Consensual Nonmonogamy: Psychological Well-Being and Relationship Quality Correlates

Abstract

Consensually nonmonogamous relationships are those in which all partners explicitly agree that each partner may have romantic or sexual relationships with others (Conley, Ziegler, Moors, Matsick, & Valentine, 2013). In this article, research examining the associations between consensual nonmonogamy, psychological well-being, and relationship quality is reviewed. Specifically, three types of consensual nonmonogamy are examined: swinging, open relationships (including sexually open marriage and gay open relationships), and polyamory. Swinging refers to when a couple practices extradyadic sex with members of another couple; open relationships are relationships in which partners agree that they can have extradyadic sex; and polyamory is the practice of, belief in, or willingness to engage in consensual nonmonogamy, typically in long-term and/or loving relationships. General trends in the research reviewed suggest that consensual nonmonogamists have similar psychological well-being and relationship quality as monogamists. Methodological challenges in research on consensual nonmonogamy and directions for future research are discussed.

Notes

¹The effect of marriage on subjective well-being is found inconsistently (see Diener, 1984), and recent research suggests that it is not marriage per se that best accounts for this effect, as marriage provides few advantages over cohabitation (Musick & Bumpass, 2012).

²At the time that the majority of the studies described in this review were conducted, participants were recruited from locations where same-sex marriage was illegal. Therefore, the literature often treats sexually open marriage and gay open relationships as mutually exclusive categories. As more research is conducted on consensually nonmonogamous same-sex marriage and on the open relationships of unmarried heterosexual individuals, it will be necessary to divide the literature on open relationships into different categories.

³Where reported in text, ranges of effect sizes reflect only the effect sizes that we could calculate for this review and therefore may not reflect the sizes of all effects found in the studies we reviewed.