By Alexandra Jones

“This language was supposed to be about trust, honesty, communication, and commitment— defining commitment in a different kind of way.” Across a staticky Zoom call, Emily Witt and I are comparing notes on non-monogamy. “It was supposed to prevent lying and concealment,” continues the journalist and author of the seminal 2017 book Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love. “But I don’t really see it accomplishing that anymore—it actually seems to be giving people an excuse to act worse than ever.” She is in her office in New York, I’m in mine, in London—but despite an ocean of distance, our “notes” are markedly similar. “I’m sure this will feel familiar to most people on dating apps right now,” says Witt, rolling her eyes.

There had been a time when, like Witt, I approached non-monogamy with a kind of puppyish idealism. It was 2017 and terms like “poly” and “ethically non-monogamous” (ENM) had just begun to penetrate the mainstream—as refreshing as a cold Pepsi on a hot day. It felt like the start of something brave and new—the start of a redefinition, as Witt says.

Recently, though, I’ve begun to wonder whether we weren’t all a little too hasty in embracing this newfound terminology. For far too long, all I have heard is horror stories—friends (almost always women) unmoored by the dynamics in these “relationships.” “Nowadays,” says Witt, “you see the term ‘ethically non-monogamous’ [on someone’s profile] and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the person will behave ethically or articulate what those ethics mean. More often it’s like they’re making a pronouncement: ‘Play at your own risk, I’m not going to take any emotional responsibility for you.’”

Take 31-year-old Kate, for example. She recently matched on Feeld with a man who was in an open relationship. What she liked about him—let’s call him Shaun—was that he went to great lengths to be clear about how and why he’d opened the relationship with his “primary partner” (whom he’d been with for five years). He was clear about what his boundaries were, and how he hoped to bring other people, like Kate, into his life. It was refreshing, she explains, to have such a forthright conversation about what they both wanted. She hadn’t set out to date like this, but Shaun made it all sound so easy.

Plus, she had recently found that the ubiquity of non-monogamy—if not in practice, then certainly in app bios—made it hard to avoid. “There are maybe three monogamists left in London,” she quips. “And they’re all short.” She had a lot in common with Shaun, and they had a similar sense of humor, so after a week of messaging, she was excited to meet him for a drink. That first date was fun, they shared a kiss and kept talking. After their second date, Shaun came back to Kate’s and they slept together. “At about two in the morning, he turned to me and said, ‘By the way, my girlfriend and I have a rule that we can’t stay the night at other people’s places.’” In all the many hours of conversation about Shaun’s boundaries and his primary partner’s comfort levels, this “rule” had never come up.

“He got up, got dressed, and left. I was just lying in bed feeling really… I mean, it affected me, mentally. I felt used,” Kate tells me. And the worst part, she points out, is that she felt like she couldn’t voice her discomfort. “I thought it was illogical for me to feel used, because he’d been upfront about having a primary partner—and having a responsibility to that person… but he never said he wouldn’t sleep over, and if he had, I wouldn’t have had sex with him.” Afterwards, Shaun’s communication slowed, he became evasive or unresponsive, and eventually told her that he’d decided—for the good of his primary relationship—that he wouldn’t see the same person more than once. “It was like he’d used all this language about compassion, and openness—about bringing people in ‘ethically’—to lure me into a false sense of security about how he’d treat me. Then, as soon as we’d had sex, he used his non-monogamous status as a way to absolve himself of any responsibility to me. I’d rather he’d just said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not into this anymore.’ Instead, I was left feeling like it was my own fault that I was hurt, because that’s just what I’d signed up for.”

For Leanne Yau—a non-monogamy educator and founder of Poly Philia, a platform that offers digestible information on poly best practice—this is the absolute antithesis of what a poly lifestyle is meant to be about. She opens our conversation with an emphatic “I have a lot to say on this issue.” Yau, who has spent years advocating for this community, is irked by the influx of people co-opting the language of non-monogamy, without ever trying to understand the theory behind it. “Unfortunately, a lot of people have begun to conflate polyamory with being single and casually dating,” she says. “But being poly or ethically non-monogamous is about responsibility, and taking responsibility for your partners: you factor them into your decisions, you consider their feelings, you uphold your commitments to them and respect their boundaries. You strive to be open, honest, and compassionate towards them—it isn’t just a matter of reading someone their rights then doing whatever you want.”

