Modern Love

No longer confined to a niche community of swingers, deviants and what Alan Partridge would call “sex people”, polyamory is increasingly being accepted as a regular lifestyle choice. As more couples question the value of monogamy, MH asks whether fidelity is an outdated concept – and why two’s company, but threes arouse

- Richard Goodwin

“They might sound like they are, but they’re not,” insists David Pickering, 35, who opened up his primary relationship six years ago and is now free to update his Tinder profile, ask out that attractive girl at work or visit a kink club – without catching hell from his long-term partner. At least in theory. “I wouldn’t say we have more sex now than we did when we had a closed relationship,” he says. “It doesn’t change the fact that going out and meeting people is difficult and time-consuming.”

If you were expecting a hedonistic free-for-all, you’ve come to the wrong party. Open relationships in 2018 are complicated. They won’t spare you emotional conversations or banish awkward concepts such as guilt, cheating and unloading the dishwasher. (Rather, imagine splitting these things three or four ways.) Polyamory, the practice of having multiple consensual partners, involves hard work, and almost certainly more of it than the relationship you’re in now.

That is, of course, assuming you’re monogamous. A study in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy posited that more than one in five adults have been in a consensual non-monogamous relationship. Tellingly, perhaps, almost half of men and 31 per cent of women surveyed were keen on the idea.

“A lot of people go into open relationships – and particularly open marriages – thinking it’s going to fix things,” says Laurie Penny, a 31-year-old writer and activist who has been an “ethical non-monogamist” for the past decade. “There are rare occasions when one partner says to the other: ‘Have you thought about trying this?’ and the other says, ‘Wow! I’m so glad you asked!’ But mostly it doesn’t happen like that.”