Polyamory

What is polyamory?

Polyamory (in Dutch polyamorie) is maintaining lasting love relationships with several people at once, where everyone involved knows about it and consents. That is how the Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek describes it. The distinguishing part is that shared knowledge: without consent the same behavior is called cheating.

What polyamory looks like in practice

Usually as one relationship life is built around, and alongside it one or more relationships that sit differently.

Rhonda Balzarini and colleagues studied this in PLOS ONE among 1,308 people who call themselves polyamorous and who designated one partner as primary and one as secondary. The outcome is stark. With the primary partner they reported more investment, more satisfaction, more commitment, better communication and less stigma. With the secondary partner a larger share of shared time went to sex: 37.11 percent against 20.74 percent.

A common case then looks like this. Two people live together, share the mortgage and the calendar, and one of them has, alongside that, had a relationship with someone else for two years. That third person does not come along to the work Christmas drinks. Not out of shame, but because the conversation afterward appeals to no one.

That is at once the most honest finding from that study: the secondary relationship gets less acceptance from family and friends and comes with more secrecy. Polyamory does not solve the problem of the outside world.

Where the word polyamory comes from

From English, and linguistically it is a mongrel.

The ANW records polyamorie as a neologism and as a Dutch-spelling adaptation of the English polyamory, in which the Greek poly ‘many’ and the Latin amor ‘love’ are recognizable. Greek and Latin mixed in one word, something language purists shudder at.

More interesting is what people themselves understand by it. Daniel Cardoso, Patricia Pascoal and Francisco Maiochi put the bare question of what polyamory means to 463 people in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Most described it as a set of behaviors within a relationship. People who live non-monogamously themselves described it more often as a possible way of relating, named feelings and ethics more often, and included consent in their definition more often. That same group stressed something outsiders rarely mention: that sex does not play the leading role in such relationships.

Why people choose polyamory

Because they do not want to choose between two people they love.

The appeal rarely lies in more sex. It lies in the falling away of the assumption that one love rules out the other, and in not having to give up a bond that already exists. What polyamory gives back is different for everyone:

• For yourself, polyamory gives room to let out different sides of yourself with different people.
• For your partner, it brings the rest of the story out. What would otherwise be tucked away in the car on the way home comes to the table.
• For everyone involved, it produces a spoken agreement instead of an assumption, and that is the only thing you can fall back on later.

In Balzarini’s study the secondary relationship came off worse on nearly every measure. And a relationship in which nothing has been said for months does not become more talkative from polyamory.

How people fill in polyamory

Roughly in two ways, and the difference is in whether there is a ranking.

One form is hierarchical: there is a primary relationship, usually with the person you live with and have been with longest, and the rest sits below it in time and weight. The other form rejects that ranking outright. Balzarini and colleagues note it explicitly: not all polyamorous people have a primary relationship with secondary partners alongside, and some reject the distinction on principle.

What both forms have in common: the ranking no one says out loud is the ranking someone trips over later.

Misconceptions about polyamory

“Polyamory is cheating with a nice word.” The ANW puts the difference in the definition itself: polyamory sets itself apart from cheating because it happens with the consent and knowledge of those involved. Without that knowledge it is not polyamory.

“Polyamory is about sex.” In Cardoso and colleagues’ study it was precisely the people who do it themselves who stressed that sex is not central, and who included feelings and ethics in their definition more often than people who see nothing in it.

“Polyamory is banned in the Netherlands.” No. What is punishable is entering a second marriage: Article 237 of the Criminal Code sets up to four years in prison for that, and six years if you conceal your married status. Living together with several partners is not punishable. Where you do run aground is registration: Article 80a of Book 1 of the Civil Code states that you can enter a registered partnership with only one other person at a time, and marriage has the same limit.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years active in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Polyamory almost never reaches me as a way of life. It reaches me as a word someone picked up somewhere and wants to know whether it applies to her.

The women who mention the word are rarely looking for a second relationship. They are looking for permission to feel something they already feel. Within ten minutes the conversation is no longer about polyamory but about what can and cannot be said at home.

And the pattern I see most often: couples who come here together and have already said the word out loud have an easier evening than couples where one of them thought it up and the other went along. I hear that difference already on the phone.

