565 - Results Are In: The Largest Non-Monogamy Study

I specifically took out a subsample of our data set. who were currently receiving caregiving because they had some maybe temporary or long-term personal or health issue. So something was happening in their life, maybe it was a recent surgery or maybe it was a chronic illness, but they're currently receiving caregiving.

And I wanted to understand what do their sources of support look like? Do they look different than the people who are not currently receiving caregiving? So among people who are currently receiving caregiving, their partner is their biggest source of instrumental and social support. Port. Right after that is their non-monogamous friends and network of community. They are seeing their non-monogamous. and friends.

strong networks providing them help with everyday chores or tasks, but then also people that they can rely on emotionally.

Welcome to the Multi-Emory Podcast. I'm Jace. I'm Emily. And I'm Dedeker. We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past. Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here. On this episode of the Multi-Emery Podcast, we're looking at some brand new data hot off the presses from the Open 2025 Community Survey Report.

The largest survey of non-monogamous people to date, and we're super excited to be joined by Dr. Amy Moores, the lead researcher, and Brett Chamberlain from Open. Brett Chamberlain is the founder and executive director of Open, a grassroots nonprofit, advancing legal rights and cultural acceptance for non monogamy. We've had him on the show a couple times already.

Under his leadership, Open has passed some landmark non-discrimination protections in multiple cities and established itself as a leading voice in the rapidly growing movement for relationship freedom. Over the past decade, Brett has led global grassroots campaigns reaching millions, including the Emmy-winning documentary film The Story of Plastic. Spoiler alert, it's not a very happy story.

So and then with that we have Dr. Amy Moores as well. Dr. Amy C. Moores is an associate professor of psychology and faculty affiliate in engineering at Chapman University. She serves as a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and the founding co chair of the American Psychological Association's Division forty four, Committee on Consensual Non Monogamy, which we've also talked about before on this show.

Dr. Morse has published more than sixty journal articles and dozens of educational materials on topics related to sexuality and consensual non-monogamy. and has received several awards for her pioneering research on polyamory, swinging, and other forms of consensually non-monogamous relationships.

We've done so many studies from Amy on this show before. I feel like almost every single time we're pulling studies in, your name appears on one of those. So Dr. Amy Morris, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Yay. Always a pleasure to be here.

All right, so I want to jump right into this and start off with uh Brett and Amy, tell us a little bit about why doing this kind of research is even important at all. Obviously we love research, but tell all of us, what's the point? Why why does this matter? So research into non monogamy is important for a number of reasons. First, it helps us understand some really important and foundational information about nominogamy.

really basic questions that we didn't have much insight into even ten years ago, prior to some of Amy's research, like how many people are non-monogamous? That's a really important starting point for understanding the population that we're serving and that we're organizing around. From there, it's really important to dive into and understand the actual experiences of people practicing non monogamy. How do they identify themselves in terms of their nommonogamous practice?

How long do people tend to practice non-monogamy? What do their relationships look like? And then critically, what are their experiences, both positive? How does nominogamy fulfill their lives? What motivates them to participate in it? What benefits do they enjoy from it? But also what are some of the challenges and barriers, particularly as folks rub up against a society that really continues to stigmatize and other these forms of relationships?

From there, that data really helps us tell the story of non-monogamy and non-monogamous people. It ensures that the presentation in the media is founded in reality. And it also helps substantiate our demands for greater rights and protections by allowing us to point to the very real and prevalent experiences of stigma and discrimination. And then finally, one of the reasons that Open does this research is that it really helps us understand what folks want to see from a group like Open.

We really consider ourselves to be a service-oriented nonprofit. We really want to be responding to the needs, to the values of the community that we serve. And so this is a really important opportunity every year for us to really touch base and be in conversation with the population that we strive to serve.

Awesome. And then Amy, what about for you? What inspired you to get into researching this in the first place and and to keep doing it, right? That you didn't just do a one-off and said, that was cool. What keeps you going with this?

Yeah, I've been in the position and a really fortunate position to make this my entire career. So for the past Over fifteen years now I've been studying the lives of people who practice consensual non-monogamy. And it started with probably like delusional optimism and naivativity as a really young scientist. I thought the goal of science was to study human behavior for what it is and document it and record it. And I think we're all told that.

And I want to believe that's true and I still do, but it turns out there's like hierarchies in science and there's biases and unfortunately a lot of scientists are not necessarily objective. It's it's a hard status to hold. especially when we're grown up and we have certain types of media or culture. And so one of the reasons why I think this research is really important is it kind of help course correct, a really long discourse in

psychology and the social sciences more broadly, this idea that monogamy is a human universal, that everyone's striving to do it, that people do it and animals and mammals and everyone does it. But when you take a closer look at the science and you really start to study people's behaviors And you also ask the right types of questions in the right type of medium, like an anonymous survey. Maybe people are gonna be more likely to be honest about things that are societally taboo.

we start to understand that a whole bunch of people are engaging in non monogamy and we get to learn a lot more about Science and ultimately throw a lot of theories over on their heads that were built on this idea that humans are universally monogamous.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a lot of why we started doing this show in the first place too, is just to show, hey, this is a normal thing and also not something that we have to do in the shadows or something that's just about what you do in the bedroom. you know, for some people it could be that, but to kinda say, Hey, it's not all that one way. So I love that and I'm glad that we're all here and that we were able to work together on this study.

Right. This was definitely a dream come true for multiamory. We've wanted to do a study for quite a while. And so the fact that we had the opportunity to sponsor this and to be involved in the creation of it. And now talking about it afterward is really, really cool for us. So was this actually the largest study on non monogamy to date? My best guess is yet.

