Is Monogamy Over? Inside Love’s Sharing Economy
BY MICHELLE RUIZ April 5, 2022 https://www.vogue.com/article/the-rise-of-consensual-non-monogamy
It had been 15 years since Megan Bhatia had sex with anyone but her husband, Marty.
In 2018, the Bhatias, 38-year-old college sweethearts, were following the prescribed path that sex researchers call the “relationship escalator.” They met at the University of Illinois at Chicago, married in 2004, and bought a house they could scarcely afford in the West Loop. Megan underwent three rounds of IVF in three years to welcome their twins, Kira and Sebastian. After the Bhatias’ jointly owned real estate business collapsed in the 2008 financial crash, Marty hatched a digital training consultancy but eventually grew disillusioned with the work; Megan was traversing the country as a full-time executive-leadership coach while a nanny logged 50 hours per week watching the twins. Getting married, having children, and striving in corporate careers, the Bhatias “bought into that American dream,” says Megan, now a fresh-faced 42 with long, beachy waves. But the traditional roles of worker, wife, and mother subsumed her: “We shut a lot of ourselves off as we live,” she tells me. “The life that started as a wide-open slate can become this little pinhole.”
Throughout the course of their marriage, Megan and Marty buried the rebel-heartedness that initially bonded them. Marty remembers a traumatic early childhood and his late mother’s alcoholism, and grew up wild and hard-partying. Megan was driven by wanderlust, living in Belgium for a year at 17, then in Spain during a year of college, where she dated men during breaks in her on-and-off premarital relationship with Marty. “I felt so free. I was exploring. I was learning new languages, meeting people,” she recalls. “I felt like everything was possible.” In the years that followed, that unbridled part of her faded into a rarely seen alter ego that she and Marty referred to as “Barcelona Megan.” Both children of divorce, Megan and Marty committed to monogamy, vowing—especially after their children were born—that their marriage would last forever.
However ironically, it was that pledge that began cracking the long-closed door of their union. By 2018, Marty started to notice, as he told Megan, “your heart is off.” Determined to reawaken his wife’s deadened spirit, Marty suggested splashes of novelty. They went on dinner dates in which they pretended, for hours, not to know each other: “I got to see him in that ‘new person’ light,” Megan says. The couple had always shared their crushes with each other—“we realized, just because we were married, it didn’t mean that we didn’t find anyone else attractive,” Megan says—but they started fantasizing about inviting anonymous people, or even people they knew, into their bed for shared sexual experiences, a practice long known as “swinging.” “Part of what’s sexy about it is how open you feel,” Megan says of their conversations. Things escalated when Marty found a private party organized through a local swingers group: The Bhatias’ behavior there was “vanilla,” Megan says, with Marty seeking her permission to kiss another woman. Megan nodded him on, and soon after, was kissing the woman herself.
Swinging offered a jolt of newness, but the Bhatias craved something more than hookups. Megan divulged to Marty her simmering attraction to a new, single friend, Kyle Henry, a man-bunned, contemplative complement to Marty’s magnanimous presence. The couple had recently met Henry at a mutual friend’s party in Chicago and talked to him for hours, with Megan walking beside him under the twinkly lights of a holiday festival at Lincoln Park Zoo. “One person can’t be everything for someone else. It was clear that my all was not good enough,” Marty would later explain on Megan’s podcast, Amory. “There was something missing, and I couldn’t provide it.”
One night, the Bhatias invited Henry over, and Marty unsubtly encouraged his wife and Henry to kiss, which led to a threesome in which both men focused on Megan. The experience felt transformative: “It was like reigniting the curiosity of a teenager,” Megan remembers. Questioning the confines of her marriage “was like coming into Technicolor,” she marvels, referencing the movie Pleasantville, in which rainbow hues begin to populate a puritanical, black-and-white town. Megan was alive with excitement and energy; she describes the feeling of returning to her body, as if she’d been previously numb. “I remember looking back at them at one point, and both of them looking at me,” she says of that first encounter. “It was like, Oh my God, this whole other world is out here.”
Opening their relationship sparked a stream of existential questions for the Bhatias, according to Megan: “Whose life are we living? What do we want?” Entrenched systems were equally open to debate. “We are in a time of questioning institutional structures like health care, education, and, yes, monogamy,” she says, referencing the rise of a vocal, progressive political movement demanding sweeping structural change. The swelling impulse to challenge the status quo, from systemic racism and criminal justice to #MeToo’s reckoning on sexist abuse, had crept into her sex life and relationship style: “I think people are disillusioned with life right now and really starting to write their own rules,” Megan says.
