Tomorrow, Today - Consensual non-Monogamy & Mental health with Dr. Amy moors

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

In this episode, we explore the idea of consensual non-Monogamy, the history of CNM and the history of CNM in academic research, and the implications it has for our future understanding of the subject. How does CSM fit into a larger narrative as inclusion for alternative lifestyles are being considered more acceptable, and what does that mean for the future of CSM? Dr. Amy C. Moors is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Faculty Affiliate in Engineering at Chapman University. She serves as a Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and the co-chair of the American Psychological Association’s Division 44 Committee on Consensual Non-Monogamy. Check out Dr. Moors’ work: https://www.amycmoors.com/ Andy IG: @theandyciccone IG @poorprolesalmanac www.poorproles.com Nash: Twitter: @Itsnashflynn Twitter: @DeathandFriends

Welcome back to tomorrow today, a podcast. Dun-d-da-da-d-d-d-dun. So today we are talking about everyone's favorite subject, consensual non-monogamy. Ooh. Basically. We chat with Dr. Amy Moore's, an assistant professor of psychology

and faculty affiliate in engineering at Chapman University. She serves as a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, and she's the co-chair of the American Psychological Association. Division 44 Committee on Consensual Non-Monogamy. So what do you know about consensual non-monogamy? I'm going to put you on the spot. Okay.

Polyamory, right? That's part of it. Cool. It's only part of it. Wow, I really thought that those were going to be synonyms. Okay, so we're just in agreed-upon relationships. I assume they're, you know, terminal. Like, everybody's in the one bubble together and nobody's, like, actually stepping out, right?

Nope. Okay. So nothing. Then we're nothing. You know nothing. I know nothing. I know nothing. You accept that you know nothing about nothing. A consensual non-monogamy is not just polyamory, but a bunch of different constructions of relationships with more than two people. That can involve two people that are in a consenting relationship with a third party who joins or they could swing or one can swing and the other one doesn't.

there's different layers to the relationship dynamics that exist within the people that are involved in the relationship. It encapsulates a lot, is the point. There's a lot of different ways this exists. In this conversation, we get into this really interesting dialogue about how research around consensual non-monogamy has basically never existed before modern times and by modern times, I mean, basically her research. There's like some really insane stats that they come out with doing like some very basic polling about the volume of people in the United States that have been in consensual non-monogamous relationships.

And it's significantly higher than what most people think to the point where somebody probably in your family, statistically speaking, has been in a consensual non-monogamous relationship. So who is it, Nash? Please God let it be my mom. Go, mom, go. Uh, yeah. No, I don't know who would be in your family. I don't know who would be in mine either. So you'll hear that stat in the interview. It's really shocking the amount of people that have said they've been in a consensual non-monogamous relationship. So, like, that's the first thing that we kind of dive into on it. And, you know, I think you brought up a really interesting

point that people think of consensual non-monogamy, which is probably not the term that they're used to hearing. They're used to probably hearing polygamy or polyamory. or like threesomes. Like that's probably the extent of what most people know. Yes. That's all I'll say. Just yes. Thanks for that input, Nash.

You're welcome. I don't want anybody to update my Wikipedia page based on my answer to that question. So just, yes. If you were to look up consensual non-monogamy on like, say, research gate or something like that and you wanted to like see what kind of evidence, you'd notice that really there's only been research in the last 10 or 15 years. Now, obviously, these practices have existed probably as long as humanity has existed, and we don't really know anything about them. Now, Dr. Moore's research really started from working with the LGBTQ community and realizing that this was a really common practice in communities like LGBTQ communities.

So it opened up this really unique opportunity to kind of dive into something that there just hadn't been a lot of research on. Now, what was really interesting to me in the research that we didn't actually get a chance to talk too much about in the actual interview itself was the statistics on things like the amount of people who would identify themselves as like straight who were in consensual non monogamous relationships because that seems like by definition would like not really have a place with multiple partners. Well, I mean, I guess however you identify is however you identify, right? Yeah, I mean, I guess technically, like, you could have like a straight man and two women or something like that. But it was just like, it was an interesting thing in those, like, so for example, I'll give one stat in particular. So approximately 75% of gay men have been in a CNM relationship because I'm not going to say consensual non-monogamy repeatedly. I will say it incorrectly and probably offend somebody. And now that's first like 25% of heterosexual men.

And like for women, the numbers are much different. So it's only 56% of lesbian and bisexual women versus 44% of heterosexual women, which I guess opens up like a really interesting question of how is that organized and how like who is benefiting in this like relationship of like why a large percentage of straight women would want to be in a relationship because I don't especially if like only 25% of straight men want to be in a relationship. because I don't, especially if like only 25% of straight men want to be in a polyamorous relationship. Because that, you know, those numbers don't jive if you see what I'm saying. Yeah, the heteros aren't having fun. That's all I'm getting from this. I mean, the heteros are having less fun, yes.