Yes, I do think so. I also collaborate with another researcher, Justin Voskowski, and he has a really large international data set. I think this it's not necessarily competition. I do think this one is a little bit larger. Not a competition, but if it were we probably won. Yeah. Okay. Good. It's certainly the largest of open surveys. We've run this survey every year since our founding in twenty twenty two, making the twenty twenty five survey our fourth annual survey.

And the responses we've collected have grown every single year from five hundred responses in that first year to over fifty eight hundred responses this year. So that size of a data set really ensures that the larger data set means that we can have a greater degree of confidence that the data we're collecting is really representative of the actual population and experiences of non-monogamous people all across the world.

And Amy, can you talk a little bit about how the participants were gathered and then what the demographics tended to look like? Sure. So we did a convenience sampling. This is really common when you work with Any sort of population where you have to target them. So we have to make it known.

Hey, do you identify with or practice consensual non-monogamy? There are different recruitment samplings where you don't have to make it known, but it's really important for this type of study so that we can reach people all over the world. We recruited on lots of different platforms, most widely on open's listserv. Brett contacted a growing list of people who follow his social medias and the organization's socials.

We recruited through your good podcast. We recruited through an in-app experience that Field pushed to some of its users who practice non-monogamy. At the end of the survey, we also asked participants, is there anyone else you'd like to share this with? Copy and paste this and send it to other people? So all of you almost 6,000 people, if you're listening to this, please give yourself a pat on the back. Thank you for participating and volunteering your time to take part in this science.

This work is hard to do, it's hard to reach people, it's also nearly impossible to get funding from state or government sources to compensate participants for their time. So it's just really wonderful to see this community support a volunteering their time to take part in science.

That's awesome. And can you talk to us a little bit about the journey? How did you get into becoming the leading researcher in the world on this specifically? And then how did you specifically get into studying this population? Sure, I'll try to make it brief, but gather around my treasure hems. Uh the short version of the long story is it was honestly an accident. I went to a master's program and I really wanted to study LGBTQ issues.

I had always been aligned of doing research that can change policy and the population that I deeply cared about at a young age was the LGBTQ community. And another student and I tried to do an online survey related to LGBTQ issues. We were at a degree granting institution that was a bit conservative, and so we weren't supposed to ask about people's sexual orientation as That makes a survey really hard to do. Um if you can't identify the population.

As one workaround, we asked people describe the type of relationship you're in. And then we thought, Great, people will describe their own gender, they'll describe who they're dating and then you know, we recruited on all of these different listservs to try to get a large number of queer people to take part in the study. And when we looked at this open ended question, it turns out that a lot of queer people were describing multiple partners and

This was the mid-2000s. It was the first time I even heard the word polyamory. I was familiar with the idea of open relationships and swinging, and like any, I guess astute young scientist, I go to the literature and I try to understand more about polyamory and the intersection of that and LGBTQ issues.

and there are less than a handful of studies. And my curiosity was piqued and it just kind of grew from there. I had a great mentor in graduate school in a later degree and when I earned my doctorate. who really supported this research. It was a big part of her work and I've just

never stop studying non monogamy. I think it's really interesting to study the human experience. That's great. I mean we've we've definitely noticed a big difference in terms of just the amount of literature out there about it. Since we started this show eleven years ago, ish, well maybe a little more than eleven years now, and

There was barely anything at first. Kinda like you mentioned when you first were trying to look into this and there were just like a handful of studies, but there wasn't very much yet. Come to now, there's quite a bit more. Still a lot less than there is of researching monogamous relationships.

Usually research that just says relationships, but they actually mean monogamous relationships because of those assumptions like you mentioned that researchers just assume, oh, that's what people mean when they say relationships. But it's been great to see that grow over time and we're we're glad that you were part of that and helping that to t increase and grow.

So let's get into this particular study here a little bit. So this one was not about polyamory exclusively. This was about non-monogamy in general, consensual non-monogamy in general. So looking at the data from this about how people identify, what types of relationships did they identify with, can you tell us a little bit about what we found? So I appreciate you flagging that this survey was about

Or I should say study because in fact this year it was IRB approved. That means it was approved by a institutional ethics research board. Which means that this really like counts now as formal academic research. Uh Amy will be publishing some of her findings in an academic journal, meaning that this in a different way than previous years

surveys really kind of counts towards that growing corpus of academic knowledge about nominogamy. So forgive that diversion for a moment. But we really did focus on nominogamous populations across the board. And That's very important to open's mission as as a whole, first of all. We've really strived to take a big tent approach, recognizing that there are myriad ways that people describe and define their own practice of non-monogamy.

And while there are meaningful and important differences between those various practices or identities, you know, ultimately we have much more in common that unites us. Certainly in terms of our experiences, but also in terms of our needs for greater understanding, greater acceptance, greater rights and protections, the very work that motivates open. So when we look at the range of

identities that people use to describe themselves, we collected over a hundred different terms. Wow. Certainly you see a wide prevalence of Labels like polyamory or the more generic ethical or consensual non monogamy, relationship anarchy shows up very high on the list.

But there are countless phrases that people like to use from garden party polyamory to monogamish to a triad to polyfidelity and so on. So it really demonstrates Just the diversity of practices or identities within that big tent of non monogamy. Yeah, Amy, was there anything that stood out to you in terms of the responses we got back? Anything that was surprising to you or was it all very consistent with what you've seen in your other research, in terms of the labels people chose?

It's consistent with my previous research, as well as people who've been studying non-monogamy a lot longer than me, people like Eli Shaf. My best sense is why people who practice polyamory tend to take part in research more is because they are likely to be more identifiable, meaning Reddit. subgroups dedicated specifically to polyamory or Facebook groups with that identity.

