Ethical Non-Monogamy

Ethical Non-Monogamy (ENM) is an umbrella term for relationships involving more than two people who all give informed consent. It has been historically recorded to be much more common than society likes to admit.

Approaches to non-monogamy

Non-Monogamy with a specific amount of partners

Gender-based non-monogamy:

History within the USA

The Polyamorous identity did not exist during the 19th century, but the early initial expression of non-monogamy had a profound influence on later poly/non-mono thinking and communities. There have been several groups of people who practiced a multiple partner relationship style in the United States in the mid-to-late 1800s, most influenced by the Nineteenth Century transcendental movement (Hutchins, 2001). Brook Farm was an “experimental free love community” (Hutchins, 2001:72) populated by “Quakers, Shakers, Mormons, and other charismatic leaders who roamed up and down the east coast preaching” a doctrine that “challenged conventional Christian doctrines of sin and human unworthiness.”

John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida community in 1848, in which they established a system of “complex marriage” where “each male was theoretically married to each female, and where each regarded the other as either a brother or a sister.” This rejection of monogamous marriage was intended to offer an alternative to “the monogamous relation [which] fostered exclusiveness and selfishness, and worked to counter communism.” Children similarly lived together in a communal children’s house. Parents were not permitted to show special affection to their own biological children, however they were instead mandated to treat all children of the community equally.

Nashoba was a free-love community established in 1862 by Frances Wright, a wealthy Scottish immigrant. Wright formed a large communal farm “bringing together both free blacks and whites to work and make love.” She opposed the racism that was spread at the time and declared “sexual passion the best source of human happiness.”

Research into non-monogamous relationships peaked in the early 1970s. By that time, the sexual revolution had popularized sexual experimentation, and the concepts of open and group marriages had gained notoriety. American culture was more sexually permissive than ever before, and the specter of AIDS had not yet destroyed the playful sense of sexual experimentation. Researchers studied those involved in “multilateral marriages,” which they defined as “three or more partners, each of whom considers him/herself to be married (or committed in a functionally analogous way) to more than one of the other partners.”

Research on swinging similarly flourished in the sexually adventurous 1960s and 1970s, documenting new trends in extra-marital/co-marital sexual involvement Studies examined swingers’ race and ethnicity, social class, education, and political perspectives. This research created a profile of a swinger as a “White, middle to upper middle class person in his or her late 30s who is fairly conventional in all ways except for her or his lack of religious participation/identification and participates in swinging.” Once the sexual revolution collided with the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections in the 1980s — a time that Peterson (1999) characterized as “the great repression” — research on sexually non-exclusive relationships dwindled. Although very few such studies were published during the 1980s and 1990s, the practice of non-monogamous relationships endured.

Resources