But statistically, there's only about a 12% difference between like lesbian and bisexual women versus heterosexual women. So like, why is that number so similar despite the fact that there's, if you're a straight woman, there's less straight men that are open to this type of relationship. Well, I mean, okay, so here's a question. Does the multiple wives scenario fall under CNN? Yeah. Okay, so there you go. You've got one straight guy, and then not everybody is engaged in sexual activity within that relationship, right? Sure, but I think what's, like, when we think about, like, the data pool for this is that the data is supposed to be reflective of the demographics of the country so it's not like they're pulling just you know Mormons or something like that the idea is that

they're pulling like enough diversity that like it's not being outweighed by specific sects like that that would be impacting those statistics it raises some really interesting questions about like who's engaging in this and for what reasons and of course like i said because this is relatively new research there isn't a lot to go with and that's why the works that Dr. Moore's is doing is really interesting and important. Were they obligated to tell the truth in this study? So they, you know, like any study, they go through a fairly, I don't want to say rigorous, like, assessment of how serious they're taking it.

But they make it enough of a pain in the ass that no one's going to do it for like a joke thing. Now, when we were talking about CNM, the goal, our conversation wasn't just around this idea of consensual non-monogamy, but particularly. particularly how it impacted things like mental health, like what kind of evidence there was for like what's called attachment theory. And it has to do with like the way you relate to people. And she explains it much better than I can, but generally like, you know,

how healthy of a relationship do you have with the people around you? And what they found was that there was a lot of variation within the, the CNM community, like how they relate to their partners and things like that. And there's some really surprising. data around like seven years. That was the number where there seemed to the data started changing a lot around how long really people had been in these relationships and how consensual nonmonogamy impacted it. So like if somebody has been in a relationship for like a long time, adding a new

partner never disaffected the health of their relationship with that long term partner versus like people that had been in relationships for a short period of time. So like if there was like a main partner and then like a secondary partner, the shorter the relationship was with the main partner, the greater likelihood that the secondary partner would have a negative impact on the health of the relationship between the primary partners. Well, that makes sense. Yeah, it did. And it was really interesting, though, to see how these dynamics play out.

And further, how those dynamics play out with relationships with the outside world who may not understand those relationships where, you know, people are either hiding their ideas. identity their their relationships through being you know just pretending someone's a friend or whatever it might be but what was what kind of played into this was the fact that we're that most of the people that are reporting were also a part of like the LGBTQ community where that already exists so like this is not like anything that's new and um it definitely underrates this idea of for people that feel like they're marginalized already there's nothing more to lose by like embracing who they truly feel like, whereas a straight person might not have that, that luxury

of saying people already view me differently, so why do I give a shit? Right. I mean, I think it does have a greater impact on, you know, heteronormativity and, and the results of that to be these very, you know, straight conforming one man, one woman type relationships. Not only do we have these dynamics of multiple partners in different ways, some that are open relationships and others that are not. You can have many partners, many genders and so on, but also this idea of hierarchy within a relationship. And generally, hierarchy is like there's primary partner or a secondary partner. Like I was just talking about like some people go in with a primary partner and somebody joins afterwards or whatever it might be.

The research that she goes into around this idea of hierarchy within the polyamorous community or consensual non-monogamous community points that outside of the, example I had given with the partners who had been together a long time and somebody joins afterwards, for those newer relationships, the non-hierarchical partnerships tend to be much healthier and last a lot longer, which is, I think, really cool and interesting in that, like, somehow because of this fluidity and this decentralization that it makes them more resilient and stronger, and I think it helps check some of those power dynamics that might exist otherwise. So we're chickens. Yeah.

Actually, no, because there is always a rooster. We're hens? No, there's still a hierarchy. Yeah, but they have the pecking order, right? Yeah, that's the hierarchy. Yeah. We got rules. Oh, you mean like in a hierarchical?

Yes. We've got a primary chicken and then... The rooster. No, we're just... We're all hens. We're not unpacking gender right now. we've just got a primary chicken. It's actually sexless.

And then, you know, our supplemental chickens. Okay. I'm not sure why we needed to bring chickens into this, but here we are. It's a metaphor for what? Chickens. Again, there's a couple. She has written like a ton of articles. And I ended up digging into like all of them because I didn't know much about the subject matter.

