Ambiamorous

What is ambiamorous?

Ambiamorous describes someone who feels equally at home in a monogamous relationship as in a polyamorous one, with no clear preference. It does not name a relationship style. It names how a person relates to them. Which of the two it turns out to be depends on the situation and on the people.

Where the word comes from

From a blog post about why mono/poly relationships so often fall apart.

Page Turner wrote on April 17, 2017, on Poly.Land that it is hard to find a workable middle between two things when you are convinced that middle cannot exist. Her comparison: gay and straight are orientations, and so is bi.

She is explicit about her word choice. “I thought on word roots for a bit before I decided to go with ‘ambiamorous’.” She ruled out biamorous because it already means something else, romantic attraction to more than one gender. Looking up her own coinage, she came across someone who calls themselves The Moorcat and had already used the word in an interview.

So it is not a technical term and not a diagnosis. It is a word someone coined to say something that, without the word, took a whole paragraph every time.

How big that middle ground is

Bigger than the debate suggests, and it has actually been measured.

Amy Moors, Amanda Gesselman, and Justin Garcia surveyed, in Frontiers in Psychology, a US-census-based quota sample of 3,438 single adults. One in six (16.8 percent) wanted to try polyamory at some point, and one in nine (10.7 percent) had done so at some point in their life.

Of the people with no interest in it themselves, one in seven (14.2 percent) said they respected it. Few sociodemographic traits went with it. There was no difference by political preference, income, religion, region, or ethnic background.

What is left standing is this: for a good share of people, wanting and doing do not line up. That is exactly the territory this word covers.

What you can do with this

• Use it as a signal, not a label. Mostly it says you are open to both.
• Talk about the situation rather than the category. According to the person who coined it, the choice hinges on the people and the moment.
• Do not expect recognition. It is scene language from 2017 and appears in no dictionary.

Sources

• Desire, Familiarity, and Engagement in Polyamory: Results From a National Sample of Single Adults in the United States. Amy C. Moors, Amanda N. Gesselman & Justin R. Garcia, Frontiers in Psychology 12, 619640, 2021 (DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.619640). Provides the sample of 3,438 single American adults based on census quotas, the 16.8 percent share who want polyamory, the 10.7 percent who have ever done it, the 6.5 percent who know someone who does or did, the 14.2 percent of the uninterested who say they respect it, and the finding that no differences were found by political preference, income, religion, region, or ethnic background.
• To Make Mono/Poly Easier, View Monogamy and Polyamory as a Spectrum, Not a Binary. Page Turner, Poly.Land, April 17, 2017. The source where the word takes on its current meaning. Provides the date, the argument that a middle ground is hard to find as long as you believe it cannot exist, the comparison with sexual orientation, the sentence about the word choice (“I thought on word roots for a bit before I decided to go with ‘ambiamorous’”), the reason “biamorous” was ruled out, and the note that she then found the word already in use by someone who calls themselves The Moorcat. A blog, and so not a scientific source. It is here because it is the origin itself.

Related terms

• Ethical non-monogamy. The category the polyamorous half falls under.
• Monogamy. The other half, with what is legally fixed about it in the Netherlands.
• Polyamory. The form the middle ground can move toward, with the numbers to go with it.
• Relationship anarchy. A third position, one that questions the categories themselves.