What's the Hierarchy in Multiple-Partner Relationships?

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After a brief "postus interruptus" for readers to consider the connections between pride, rights, and backlash, this is the final post in a series that untangles types of consensual non-monogamy (CNM) relationships.

While most of the posts in this series looked at the ways relationships can be focused on an individual, couple, or group, the common thread underlying all of these different formats is the degree of hierarchy that the people involved negotiate. Couple-focused forms of CNM have the highest levels of hierarchy, making it clear to all participants that the couple is the most important element and the other relationships exist only to the extent that they augment and support the couple. Both individual and group-focused CNMs can challenge or reject hierarchy, with varying degrees of success.

Is Hierarchy OK?

It depends. Has everyone enjoyed equal access to decision-making and freely chosen the hierarchy? Then, yes, that is fine. Hierarchy really works well for some people, and those folks should gravitate to the hierarchical forms that emphasize the couple or have an external structure like a clearly detailed agreement.

If swingers want to prioritize their spouses over their casual sex partners, and everyone in the setting knows that is the arrangement, then, yes, that kind of consensual hierarchy is absolutely OK.

For those people who grate against hierarchy, however, avoiding relationships that are oriented toward sustaining a couple and seeking instead the more flexible, less structured, more egalitarian forms will work much better. Some vocal segments of polyamorous communities in the U.S. are quite judgmental of hierarchy, both because they look down on it as insecurity imported from monogamous relationship styles, and because when people come to them wanting to establish relationships founded on hierarchy, it really rubs them the wrong way.

It can be incredibly difficult to police emotional priority, in part because requiring a partner to love one person at an 11, and all others at no more than a 7, begs the question of how to measure love. Also, many polyamorous folks point out that they get different things from their multiple relationships, and that they love each of their partners differently without relying on a scale of which love is more or less.

Feelings Change

Furthermore, people change over time and feelings are unpredictable. Agreeing not to fall in love or to only love others a little, and love someone else the most, assumes that people can control how they feel about others. People can only control how they act toward others, and attempting to manufacture or deny emotions leads to all sorts of problems in the long run.

Hierarchy becomes problematic in a range of ways, two of which are that some members impose it against the others’ will or without their input (as with a couple’s privilege), and/or when people claim they have no hierarchy but act in ways that exhibit hierarchy.

Couples Privilege

In many swing settings, the participants agree that the couple is prioritized, so when people act like the couple is the top priority, it is not generally viewed as problematic or as an expression of the couple’s privilege (CP). CP becomes a problem when the relationship is imbalanced, either because the couple uses their united might to prioritize themselves and impose their will on the third person, or they pretend that they have no hierarchy but then actually expect to be prioritized in some way.

This is most often expressed as veto power, in which members of a couple have the right to demand that the other partner end their relationship with someone else who seems threatening or somehow exerts a negative influence on the couple's relationship.

Among many polyamorous communities today, unicorn hunting is perhaps the most disdained form of couples’ privilege. Unicorn hunting is when an established female-male couple approaches polyamorous dating to find a “hot bi babe,” who is an unattached bisexual woman seeking a couple that wants her to just fold into their lives.

The couple’s frequent assumptions that she will have no other partners, come to them to add herself into their lives at their convenience, and then leave when they find her inconvenient represent the essence of couple’s privilege. Many polyamorous folks find the couple’s privilege enraging, personally offensive, and politically inexpedient because it reinforces negative stereotypes about CNM relationships.

Hierarchy in Nonhierarchical Relationships

Legislating how much partners are allowed to love each other, or others, is almost always doomed to fail. But placing boundaries around how people interact with each other is more reasonable. Some groups have attempted to enforce boundaries that require all people to be equally connected, and historically that has not worked well at all.

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The New Tribe of Kerista—a famous CNM group, commune, and household established in San Francisco in 1971 that lasted into the 1990s—attempted to enforce this equality under the label of polyfidelity. It required group members to reject romance in favor of rational equality, have sex only with other Keristans and no one outside of the group, and use a rotating sleep schedule to pair members with each other's “opposite sex” household member.

The community lasted for decades, with love, glee, spite, and discord, crafting their “polyfidelitous communalism” as best they could. Predictably, for pretty much any religious cult formed around a charismatic leader, things got weird and eventually fell apart. The Keristan ideal of polyfidelity, however, remains an active commitment for some people who value the well-being of their "polycule" above any individual relationships within it.

On a smaller scale, many quads have attempted to establish a balance of equal love for everyone, and, at least in my Longitudinal Polyamorous Family Study, that does not appear to work. People love each other in different ways and at different levels, and allowing for those varying levels of connection appears to work far better than attempting to deny or erase them. This can be especially true for blended relationships that include some people who were already together as a couple and then joined a larger relationship.

In truth, however, while these folks claim to be without hierarchy, research indicates that they do establish hierarchies in how they invest their time, money, and cohabitation. That is not to say that they institute emotional or priority hierarchies among their partners, but that their claims of complete equality fall flat in the face of reality.

Research indicates that most people in nonhierarchical CNM relationships do in fact have one partner with whom they tend to spend more time and money, and with whom they are more likely to cohabitate. The people whose relationship structures are most intentionally free of hierarchy are solo polyamorists and relationship anarchists.

Gravitas

Here I use gravitas to mean the depth and gravity of a relationship that grows over long-term interactions. Gravitas can be a feature of any type of relationship and is not limited to, or excluded from, romantic and/or sexual relationships. Rather than claiming a complete lack of hierarchy, it can be more useful for people in CNM relationships to own the fact that their long-term relationships are different because of what they have been through together, and that doesn't have to be bad.

Longer relationships have more gravitas than newer ones, and relationships with greater connectivity will have more importance than more distant ones.

However, that doesn’t have to mean that hierarchy must be imposed on how they treat each other. CNM folks can still avoid veto power, unicorn hunting, or the one-penis policy. Instead, it indicates that partners should be honest with themselves and each other about the forms and types of hierarchy that do in fact exist between and among them, and decide how to manage them forthrightly.