And she's like basically written most of the content that exists out there on it. And one of the things that she also points out is. that a lot of the hierarchical relationships were significantly older. They're also more likely to have marriages that existed with a primary partner versus the non-hierarchical relationships. We're generally, you know, younger people. And, you know, it dips into this question of, like, how much is this because of the fact that, like, the world is fucking collapsing and no one can afford anything? So, fuck, we may as well, like, enjoy ourselves and live it how we want to. and how much of it is actually just like

experimentation at youth and we just never really got a good did a good job of like documenting that. I mean I was actually thinking it was like more housing related. You know, you have a merry couple that's not able to make the mortgage so they bring in a younger person and then it's just you're all living in the house, you know? And then like you popped open a bottle of wine and six months later you share a bed?

Yeah, it happens. But you know, the seven year slump is a thing. Like that's a thing that people say. You have to stop stealing the same. stuff that I literally talk about in the interview. I'm sorry. We talked about the housing issue as an impetus for this. And we talk about the seven-year itch.

And she's like, I've never thought of that. And I was like, how? It's a thing people say. Like, it's legitimate. Yeah. Yeah. How long have we been married? I don't think we want to answer that question.

No. I mean, I do think as society continues to collapse in a road, we will see a lot more of these relationships and they'll sort of become like a background. function of collapse. And it really raises a question around like historically this has existed, but is it existing for a different reason today? And I don't even just mean like functionally in terms of like financially and like trying to afford housing and things like that. But more of 50 years ago, people had six siblings, eight siblings who they had close relationships with.

Now we're a generation of one and two children, sometimes three. We don't have those dynamics. especially if we take that and then consider the fact that most people move away from home as they get older. So those few relationships are further strained. So it adds this whole new dynamic of what does family look like? And then if you're not related to them, like why can't those feelings of love include like a much more like, what's the word? Amore form of love? Amorous? Yeah, I guess amorous.

I was thinking more like the Latin it. But yeah, like an amorous form of love. Why not indeed? Even if these people are fulfilling these functions in our lives that are traditionally done by like sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and things like that, they aren't our sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts. So why can't they be more intimate with us? So like when the kids call, you know, the parents, friends, auntie, uncle, you know, why, why do those relationships have to feel like sibling in relationships? Why can't they function differently? Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I think we should start, right? Fuck your friends. That's what we're saying. Go fuck your friends. Go fuck your friends. With protection, of course. Of course. But I do think that part of the uptick of these relationships is just society being generally cooler with same-sex relationships.

Because theoretically, if there's three, there's going to be some same-sex. I mean, of course, like we were talking about with the straight women, like, that's not always the case. But statistically speaking, it was like almost in terms of men, it was three times. higher for homosexual and bisexual men versus heterosexual men. Right. So there is an uptick in gay banging, which personally I like. Great. Now we all know that.

I'm happy to hear that. I think this is one, you know, we just did an episode about death. I think this is like optimistic in a different way. What a back-to-back episode feature. Yeah, it's the creature feature. Yeah. Just a little bit of death, a little bit of life in the best way. Yeah.

And one of the things that's kind of interesting is that, that in statistics, they pulled a bunch of people. And just about a third of people were open to the idea of a non-monogamous relationship, which I think, I wonder how much of that is just like, dudes, I want to have a threesome and how many people genuinely are like, I'm not fully satisfied in my relationship or I'm not in a relationship. And part of it is that there's no one that would make me fully satisfied. And committing myself to them doesn't feel like something I can do.

Right. So I think there's definitely a thread going on. There's this undercurrent that exists that has always existed. But I think given the tumultuous world we live in, there's more interest in it and more willingness to engage with that uncomfortable reality because of the fact like, fuck it, everything's falling apart anyway. Right. I mean, at least for the millennial generation, you know, we sort of came of age as, you know, as 9-11 happened. And nothing really got better at. after that. And I think, you know, we're the first generation to just be like, this is way worse than everything our parents promised us. Let's find new ways of, you know, at least getting some value out of this. I thought you're going to have more jokes with this. Oh, was that, was I supposed to do jokes? I mean, you're the joke person here. I'm, I thought I, you were like, you want to hear about consensual non-monogamy and I just followed you down here. Yes, I do. So I know you came into this, not knowing like anything other than like,

polyamory and I'm curious about your thoughts. I'm surprised the numbers are as high, but I'm pleased that they're that high. You know, I mean, I think even, you know, in secret, I think it's nice to know that people are sort of breaking the boundaries of what the boomers always expected our relationships to look like and what their parents expected those relationships to look like, especially because heteronormativity exists and we all felt like there were certain expectations for what our lives would become. So I think it's really nice.

I think it's a really interesting way that we're sort of pushing back on what we expected society to be. Yeah, there was an interesting quote I saw this morning. I just want to read it. The responsibility of each generation isn't to please their predecessors. It's to improve things for their offspring. It's more important to make your children proud than to make your parents proud. And I think that plays really well into this conversation. I agree.

Fuck you, mom and dad. Wow. They're going to listen to this. They definitely are not. They definitely are not. You say that. Actually, you know what? I stand by it.