My guess is other forms of non monogamy like an open marriage or monogamous are probably more common. It's just not necessarily a central of maybe an identity or a salient to people. And so closeted. Right. Absolutely. That too. And so they can sometimes be harder to identify to take part in research. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And that's something that is I think really interesting about studying nonmonogamy is That of how there's

not kind of just this one community of everybody all together. That there are kind of these disparate communities and places like Open are trying to encourage us to come together more and and unite more on the things we have in common than the things that make us different. But

Yeah, it is it is a struggle that there are these very different communities and so how do you find how do you find all these people to to do research? It's been easy. It's been abreast. I don't know what you're talking about. So easy. Yeah.

There was another section of the study that asked participants about how important nonmonogamy is to their life. Can you talk a little bit about what you saw in those responses? Aaron Powell This was a new question that was asked in this year's survey, and I'm so glad that it was included because I think that the response illustrates something really important.

By and large, people report that nominogamy is very important to them. Specifically about seventy percent, just over seventy percent of people responded that nominogamy was very important or extremely important to them. I think that this really illustrates a number of important points. The first is just the centrality of relationship to the human experience. regardless of how you're structuring a relationship.

And certainly non monogamy often means more relationships, a broader array of relationships, I think less constraint in terms of the the roles or forms that relationships are expected to take compared to mononormative society. But it also I think illustrates that those relationships, you know, within non monogamy can be incredibly rewarding. And finally, it illustrates that non-monogamy is for many people a core part of their identity. You know, as Amy was just alluding to, for some people.

And some practices generally some populations, some subpopulations of nomadogamy can be more of a practice, a lifestyle, a thing that I do. But for many people, as this data evidences, nonmonogamy is a very core part of their identity. And one of the reasons that's important to open in our work to organize around this.

is that we really want to activate the non monogamous population, n not only for our own rights and protections, but as I've shared on this podcast before, we wanna see that constituency mobilize to really turn up for intersecting and overlapping movements. And I think that, you know, there's a theory within kind of social organizing that people will tend to mobilize around the identity that is most important to them.

So if we can activate people around their non monogamous identity, we can engage them as a really powerful constituency, not only again for our own rights and protections, but also for for others, for our neighbors, for our peers, for our siblings and so on. Yeah, I I actually found that looking at that

part of the study was surprising. And w I don't know if it should have been surprising to me or not, as someone who clearly this is very important to me and have done a podcast about it for a long time. But I I was actually surprised at how high that number was, of how important this was to people, especially when you think about this being across all different forms of non-monogamy. Like if you were to just talk about polyamory, I think it would make sense to me that number would be that high.

But when we're including also more like kink, BDSM, or swinging or or monogamous type relationships, that it's still important to people. And I think that's really valuable and important to include when we talk about this, that this isn't just Oh, like I also LARP on the side. It's like, no, this is like a core part of who I am and something that's really important to my identity.

Sorry, sorry if you really strongly identify with LARPing. I shouldn't have said that one. That's I c I could see what you're strongly identifying with LAP.

But clearly relationships in general I think for anyone do tend to be some of the most important parts of their lives, whether that's with friends or romantic relationships. And so it makes sense to me that regardless of where you put yourself on the non monogamous spectrum, whether you're don't ask, don't tell, or kitchen table polyamory, that within that you would still find it to be extremely important in your life.

Absolutely. And that's a good segue, I think, into talking about openness, right?'Cause this is a really important part of people's lives, but something we've talked about on this show a lot is the challenge of

You know, with with whom can you be open about it? Who can you talk to about it? What are your resources? And we're gonna get into that a little bit more and what we found in the study. But first we're gonna take a quick break to talk about some sponsors for this show. They do really help support us. And that in turn helps us support things like this study. And what supports us most of all is anyone who does subscribe directly to our community, which you can do at multiamory.com.

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And let's talk about openness. So this question has come up since the very early days of our podcast about how out

should you be? How out is it safe to be? How open should you be about this identity with people? And this is something that I think is a daily thing that non monogamous people need to think about. Not just a decision you make once, but I find for myself every single interaction almost at work with new people that I meet anywhere, there's always this little bit of a background process that has to run about, okay, do I say

partner here? Do I just say girlfriend? Do I say friend to just not even get into the conversation? Do I sort of collapse multiple people's stories into one sort of person who's this person I'm dating. Like what do I do about that? And I think this comes up a lot in our daily conversations. And so looking at this study, there were questions about how open people are in various parts of their life.

And I thought that was really cool getting to see the range of openness there. And so Amy, could you tell us a little bit about what we found from this in terms of how open people are? How does that compare in different parts of their lives? Sure thing. So we used a measure that's really popular among people who are part of the LGBTQ community to assess uh the amount of openness or another way put in the signs we call disclosure. And so

We asked people about a variety of different kind of categories of people. So are you open to your immediate family, coworkers? Your older term friends who practice monogamy. So maybe people you went to elementary school with or high school, these longer term friends.

Uh what about friends who practice non monogamy? Are you out on social media? Do you tell strangers? So we were able to get a wide variety of these different categories, and as you can imagine, they're gonna vary greatly depending on, you know, different circumstances. It's funny, when Brett and I were talking about the results, we kind of see them in a different way, even though they're the exact same results.

And Brett is a remarkably optimistic person, but he was a little bit less optimistic maybe than I was, where I look at the results and I'm like, wow, uh broadly almost half of people Or, you know, close to half of people are extremely out, meaning definitely these people know their friends who practice monogamy, their friends who practice non monogamy on social media, maybe not with strangers, but parents, siblings, their children.

