Polyamory isnt all about sex | Scientific American

scientificamerican.com · Feb 17, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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The first time her husband went on a date with another woman, Kelly felt sick to her stomach. Consumed by jealousy, she threw up twice and cried for three hours straight until he came home. The second time he had a date night, with a different woman, Kelly sat on the couch wrapped in a blanket, hate-watching 90 Day Fiancé until she heard his car in the driveway. By the fifth time, she just went to bed early. The eighth time, Kelly met her husband for drinks after his date. Then, she says, they went home and had the best sex of their lives.Kelly, a trial attorney, is no shrinking violet. She goes on her own dates with other men, and her husband, Tim, is thrilled. (Names have been changed in this story to protect the privacy of the people I interviewed.) “There’s nothing like that feeling when Kelly comes home from a date, and she’s soaring and giddy because it went so well,” he says. “And I’m like, ‘That’s amazing, babe! I’m so happy for you!’ And I truly am.”Kelly and Tim practice polyamory: they form deep, meaningful, romantic relationships with more than one person at a time, with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved. This departure from traditional dating and marriage is gaining popularity in the U.S., according to research and surveys. In popular media, though, it is usually ridiculed and dismissed.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Critics deride polyamorists as decadent liberal hedonists looking for ethical cover for their desire to sleep with lots of people. An Atlantic article says polyamory is emblematic of the “banal pleasure-seeking of wealthy, elite culture in the 2020s,” allowing people to justify indiscriminate sex and avoid the hard work of commitment. “No one can truly feel safe inside a marriage whose vows have an asterisk,” claim the authors of a piece distributed by the Institute for Family Studies. “Anyway, these people are crazy,” writes Rod Dreher, a former writer at The American Conservative.These views of polyamory are dead wrong.I am an anthropologist and licensed therapist, and I have spent the past seven years researching polyamory the way anthropologists do: by spending a lot of time with a lot of people who engage in it. I’ve interviewed more than 100 practicing polyamorists in depth, and we talked about their experiences, motivations and aspirations, as well as regrets and lessons learned. I’ve heard about how polyamorists view themselves and the world, and I’ve observed what they do. And what I’ve found is, in many respects, supported by other scientific research—but not by popular perceptions.First, polyamorists are not a privileged elite. They are more likely than monogamous people to earn less than $40,000 a year, according to one study, although they do tend to be more highly educated. They are regular folks. They have jobs and children. They run carpools and pay rent and go to the grocery store and watch the news. There is nothing inherently class-specific about the practice. (Nor is it limited to particular race or ethnic backgrounds, although the population skews white.)Politically, polyamory is a rare place where the left and right meet: you might encounter a libertarian or a Donald Trump supporter or a Bernie Sanders bro. The philosophy and practice of polyamory resonate with people across political divides and are not simply liberal indulgences—in fact, they tie into a libertarian and conservative ethos with deep roots in U.S. society, where people rebel against the powers that be telling them what to do.Where popular portrayals of polyamory most miss the mark, though, is in the idea that the practice is primarily about having sex with multiple partners. Polyamory is mostly about intimacy, not sex, say the people involved in it, and it has ethics at its core. My observations support this claim, and so does other social science research. In a detailed 2021 study of 540 people published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, psychologist Jessica Wood of the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada and her team found that relationships based primarily on sex are viewed negatively by many polyamorous people. People in these relationships prioritize mutual emotional support and opportunities for self-discovery. Respect, consent, trust, communication, flexibility and honesty are fundamental to these unconventional dynamics, according to a large review by researchers at Virginia Tech published in 2023.“We are not sex-crazed freaks in some crazy lifestyle. We spend more time communicating than anything else.”And these principles can have beneficial consequences. Psychologist Justin Lehmiller, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, reported in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that polyamorists engage in safer sexual practices than the people who say they are monogamous—a quarter of whom reported having sexual relationships unknown to their partner—and this caution may reduce rates of sexually transmitted infections.In short, polyamory is radically different from what many people may envision. Its current flourishing is not just a curiosity or random event: it indexes something important about this cultural moment and how people experience and value intimacy and relationships.I am not an apologist for polyamory. I have been in such relationships in the past and had positive experiences, but I ultimately decided polyamory wasn’t for me. It activated some insecurities that I have spent years of my life working to heal, and I never felt that polyamory resonated deeply with my sense of who I am. For me, participating in polyamory successfully would take continual, deep work around old and familiar emotional wounds, and I simply wasn’t all in.Clearly, however, other people are all in, and profound misunderstandings of polyamory have been circulating since its rise in popularity. Getting beyond such misconceptions offers a valuable opportunity to comprehend the power and importance of human needs for intimacy in a variety of forms.Reality TV shows like The Bachelor, Love Is Blind and Say Yes to the Dress are popular for a reason—they tap into a dominant cultural narrative about “true love” and monogamy. The story is familiar: Someday we will find our one true love, the person who will “complete” us. They will be our best friend, lover, intellectual partner and emotional-support system all rolled into one. If we aren’t fulfilled, then there is something wrong.Polyamory holds that what’s wrong is the very premise of monogamy in the first place. One person cannot possibly meet all our needs. “It’s like this,” Kris, a 37-year-old real estate agent, says. “We have groups of friends, right? Maybe one you go out dancing with on the weekends, another one is the person you call when you’ve had a horrible day; maybe someone else is a sports fan, so you go to ball games together. Totally normal, right? We don’t expect one friend to be our only friend, because we have different kinds of relationships with different people. It’s unrealistic to expect one person to do it all.”Love, polyamory practitioners say, is similar. Like friendship, it is not a limited resource—it is additive. More love begets more love. “When you have multiple kids, you don’t love one of them less just because another one is born,” John, a 36-year-old business analyst, explains. “There’s enough love for all of them. You love them each for who they are uniquely.” A 2024 study by gender and sexuality scholar Jessica J. Hille of the Kinsey Institute and her colleagues highlights the flexible definitions of intimacy in polyamorous communities where intimacy is not always predicated on sex. Such relationships are common enough to have their own term, “platonic polyamory,” which describes connections with multiple people that may be deeply significant and intimate but not sexual.And despite the perception that polyamory is justification for bed-hopping, polyamorous relationships are generally not fleeting. They might involve commitments that last months, years or a lifetime. A 2017 study of about 2,000 monogamous and nonmonogamous people found no difference in relationship length between the two groups, with an average length of slightly more than 10 years. They were also comparable on measures of relationship satisfaction, commitment and passionate love. This finding suggests polyamorous relationships can be just as fulfilling, meaningful and enduring as monogamous ones.None of this means polyamorous relationships are easy. Jenna and Michael are in their late 40s and have been married for 23 years. In the summer of 2023 we sat down at a coffee shop in Nevada to talk about their journey to and through polyamory. For the first 10 years of their marriage Jenna and Michael were happily monogamous. Then things changed. Michael, a reservist in the armed forces, was deployed overseas and experienced a harrowing near-death incident. “After that,” Michael recounts, “I really thought a lot about my life and what I wanted. I realized that, among other things, I didn’t want to be monogamous anymore. I loved my wife more than anything and didn’t want out of the marriage. But coming that close to death made me realize how much more life there is for me to experience.”Michael returned from his deployment and raised the issue of opening the marriage with Jenna. “She was not in favor at all,” Michael says. “She had a lot of fears and concerns, which is totally understandable. I did, too. So we read everything we could get our hands on about polyamory and talked to people we know who are in the lifestyle. We took it slowly. About a year after that initial discussion, we were both ready to open things up.”“And how did it go?” I ask.“Michael had a really hard time at first,” Jenna says, “