The problem clearly isn’t the relationship configurations themselves—which, as Witt points out, were always meant to be about defining commitment, rather than safeguarding apathy. For her, it comes down to dating apps, which have spread the language of non-monogamy so widely, “that people who may not have heard the terms before, read a book like The Ethical Slut, or come out of a subculture where these practices are discussed and studied, will go on a dating app, see ‘ethical non-monogamy’ or ‘poly-curious,’ and take it to mean whatever they want it to.” Witt has often found herself untangling the miscommunications borne of this new world where two people might use the same word to mean two completely different things. “For instance,” she says, “I’ve had a guy whom I was dating—and whom I wanted a relationship with—say that he would be polyamorous with me.” Polyamory, as Witt understands it (and as I understand it, too), is the practice of having many concurrent relationships. If anything, it is a deeply committed way to live. Witt continues: “I said to him, ‘Are you saying you want to be my boyfriend? Because that’s not the vibe that I’m getting at all. It seems like you want to do whatever you want—and if it’s convenient for you to hang out with me, then you’ll be there, but otherwise not.’” They broke up soon afterwards—as she suspected, when he said “polyamorous,” he didn’t mean “boyfriend.” “But if I’d taken him at face value, I could have ended up quite badly hurt.”

This story is echoed by a friend who’s recently sworn off dating anyone on the ENM spectrum. “I’ve just found that what a person usually means is that they want to have regular sex without committing to you or to anyone—or they want the full relationship experience but without taking accountability for your feelings.” She says that, after trying this a few times, the lack of “stability and safety” that she felt in these relationships left her constantly on guard. “Ultimately I felt like people were whitewashing their bad behavior by couching it in these terms.”

“What is interesting to me,” says Sarah, who is 33, has been single for two years, and dates mainly via Feeld and Hinge, “is that we are well-versed in the red flags of jealousy and possessiveness—and we avoid these like the plague—but there is another end of the spectrum now, equally dangerous in some ways, where someone uses non-monogamy to convey a sense that they are so free-spirited that they simply cannot be pinned down. I’ve noticed increasingly that it’s older men who are calling themselves ENM—Peter Pan boys in their 40s, who have learned a new language to help them avoid accountability and protect their ‘free to fuck anyone I like’ status. It puts the onus on you, like, ‘Am I going to eat the crumbs you’re offering, knowing that I’ll never feel satisfied, or do I just walk away?’ And if you don’t walk away, then it’s all on you.”

Witt sees the rise in people proclaiming themselves poly as part of a wider trend within the app-sphere for “pop psych” explanations for our behaviors. “I’m sure you’ve seen all that stuff about attachment styles and ‘love languages,’” she says. “If another guy tells me he’s ‘avoidant,’ as if it’s some way to excuse behaving irresponsibly towards someone, I might actually scream.” For Yau, the misuse of poly and ENM terms comes down to the fact that we live in a highly individualistic society. Non-monogamy is ultimately a relational state—something that’s meant to be discussed, explored, and defined by the people engaging in it. It’s not so much something you “are,” as something you do with other people—so the premise of it breaks down when we use it to defend or prop up a behavior, like, “sorry, this is just who I am.”

Personally, I feel a lot of compassion for people who are blundering their way through this new world. I spent a year in an ENM relationship doing just that—and looking back, I can see myself in many of these descriptions of bad behavior. I learned rather quickly that the utopian ideal of “anything goes as long as we’re honest” could, in practice, be corrupting, painful, and humiliating. It wasn’t because I personally was a bad-faith actor—as I said, I entered with an idealistic outlook—but rather, that I hadn’t taken the time to properly educate myself on what was required. Also—and perhaps most crucially—my partner at the time wasn’t really up for it. He went along with it because those were the only terms I was offering—at first uncertainly, then with a gusto which was mainly born out of a desire to “teach me a lesson.” He was hurt that I didn’t want to be with him exclusively, so then he slept with other people to show me what this hurt was like—and when he did, I was rarely allowed to express dismay because “I wanted this” and “this was my choice.” Both of which were true—I did want it, it was my choice—but I’ve never felt such searing hot jealousy as the time he came home from a wedding and explained that the reason he’d stopped replying to my messages halfway through the evening was because he was sleeping with a bridesmaid. As a friend said to me at the time: “There are only ever two people in an open relationship, the one who wants it and the one who’s crying themselves to sleep at night.” Somehow I was both.

All of which is to say that I’m not here to call anyone out or point any fingers. I’d like to think that most people don’t have bad intentions—we’re all just trying our best. It’s just that as people calling themselves “non-monogamous” take up more and more space within the dating sphere, we must try to understand the emotional sticky patches—the murkiness, as well as the light. It clearly isn’t ever okay to make someone feel disposable—but it’s particularly not okay if you’re co-opting terms which have been specifically developed to guard against that. At this point, you’re not just hurting someone’s feelings, you’re making them question what right they have to be hurt—a strange kind of gaslighting.

After a drunken night out, a friend sends me a link to an article by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, a review of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation by Christine Emba, in which Emba explores the concept of “sexual liberation” as it currently exists. There’s one particular line, my friend says, which made her think of our discussion about ENM: “What passes for sex positivity is a culture of masochism disguised as hedonism. It’s what you get when you liberate sex without liberating women.” In a way, she says, this is how she feels about non-monogamy now: We are more liberated than ever before from the old strictures of monogamy—but we’re not evolved enough to know what to do with, or how to act in, our freedom.

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