If you're listening to this for some reason, apart yourselves. But in a good way. Like, find the neighbor. Like, yeah, fuck your neighbor. Fuck your neighbor, mom. Do it. Actually, you know what?

I've seen your neighbor. She's old. I'm afraid that you would break something. You have friends that we call Auntie and Uncle. Go ahead. Actually, never mind.

You know what? I want to sanitize my brain now. Listen, everyone fucks Ashley. We started this episode like that. We're ending that episode like that. Okay, all right. You know what? Live your best lives, mom and dad.

Just... Everyone fucks. Do not tell me about it. Hopefully you guys enjoy my interview with Dr. Moore's. She's got tons of new research coming out in the next couple years. If you want to read her work, go check out her website. We'll have it plugged in the show notes. And I think people are going to enjoy this conversation.

So go fuck your friends. Amy, thanks so much for carving. bring some time out to talk to us. Could you please introduce yourself? Sure thing. Hi, I am Amy Morris. I'm an assistant professor of psychology at Chapman University. I'm also a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. And then in my area of service, I co-chair a committee on consensual non-monogamy as part of the American Psychological Association Division 44. Awesome. So I came across an article probably a few months. ago before I'd reached out. And it was about the rise in polyamory during COVID because I guess the idea of, you know, what constitutes a family started really getting challenged when especially like parents and people that were single started thinking about, you know, if I'm going to be locked down, what does that really look like? What do I want that to look like? It's definitely raised some questions, I think, for a lot of people about the dynamics of family. This brings up this idea of consensual non-monogamy. And I ended up finding some of your page.

and ended up reading like eight of them back to back because they all kind of fed off of one another. So it seems silly to only read one. It was like, oh, we'll go to the next one. And then I had to have you on. So first, I want to ask about this concept of attachment security. Could you talk a little bit about what that is and what kind of research has really been done around monogamy? Yeah. So thank you so much for reading, voraciously reading some of my research. I guess to best contextualize attachment security, let me take a couple steps back and describe what attachment theory is. Attachment theory was first introduced about 50 years ago by a researcher John Bolby who was studying the experiences of children who were without parents, so at an

orphanage in Europe, and trying to understand their experiences with these caregivers in their lives, like were they distressed or anxious? And he came about this idea. of attachment as a meta theory. And so we have these internal workings about how we orient ourselves towards people who are close in our life. So, you know, do we get anxious or do we avoid them? When they come back to us, when we're apart from them, how do we respond? And so for a couple of decades, researchers were really thinking about attachment in terms of this is happening with children and their primary caregivers. And then in the late, 80s, two researchers came along, Cindy Hazan and Phil Schaver, that applied that theory to thinking

about adults. And they had the idea, you know what, I think this attachment orientation and how we're attaching ourselves to people happens in romantic relationships. And so what they theorized and what now is really popular is the idea that we can be anxious or avoidant or we can be secure with our adult intimate relationships. And so security is simply that, like feeling secure with someone. So having interdependence, providing and also receiving care and compassion and stability. And then according to this framework, people who are secure with their partner also would exhibit really low levels of anxiety and low levels of avoidance. So anxiety would be thoughts like, oh, I worry my partner is going to leave me for someone else.

or, you know, getting really physically distressed if their partner isn't around, maybe checking your phone, checking for messages. And then avoidance is kind of not that. Avoidance is more being a little bit aloof and wanting some emotional or physical distance from your partner. And so the way that we tend to conceptualize attachment security is low levels of both of those dimensions and instead, you know, this interdependent relationship. In terms of like monogamy, how has that been traditionally applied?

I would say like all of the research implies monogamy, to kindly put it. And we probably shouldn't be surprised that that's happening. I'll explain that in a second, but I looked into the database that psychologists tend to use to bring up empirical articles. It's called psych info. And so it's a database, kind of like Google, but, you know, for empirical articles. And I typed an attachment theory. And over 23,000 articles came up. And then if you were to do attachment theory and consensual non-monogamy, about three come up. So this idea of attachment has really been embedded and implied that the superior type of relationship or the normative type of relationship that humans are having is monogamous. And so most of the research, and there's been really great research, it's

just really applied to the concept of monogony. So how do our attachment orientations affect our health and well-being or our relationship quality? You name it. And in those 23,000 articles, it's probably been studied. It's one of the most popular theories to date of how people navigate their intimate and close relationships. Yeah. And that's why I ended up finding you is because when I was trying to find more to back up what this article was talking about with COVID and polyamory, or consensual non-monogamy, it definitely lacked a lot of evidence in terms of, not like the data that people were turning towards it, but rather like the argument that it makes for more stable households or any of these other