And then the lowest categories are strangers, extended family, where these people definitely do not know. So this was a scale that varied from definitely knows to definitely does not know and then some degree of variance where they might be sure but we don't talk about it and so things like that.

So I guess to briefly sum up my my take, it seems that people are sharing this information with most certain sorts of categories with people, but at the same time there is a lot of room for you know, telling people if you want, or another way put, uh there are a lot of people who don't know and there's probably very warranted reasons why these categories of people don't know this information in someone's life.

And Brett, what's your different take on it? I was like, What can you talk about your pessimism in this part of the study? I was surprised to hear myself referred to as an optimist. Thank you. Very charitable with that, Amy. One of my personal mantras is often a attributed to this Italian communist and it's pessim of the intellect, optimism of the will. So perhaps this was my a pessimistic intellectual assessment that allows for my optimistic who will of trying to organize around it.

Aaron Powell What I see i i c certainly it's true that people are you know, there are large chunks of people that are disclosing uh and are quite open with large chunks of their life and very important parts of their life, right? Their friends, their family, and so on. And I also see that many people in many domains of their life are not open. And I think it's important to illustrate what that experience of of not openness can look like. And Jace, you spoke to this a little bit, but

to kinda go deeper, right? There's the sort of classic example of you're standing around the water cooler at at work on a Monday or or contemporarily perhaps you're in the all team channel in Slack. And people are asking what you did that weekend and you were with your girlfriend, who is not your wife.

who your coworkers don't know about. And there is that calculus of do you lie, do you self-censor? And there's an intellectual burden that comes from that. And there's also like this real kind of part of your soul, your spark that like gets a little smushed. to not be able to be fully open and share. Then there's also the calculus of like, what if I get caught, right? What if I'm out for dinner with that girlfriend and my boss or coworker sees me and now they think I'm having an affair?

What if you disclose to a trusted coworker friend, but not your boss because you know that your boss would not be supportive? Well, now you have to worry about the containment of that information. And I think that those last couple e examples in particular really illustrate how if you're not fully open with everyone and like feel safe being open.

you're kind of not really out at all because there's always gonna have to be that wall, that border around who knows and who doesn't that has to be maintained. And again, that can create a r a real burden on people. Amy has done some research that perhaps you can speak to Amy about the implications of that self censoring. Right.

Ample research, mine included, shows that when we kind of keep parts of ourselves a secret, especially things that are important, like we just talked about how the centrality of people's non-monogamous identity was very important to a lot of people. When we keep those parts a secret, it can create internalized stress and psychological conflict.

A few years ago I coined what the term is. It's a mouthful, but it's scientifically accurate. It's internalized consensual non-monogamy negativity. Another way put, it's self-stigma. So when We grow up in a society that prioritizes monogamy and prioritize like I don't know I don't even know if that quite captures it. Like the entire legal system is set up to benefit monogamy and you know, all social norms. Prioritize doesn't seem quite, I don't know, intense enough of a word. Yeah.

And so when you grow up in that society that really stigmatizes, shames, degrades. any form of relationship, whether it be single or non-monogamy or multi you know, whatever, you can start to internalize that. And that's this self-stigma that I'm talking about. And disclosure is a big part of that. Who to come out to. It takes a lot of cognitive energy to make those decisions. It takes a lot of cognitive energy to hold on to it.

And then not surprisingly, people with these high levels of internalized consensual non-monogamy negativity, it's linked with higher levels of depression, anxiety, and then also relationship conflict and stress. So it can even spill into people's multiple relationships when they have multiple partners.

The caveat though, and we'll probably talk about this more, we started to dance around it at the beginning, sometimes it's really not safe for people to talk about it. So I don't want to present that research finding and be like, you're gonna find peace if you were to just let everyone know in your life you do this. Because there can be consequences that are, you know, social reputation or legal or financial for people as to why they have to keep this a secret.

Yeah, and so something that I did want to bring up. before we get into the stigma and discrimination piece of it, because that is very important, is something that I haven't really seen in research. And I think something that I hope we can get more of in the future. Maybe, maybe we can all make a note of this for next year if we do this again. Is

In terms of people's openness in these different areas, is looking at also the reasons why people might not be open and Something that I found has come up for me that's that's changed having been non monogamous for a longer time, is that at first it was much more about

Yeah, maybe fear of judgment. And there's certain areas where I think I still have some of that fear. Like with work based things, right? Like there's kinda still that I don't know if I just wanna mess with this at all. Even if I don't have like an acute fear. So I think one is sort of this like, is it that I want to avoid the trouble or is it that I have a real fear of consequences? Right. And I can speak for myself as someone who did manage to get my work to pass

their own anti discrimination update to include the family and relationship structure. That's the thing that, you know, open's really fighting to get more legislations to do at the, you know, city government level. But, you know, I was able to get my work to add that. And they were very open to it. The HR was super welcoming of it. All of that. They were like, We didn't even realize that wasn't a protected class. Well, of course. Yeah, let's put that in.

So like I'm I'm in a very privileged place there with work, right? I'm not fearful of losing my job over it, but still that kind of like, I don't want this to be like a thing that's coloring how certain people think about me or that could be awkward in certain situations or that kind of thing. And then I would say even a step down from that is there's times where, like with strangers,

Where I'm just like, I'd rather not bring it up because I don't wanna have to explain. I don't have the energy to spend an extra twenty minutes explaining to you all this stuff and answering your questions. So I'm curious Hopefully in the future we can get more into that of kind of like what are the reasons for people and how much is that

I just don't wanna waste my time explaining all this to you and how much is real fear and how much is more that in between fear of like, uh, I just don't want them to like be weird to me about this. Not that I actually fear a real consequence, but like that middle ground. So I'm not sure if you're aware of any research that specifically looked at that, but that's something I don't feel like I've really seen before.

