It has been a tough new year for non-monogamous people, who have been growing in number while at the same time weathering a cultural backlash. Polyamorous people are stereotyped as “ugly” and “annoying”; gay guys in open relationships are blamed for the death of romance, and as for swingers…well, no-one really talks about them anymore as the term is so 1970s, so groovy, that it’s hard to imagine anyone doing it in 2025 (but perhaps that erasure is itself a form of epistemological violence…) Non-monogamy needed a PR victory, badly, and one has finally come along: according to new research, non-monogamous relationships are just as happy and satisfying as monogamous ones.

The authors of the study, which was published in the Journal of Sex Research, hope that their findings will challenge the idea that monogamy is inherently superior and with it the stigma faced by non-monogamous people (25 per cent of polyamorous people have reportedly experienced discrimination on account of their relationship orientation). 

After carrying out a meta-analysis of 35 different studies, involving 24,000 participants, the researchers concluded that there is no meaningful difference in relationship satisfaction between monogamous and non-monogamous individuals. This holds true whether people are LGBTQ+ or straight and regardless of the type of non-monogamous relationship, with poly people experiencing the same levels of satisfaction as people in open relationships, swingers and the merely “monogamish.”

The flipside is that the research doesn’t find any consistent benefits to opting out of monogamy either: perhaps surprisingly, people in non-monogamous relationships do not experience “significantly” higher levels of sexual satisfaction. Could this revelation dampen the envy and resentment which some monogamous people clearly feel towards people they assume to be having more sex than them? Could it be the beginning of a detente between two warring factions, who clearly have more in common than they realise? Maybe all relationships trend towards sibling-like companionship punctured by perfunctory bouts of missionary, regardless of how many partners you happen to have. Maybe the non-monogamous aren’t all sex-crazed libertines who live in communes and spend their time having drug-fuelled orgies and making their own kimchi, but human beings with ordinary desires and disappointments, just like you and me.