A recent study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior suggests that people who maintain multiple romantic or sexual relationships use specific communication and boundary-setting practices to keep their partnerships healthy. The research provides evidence that openly discussing jealousy, sharing resources, and managing sexual health tends to improve relationship satisfaction for both non-monogamous and monogamous couples.
Consensual non-monogamy involves having more than one romantic or sexual partner at the same time with the informed consent of everyone involved. This includes relationship styles like polyamory, open relationships, and swinging.
The research team, a large international group of relationship scientists and therapists, conducted the new study to investigate how some individuals successfully manage the complicated dynamics of having multiple partners. They wanted to identify the specific habits that reduce conflict and build trust when more than one partner is in the picture. The goal was to create a psychological questionnaire that measures these relationship maintenance habits accurately.
“Early in my career, I developed an interest in how people in consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships make multiple relationships work. My personal experiences, and my training within the evolutionary social sciences, led me to believe that humans are well-designed for monogamy and experience less satisfaction and more conflict when non-monogamous,” said study author Justin K. Mogilski, an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina Salkehatchie.
“We experience jealousy when valued relationships are threatened, we engage in mate guarding behavior to prevent a partner from having sex or forming a loving relationship with other people, and we are competitive for access to intimate partners. Nevertheless, I’d read about and met people who reported success, happiness, and low levels of conflict within CNM relationships. So, I wanted to know what people were doing to circumvent the discord that people can experience when they or their partner(s) form multiple relationships.”
The research team conducted their investigation in two main phases. In the first phase, they recruited 429 participants with experience in consensual non-monogamy through social media and personal networks. These participants answered open-ended questions about the challenges of having multiple partners, such as managing jealousy or sharing finances. They then nominated the most effective and least effective ways to resolve those specific issues.
Four independent reviewers sorted these responses into categories based on common themes. This process helped the researchers identify ten core habits that people use to maintain harmony across multiple relationships. Based on these categories, the team drafted a thirty-question survey designed to measure how often individuals use these specific communication and boundary-setting strategies in their daily lives.
“We started with an evolutionary framework and predicted that whatever people were doing in these relationships must at least partially resolve the adaptive challenges that people face when courting multiple partners, such as the risk of mate poaching or partner resource diversion, STI and pregnancy risk, childcare and provisioning, reputational damage, or zero-sum rivalry,” Mogilski explained. “We then crowdsourced the ‘best’ practices for having a CNM relationship from people with experience in these relationships, turned these into a questionnaire that measures how often people engage in each practice (i.e., the Multiple Relationships Maintenance Scale; MRMS).”
In the second phase, the researchers administered this new survey to a massive international sample to test its accuracy and reliability. The survey was translated into multiple languages, including Portuguese, Italian, Polish, and Finnish. They collected data from 4,290 participants, analyzing their responses to refine the survey into a final twenty-four-question tool. To do this, they used a mathematical process called factor analysis, which groups similar survey responses together to reveal underlying behavioral trends.
The researchers also tested the survey across different demographics to ensure it worked universally. They confirmed that the questionnaire was accurate across men and women, single and multi-partnered people, North Americans and Europeans, and individuals older and younger than forty.
The final survey measured nine distinct relationship habits. These included disclosing attractions to others, regulating jealousy, showing a willingness to share childcare responsibilities, and experiencing compersion. Compersion is the feeling of joy or satisfaction a person experiences when their partner is romantically or sexually involved with someone else.
Other habits measured by the survey included sharing extra sexual experiences, creating a hierarchy of partners, being thoughtful about resource distribution, maintaining sexual health, and managing one’s reputation by hiding relationships.
A smaller group of 871 participants from the main sample completed additional questionnaires about their relationship intimacy, passion, and commitment. The researchers compared the survey scores between people who practice consensual non-monogamy and those who practice monogamy. They found that people in non-monogamous relationships were more likely to disclose outside attractions, regulate jealousy, experience compersion, share sexual experiences, focus on sexual health, and manage their reputations by hiding their relationships.
People in monogamous relationships reported higher levels of partner hierarchy and greater willingness to care for a partner’s children. Partner hierarchy refers to giving one specific partner, such as a spouse, more influence over major life decisions than other partners. The researchers did not find a statistically significant difference between the two groups regarding how thoughtfully they distributed material resources like food and money.
The researchers also looked at differences within non-monogamous groups. Individuals in swinging relationships reported the highest levels of shared sexual experiences and the most willingness to care for a partner’s children. People in polyamorous relationships reported the highest focus on sexual health maintenance and the lowest levels of partner hierarchy. Those in open relationships reported the lowest levels of compersion and the least thoughtfulness about sharing resources.
Experience levels also played a role in how people managed their partnerships. Having more experience with non-monogamy was linked to more frequent disclosure of attractions, better jealousy regulation, and more shared sexual experiences. Having more experience with monogamy was associated with less disclosure of outside attractions, less compersion, and fewer shared sexual experiences.