No, I'm completely unaware of research. I'm gonna make a note this time next year. We'll have answers. Awesome. I love excellent. The way that we frame this question in the survey is stigma or discrimination, right? And there are important differences between stigma and discrimination, right? So stigma tends to be more social, tends to be more more soft, albeit still consequential, right? It's a

Snarky comment, it's it's judgment, whereas discrimination tends to be more, you know, m materially consequential, right? It's like being fired from your job, being denied a rental application, and so on. But those things bleed into one another. And the stigma informs the discrimination.

And part of the decision to self censor or to not be fully open is because like you don't know where it's gonna fall down on that line. So yeah, maybe it could be that your coworker makes a snarky comment that you're gonna steal his wife or whatever. Maybe it's that you get dragged before HR the next day and you get fired. And that's one of the reasons it is important that we have these explicit protections.

even when the experiences of discrimination may be less common, right? You you might work in a very open workplace and have bosses who end up being very supportive, as was the case with your employer, Jace. But if you don't know, I think people could be very forgiven for just choosing not to roll the dice every time.

Absolutely. That's yeah. Very much how I feel a lot of the time of like, I just this isn't a person I'm gonna get close enough with that I don't wanna bother. It's just not worth it. And that's that's definitely a thought that has to come up pretty often. In every Uber ever, I still work in the plastic pollution nonprofit sector.'Cause I just easier going to the airport at five AM. Oh, we have different Uber experiences. They love hearing about your research.

Oh it makes the best bar talk. I'm friends with so many random people on my socials. Nice. Even talking about the show, sometimes I'm like we do research backed relationship advice for relationships, not necessarily non monogamous relationships or an emphasis on non-traditional relationships. You know, they could Google any one of us, certainly, and h look it up and actually see what we're all about. But sometimes I agree that you have to take that risk or not.

Can you two talk about specifically what the study showed about stigma and discrimination amongst the non monogamous populations? So here's the headline. 60% of non-monogamous people report an experience of stigma or discrimination in at least one area of their life over the course of their lifetime. And importantly, that number increases for people who hold other marginalized identities. So you're more likely to report an experience of stigma or discrimination if you are

trans or hold another LGBTQ identity as opposed to being cis or straight. You're more likely to experience stigma or discrimination if you are a woman or nonbinary or gender fluid as opposed to being a man. more likely to experience stigma and discrimination if you are a person of color, as opposed to to white. So we asked people if they've experienced stigma and discrimination on the basis of their engagement or identifying with non-monogamy. So it had to be really related to that.

And then we ask them in the past year,'cause our memory kind of works like that. We can remember what's happening in the past year. And then we ask them also within their lifetime. And so as Brett was just articulating, we asked in all of these different sectors, so have you experienced stigma and discrimination on the basis of your engagement in non monogamy or identifying with non monogamy in

housing, so wanting to rent or buy a home or in government services or social settings maybe from friends'cause it can take all of these different shapes and form. And across the board, unfortunately, most of our participants have experienced stigma or discrimination in all of these different settings. Yeah, I thought that this was particularly interesting seeing the amount of people who reported specifically having experienced some kind of

stigma or discrimination just in the past year, actually. And that's that's a little bit lower number. It's forty percent on average, which still to me is really high for just within the last year. Uh when you think about the amount over your whole life, but just within the last year it would be that much. And it was interesting looking at the areas where that shows up too, where the highest areas where that occurred was in social and family or community settings.

followed by healthcare, which is getting a little more dire, I think. to employment and government services actually being the least, but the consequences for those maybe arguably are higher. So it's kind of this interesting like risk reward calculation I could see going on of like, maybe my odds of actually experiencing discrimination at work are low, but if that happens, that's a pretty significant Thing versus

my friend making a rude comment or something like that. Not that that doesn't hurt a lot too, and not that that isn't negatively affecting our psychological well being. Um, but it's it's just interesting to me to look at kind of It seemed almost like this inverse relationship between the amount of stigma and discrimination to how life-changingly bad that outcome could be from that discrimination. Does that make sense what I'm trying to say there?

It absolutely does. And and in fact we have a theory for why that is. So we did a cross analysis, right? Where we we looked at how open people were comprehensively across all of the areas of their life, right? We basically totaled up their responses to all those different domains, called that their openness score. And then we correlated that with the likelihood of them reporting an experience of stigma or discrimination in at least one area. And

It's a pretty straight line. You can see the scatter plot on the the report and open to website. And what this suggests is that the more open people are, the more likely they are to experience stigma or discrimination. And this informs the decisions that people are making about their openness. And this, you know, returns to the conversation we were just having, right? Because the consequences are potentially so high in the workplace, people are far less likely to be open in the workplace.

Yeah. And as a result, they are less likely to experience stigma or discrimination in the workplace. But these experiences are are are still happening. So looking at that particular domain, we did see that about six and a half percent of people report an experience of discrimination in the workplace, such as being denied a promotion, fired, or not hired. And about three percent reported that within the last year.

Now it's tempting, I think, to say, oh well three percent that's nothing, right? That that's a rounding error. But if we consider the size of the non monogamous population, right, folks hopefully listeners are are by now familiar with the kind of four to five percent of American adults figure that originates, of course, from Amy's research, we're talking about millions of adults.

And if we're talking about three percent of them experiencing, you know, again, being denied a promotion, being fired, losing your healthcare on the basis of this relationship, you know, we're talking about very, very consequential experiences that thousands of adults are facing every year.

And I think you hit a key point there in terms of how out people are in different areas.'Cause I am realizing that if you did look at it in terms of the percentages of people being open to work supervisors, for example, that the third smallest category after religious leaders and landlords or housing providers in terms of who you're open to. So if you look at it that way, you could even make the argument of that three percent's actually really high based on how few people are even out to work.

