When you say “polyamory” to most people, the throuple or triad is the image most people will have in mind. It just means that they don’t want to live in the assumption that they’ll follow the timeline and milestones of a traditional relationship. This doesn’t mean that a solo poly person is dismissive of feelings or has trouble connecting more than another relationship model.

Often, solo polyamorists prefer to live alone or in a way that they’re not cohabitating with one partner long-term. Solo Poly folks don’t need or want a primary partner, and many describe themselves as their primary relationship. The exact polar opposite of Hierarchical Polyamory is Solo Polyamory.

That isn’t to say the model is flawed, but in a healthy, functional hierarchical poly relationship, the hierarchies will seldom come up. Generally, many people won’t really identify as hierarchical poly it’s usually a term that enters the conversation when something has gone wrong. Obviously, if someone can’t handle the jealousy, this gets real toxic real quick. You have a couple, either married or in a long-term relationship, who decide to embark on the journey of polyamory together.īut the hierarchical polyamorous couple is open and transparent that they are each other’s priorities and that their relationship comes first. This tends to be the one that’s easiest for people to grasp. Read on, and we’ll go into some of the more common subtypes you’ll run into. Polyamorous people reject the idea of having “one true love” at the expense of all others and craft their lives with the hope of finding more than one partner to have genuine, romantic love with.īut we can’t just define polyamory as the opposite of monogamy- there’s a whole array of different ways people describe their relationships. Non-monogamous relationship types Polyamory‍Ĭombining the Greek and Latin roots for “many” “loves,” polyamory is a relationship model built on the idea of having romantic love with more than one person.

So while this is by no means exhaustive, here’s a handy field guide to the language of non-monogamy. But how maddeningly open-ended is that?Īlthough it’s super common for people in the same relationship to prefer different terms to describe it (one man’s triad is another man’s swinging), it helps to understand the terms surrounding non-monogamous relationships. It’s also sometimes called consensual non-monogamy or sometimes just plain ol’ open relationships. Ethical non-monogamy (abbreviated as ENM for those in the know) describes the practice of having more than one sexual partner, although the “ethical” part is used to differentiate it from cheating.

Non monogamous marriage is healthy