Open relationship dating in the United States

The American scene is not one scene

Published research suggests that roughly one in nine American adults has been in a polyamorous relationship at some point, and that a larger share again has practised some form of consensual non-monogamy. Those numbers are almost certainly conservative. People under-report arrangements that carry professional risk, and in much of the country an open relationship still carries professional risk.

What the national figure conceals is how unevenly non-monogamy is distributed. There is a version of American non-monogamy that is public, organised and socially unremarkable, and it lives in a handful of metropolitan areas. There is another version that is private, careful and organised entirely through closed groups, and it covers most of the map. Both are legitimate and both are represented here, but they call for different approaches to dating.

In the first category are the coastal metros and a scattering of university cities, where community infrastructure has existed for decades. Discussion groups meet on a fixed schedule. Therapists advertise non-monogamy as a specialism rather than treating it as a presenting problem. People are out to their employers. In the second category, which includes most of the South, the Mountain West and the rural Midwest, the community is real but deliberately quiet, and the first question anyone asks a new member is who else knows.

Where American law has actually moved

The United States is, unexpectedly, the country where multi-partner relationships have gone furthest toward formal recognition, and it happened at the municipal level rather than the federal one.

In July 2020 Somerville, Massachusetts became the first city in the country to extend domestic partnership to three or more people. Cambridge passed a comparable ordinance in March 2021, and Arlington followed later that year. The three ordinances were shaped with input from the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, a group formed specifically to push this work forward. In California, Oakland and Berkeley have since passed measures protecting people in polyamorous relationships from discrimination.

The practical reach of these ordinances is narrow. A municipal domestic partnership can affect things like hospital visitation and, in some cases, employer benefits within that city. It does nothing at the state or federal level. But the symbolic weight is real, and the take-up has been steady rather than theatrical: Somerville has registered a few hundred domestic partnerships since 2020, a small but consistent minority of them with more than two members.

The risks that vary by state

Relationship structure is not a protected class under federal law, and only a handful of municipalities have made it one locally. That absence shows up in three places.

• Family court. Custody decisions apply a best interests standard broad enough to let a judge's personal view of your household matter. Outcomes vary sharply between states and between individual judges within a state. This is the single most common reason American members give for keeping a profile discreet.
• Employment. In most states, at-will employment means an employer who objects to your private life has room to act on it. Whether that is likely depends enormously on sector and location.
• Housing and benefits. Multi-adult households can run into problems with occupancy rules, lease terms and benefit eligibility that were written on the assumption of a couple plus children.

None of this is a reason not to date. It is a reason to be deliberate about what appears on a public profile, and it is why our privacy controls are built around the assumption that some members need to be findable by the right people and invisible to everyone else.

What American members actually ask for

Two requests come up more often here than in any other market we operate in. The first is granular privacy: the ability to be visible to people searching within a set radius while staying out of general browsing. The second is clear labelling of what a couple is looking for, driven by a widely shared frustration with couples who present as a unit and then turn out to have very different intentions from each other.

There is also a distinctly American vocabulary problem. Kitchen table polyamory, parallel polyamory, hierarchy, comet relationships and relationship anarchy are all in common use, and members frequently arrive using one word to mean something another member would call the opposite. Profile fields that describe the arrangement in plain sentences, rather than asking people to pick a label, solve more of that than any taxonomy would.