That's another way to look at that as well. That might be something worth doing some more cross analysis on. My brain's already itching to pull up those numbers and see see if I can find what happens if you weight those discrimination experiences in those areas against the openness. in general in those areas and see how those percentages change.

'Cause it actually might paint a very different story in that case. We may actually see other family settings are actually less than employment or something when you base that on how open people are.'Cause when it comes to their families, people actually are more than half

open, right? Like more than half of people said that they were to some degree open. And so that's definitely very different from the, I forget what it is, like 12% or something that said that their landlord might know about this. Right. So that's a very different relationship that we have.

You're really revealing yourself to be a data nerd through this process, Jason. I I am. You have no idea. Yeah, very much. I'm like, oh, I'm actually gonna work on a paper about this serious topic. I love that.

So because of this, how should non monogamous individuals and the organizations that support them balance this desire for things like advocacy and fighting for rights? with this very real risk of blowback and discrimination and this overall kind of fear of stigma.

Sure. You know, th there's a real strategic challenge there, and that is that In order to make the case that non-monogamous people are members of your community that are experiencing these negative outcomes, we need people opening up about their identities and sharing their stories in order to build power and pass these laws and protection. And without protections, people are understandably very averse to opening up about their identity.

That's why one of the first things that we really do at Open is encouraging people to open up about their identities if it is safe for them to do so. And it's very important to acknowledge that that is not the case for everyone. Again, particularly for individuals with intersecting marginalized identities.

But if you enjoy a relative degree of social safety based on your identities, based on the material conditions and your class position and so on, Having those conversations can be incredibly impactful to helping to chip away the stigma and make it safer for other people to follow. Mm. It also points to the importance of advocacy within

professional organizations, for example. You referred earlier, Jace, to the experience of stigma and discrimination in healthcare and in mental healthcare settings, which is surprisingly high. There are dozens of people that reported in the the narrative response section to this question on our survey. about being denied an STI test. By a doctor who knows that the person is married and therefore shouldn't need one. Same for vaccinations for things like HPV.

or mental health care providers saying, Oh, you're polyamorous. Well clearly this is an indicator of some underlying mental illness, or this is the source of all your problems, and if you could just have a normal relationship, your life would be fine. Now, luckily, the medical association and the mental health care profession are highly professionalized organizations, right? And so there's a real opportunity for professional advocacy groups within the APA or the AMA.

to really bring these conversations forward to their members and to help use continuum education and so on to really help people that maybe graduated from therapy school or got their degree, you know, decades ago before nominogamy was quite as well understood. Kind of catch them up to where we're at now in these conversations. Yeah.

Absolutely. And I mean it's I think a step toward that. I mentioned a little bit earlier on with the Division forty four of the Committee on Consensual Non Monogamy within the American Psychological Association, within the APA. And so hopefully that can continue and that through the like continuing education, we can actually get more of these people to understand.

I think it's I've definitely seen that improve within the mental health world just from the stories that we hear as multiamory in terms of people's therapists being more likely to at least have Some awareness of it? Yeah, even if they don't really know how to talk to it, at least they're kind of aware, oh, this thing by itself isn't a problem.

We still, of course, hear stories of people that do run into that issue where their therapist just doesn't get it or tries to blame everything on that. But I do feel like that's at least improving and hopefully we can keep pushing that. I don't know if you have any other updates to give us, Amy, since you're on that committee. Yeah. I oh, that's my beloved committee. I actually just rotated off a couple of months ago, so I'm no longer the co chair. I'm still actively a part of it, but

Alien, a lot of the work that we do there is try to translate research that's been done to a clinical audience. So to make, you know, recommendations about how to work with clients and then do a lot of what's called continuing education credits.

So anyone who needs to maintain licensure, whether it's for a psychology professional society or social work, you have to earn a certain amount of credit hours and many of us in the committee will host those workshops and do those continuing education workshops, often for free, m actually pretty much always for free. To try to get a wide set of therapists or trainees a part of it so they can start to understand basic knowledge about non monogamy and

be more comfortable about when to refer out. So if they don't actually have the knowledge, they r refer the person to someone else in a really kind way that doesn't seem like dismissive or I can't deal with you, things like that.

And so we're working on that and one of the big things that I know the new chairs are gonna work on are they're both clinicians, the new incoming chairs are gonna work on more treatments and techniques for working with non monogamous populations that are really tailored to them, not just these other things that we take and adapt for non-monogamous populations. Yeah, I love that. That's great.

Yeah, we're always looking for more, you know, interventions and things to be able to talk about.'Cause I feel like we're often on the other side of that of taking research or like psychological interventions and then translating them into more everyday. How can you apply that in your everyday life? And so I love I love that we can go back and forth and kinda learn from experiences on both sides. That's awesome.

So with that, let's go into a little bit of what we can do from here, what we learned from this study and how we can all be part of making this change that we're talking about. So we're gonna take another quick break to talk about our sponsors for this show. Please do give those a listen and use the promo codes in our description. That does help support our show. And then of course you can join our community at multiamory.com slash

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So to move on, the survey asked people to prioritize what movements they think are most important within this community. And the top two priorities ranked by respondents were passing laws to protect non monogamous relationships and individuals, and then also creating media, cultural events, and more that normalize nonmonogamy. So with all that

What's the current legislative landscape for non-discrimination and legal recognition? And what is the single most actionable recommendation that maybe you, Brett, would give to an individual who really wants to support all of these efforts?

