One thing that is true of the poly community is that it tends to collect together a lot of people who are interested in, experienced with, and at least in some cases, good at having relationships. When you’re having more than one romantic relationship at a time, you manage to pack more relationship experience into fewer years of living. You might encounter more of a diversity of personalities or relationship styles. You typically spend more time discussing and unpacking and processing your feelings.

So it’s no surprise, then, that the poly community has some people in it who are doing some interesting work about relating. Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickart have written about the ethics in ethical non-monogamy in More Than Two. Amy Gahran takes a look at what it means to separate emotionally and sexually intimate relationships from the existing social expectations around what commitment looks like in her book Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life. New terminology abounds in the community—‘New Relationship Energy’, ‘the Relationship Escalator’, ‘metamours’… the list goes on.

The thing that fascinates me the most that I have discovered in all of this culture about thinking about relationships is the divide between people who arrange their relationships in a hierarchy, and those who have an egalitarian philosophy. This isn’t something that necessarily aligns with whether or not someone’s relationship is non-monogamous. I believe that I have encountered the idea in the poly community first because it’s such a hotbed of thinking about relationships. (It is relevant to note that this *is* central to one form of non-monogamy—egalitarianism is one of the main principles of Relationship Anarchy, so RA folks are, by definition, egalitarian.)

Hierarchical configurations are those in which relationships are explicitly ranked in order of importance, and required to adhere to their assigned places. In monogamy, this presents as the default assumption that romantic relationships and especially marriages are automatically more important than friendships or relationships of other kinds. Examples are easy to find, in books and movies and often in the lives of people we know.

In poly circles, a sign that this aspect of the mainstream culture is still valued by someone who has embraced non-monogamy is when you see people who set up a lot of rules to protect the importance of the ‘primary couple’. Often the underpinning of this behavior is fear—fear that new connections will dilute or weaken existing relationships. New partners are evaluated on the basis of how well they support or enhance (or never conflict with) the preexisting relationship. Sometimes these rules might include a person in one of these preexisting couples having a say in their partner’s other relationships when it comes to how often they can see each other, or what kinds of activities they’re allowed to do together, or even whether they can stay together (i.e. – veto power). In the swinging community, it might come in the form of an admonition from one’s primary partner that sex with others is fine, but emotional entanglement is not allowed. (Trying to exert control over other people’s feelings is, by all reports, somewhere between difficult and impossible, so this often leads to drama.)

Egalitarian configurations can run the gamut from Relationship Anarchists, who take care not to privilege any relationship over another whether it is romantic and sexual or not, to people who engage in what they call ‘descriptive hierarchy’ in which some relationships are more important than others, but have grown that way organically, without having their shapes predetermined by rules imposed from without. Rather than imposing rules on each other, egalitarian-leaning folk tend to emphasize boundaries instead, communicating how they will respond to various situations in ways that respect the autonomy of all of the individuals involved.

My preference in relating is strongly egalitarian, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a relationship anarchist. I enjoy finding ways to balance care for myself with care for others, neither ignoring my own needs and desires in service to ‘the relationship’ nor riding roughshod over my partners’ needs and desires in service to my Self.

My relationship with my husband has had this egalitarian quality both during the times we’ve been living monogamously and when one or the other of us has had other partners. Even his role in my life has shifted, from being a secondary-type partner when we first met, to being the person I have chosen to live with and co-parent with. That evolution could not have happened had I been engaging in a more hierarchical form of relating. And I’m sure that egalitarianism is a quality, perhaps too-little recognized, in many healthy monogamous marriages. It doesn’t take non-monogamy entering your life to realize that the romantic ideals of mainstream media are so often stories of codependency and poor communication, and don’t really represent love very well at all. Not mature, balanced, grown-up love that lives in the head as well as the heart, anyway.

This is something I hope will be explored more by relationship geeks and gurus of every orientation as we move forward. Let us seek out, together, the best ways of being in relationship with one another, supporting each other in becoming happier and less fearful and more whole. Let us challenge their love stories with some stories of our own.