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Key points
- The more people in a group relationship, the more likely it is that some will have non-sexual relationships.
- Polygyny is the longest-lasting group relationship style historically, with one husband and multiple wives.
- Group marriage has fewer rules than polygyny but still focuses on heterosexual relationships.
- Polyamory and relationship anarchy take many different group forms that often focus on equity.
Group relationships focus on a relationship with more than two people in it. People in group relationships will sometimes hang out in, you guessed it, groups with each other. Relationships among members of the groups tend to vary, with some amorous or sexual relationships and other platonic and (ideally) friendly interactions. Occasionally, all members of the group will have amorous relationships with each other, and the smaller the group, the more likely that is (a triad or throuple will have a higher likelihood of completely mutual sexuality than a moresome or polycule with seven or eight people).
Some groups have a clear hierarchy or structure in which partners prioritize some relationships over others, and others do their best to avoid creating any kind of hierarchy. The main consensual nonmonogamy (CNM) identities that match best with the group relationship category are polygamy, group marriage, polyamory, and relationship anarchy. Once again, it is important to note that these are not stages or exclusive categories—one relationship might transition through different categories across its lifespan or exist in more than one category simultaneously, depending on how people structure their lives and boundaries.
Polygamy
Polygamy is marriage to more than one spouse, most often as polygyny, a heterosexual relationship with one man married to multiple women who are not also married to each other. Across history and around the world, polygyny has been more common (especially among wealthy men) than monogamy. Currently, in the United States, polygyny is most commonly associated with religion, either Islam and the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints/Mormons on the conservative side and cults on the counterculture side.
Wives in some polygynous families have access to influencing the choice of their husband, education, paid employment, control over their fertility, and some say in any new wives who might be added to the group. In other polygynous families, very young women or girls marry older men in arranged marriages and have little to no influence over choosing their own husbands. These women are also less likely to be able to access education, paid employment, birth control, or influence over additional wives joining the marriage.
There is a clear hierarchy in polygamous families, with the husband at the top in power and decision-making and the wives arranged beneath. The hierarchy among the wives can depend on many things, including the order of marriage (with the first wife often being the head wife), the motherhood of sons, the husband’s affection, and the women’s personal power and resources. Some families emphasize equity among the wives, taking care to schedule equal time with the husband for each of his spouses. Others have no intention of equality among the wives and, instead, establish a clear flow of authority and decision-making.
Group Marriage
Group marriage is technically polygyny, except that it was mostly a figure of the 1970s and frequently included multiple men and women, with women having relationships with more than one man. Some people still practice group marriage today, but the label is not as common, and people in such group commitments today are more likely to identify as polyamorous or open.
Polygamy and group marriage have too many similarities and differences to list all of them here, but it is worth noting that both are almost always heterosexually focused and involve some sort of hierarchy. Hierarchy is often more fluid among people in group marriages, with fewer rules than polygyny. Many group marriages are built on two existing couples that hooked up with each other and may prioritize the original couples or the group, depending on how participants negotiate their boundaries.
Even with fewer rules, most heterosexual marriages (including group marriages) have a gender hierarchy that involves the women doing far more unpaid labor than the men usually perform. Women’s unpaid labor includes not only cooking, cleaning, parenting, laundry, driving, and practical daily life maintenance but also the kind of emotional labor that tends to spike in high-maintenance relationships like group marriages. Individual relationships certainly vary, and in some groups, people of other genders have far more emotional intelligence than the women with whom they relate. In a patriarchal society, however, all genders but men are lower in the hierarchy—and that will influence how people interact.
Non-Hierarchical Polyamory
Polyamorous relationships are more recent and much queerer than polygynous and group marriages. In a previous blog, I detail five primary differences between polygamy and polyamory. Now in their third incarnation, assisted by Internet connections and social media, polyamorous relationships are much more idiosyncratic than the more structured group relationships. They almost always have the same rules applying to everyone in the relationship regardless of gender, but beyond that they have widely differing expressions of connection, hierarchy, equality, structure, and all the things.