kinds of things. And I just was curious about like, what do we actually know about it in terms of like that mental stability and things like that? And then I came across some of your work. You know, I'm curious why you decided you wanted to get involved with this kind of research. Yeah, great question. I wish I had like this beautiful aha moment where I could describe it to you or like the Red Sea parted. I think a lot of research sometimes it just is an accident or you stumble upon something interesting. And so when I really decided to shift my

attention to study non-monogamies, I was quite early in my career. I was at the master's level. And it was just so interesting to me the idea where I'm doing research on LGBTQ issues and I'm asking people to describe their relationship and just as a way to understand their relationship for that study. And then what I ended up getting because I asked this qualitative question like, hey, describe your relationship to me. I was getting a lot of people saying that they had multiple partners and they were using words like polyamory and relationship. and actually words that I had not seen in my training today. And then so I go to this database like Psych Info or these other databases and I'm trying to understand more about, you know, the intersection of radically rethinking the rules of relationships and LGBTQ issues.

And there was just a handful of studies about, of academics really interrogating and trying to understand consensually non-monogamous relationships. And so that really ticked off my curiosity where I was like, this kind of seems like a common behavior, but we're not talking about it. And so the psychologist in me wants to capture it. Is it normative? Is it, why is it stigmatized? What are the outcomes? And, you know, now I've been studying consensually non-monogamous relationships and chair a national committee for well over a decade now. And I don't think I'm going to stop anytime soon. So you just happened to mention this idea that you had worked with LGBTQ communities where you became more exposed to these different types of non-monogamous relationships.

In one of your papers, you use this term, the outer limits. And it relates to your previous research before you started getting more specifically to these types of relationships. Could you talk a little bit about what this concept of like the outer limits is and why that's important? Of course. Oh, gosh, I'm such a musician fan. And I feel like you're really getting to deep tracks, you know? the things that I've written. So that's a really wonderful paper you're bringing up. That's actually one of the first papers I wrote as a grad student with my dear friend, and he's still a dear friend, and he co-chairs this committee with me. He's checking her. And so this idea of the concept of the

outer limits is coming from Gail Rubin's 1984 seminal research, where she's introducing this idea about how sexuality is hierarchically organized in our society. And so what she's really setting forth is this idea that the way that we're viewing sexual acts, they should be assessed by the way partners treat one another or the presence or absence of coercion or even the quality that they provide each other. But instead, the way that we're viewing sexuality is like what acts are deemed as charmed or normal? So she has this really brilliant drawing in her theorization where there's imagine two circles. And the circle on the inside is all of these charmed behaviors, things like what is acceptable in society? So sex for

procreation, sex in marriage, sex with just one other person, sex without toys, monogamy, heterosexual sex, all of those behaviors. If you do those, you are going to fit into society. And you do not get repercussions, whether it's social stigma or even legal repercussions. And so this idea of the outer limits are all of those counterpart kind of behaviors that are on literally the outer limits of society. So things like multi-partner sex or engaging in consensual non-monogamy or queer sex or non-committal casual sex. All of those things are on the outer limits.

And she describes these two circles. And like the idea that there's two circles, that line dividing the two circles is this kind of arbitrary thing that we have in our society, as if it is this line between keeping order and having sheer chaos, where, you know, I tend to look at the idea of studying consensual non-monogany through a similar queer theory lens that a lot of people apply to LGBTQ scholarship. like people engaging in ways that are just not considered normative in the U.S. and have a lot of stigma. Although my research shows that it's actually pretty normative in common. A lot of people are engaging in non-monogamy, just the societal stigma and also the legal system is set up where people are penalized or even worse, there's some tangible negative repercussions for engaging in non-monogamy.

So this idea, I think, is really important in order to start diving into consensual non-monogamy because it's really important to understand, I guess, that there is this arbitrary line and it has existed and in some cases has moved throughout history. So I want to talk about this idea that you brought up of, I believe the term you used was relationship anarchy. Yeah. I was reading some of the stats in the research you had been doing around this idea of like hierarchy within the relationship. You show that there's no significant change in satisfaction when, say, new partners are added, which really reinforces this idea of like the passionate love is much more similar to like the love we feel for family in that there's a you could say quote unquote limitless amount of it to go around which I think is it never occurred to me until I had read this this argument that you had on it that we do treat them as one is limitless and the other is not I just wanted to know what you thought about like does that stigma still exist even in like these consensual non monogamy relationships? Could you talk a little bit about that the parody between like hierarchy and this concept of love?

Yeah. Yeah, these are so, so many interesting points. So first I'll start with this idea about, you know, we have this kind of false idea about love and our society. And then I'll get into, you know, how this might be or is not actually affecting people engaged in non-monogamy. So we tend to be fine with this idea that like platonic love is endless in our society. And this is one of my favorite lectures that I give while teaching because it's usually the lecture where like there is literal jaw dropping where I ask all of my students like raise your hand if you love more than one of your best friends or family members.

