The depressing truth behind the polyamory trend

The internet last week was inundated with a slew of articles — including an entire issue of New York magazine — about the “increasingly mainstream trend” of polyamory. But the unspoken detail at the center of all this discussion of polyamory was a goal: to promote Molly Roden Winter's new memoir, “More.”

To quote the New York Times, “More” is about how one mother’s “big sexual adventure,” i.e. polyamory, helped her “find herself.” What she found and why exactly she needed to open up her marriage to find it remained unclear even to the most open-minded readers. The newsletter Today in Tabs may have put it best: “Rich people have made polyamory boring.”

So the media hamster wheel turned, and suddenly, social media buzzed with conversations about polyamory. Apparently, “everyone” is "ethically non-monogamous" now. If you’re on the apps, you simply can’t avoid it.

But everyone where? Bushwick? Park Slope?

I was skeptical. Polyamory is, to put it bluntly, a lot of work. Granted, not everybody who’s polyamorous adheres to its subcultural norms, but generally speaking, it’s a formalized system of having multiple partners. It typically involves long discussions about boundaries, rules, and occasionally, even contracts. I mean that literally. It’s a relationship style in which contractual obligations aren’t unheard of and, in some cases, are even considered a good thing.

Anyway, long story short, I simply don’t buy that it’s all that common outside the rarefied circles of the New York media class and San Francisco Burning Man attendees.

Maybe the idea that polyamory is sweeping the country is just wish fulfillment. People are cheating or simply not committing in the first place.

I live in Chicago and don’t know anyone who would use the terms "polyamory" or "ethical non-monogamy." I asked my siblings, both young professionals in the Miami area, if they thought it was a trend where they were, and they said the same. They know polyamorous people; it’s not unheard of, but usually they’re not heterosexual. And trends in gay relationships, my sister suggested, might not be translatable to heterosexual ones. “I don’t know any straight poly people.”

G., a 34-year-old woman from New York who’s been in a polyamorous relationship for a decade and in the wider scene for a little bit longer, shared my skepticism that polyamory as she knew it was creeping into the mainstream. More people were talking about it from her perspective, but that wasn’t the same thing as actively participating in it. She compared it to when Newsweek released its now-infamous bisexuality issue in 1995. Almost three decades on, what’s the verdict? In her experience, many more people identify as bisexual, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that reflects their physical world experience. The same, according to G., may end up being the case with polyamory — all talk, no commitment.

I decided to take to Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble and run a little experiment.

Using three different profiles, two women and one man, all under the age of 45, I did a cursory search of the greater Chicagoland dating landscape. How many polyamorous or ethically non-monogamous people would I be able to find? I swiped for approximately an hour on each app. In total, I found only two people who identified as poly or ethically non-monogamous. There were a higher number of profiles run by heterosexual couples looking for “a third” for one night only, but that was also pretty rare.

Now, a few things are possible. I didn’t even spend a day on this search; it was cursory. It’s also plausible that people just aren’t advertising it on their profiles, which is fair; saying you’re poly could scare people off. It didn’t seem ethical to start conversations with people using a puppet profile, so I didn’t. For all I know, people bring it up once you begin messaging one another.

When I shared my results with friends, they told me that I’d have better luck if I set my location to Portland, San Francisco, or Brooklyn or used more specialized dating apps, like “sex positive” Feeld or OKCupid. But if it’s “increasingly mainstream,” as New York magazine claims, wouldn’t it be easier to find polyamorous people in an area as diverse as within 100 miles of Chicago? “Increasingly mainstream” seems to imply that I wouldn’t have to visit designated subcultural spaces or notoriously progressive cities to encounter it in the wild.

Still, I recognize that my brief search for the polyamorous wasn’t investigative journalism. It wasn’t an in-depth sociological survey. It wasn’t a poll or a study. All I had was a modest amount of anecdotal evidence.

Unfortunately, determining the numbers around polyamory has so far been a challenging topic to research. According to Psychology Today, there are definitional challenges; people may not be comfortable talking about it, and it’s hard to get a random sample.

But some data is available, and it at least partially validated my anecdotal evidence. For example, polyamory is more prevalent among non-heterosexual couples than heterosexual ones, and it’s most popular among people who identify as bisexual.

In that same data set, however, one in five people said they’d been in a non-monogamous relationship, which, crucially, is not the same thing as polyamory. If there is a trend, that might be it. Not a conscious embrace of alternative relationship models, but something a little bit darker. People who are dating aren’t dating exclusively and not always by choice.

Monogamy may be a distant goal, but the truth is that the best many people can manage is short-term and uncommitted, with the alternative being nothing at all. “Casually dating,” as opposed to dating for marriage. The conversation about polyamory may be the sugar-coated version — New York media’s aspirations to promote Roden’s memoir aside.

Maybe the people who are not in monogamous relationships aren’t because they can’t be. They’re not opting in to free love. It’s being forced on them. Maybe it’s that the ever-diminishing population of people who are dating at all are trapped in a societal change of short-term relationships with people who aren’t interested or, worse, aren’t capable of a longer-term arrangement. And when they do commit, if they commit, the threat of a never-ending corral of backups looms.

Conversations about behaviors like “micro-cheating” — Millennial and Zoomer parlance for “having a wandering eye” — seem more salient in this environment than concerns about polyamory’s popularity. Maybe the idea that polyamory is sweeping the country is just wish fulfillment. People are cheating or simply not committing in the first place. Might as well make it look like a choice.