Relationship anarchy

What is relationship anarchy?

Relationship anarchy (abbreviated RA) is the view that relationships don’t have to have a fixed ranking. Friendship, sex, living together and romance are agreed separately per bond instead of delivered as a standard package. It is a starting point about how you make agreements, not a rule about how many people.

Where relationship anarchy comes from

From a Swedish pamphlet of eight points, and it is shorter than the discussion about it.

Andie Nordgren published it in 2006 at Interacting Arts under the title Relationsanarki i 8 punkter, later translated as The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy. The eight headings:

1. Love is abundant, and every relationship is unique
2. Love and respect instead of entitlement
3. Find your core set of relationship values
4. Heterosexism is rampant and out there, but don’t let fear lead you
5. Build for the lovely unexpected
6. Fake it til’ you make it
7. Trust is better
8. Change through communication

What stands out about that list: it says nothing about numbers of partners. Not a word. It is about how you treat people, and the question of how many people you do that with never comes up in any of the eight points.

Nordgren adds the point customize your commitments to that: design your own agreements with the people around you, instead of assuming that certain obligations belong to it for love to be real.

How relationship anarchy relates to the other forms

As the form that goes furthest in letting go of the ranking.

Roos Reijbroek sets the four forms of consensual non-monogamy side by side in Systeemtherapie, and describes relationship anarchy this way: “every contact in someone’s life is important, and so no moral hierarchy is made”.

That is the distinction from the neighbors. In polyamory there may be several love relationships, but the category love relationship stays in place and usually ranks above friendship. In swinging the partner relationship even stays explicitly the main relationship. Relationship anarchy scraps that ordering itself.

In practice it means a friendship in which you live together can weigh more heavily than a romantic bond in which you don’t, without either one being declared “more”. Neither wins.

What’s political in it

More than a relationship form, and that is how it was meant at the source too.

Roma De las Heras Gómez approaches relationship anarchy in Sociological Research Online in three ways: as a philosophy of love, as a way to order affective bonds, and as a political philosophy. She focuses mainly on the last, from a queer-feminist angle.

That explains the fourth point of the manifesto, about heterosexism. Nordgren wrote no dating manual but a resistance to a normative system that decides which love is real.

Anyone who reads relationship anarchy only as “no labels” misses that side. The term carries anarchy in the political sense: no imposed ordering, not: no ordering.

The relationship escalator, and why it’s the target

Because it is the ordering relationship anarchy refuses, and almost no one ever chose it.

The relationship escalator means the fixed track a relationship is supposed to travel: dating, becoming exclusive, meeting each other’s parents, living together, marrying, children. Each step counts as progress, and standing still or stepping off as failure.

What relationship anarchy brings against that is not that those steps are bad. It is that they come as a package. Whoever lives together is supposed to be exclusive too, whoever is exclusive is supposed to move toward living together, and whoever doesn’t want one of those steps has to explain why.

The manifesto turns that around. Point three, find your core set of relationship values, asks you to work out what you yourself find important before you choose a form. Point five, build for the lovely unexpected, is about leaving room for bonds that fit no existing category.

That is also where the concept becomes useful beyond non-monogamy. A monogamous couple that decides not to marry and to keep living apart steps off that same escalator.

What people get wrong about relationship anarchy

“It means making no agreements.” The opposite. The manifesto asks for agreements you design explicitly instead of taking over. Where a standard relationship leaves much unsaid because it “goes without saying”, here everything has to be named.

“It’s polyamory by another word.” Polyamory is about several love relationships. Relationship anarchy is about refusing the ranking, and can be done with one partner or with none.

“It’s an excuse not to commit to anything.” Point seven of the manifesto is trust is better and point eight change through communication. Those are no free passes.

“It’s a modern internet current.” The pamphlet is from 2006 and Swedish. What’s new is the attention for it.

What you can do with this

• Start from what you want with this person, instead of from which category the bond is supposed to get.
• Make an agreement per element. Sex, time, living, money, touch: the smorgasbord worksheet that circulates in these circles does exactly that.
• Don’t confuse it with non-commitment. Fewer assumptions means more conversations, not fewer.
• Check whether the person you’re talking to means the same thing. The word is used loosely, and the gap between the manifesto and everyday use is large.

More reading on relationship anarchy

Within this glossary the umbrella is at ethical non-monogamy, and polyamory and swinging describe the forms relationship anarchy distinguishes itself from most sharply.

Beyond this site, Nordgren’s manifesto is a ten-minute read, and that is the shortest route to what it really says. Anyone who wants the political side finds it in De las Heras Gómez.

Where this fits on this site

I rarely come across this word in emails, and when it drops it’s usually about the question of whether an appointment with me “means something”. With relationship anarchy that is a wrongly put question: what it means is something you agree. How that goes beforehand is on making an appointment.

Sources

• The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy. Andie Nordgren, 2006, originally published in Swedish as Relationsanarki i 8 punkter at Interacting Arts. The source text of the concept, written by its originator. Gives the eight points in their original wording, the addition customize your commitments, and the starting point that obligations are designed instead of taken over.
• Thinking Relationship Anarchy from a Queer Feminist Approach. Roma De las Heras Gómez, Sociological Research Online 24(4), 644–660, 2018 (DOI 10.1177/1360780418811965). Gives the three angles the author approaches relationship anarchy along, namely as a philosophy of love, as a way to structure affective bonds and as a political philosophy, and the choice to work out the last from a queer-feminist perspective. I couldn’t get in at the publisher. The abstract was retrieved from Crossref.
• Consensuele non-monogamie in de spreekkamer. Roos Reijbroek, Systeemtherapie 37(2), 2025. The Dutch-language professional article that names the four forms of consensual non-monogamy. Gives the description of relationship anarchy as the view that “every contact in someone’s life is important, and so no moral hierarchy is made”, and its placement alongside swinging, the open relationship and polyamory.

Related terms

Relationship anarchy is one of the forms under the umbrella; the terms below are the neighbors.

• Ethical non-monogamy. The umbrella, with the prevalence figures and the research on satisfaction.
• Polyamory. Several love relationships, with the category love relationship still intact.
• Swinging. The form in which the partner relationship explicitly stays the main relationship.
• Monogamy. The ordering relationship anarchy sets itself against.
• Metamour. Your partner’s partner, a concept that loses its self-evidence here.