Polyfidelity is an agreement to exclusivity among three or more people who share a closed relationship. The kind of fidelity and type of commitment varies widely, such as triads who agree to sexual exclusivity and have deep, queer, platonic relationships with others, intimate networks of 20 people who share a common STI status (i.e., HIV-free or positive for herpes) and have unprotected sex with each other and use barriers with others, or cross-coupled quads composed of two couples who share partners. Kitchen table polyamory emphasizes equality and mutual reliance among the group members, regardless of their sexual relationships. Some solo polyamorous people really enjoy the group dynamic of kitchen table polyamory because it does not focus on a primary partner, which is something most solo polys do not want.
Often these group relationships do not translate to a permanent orgy, and many people in my research indicate that they primarily have sex with one other person at a time while group sex was more occasional or never. Like other long-term relationships, emotional and practical connections become much more important to building these lasting group relationships. Some non-hierarchical polyamorists categorize their relationships around cohabitation, living with their nesting partners and separately from their non-nesting partners. Cohabitation is not necessarily the hallmark of a more serious relationship, and other elements like location, presence of children, standards of cleanliness, and financial constraints can influence nesting arrangements more than emotional connections.
Some people in non-hierarchical polyamorous relationships are oriented towards that specific group, and if they had not collected as they did, those folks might not be in a group relationship at all, but they ended up connecting with groupish folks and joined in. If that special relationship breaks up, then this kind of group person may or may not seek another group or continue to identify as nonmonogamous. For others, group orientation runs deeper, and they tend to seek out groups more consistently and persistently as an ongoing choice. Often people in that second category continue to think of themselves as group-oriented even if they are not currently partnered with anyone. In other words, some people who identify as polyamorous will continue thinking of themselves as polyamorous even if they are single for the moment. As I mentioned before, this category can wrap around to the individual category with a collection of individuals who eschew hierarchy coming to value each other as a collective.
Relationship Anarchy
Some people in relationship anarchy (RA) configurations prefer to be completely independent, relating as they wish in the moment and allowing for change when the time for transition comes. Others are more attached to a collective that shares mutual care and assistance, may combine housing and daily life tasks, and often hold similar political ideals that prioritize the well-being of the collective above the advantage of any one member. Some RA collectives—a group that expert Mel Cassidy refers to as an anarcule—have both trends happening simultaneously, in that members craft fluid relationships that may shift or change over time, and retain an ongoing connection with each other and their larger group even as individual relationships transition between forms.
For the more philosophical relationship anarchists, personal connections are inherently bound up in their social practice of collective responsibility in a self-governed setting with decentralized power. These RA practitioners are most likely to live with or near communities of people who take similar responsibility for the collective good and wish to share decision-making through processes like consensus. Their relationships may or may not include sexuality or romance, or they may include some element of sex and romance at one point in their association but not necessarily orient around that as the most important component of the interactions.
Mel Cassidy, a nonmonogamy educator and relationship coach specializing in Relationship Anarchy, explains the emphasis on collective interdependence and cautions that “while many might be drawn to explore [RA] as a means to being a 'free agent', it becomes very hard to do that without eventually embracing Relationship Anarchy as a social practice: collectively working towards social equity through creatively challenging hierarchies and centralised power structures, not just in intimate relationships, but also in the wider world… People practicing RA in this way often discover that instead of having the experience of secure attachment with just one or two romantic or intimate partners, they might develop a whole network of secure attachment.”
Cassidy points out that RA’s group orientation goes far beyond CNM to foster empowered, autonomous beings that “thrive best when we're part of real community—and to create real community, we have to take action against the things that stand in the way of community, such as social injustice, economic disparities, disability, and other ways individuals and groups can be marginalized."
So far this blog series has examined relationships founded on individuals, couples, and groups. The final installment of the series explores hierarchy in CNM relationships.
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