And everyone raises their hand. And then I start like enthusiastically clapping. I'm like, oh my gosh. I'm so happy for you. I'm so happy. You love so many people. And like they care about you. And then I ask them what they do for them and why they love them. And, you know, and then I'm like, you see how there's like no stigma surrounding that. But if I were to ask you, have you ever loved, you know, more than one person in a romantic way? Or if I were to tell you a story about someone who does and has two really or three really committed partners, I think all of you would be, you know, skeptical or maybe. feel disgust or some moral panic ensue. And so we tend to be fine with this idea in our society that platonic love is endless, but when it comes to romantic love, that it is limited. It is finite. It is a zero-sum allotment. It can only be for one person. And if it's not for one person, then something must be wrong with the person or their relationship. And so when we look and

interrogate what love looks like, a really interesting, you know, group of people to study are people who engage in polyamory, which is a specific type of consensually non-monogamous relationship. So people who engage in polyamory are typically agreeing to the idea that they can have these emotional and intimate and also sexually intimate relationships with multiple people. In other words, put, like love can be on the table with multiple people. And so, as you mentioned, when we're studying the hierarchy of, you know, if people have multiple relationships, if someone even deems them in a hierarchical way. So not everyone engaged in polyamory is hierarchical, meaning they have a primary partner and a secondary. You know, we end up finding that

you can add more people to the relationship and they're not necessarily all dating or maybe a relationship could break up for whatever reason. It's not impacting relationship satisfaction in the other relationships. They're really independent of each other. There isn't necessarily a spillover effect, whether that spillover be negative or positive across different relationships. And so something interesting to think about is that's probably happening with our best friend relationships too. Like I could be in a fight with one of my best friends and things could be really negative and it's probably not affecting my relationship with another best friend, especially if they're not good friends either. They might not know each other. What's really interesting as I was

looking at like the data that you guys collected was that it seems like the longer the first relationship was, the more stable it was even if other partners were added. And it seemed to be like at the seven year mark, which just reminds me of like the stereotype, the seven-year itch for marriages that like they get bored or whatever. And it seems like at that point is like the perfect time to introduce a new person to the relationship if if that's what they're looking for because it reduces some of that. I don't know, boredom. I'm not sure what the term is, but something. Oh, that's so interesting. I've actually never thought of because you're right.

That is the average. If you take the mean of how long people have been together with one of their partners, the longest one. it is seven. Yeah, maybe. Or like, it could be a seven-year-inch or that's also usually a defining feature of common law marriage. I think it's just potentially the average of everyone. Just coincidence. Yeah, it's just a coincidence. It was just something that stood out to me. It was like, I think the year it was like 7.42 was the mean. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting number to just happen to fall on. Yeah, I think it could be a cohort thing too. So, what I'm finding with some of my more recent research, so that research, the average age of people

are usually in their 30s or 40s from when I started doing work on consensual non-monogamy about 10 years ago, I'm finding a little bit more variable today when I collect current day data about consensual non-monogamy. And I think over, you know, even the short period of time that I've been studying non-monogamous relationships, there are these really rapid changes happening in society. Like, you know, celebrities are talking about non-monogamy openly in ways that I've never seen before. Some plot lines are starting to have, you know, triads or just talk of open marriages. So it's becoming, I don't want to go and say it's a zeitgeist, but I think maybe we're coming there where these words might become common household words. And so I'm finding in some

my newer research that the average age variability is really decreasing. So among the Gen Zers and even really early millennials, I think that they might be exploring consensual non-monogamy earlier than people who have gone through a traditional way of having a monogamous relationship because a lot of millennials and Gen Xers didn't have examples like, oh, there's a whole other way to do relationships. So they've probably entered a monogamous relationship, been in that for a while and then they're like oh well we could you know have this other thing um and so i look i'm i'm really curious to see how you know this pans out and if there are cohort effects moving forward yeah i agree it's especially during covid during this time of like being home and being able

to have that time to think about who they are the amount of people that have come out with new identities just because of that opportunity to just sit at home and think about who they wanted to be and who they felt they were, that when they're not in that rat race, they have that time of contemplation. And I think for younger people, they have more of that than people that are working and going to school part-time and maybe have kids or whatever it might be. That's something they can explore at a younger age, and there are more examples of it today. I think that all kind of plays together into this conversation.

You've been doing all this research, and I'm curious now if the amount of papers on consensual non-monogamy since like 2016 is like 50 times higher than before 2016 collectively. So I'm curious with all this new research that's been coming out, is it changing the way we understand, and I say we as in people outside of consensual non-monogamy, understand these relationships and the assumptions that had been in place versus the practices in themselves? I'm not sure we're there yet, but I think we will be. What happens is often the scientific process is just like a little slow. Sometimes academics may or may not be the best at translating research into policy or doing science communication.

