3 Reasons Why Polyamory Is So Popular

One of them has to do with a personality trait called openness to experience

Photo by Deon Black on Unsplash

Happy Valentine’s Day! Tonight, many of you will celebrate romance with that special someone. And some of you may celebrate it with special someones.

Polyamory, if you haven’t heard, is big. Both New York and The New Yorker recently published stories about the rise in people who carry on multiple romantic relationships at the same time, with the help of Google calendar and therapist-workshopped lines about boundaries.

The research on how many people actually practice ethical nonmonogamy or polyamory is poor—researchers don’t ask about the practice consistently, and people avoid admitting that they do it. But what I’ve seen of the data convinces me that these types of relationships are probably becoming more common and definitely becoming less stigmatized.

From the New Yorker’s story:

51 per cent of adults younger than 30 told Pew Research, in 2023, that open marriage was “acceptable,” and 20 percent of all Americans report experimenting with some form of non-monogamy.

To this I’ll add that about a third of U.S. adults say their ideal relationship is nonmonogamous in some way, according to a 2020 YouGov poll; 43 percent of Millennials say so. Another YouGov poll from last year found that a majority of men under 45 say their ideal relationship is not completely monogamous. (The numbers are lower among women, but still considerable: 41 percent prefer something other than monogamy.)

The apps are following suit: In 2022, the dating app Hinge added nonmonogamy to its menu of “relationship type” options. Tinder created a similar feature last year. (OkCupid added a polyamory option way back in 2016.) On Tinder, of the American users who have added a relationship type to their profile, 38 percent are open to or interested in nonmonogamous relationships, the company told me. The poly-adjacent dating app Feeld launched in 2014 but has, by its own metrics, grown explosively since the pandemic began. Feeld allows its users to connect their profile to a partner’s in order to seek additional people to join the relationship, and about 35 percent of users are on the app with a partner.

In 2014, when I last wrote a big story about polyamory, I found my sources mainly through obscure Meetup groups and word-of-mouth. Most were terrified that they’d be “found out.” Today, I can quickly name at least five people in my (limited! tame!) social circle who have been polyamorous in some way.

Several of these more recent polyamory stories seem to be pegged to the book More, by Molly Roden Winter, who wrote about her journey into the world of menages a trois. But I’ve been tracking polyamory for years now, and I have a few additional theories for why so many people seem to have such populous love lives these days:

1. The #MeToo movement placed a premium on transparency in relationships. To be sure, some of the rise in polyamory might simply be people rebranding cheating as nonmonogamy and hitting the apps with the newfound reassurance that it’s “ethical.”

   But this kind of thing is frowned upon by people in the poly community. And people of all persuasions now seem more inclined to be honest about the contents of their love lives. Consent is sexy; sneaking around is not. “Ethical nonmonogamy is saying, ‘Everybody’s aboveboard. Everybody knows I’m not keeping secrets,’” Riki Thompson, a professor at the University of Washington at Tacoma, who has researched nonmonogamy, told me. Dating while married looks distasteful if you hide it, but like just another personal preference if you don’t.

2. Pandemic death-anxiety made people realize life is short. Some researchers think the long, lonely months of the pandemic prodded some people to rethink what it is they truly want in life. Are you really ready to spend eternity with the guy across the room clipping his toenails during a Zoom meeting—and only that guy?

   When Amy Moors, a psychologist at Chapman University, and her colleagues examined people’s attitudes toward relationships during the first year of the pandemic, they found that nearly a quarter felt that monogamy had become less important to them. “Sometimes … when people are thinking about the possibility of dying, they start to reevaluate what are some of their core beliefs or how they want to spend their time,” Moors told me. In addition to rethinking their careers and priorities, she said, some people might have wondered, “What types of intimate things or sex things haven’t I done yet?” 

   Some people spent all that time alone in self-reflection and decided to have a baby or to switch careers. Others, well, decided to do something a little different.

3. People are becoming more open to experiences. Openness to experiences, one of the Big Five personality traits, is associated with imagination, creativity, and some forms of intellect. It’s also associated with political liberalism (especially social liberalism) and with being more sexually adventurous. (As one study puts it, “open men and women have more information about sex, wider sexual experience, stronger sexual drives, and more liberal sexual attitudes.”) And there’s evidence people are becoming both more open and more liberal over time.

   For one study that came out last year, researchers looked at personality data collected from thousands of people in Seattle born between 1883 and 1976. They found that by age 58, people born later were both more extroverted and more open to experiences than those born earlier. (They were also less agreeable and less neurotic, the grunge era notwithstanding.)

   Other research has found that Americans’ attitudes towards topics like sexuality have become more liberal in the past 50 years, and especially since the 1990s. In one study, not only were younger cohorts of Americans more liberal than older ones, each cohort itself became more liberal over time. One of the strongest associations in personality psychology is between openness to experience and political liberalism, so it makes sense that as people are becoming more liberal, they are becoming more open, too.

   Interestingly, bisexuals also tend to score higher on openness, and bisexuality is also on the rise. Polyamory seems especially well-suited to people who are bisexual: Within the polyamorous community, it’s completely valid to enter into a heterosexual relationship and realize, a few years in, that you’d also like to date people of the same sex—ideally without breaking up with your original partner.

Will this open, transparent, yolo trend of polyamory continue, or will people eventually transition back to more traditional sex lives? The sociologist James A. Davis once noted that, amid a climate of growing liberalism, there was a weather pattern of conservatism during the 70s and 80s. That is, Reagan-era conservatism was a brief trend that would pass. It certainly seems like we’re back in an enduring shift toward socially liberal attitudes and openness to experiences. It remains to be seen if it’s a false spring or a permanent thaw.