Sure. So those two priorities that people indicated, right, in shorthand are rights and acceptance. And those are right there in our mission statement. And this has been consistently what people have been asking for year over year as we've asked this question. specifically in terms of the rights and protections piece, that's really one of the key pieces of Open's work. That is our our legislative advocacy, which at this phase is pushing for municipal level non-discrimination protections.

on the basis of family or relationship structure. So this would effectively expand existing civil rights protections within a city's code. to include that additional phrase, family or relationship structure. Relationship structure obviously accounts for non-monogamy.

Family structure, you know, reinforces that, but it also picks up a range of non-nuclear or non-normative family structures that currently also don't benefit from protections, things like multi-generational families, blended families with stepparents and stepkids. in addition to multiparent or multi partner families. So it really expands the coalition and recognizes the ways that people are forming not just relationships, but also families today.

As listeners may be aware, there are now four cities in the U.S. that have these protections in place. starting with Cambridge and Somerville, which passed them in twenty twenty three, followed by Berkeley and Oakland in twenty twenty four. And Open has really made this a a centerpiece of our work over the course of the last couple of years.

I'm very pleased to share that we are close to celebrating victories in a a few more cities and perhaps some of the largest cities we will have seen pass these protections yet. We have a commitment to introduce the bill in Portland, Oregon, which we hope to see pass, you know, within the first half of twenty twenty six.

And actually on the date that I think this episode is coming out, we will be seeing the final passage of the productions in Olympia, Washington, and we hope to see Seattle not not far behind. There's a handful of other cities across the country that we're working on as well, but that's really the the front edge of things.

In terms of what people can do, you know, as I mentioned earlier, having a conversation about your own non monogamous practice or identity, and if it's safe for you to do so, is a really important part of the way that we can advance understanding and acceptance. On the advocacy side, we really encourage people to leverage some of Open's resources to start these conversations about non discrimination protections in your own city. So if you visit our website, open love.org.

you can find the legislative toolkit under the resources section. And that's a pretty comprehensive guide to how you can go about passing non-discrimination protections, which we developed together with our coalition partners at the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition. Now if that feels like too much to bite off, there's myriad of other

smaller ways that people can get engaged. So for example, going to your library and filling out the form and asking them to add great non monogamy resources like, I don't know, multi emory, essential tools for modern relationships to their catalog. You know, it's it's really about identifying an area i in your life or in your community uh where you think that there could be a little bit of a wider open door for diverse forms of family and relationship to be included.

I would definitely second those resources at open-love.org. The one for getting your workplace to introduce protections is the resources that I used when going to my workplace about that. So definitely recommend checking all of that out as well. Or if you work in HR, even better. Go apply this yourself. Just go do it right now. Amazing. And going back to the survey responses, Amy, can you tell us a little bit more about what you noticed in this area as well?

Sure. Our participants and the good people who took part in our survey really were skilled at kind of making recommendations about how to move things forward in addition to giving us recommendations. Brett, I've kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but if we start to think about Issues related to people who practice nonmonogamy. So whether they be workplace issues or interacting with mental or physical health care facilities.

If we start to frame and think about these things as not just a singular issue that it only affects people with multiple partners or only affects people who practice non-monogamy, and we start to coalition build We can probably make a lot of movement. I'll give one example. The idea of the way that healthcare is set up in the US. You basically can bring a domestic partner or a a legally married spouse onto one's plan.

But if someone were to get on a committee at maybe the state level, federal level, or maybe just at one's workplace,'cause workplaces can also grant health insurance however they please as a private entity.

And start to argue that the way that the healthcare system is set up at a given organization disenfranchises single people and then By making that logic, you can also start to point out, well, actually that could maybe disenfranchise people who have step families or are in these in betweens and you can basically change policy or law that benefits people who practice non-monogamy by thinking broader than outside of

Just the needs because what's disenfranchising that population is also probably disenfranchising other populations like blended families, step families, or people who are single and maybe want their sibling on their health insurance policy. So our participants were Several of them were indirectly kind of making these recommendations and also the way that we worded the questions.

In the close-ended portion, we wanted to understand what should we be prioritizing at the intersection of non-monogamy and these other important topics that are just intrinsically linked, like like sexuality or LGBTQ issues or women's rights issues.

Awesome. So we're really excited that we got to be part of this study and we really hope that we can continue to be involved with this in the future and continue to expand this research that we're doing. So As we're imagining the coming year and the years after that, are there any other areas from this survey or other research, maybe things we've talked about today, that you're particularly looking forward to researching in the future?

Yeah, so many things. Brett and I recently finished a second report from this survey.

So for those of you who took the survey, we asked you a lot about how satisfied you are with your life and if you were confined to your bed because you were sick, who was gonna bring you food? And so these are types of questions that are under the umbrella in the social sciences of factors of resilience or well being. And studying these sorts of things are really important because ample research shows that when we have strong sources of social support or we're happy with our our lives

It decreases mental health issues, physical health issues, increases longevity. There's even spillovers to just enjoying your workplace more, even if you don't even care for your workplace that much. you know, it it can't be understated how important it is to have other people in your life that you can go to and that care about you. Shockingly, even though people who practice non monogamy

have multiple partners, I am not aware of a study that looks at sources of social support among this population. It seems ripe for the taking. Uh so Brett and I

swooped in and we have a kind of a good idea about what's going on. So I'll give you a couple of top level findings. When we ask ask people who practice or who identify with consensual non monogamy about their life satisfaction, we used a validated psychological measure that's been around since the mid eighties, meaning hundreds and thousands of people have taken this measure.

And our population, so our sample who took the study is exactly the same mean response as all of this other research, meaning people practice non-monogamy, highly satisfied with their life and similar to other western or industrialized populations. And yeah. So not necessarily better, but not worse. It's just coming out the exact same. Which is interesting, not like you have to do comparative research, but it is interesting to understand where people who practice non monogamy fall.

