and more logistical; desire doesn’t operate on scarcity logic, it contradicts itself. People change and dynamics shift, and sometimes one relationship—no matter how loving—can’t contain the full register of our attachments. Wanting more isn’t necessarily a failure of commitment, it’s a recognition of our emotional plurality. But as soon as we begin to act on this plurality and accommodate it, everything goes to shit (I would think).
The irony is almost comical, isn’t it? We turn to non-monogamy in search of this expansive fluidity, an openness, but we find ourselves drafting new constitutions of intimacy. A constellation of connections all in service of making the boundless legible. What do these systems say about the human impulse of classification? Where constructing these frameworks is less about escaping an “oppressive” system—monogamy—and more about the human craving for structure itself? Even when we reject the script, we still want a stage.
At the end of the day, maybe the whole monogamy-versus-non-monogamy debate is a red herring—aren’t we all just improvising around the same basic truth? Is it really possible to eat our cake and have it too? Every structure we build is just an attempt to manage the unruliness of wanting. We create rules because desire is unpredictable, and we negotiate boundaries because we’re terrified of being lost in the vastness of other people. Non-monogamy doesn’t expose the inadequacy of monogamy so much as it exposes the incompleteness of every framework we’ve inherited. No configuration—monogamous or otherwise—solves the fundamental problem of wanting, it only reorganizes where the uncertainty falls.
