What is Relationship Anarchy?
And how relationship anarchy can help you foster a thriving, supportive family system, independent of your values about sexuality and monogamy.
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One of my specialties is working with couples and families with young children.
New parents experience an exponential growth in the number of roles that they play in each other’s lives.
Prior to a child, perhaps the relationship only played a few roles. Sexual partner. Emotional confidant. Companion.
The first two years of a couple relationship are about bonding, finding similarities, and consolidating resources. Often that corresponds with a slight reduction in additional relationships; two people in a couple may spend less time with other friends and family members in lieu of hanging out with each other.
However, typically by the second year mark, each person in a couple begins to invest time, financial resources, and emotional energy into friendships and other relationships. This process, the differentiation stage of a couple relationship, can create some pressure to the relationship if one person is still motivated to spend a large amount of time with their partner and the other person wants to engage their time with other relationships and spaces. I can get into the details of that in another Substack.
For the sake of today, though, parenthood invites a slew of other potential roles to the relationship, including:
Financial: How are we going to allocate our money to pay for the present and future needs of our young children? Even if couples have determined strategies to share financial resources, the folks at Lending Tree remind us that it costs an additional $297,674 to raise one child over 18 years. That’s $29,419 per year. Per child. So how are also going to earn more money, and spend money differently than we did before children?
Administrative: How are we going to utilize our time to watch, feed, clean, awaken, put down to sleep, awaken again, and organize our new child(ren)? And to tag this back to the financial piece, how do we make decisions about who does unpaid labor?
Disciplinary: How are we going to teach and train our child to be a thriving member of society? What types of emotional energy do we want to invest in correcting the mistakes and learning experiences of our children?
Family of origin: Different members of our family are going to want to have relationships with our children, and us as new parents, on their own terms. How do we want to direct those conversations with other family members? And what’s our gatekeeping process to ensure that there are solid enough boundaries between our family unit of three or four or five and the outside world?
Most new parents come to my couples therapy office completely exhausted and overwhelmed. After all, nothing can prepare you for parenthood like parenthood, right? In the midst of adding new roles for the relationship, I often discover that couples with young children lose or sacrifice three important functions of the relationship:
Sexual: This is especially true for people who have a higher responsive desire, meaning that their sexual desire accumulates based on context and specific circumstances, such as a slower cardiovascular rate, accessing key sensations (i.e. sounds, smells, textures, touch) in the buildup to genital play, and a longer amount of time to attend to one’s personal needs or connect with their partner in an emotional way. (As a note, a sizable portion of men have higher responsive desires.)
Non-sexual intimacy: As we’ve discussed, intimacy is a combination of the disclosure of important information about one’s perspectives and internal world and the capacity to confront yourself in the presence of another person. In more naturally stressful times, such as raising young children, new parents might lack strategies to hit the pause button, reflect on what’s happening in their world, and share their self-explorations with their partners.
Companionship. A couple might lose the capacity to play, explore, and be curious with each other, unless it’s through the lens of their developing child(ren).
And that’s before we get to the loss of relationship with oneself. Our child-centric world now refers to you as “Chloe’s mom” or “Danny’s dad”. The capacity to go to the gym or read a book or take a shower now requires some administrative work, as you and your partner have to figure out who’s going to watch your child while you take 30 minutes to take deep breaths and re-regulate your nervous system and not be touched by anyone except yourself.
One of the first things that I ask my new parent couples is “Who’s in your village?”
The couples that struggle the most are the ones who don’t have an answer to this question.
My office is in Boston, and Boston is quite transient. Perhaps they just recently moved to Boston, and haven’t had the time, resources, or fortune to establish community, which is uniquely difficult in a more clannish, closed-off city like Boston. Julia and I are keeping this in mind as we’re selecting a new city to build our family in. One of our deciding factors is what communities give us a higher likelihood of accessing people who might want to be part of our family commune.
What happens more often, however, is that psychologically speaking, these are people who have trouble asking for help.
Perhaps they have canned excuses. A common one I hear is, “Well, my neighbor that I see all the time is just as busy as we are, and I wouldn’t want to burden them with our stressful family.” This is where I introduce the concept of anxiety: Worrying or projecting a worst case scenario about a future interaction. Anxiety often corresponds with avoidance, or the refusal to take the risk to, in this case, move into a potential relationship with that person.
Or perhaps they’ve bought into the worst parts of the fusion of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic: A rugged individualism that values humans based on the quantity of their production. A performance-oriented approach to life that suggests that they’re a failure if they other people ask for help. Developing a family commune is certainly the opposite of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”.