The study provides evidence that engaging in these communication and boundary-setting habits tends to predict higher relationship quality across both monogamous and non-monogamous groups. Practices like regulating jealousy and sharing extra sexual experiences were linked to higher satisfaction, commitment, and love across almost all measures. People who scored high on these habits also reported that their interactions with others felt less like cheating, which suggests that setting clear expectations prevents feelings of betrayal.
“We identified nine relationship maintenance practices that were more common to CNM relationships, and we demonstrated that people who engage in these practices – whether monogamous or CNM – report higher relationship quality,” Mogilski told PsyPost. “We also separately assessed how often people engage in infidelity (i.e., they have interactions with other people that they knowingly keep secret from a current partner).”
“People who reported more infidelity reported engaging in the MRMS practices less often, and had lower relationship quality. To us, this suggests that there are different ways of having multiple partners, and an approach that involves dishonesty, deception, or broken relationship agreements (e.g., infidelity) appears to be worse for relationship quality compared to when partners are thoughtful about the challenges of having multiple partners and then coordinate openly and honestly to resolve them (e.g., CNM).”
Sharing resources and childcare duties requires explicit negotiation in non-monogamous relationships. The researchers found that explicit thoughtfulness about sharing resources and childcare strongly predicted higher relationship investment quality for non-monogamous individuals compared to monogamous ones. Openly discussing how time and money will be divided seems to clarify expectations and provide a sense of security.
However, not all communication habits improved every aspect of a relationship. Disclosing outside attractions, expressing a willingness to share childcare, maintaining a partner hierarchy, and sharing resources were linked to more trust and relationship investment. These specific practices did not, however, relate to higher sexual satisfaction or passion.
Other habits showed surprisingly weak or specific links to relationship quality. Compersion was only weakly connected to overall relationship satisfaction and trust. A focus on sexual health maintenance was only associated with current relationship investment in a first partner, rather than general relationship quality across all partners.
“The practices that we identified sometimes did not have a clear or expected association with relationship quality,” Mogilski said. “For example, among people in CNM relationships, there is disagreement about whether it is better to be hierarchical (e.g., some partners are considered “primary” compared to others) or non-hierarchical (e.g., you do not give some partners greater priority than others). We found that people who reported more hierarchy tended to report better relationship quality. Likewise, experiences like ‘compersion,’ where you feel joy or gratitude for your partner’s other relationships, had weak or no association with relationship quality.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The data is observational and collected at a single point in time, meaning it cannot prove cause and effect. It is possible that these communication habits lead to better relationships, but it is also possible that people in already healthy relationships are simply more willing to communicate openly with their partners.
“We did not use an experimental design,” Mogilski said. “This means that we don’t know that engaging in these CNM practices causes a change in relationship quality. Therefore, readers should not confidently assume that adopting these behaviors will improve their success in a CNM relationship.”
Additionally, some of the specific habits measured by the survey showed low statistical reliability. This suggests that the questions measuring habits like resource distribution or sexual health maintenance may need further refinement to capture these behaviors perfectly.
“The next step is to further validate the MRMS as a tool for assessing how people in CNM relationships manage their relationships,” Mogilski explained. “Right now, research comparing monogamous and CNM relationships does so by comparing people with different relationship identity labels (e.g., do you label yourself as ‘monogamous’ or ‘polyamorous’?). Instead, I believe that researchers should be comparing what people actually do in these relationships; not just what they say they are doing.”
“A tool like the MRMS allows social scientists to quantify or measure people’s behaviors or relationship habits, which I hope will make it key to advancing this area of social science. But most importantly, the next step is to design an intervention based on the MRMS that can be experimentally administered to people who are having difficulty with CNM. This study design will test whether the MRMS practices cause improved relationship quality, or whether they are associated with higher relationship quality for some other reason.”
The study, “How Do People Maintain Consensual Non-Monogamy? An International Development and Validation of the Multiple Relationships Maintenance Scale,” was authored by Justin K. Mogilski, Geoffrey F. Miller, Peter K. Jonason, Katarzyna Grunt-Mejer, Jaroslava Varella Valentova, Rhonda Balzarini, David L. Rodrigues, Elisabeth Sheff, Laith Al-Shawaf, Zsófia Csajbók, Andrew G. Thomas, Tamas David-Barrett, Cezar Giosan, Daniel J. Kruger, David J. Ley, Justin J. Lehmiller, Heath A. Schechinger, Amy C. Moors, Stefano Ciaffoni, Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair, Stephen Whyte, Zuzana Štěrbová, Klára Bártová, Ryan G. Witherspoon, Magdalena Żemojtel-Piotrowska, Pavol Prokop, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, David P. Schmitt, Adil S. Sarıbay, Magdalena Lipnicka, Ivana Goláňová, Ezra Hampikian, William Costello, Limor Gottlieb, Cory J. Cascalheira, and Michelle A. Larva.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.