That could be some of it. But also with talking about sexuality issues in the U.S., it's just so contentious. Like we're still at the federal level. Like we don't have well-managed inclusion. or comprehensive sex education. So like that even makes it harder to be a researcher studying sexuality and then trying to reform society, take research and apply it. I think in academia, things are moving. When I first started this work, I was the only person often at conferences presenting on a topic. A topic, by the way, about one out of five people in the U.S. have engaged in

consensual non-monogony at some point during their life, that to me seems quite common. The conferences that I attend are national or international, thousands, if not tens of thousands people attend. Now that's different. There are much more, as you noted, you know, a beautiful uptick in people who are taking seriously the topic of non-monogony. And so I think it's going to start to translate into the general public. And then I know many of my colleagues, we've been working hard to do that. Like, as one concrete example, with some of the research that I've been able to do over the past 10 years, I was able to be able to co-develop a new guideline for the American Psychological Association when working with sexual minority persons in clinical practice. And this

guideline is all about consensual non-monogony. So if someone is a therapist and they're looking for advice or recommendations about how to be affirming, how to be unjudgmental, and then research about people engaged in non-monogamy, it's now there for the first time ever in APA, U.S. history. The topic of consensual non-monogamy had never brought up in these professional practice guidelines. And so, you know, the more things happen like that, you know, the more we can get it out there. And also doing this type of science communication with the good people like you, doing podcasts, talking about, and allowing people to be exposed to new ideas.

Like, there are different ways to have and navigate your intimate life. And if you feel like monogamy isn't quite working for you, you're not alone. There are a lot of other people engaging in different forms of consensual non-monogamy. That one in five statistics still, like, baffles me. I know you repeated a lot in your writing. but it just seems so much higher than I would have expected. Yeah. I,

yeah, when we first did that study, and this is a national study. So this isn't a convenience sample. This is, you know, people across the U.S. and it's weighted to look like the U.S.

demography of who takes part in the census. So the idea of this survey methodology is it should reflect the U.S. And so that's what we're going with. I also remember when we first found that, finding and we replicated it across a couple of studies. I was like, wow, this is so common. I just didn't anticipate also that it was that common. But it kind of makes sense when something is really stigmatized, people aren't going to talk about it. We also know that like queer or same gender or same sex, sexual experiences are really common, but people aren't necessarily

identifying as LGBT or Q. So we know that people are doing things with their body, in their intimate life, but they're probably not talking about it because the norms around society in our society around monogony are so rigid. And as humans, we seek out support and we actively avoid stigma. So we're going to do that too when it comes to sex. Do you think, and this is outside of the scope of the research you've done, so I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit, do you think that number is growing partly because of the economic conditions that have led people to feel a little bit more isolated between longer

work days, being able to afford less things unless they partner collectively. I think that the stresses of the modern world, especially with the increasing use of technology as like the solitary means to communicate with people, do you think that's feeding into this or do you think it would, it has been stable at like that one in five historically speaking? Interesting. So I think you're on to something. I think COVID gave people quite a bit of time to do some introspection. And I think when there are any pressing stressful situation, finances are not,

people are sort of going to reevaluate their life. I anticipate that there are a group of people where the finances or sharing resources or doing something more communal to live out their life is a big motivator for people to engage in non-monogany. But I think that there's also a lot of other motivations why people would, you know, explore this type of relationship. And as for the prevalence of one out of five, that study that we're talking about that my colleagues and I did in 2017, that was the first of its kind. No other researcher or polling place or, you know, you name it.

The U.S. loves national polling. No one had asked about consensual non-monogany, so we don't actually. have a historical view of how common it has been over any sort of time period. One of the first times it was assessed was 2017. My colleagues and I at the Kinsey Institute, we're looking at it year by year by year. So as the years go on, we'll have some idea of if it's increasing or decreasing or staying the same over time. But unfortunately, we just don't have that knowledge about, you know, the history of engagement in non-monogne at a national level, which I also just find completely interesting.

We know probabilities about everything, like prevalence of people who own red cars, like prevalence of, you know, all sorts of behaviors or activities. And we just don't have it about consensual non-monogne over time, unfortunately. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out in the next decade, which brings me to actually my last question for you. is, you know, what are you working on right now and kind of where do you see your research going forward in the future? Yeah, I'm working on all the things. Something I really like about studying consensual non-monogamy is for the most part, if you have a research question

where you're interested in learning more or even exploring something about people who engage in either swinging or open relationships or polyamory, for the most part, it probably hasn't been done before. That societal stigma is also in academia. It's not like researchers and clinicians grow up in a vacuum. We grow up in the same society that everyone else is raised in. And so, you know, often the ideas and ideals surrounding monogony haven't been challenged. And that is just really exciting. So I find myself studying all different sorts of things. I'm really interested currently in kind of two different avenues. One is, is understanding how the stigma and potentially discrimination of some people who engage in consensual