What you can agree on with polyamory

• Say out loud first what you are looking for before you use the word polyamory, because that word covers something different for each of you.
• Each of you, put on paper what does and does not fall under it: falling in love, staying over, going on holiday together, meeting family. Then compare.
• Agree how and when you update each other, not only what is allowed.
• Discuss explicitly what the second relationship may expect. That is the role that comes off worst in the research, and it is the only one rarely at the table.
• Arrange the practical side separately. Marriage and registered partnership go with only one person, so everything beyond that you arrange yourself or not at all.

More reading on polyamory

On this site, monogamy explains what polyamory pushes against, compersion describes the feeling most often named in polyamory circles, and NRE is about the infatuation high that an existing partner witnesses up close.

Beyond this site, the ANW article is the shortest reliable entry point in Dutch, with example sentences from newspapers. Anyone who wants the figures reads Balzarini and colleagues, who laid the primary and secondary relationship side by side.

Where this fits on this site

If the question is alive for you as a couple and you want someone with you who has no stake in how it turns out, the page on a gigolo for couples sets out how the first conversation goes and what you set down there together.

Sources

• polyamorie. Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. Gives the Dutch dictionary definition “het onderhouden van duurzame liefdesrelaties met meerdere personen tegelijk waarbij de betrokken personen dit met elkaars medeweten en toestemming doen”, the listing as a neologism, the word formation as a Dutch-spelling adaptation of the English polyamory with the Greek poly ‘many’ and the Latin amor ‘love’, and the semagram that polyamory sets itself apart from cheating because it happens with consent and knowledge.
• Perceptions of primary and secondary relationships in polyamory. Rhonda N. Balzarini, Lorne Campbell, Taylor Kohut, Bjarne M. Holmes, Justin J. Lehmiller, Jennifer J. Harman & Nicole Atkins, PLOS ONE 12(5), e0177841, 2017 (open access, full text read). Convenience sample of 1,308 people who call themselves polyamorous and who designated one partner as primary and one as secondary. Gives that with the primary relationship they reported more investment, satisfaction, commitment and communication about the relationship and less stigma, that the secondary relationship had more secrecy and less acceptance from family and friends, the percentages of 20.74 against 37.11 for the share of shared time that went to sex, and the finding that not all polyamorous people use a primary-secondary split and some reject that ranking on principle.
• Defining Polyamory: A Thematic Analysis of Lay People’s Definitions. Daniel Cardoso, Patricia M. Pascoal & Francisco Hertel Maiochi, Archives of Sexual Behavior 50(4), 1239–1252, 2021 (open access; authors, volume, issue and pagination checked against Crossref). Thematic analysis of 463 usable answers to the open question of what polyamory means. Gives that most people describe polyamory as a set of behaviors within a relationship, and that people who live consensually non-monogamously themselves describe it more often as a possible way of relating, name feelings and ethics more often, include consent in their definition more often and explicitly point to the non-central role of sex.
• Civil Code Book 1, Article 80a and Criminal Code, Article 237. Dutch legislation via wetten.overheid.nl. Give that a person can enter a registered partnership with only one other person at a time and may not then be married, and that deliberately entering a double marriage is punished with at most four years’ imprisonment, or six years when the married status was concealed from the other party.

Related terms

• Monogamy. The arrangement polyamory pushes against, with the law and the cultural history.
• Ethical non-monogamy. The umbrella polyamory is one of the four forms of, with the prevalence figures and the research into satisfaction.
• Non-monogamist. The word for the person, as opposed to the relationship form.
• Compersion. The word for the shared joy held up as an ideal in polyamory circles, and why it does not come on its own.
• Metamour. Your partner’s partner, and the only bond in this field you get without choosing it.
• NRE. The infatuation high with a new partner, which in polyamory an existing partner witnesses up close.
• Consent. The knowledge and consent the whole definition of polyamory rests on.
• Hotwifing. The narrower arrangement where it stays at sex and no second relationship is added.
• Cuckolding. The form where the arousal comes from watching, so a very different motivation from polyamory.
• Swinging. The umbrella over that variant, and the term polyamory is most often confused with.
• Boundary. What you need as soon as the arrangement starts to move.
• Veto. The right to forbid a contact of your partner’s, and the reason the ranking between relationships is up for debate.
• Relationship anarchy. The form that also lets go of the love-relationship category, where polyamory keeps it.