So began the Bhatias’ winding path into consensual non-monogamy or “CNM,” the modern umbrella term for the practice of mutually and ethically agreeing to open an exclusive relationship to other sexual experiences, and in some cases, serious romantic partners. As “conscious uncoupling” was to divorce, consensual non-monogamy—sometimes called “ethical non-monogamy”—is to open relationships. In contrast to the free love of the ’60s or suburban key-party ethos of the ’70s, consensual non-monogamy in 2022 is a thoughtfully considered, typically therapized practice, complete with tidy acronym. CNM is rooted in open relationships that aspire to be “honest, moral, and trustworthy,” says Jessica Wood, Ph.D., a sexuality and relationships researcher at the Sex Information & Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN), who has studied CNM since 2018.
The Bhatias are not alone: In a national survey conducted by data analytics firm YouGov in 2020, only 56 percent cited complete monogamy as their ideal relationship style, a 5 percent drop from 2016. An estimated 23 percent of respondents said their relationships were already non-monogamous, echoing breakthrough 2017 research published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, which found that more than one in five single Americans in their study had tried consensual non-monogamy. “You could go to the grocery store, close your eyes, point at someone, and as long as there’s at least five people in that grocery store, one of them is probably engaged in non-monogamy,” says one of the study’s authors, Amy Moors, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at Chapman University and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. At a minimum, the CNM community is “as large as the LGBTQ population in the United States,” Kimberly Rhoten, a founding member of the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, tells me.
Nor is aspiring to monogamy any longer the societal default: When asked about their relationship ideal, from completely open to completely monogamous, the number of people who replied “I don’t know” more than doubled in the 2020 YouGov study, leaping from 5 percent in 2016 to 12 percent. “More people are starting to question,” says Zhana Vrangalova, Ph.D., an adjunct professor of human sexuality at New York University, who researches non-monogamy. “There are a couple of cultural shifts that are really making monogamy—complete, strict, lifelong monogamy—a very difficult thing to pull off.”
Though a pandemic might seem inimical to meeting new partners (social distancing and swinging hardly mix), Feeld—an app catering to open relationships, founded in 2014—has “bloomed” during COVID, according to its CEO, Ana Kirova. The company reports its monthly active global users have doubled since January 2020, and U.S. users increased 41 percent between January and September 2021. Kirova theorizes that the pandemic sparked a kind of global identity crisis: “A wake-up call, like someone, flicked a switch,” she says. “Life is not guaranteed. Anything that you wanted to do for your happiness was just not worth postponing. Humans are what make life worth living.” Along with the reconsideration of careers and jobs and a migration from cities to suburbs, the pandemic has occasioned a cultural shift in the bedroom: “Maybe I want to have sex with other people,”
Moors says. “Why am I just skipping along to these unwritten rules? Monogamy, and how people navigate their intimate life, is part of that.” For Tina, a 33-year-old product designer in Essex, England, 2020 was at once “the worst year for meeting people” but also, “weirdly enough,” the year she and her partner of four years decided to try consensual non-monogamy. (For privacy, Tina requested Vogue use only her first name.) The meticulous couple, who gleefully log their spice rack via an Excel spreadsheet, had considered it, but “the pandemic changed our routines, meaning we stopped going to the office and actually had time to meet and build relationships with new people,” Tina says. “I suspect six months of lockdown helped my introverted partner open up to the idea of meeting new people, too.”
Speaking for myself, as a (reluctant) participant in the suburban migration from New York to Connecticut, I saw a shift too: new friends and neighbors piercing the ennui with titillating talk of swinging, including the rumor that displaying two red Adirondack chairs on one’s front porch, or placing a pineapple (a symbol of hospitality and warm welcome) in your grocery cart, signals willingness. (The pineapple code is real, one consensually non-monogamous couple confirms, though more often communicated through pineapple-emblazoned T-shirts than fresh fruit at Whole Foods.)
Sex scholars studying CNM are beginning to explore the possibility that the desire to be non-monogamous is a “relationship orientation” unto itself, or may be part of sexual orientation. Creating a more nuanced definition of sexual orientation could mean asking: “Do you want no partners, or do you want to be exclusive in sexual and/or emotional ways to one partner, or open with multiple?” Moors says. As with gender and sexuality, relationships can exist on a spectrum, Vrangalova argues. “We’re not dealing with a binary world of ‘Oh, you’re monogamous,’ or ‘You’re totally open.’ There’s lots of different things in between.”