We also asked people about their self-esteem. Self-esteem is another important thing, how good and confident they feel about themselves. And the levels that we found in our study are the same as other general population research nearly identical. And the findings that I think are just really interesting and kind of gave me like a moment of pause and a big smile were about social support. So we asked people to tell us about these different groups of people in their lives.

So their family members, their partners, because people identify with non-monogamous, we also asked about their metamors and their partners' partners. We asked about immediate family members and we asked people to fill out eight questions things related to each category of people. Meaning we asked people to tell us about the levels of instrumental support they get. So if you broke your foot, who's coming to help you?

And, you know, can you rely on that person? Or if you were sick and you needed help doing chores, who's that person? That would be examples of instrumental support. And then we asked people to tell us about the level of emotional support they have. So who do you have a good time spending time with?

Um, who'd you want to go and call and give exciting news to? Or if you had a problem, who are you gonna give advice to help you solve it? And I did some calculations to kind of understand what are the strongest sources of support out of all of these different categories.

And not surprisingly, among our sample people who identify with non-monogamy, their partners served as the strongest source of support. So across the board, people are really relying on their partners for instrumental and social support. And then shortly after that, I wanted to know, okay, well, what's the second most robust source of support? And it turns out that it's nearly a tie among well, then it's their immediate family members, so siblings, things like that.

And then it's nearly a tie among their friends who are kind of longer term friends who identify as monogamous and then their nonmonogamous community. So their network of friends, which just starts to illustrate that making it into the top four, their non monogamous network of people, is just Yeah. Interesting and shows the importance of this community. And then I specifically took out a subsample of our data set.

who were currently receiving caregiving because they had some maybe temporary or long term personal or health issue. So something was happening in their life, maybe it was a recent surgery or maybe it was a chronic illness, but they're currently receiving caregiving. And I wanted to understand what do their sources of support look like? Do they look different than the people who are not currently receiving caregiving? And this was the finding where I got the pause and I was like, Oh

Oh, that's that's very interesting. So among people who are currently receiving caregiving, their partner is their biggest source of instrumental and social support. right after that is their non-monogonous friends and network of community.

So like that community even more than their family and their other monogamous friends. Wow. Yeah. So there's something uniquely happening among people who need caregiving for whatever reason. Maybe it's temporary, maybe it's long term. They are seeing their non monogamous. community and friends as these really robust, strong networks, providing them

help with everyday chores or tasks, but then also people that they can rely on emotionally. Yeah, and that should be coming out in about a month or so. So definitely everybody keep an eye on that. Check out open site for the next next publication of that. We'll probably post about it in our socials and give links to it and stuff as well. So definitely check that out.

We really appreciate both of you joining us today and just all of the incredible work that you did to get this study out there and then also the work that you're doing to figure out what the findings are and to present them to all of us. So where can our listeners find more information about both of you and your work?

Well, let me start by just repeating my thanks for the multi-amory team for co-sponsoring this research. They really made it possible for us to go deeper, for us to work with FAMI. So listeners, please give them the ups that they deserve.

And Multiamory was joined by our friends at the Field app, who also stepped in as co sponsors to help make this possible. Folks can learn more about Open and participate in our work by visiting open-love.org, where you can find all of our resources, all of our opportunities to take action and sign up for updates. And if you visit open-love.org slash hello, you'll find the friendly little landing page with the links to all of our social media platforms.

as well as our community Discord. And finally a link to chip in and support our work. We are ninety percent community supported. There is no federal or state or local money coming towards this work. So we really appreciate folks' support that lets us get things like Stickers and legal support and uh all the things that it takes to to change laws and policies. So again, that's open-love.org. I'm gonna fall. I'm a-

Nerdy professor. I do have a social media presence. You can follow me at Professor Moores. Moores is my last name. on Instagram. I also have a website where I post the copyright free kind of version of my research. Uh academics basically when we publish it often goes behind a paywall. the average person is not paying thousands of dollars to access journal articles But there is a loophole where we can

post the preprint version on our website. I do that so you can see all of my research there. You can also email me directly if you can't get access to one of my articles. I'm happy to talk to you about it, send it to you for free. We are legally allowed to do those things. Nice. That's great. And what's your site where we can find that? Oh perfect. Great. I'm just naming it without the just find me. Uh it's Amy C Moores.com.

Awesome. Excellent. Yeah, highly recommend that. I I love any time there's a new study and I find that the researchers have published that somewhere where we can actually access it because that also helps us do a better podcast when we can actually get access to these studies.

when we're not able to find someone who has access through an academic institution or something to get it for us. But yeah, we've often had to reach out directly to researchers for it. So that's awesome that you publish that for everybody. Well, cool. Thank you so much. And we really appreciate the work that both of you do. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having us. Thank you for supporting us. Awesome.

So we also want to thank all of you listening at home or or wherever you are on your podcast machines. We have a question of the week for all of you. We're going to be posting this on our Instagram stories. You can answer. Anonymously, and we're going to share these with Dr. Amy Moores and with Brett to help influence future research. But the question is just

What do you wish there was more research about in non-monogamy? Really curious to hear what all of you say. Maybe you were inspired by something in this episode. And then with that, We would love to hear from you. The best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server, or you can just post about it in our private Facebook group, and you can get access to those groups and join the community by going to multiamory.com slash join.

In addition, you can share publicly on Instagram at multi-amory underscore podcast. Multiamory is created and produced by Dedeker Winston, Emily Matlack, and me, Jace Lindgren. Our production assistants are Rachel Shenowork and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Do. Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.