Monogamy: the Renegade Choice

“I still get a little nauseous thinking about it,” Molly Roden Winter told The New York Times about a “cringy” sexual episode in an interview about her new book, More.

“Nauseous” is the right word to describe my sentiment as a reader of said interview, a summary of her memoir about living a polyamorous life despite being legally married with two sons (in fact, the interview alone should be labeled 'E for Explicit,' and reader caution is certainly warranted).

Nausea certainly wasn’t the intended effect of the piece. Winter is described as “sipping tea in the living room of her bright and airy townhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn.” Throughout the piece, she is painted with nearly every cliché in the liberal self-actualization playbook: a mom “juggling her obligations as a wife and mother,” while living “in pursuit of sexual and romantic fulfillment” and a “big sexual adventure,” the result of which is “self-discovery” because she “found herself.” Gag.

The interview and her book are just the latest manifestation of the cultural thumb push in favor of something once viewed with nearly unanimous cultural disdain: polyamory (having multiple romantic/sexual partners at once). Polyamory, polygamy, and bigamy have long been reviled because they overwhelmingly objectify women and place children in an unjust familial limbo. Abraham Lincoln once called polygamy one of the “twin relics of barbarism.” 

But now there is a push to revive it—this time with a feminist Park Slope gloss. 

And apparently, it’s working. A 2023 YouGov poll found that a third of Americans describe polyamory as their “ideal relationship.” Of course, these numbers are highest among men, who can walk away from the everyday realities of polyamorous life, most significantly pregnancy and child-rearing. But they are also startlingly high among young adults. According to research conducted by Pew, more than half of adults under the age of 30 consider “open marriages” to be “acceptable.”

No doubt the fact that this age cohort consumes endless hours of what The New Yorker calls “prestige television,” which has been slowly normalizing, and arguably glamorizing, polyamory, is relevant. Of young people’s growing acceptance of it, the author writes, “art is catching up with life.”

To the contrary. Those in positions of cultural influence in mainstream media outlets and publishing houses are a part of a concerted effort to de-stigmatize polyamory, and it is cultural and emotional malpractice. This comes at a time when we have more social science than ever making clear that a stable and committed marriage is best for women, children, and men in terms of their emotional, physical, mental, and financial well-being. 

And it’s also dishonest. Ironically, open marriages are often portrayed as a way to preserve a struggling marriage by allowing one or both partners to find sexual fulfillment elsewhere, while keeping the stable framework of the marriage intact. But research has found that long-term stability and happiness are tied to having less, not more, sexual partners, with the least likely cohort to divorce being women whose only sexual partner in life is the man they married. Research published in these pages also found that couples who are the “least sexually experienced” outside of marriage report the highest levels of both sexual and emotional satisfaction in their marriages. And that doesn’t count the negative effects of these relationships on child well-being. As one sociologist put it, “Kids are not like a pizza you can slice up six different ways.”

In short, open marriages may seem sexy, but they are neither sexually nor emotionally satisfying. Never mind the havoc they wreak on the children involved, or the families where one person’s “open marriage” ends another person’s "closed" marriage. These “open marriages” are, in fact, nothing more than a rebranding of adultery and must be called out as such.

The increasingly brazen effort to normalize polyamory is a flashing red light. But when a majority of an entire generation accepts such a dim view of marriage, monogamy increasingly appears to be the renegade choice. It certainly is a thrilling one, for those who are living its richness. Our challenge is not just to defend its merits, but to convince the culture that it is in fact the truly adventurous and fulfilling path.

Ashley E. McGuire is a Contributing Editor at the Institute for Family Studies and the author of Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female (Regnery, 2017).