non-monogony, what that feels like to people, and then also how that can trickle down and impact people's psychological well-being and also physical well-being. And so some of my recent work has really explored this idea of minority stress, meaning that, and it's a very popular theory when studying people of color and then also studying sexual minorities where you have an identity that is stigmatized in society. And then that stigma are unique stressors that therefore can have negative psychological and physical well-being. So I'm trying to understand the extent to which people engage in non-monogamy experience that and then how to remedy it. So, you know, it's one thing to document that things can be bad, but then also how do we intervene and ameliorate?

those negative effects. And then some of the other new research I'm doing is some collaborative stuff about looking at the different networks of people who are engaging in polyamory. So not just their own individual perspective, but like everyone who's kind of dating each other, like looking at it more like a family unit instead of just the individual perspective. So how are people influencing each other back and forth or different people? How are people getting along? How does this affect quality and stability? And, you know, even things that we've talked about in this conversation, resource management, like what are these potential benefits? What are some drawbacks? And then importantly, what can we learn about communication strategies, how people navigate jealousy, all of these inner workings of polyamist relationships that then could be applied. to people who engage in monogony.

So it's not to say that we're trying to get people to engage, who are monogamous to try a polyamory, but more are there lessons learned? Are there new ways or, you know, just different ways of communicating or expressing needs or desires that could be beneficial to people regardless of what type of relationship they're in? It's interesting how if you're able to take a subject that is, there hasn't been a lot of research done into it. You can often use that as like the opportunity to look at. at other things with fresh eyes.

Like you're just talking about this idea of like we can look at these relationships and reflect back on traditional monogamous relationships to better understand both, which I think is really interesting. So my last question is really, where do you see the future around this subject matter in say 10, 20 years? I know you said it seems like it's becoming more normalized. As somebody that spends a lot of time talking to people in these relationships, doing the research, seeing the trends.

Where are we in 20 years? I think we're going to start to have some very serious legal conversations. I'm not quite sure what that looks like because I'm not a lawyer. But I do know that the research that I'm doing other consensual non-monogony, other consensual non-monogany scholars are doing is starting to be used in briefings. There are three places right now in the state of Massachusetts where people can go and get multi-partner domestic partnerships. And these are the same three cities that first enacted same-sex domestic partnerships in the U.S.

And so I anticipate that these type of city-level or even state-level conversations around multi-partner domestic partnerships or even expanding the institution of marriage are easily on the horizon within 20 years. I think that there are also going to be other types of offshoots and. in the realm of the law. Because the law kind of, for lack of better word, sets the precedent often around stigma, around what's legal and what's illegal. And so there are, I think there's going to be a lot of conversations around anti-discrimination

housing laws. There's going to be, you know, potentially a whole new training or modules or certificates for mental health practitioners to really focus on consensual non-monogamy. potentially the idea of consensual nonmonogony might break out into its own subfield. Right now, it's kind of, you know, at the margins of whatever academic discipline people are in, either psychology or sociology. It's a little bit of women's studies. It's a little bit of LGBTQ studies.

Maybe it might be, you know, its own new discipline. I think there's a variety of different ways that it's going to unfold. I don't see, you know, going away as an idea. I think that there's going to be new media representation, movie plot lines where people are maybe in triads or people are swinging and they're not the punchline of a joke or they're not drawn in for the plot line for a shock value or to make it really sexy. I think they're just going to be kind of like, oh, yeah, here's my neighbor.

and, you know, there's his partners or whatever. Yeah, yeah. I think we might be there in 20 years, having those conversations and, you know, maybe even some very serious legal conversations at the state level. So for people that want to hear more, read more of your work, do you have like a website or social media handles or send them to Google Scholar? What do you want me to do? I do.

Yeah, you can go to my website. it's www. eneycmores.com. And as long as I'm not breaking copyright, I post all of my articles there free for people to read. If you want to actually read an article that for some reason is behind a paywall because I couldn't break copyright, you can email me directly. And I will, you know, clearly send you all the research. You can also check out the resources that the good people at the committee on consensual nonmonogony, at Division 44 of APA that I work with. We have our own website,

div44CNM.org. And so we produce different brochures or mental health resources for therapists who are seeking to be more affirming of people engaged in non-monogamy. And then also resources that people engaged in non-monogamy can share with like family or friends, like, hey, here's some basics.

Here's an overview of like, you know, what I do and my life or information to give doctors so that maybe the state. could be ameliorated or at least, you know, people within the mental health profession could have a better understanding of monotony. Awesome. Amy, this has been fantastic. Yeah.

Thank you.