Many Loves: An anthropological exploration of the values and narratives of consensual non-monogamists on love, sex, and relationality

This article explores the multiplicity of experiences and perspectives of people practicing consensual non-monogamy (CNM) and questions how their values about love, intimacy, relationality, and sexuality relate to their practice of CNM. To gain these insights, I used experimental ethnographic methods such as autoethnography, film, and in-depth unstructured interviewing, alongside a theoretical framework based on Foucault’s view on sexuality and the concept of mononormativity combined with the wider contextualizing academic discussion surrounding CNM. This resulted in argumentation that centers around the idea that the discourse and narratives surrounding love sex and relationality one adheres to, relate not only to various practical approaches to CNM but also to one’s sense of identity and morality within it. First, I explored sexually nonexclusive relationships or open relationships, in the context of the youth hook-up culture, and then in married couples exploring swinging and...Show moreThis article explores the multiplicity of experiences and perspectives of people practicing consensual non-monogamy (CNM) and questions how their values about love, intimacy, relationality, and sexuality relate to their practice of CNM. To gain these insights, I used experimental ethnographic methods such as autoethnography, film, and in-depth unstructured interviewing, alongside a theoretical framework based on Foucault’s view on sexuality and the concept of mononormativity combined with the wider contextualizing academic discussion surrounding CNM. This resulted in argumentation that centers around the idea that the discourse and narratives surrounding love sex and relationality one adheres to, relate not only to various practical approaches to CNM but also to one’s sense of identity and morality within it. First, I explored sexually nonexclusive relationships or open relationships, in the context of the youth hook-up culture, and then in married couples exploring swinging and BDSM non- monogamously. I argued that both of these relationships’ structures depended on a mononormative separation of romantic love and sexuality, while for the first group this separation was implicit and extradyadic sexuality went unspoken, the second group created this dissociation voluntarily and critically as they presented sex as a form of play and claimed to take advantage of the conventional structure of marriage. After this, I focused on polyamory i.e., romantic CNM, and its use of language to label feelings, relationships, and social phenomena to change the way polyamorists relate and communicate. Which impacted not only polyamorists’ philosophy of relationality but also causes a reorganization of their lives and their sense of identity. However, as this sanitized holistic vision of love is essentialized into a relational identity, it still carries underlying mononormative tendencies.Show less

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Many Loves: An anthropological exploration of the values and narratives of consensual non-monogamists on love, sex, and relationality