I want to take a quick pause here, because consistent readers of Relationship 101 (and a huge Thank You if you are one) may be a bit confused.
Last week, I mentioned that our Substack articles last week and this week are deeper dives into the practice of ethical non-monogamy.
For our most recent podcast, we invited our friends Jimmy Bridges and Becs Waite, co-owners of the private practice This Space Between, to talk with us about ethical non-monogamy (ENM).
In our most recent post, we explored why people might be drawn to ENM as a practice.
And later this week, I’ll send articles about navigating jealousy (Wednesday), and parenting in a non-monogamous arrangement (Friday).
So you may be asking some version of, “What in the world does being a new parent have to do with ethical non-monogamy?”
And to answer that, I want to make a brief stop at a seminal concept in the ethical non-monogamy world.
Relationship Anarchy
As I wrote last Tuesday, every relationship is an open relationship.
We all have multiple important people in our lives. Relatives. Best friends. Neighbors. Your hairstylist or favorite barista.
All of these relationships require some combination of emotional, financial, and temporal energy. When you schedule a lunch with a good friend, let’s say, you’re prioritizing that relationship during that specific window of time. During that lunch, perhaps you both commiserate about how hard it is to be a human, strengthening the emotional and friendship bond between you two. Or perhaps you generate ideas on how to take care of an ailing parent or the constantly changing needs and emotional states of your children.
And as you’re paying for your lunch, perhaps there’s a deeper conversation about your financial world, even if it’s just to ponder why you paid $15 for a sandwich that you easily could have made six of at home for $6. Maybe there’s even some flirtatious energy during that interaction, even if it’s just a prolonged gaze. The big hug as you walk out the door certainly reflects an experience of physical affection.
As Esther Perel reminds us in Mating in Captivity, we cannot rely on one person to meet all of our needs. Our survival requires us to have a community with multiple, dozens of important people.
Relationship anarchy is a decision making process that can help us inform how we want to allocate our resources of time, space, finances, and emotional resources.
In 2006, Swedish designer Andie Nordgren wrote a document called the Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy. (Please read through this. It’s nine paragraphs.)
While a lot of ethical non-monogamy has to do with a reconstruction of love and the role that sexuality plays in it, as we’ll talk about in Wednesday’s article, there’s also an extremely practical component to relationship anarchy. Nordgren writes:
“Life would not have much structure or meaning without joining together with other people to achieve things — constructing a life together, raising children, owning a house or growing together through thick and thin. Such endeavors usually need lots of trust and commitment between people to work.
Relationship anarchy is not about never committing to anything — it’s about designing your own commitments with the people around you, and freeing them from norms dictating that certain types of commitments are a requirement for love to be real, or that some commitments like raising children or moving in together have to be driven by certain kinds of feelings.
Start from scratch and be explicit about what kind of commitments you want to make with other people!”
I love the way that Roma de las Heras Gómez describes the value of relationship anarchy in a 2018 article of Sociological Research Online:
“Relationship anarchy is a communal perspective, in the sense of being conscious that our bonds make us interrelate and our affective relationships weave a web…
It poses the rearrangement of care and life-sustaining work outside the exclusive romantic couple and traditional family; broadening this mindset also brings forth change in the way that we establish familial relationships, offering other ways in addition to blood ties and romantic bonds.”
I want to share one more resource today: The Relationship Anarchy Smorgasbord.
Lyrica Lawrence and Heather Orr of Vancouver Polyamory developed an assessment that lays out 24 different functions to a relationship.
And as we wrap up today, I want to ask you three things. Open the Relationship Anarchy Smorgasbord, and considering your current relationship and family system, ask yourself:
Who are the people that I turn to for support in navigating each of these categories, assuming that I want to explore these relational functions? (For instance, you might not be interested in kink or intentional power exchange spaces.)
Who are potential people that I could turn to for support in navigating each of these categories? This could include people that you nominally know or know of, or spaces in which you might access these people.
If you’re in a long-term partnership, what are the roles that my partner plays? And how well do we communicate our expectations for how these functions get played out?
Julia and I offer free 30 minute consultations with couples who are interested in pursuing relationship and sex therapy/coaching. (60 minute consultations for paying members of Relationship 101!)
We specialize in working with who participated in an Evangelical, Mormon, or Pentecostal community, and are looking to discover or rediscover the role that sexuality might play in your life and relationship.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia