Musings: The Misadventures of Relationship Anarchism: A Challenge for RA as a Relational Identity
I.
Among non-monogamists the term “relationship anarchy” is somewhat common. As I understand it, relationship anarchy is a philosophy about relationships that involves the belief that intimate relationships should not be governed by conventional rules or norms. Some things about this should be relatively unsurprising. After all non-monogamists are accustomed to existing across relationships in ways that deviate from social norms.
While relationship anarchy (RA) as a practice or a philosophy of relating seems straightforward enough to understand, it is sometimes mistakenly taken up as an identity. I am confounded when non-monogamists self-identify as relationship anarchists (admittedly, I am even more surprised when the same anarchists have spouses; as is sometimes the case).
II. A Note on Embeddedness
Ann Tweedy has explored the question of whether or not “polyamory” as an identifying marker is applicable to matters of sexual orientation. In other words, is polyamory a sexual orientation? In exploring the question, she introduces a theory of embeddedness where “The more embedded a way of being is the more sense it makes to consider it an identity and specifically a sexual orientation”.
For Tweedy, embeddedness can exist on a scale ranging from most embedded to least embedded. On the side of the most embedded, we would be likely to find identities that some believe are essential to them (assuming such identities can exist). Very nearby, we should expect to find constructed identities that are believed to be so constraining and powerful that our lived assignment to them appear altogether unchosen or unchangeable.
Pertaining to the least embedded part of the spectrum, we could expect to find identities that are experienced as extraneous. For, public transit commuters needn’t think of themselves as environmentalists. Neither do those who use public transit out of necessity for short periods of time.
On this view, the more embedded in identity is, the more likely it is to manifest as strong and consistent or at least settled and repeated.
The embeddedness view introduces a pathway along which we might find possibility for RA as an identity of sorts. The thought would be that for those who believe or experience their practice or philosophy of relationships as deeply embedded parts of themselves, relationship anarchy is an identity. Furthermore, self-definition is a central tenant of non-monogamy. Perhaps then, the most politically correct way forward would be to allow RA’s the space to self-identify as they please. Yet I have deep concerns about the coherence of this practice.
Is the practice of self-identifying as relationship anarchists inherently incoherent? What is gained through the employment of this practice? What will be lost if it is eliminated?
III.
Aristotle took note of the keenly political nature of humans long ago. Just as sure as we are creatures who cannot avoid being active, we too are ones that cannot avoid having our existence bound up in social and political strata. It should not surprise us, then, that the evolution of our humanity has brought us to the place where we think our identities are both important and meaningful. We also identify and label things outside of ourselves such as our relationships.
In the case of relationships, our labels create axes a long which social distinction is forged. Often times, these axes are also the sites where privileges are created and upheld; and they are also the primordial waters from which oppressive powers, subjection, and subjugation emerge.
Identifying is an inherently political project and identity politics, in our own social context, are vested in a hierarchical scheme.
Take the normative pressure imposed on social subjects by amatonormativity and mononormativity for an example. In a society like ours, one that revers marriage as the only archetype of respectable intimate relationships, these normative pressures become skilled swordsmiths in the weaponization of monogamy. People who identify (or are identified, as by others) as “monogamous”, “husbands”, “wives”, “girlfriends”, “boyfriends”, or “partnered” (where the default for partnership is dyadic) are the recipients of special privileges and entitlement that “others” are not. Indeed this very categorization is at the heart of “other formation” (what some call “otherization” or “othering”).
Given the distributive asymmetry of power and privileges associated with these titles and their concomitant ways of relating, one can see an immediate upshot of relationship anarchy as a viable political project. Rejecting conventional labels and norms in the service of diversifying the relational landscape of intimate relationships disrupts traditional schemas of delegating this power and privilege. And since we know that unjustified discrimination takes place on the basis of peoples intimate lives, the project is a noble one indeed.
The project’s nobility is of particular intersectional interest as well. I mean, so long as much of the power is reserved for relationships that can be legibly read as “respectable”, subjects whose lives and identities regularly fall out of the purview of respectability such as Black folx, LBQTQIA+ folx, and women for example, have much to gain from diversifying relational landscaping — including solace from the perpetual pursuit of recognition.
My worry about the project however, is that no sooner than one identifies as a relationship anarchist, it seems to lose some transformative potential. Herein lies the tension: as the anarchist project requires a radical rejection of conventional rules and labeling, labeling one’s self a relationship anarchist is thus counterproductive. If the struggle from recognition yields but another way of labeling and hierarchically situating ourselves in society, it also yields a necessary reliance on the systems that produce the felt need for identifying as such. The anarchist project becomes thereby co-opted under the dominant systems and forces already at play.
What of those who label people relationship anarchists from the outside? The fact that people readily evaluate, assess, and make judgments about who or what we are is relatively uncontroversial. And, admittedly, to my mind the practice of being labeled a relationship anarchist from the outside seems more compatible with the project. That is, if people are to arrive at the conclusion that another is a relationship anarchist from a considered observation of one’s relational politic, perhaps this is evidence of the project’s disruptive potential. Still, however, the preservation of the project’s power by resisting self-identification, is frustrated by the powerlessness that is often associated with being labeled, assessed, evaluated, and/or judged by others; this presents quite the paradox — a paradox that, without resolution, should introduce hesitance upon meeting RA as a kind of identity regardless of how seemingly embedded it shows up.
IV.
It is not immediately clear to me what should be done about this tension or how it might be resolved. Should we do away with thinking about RA as an identity all together? How might its desirable ends be achieved?
Here, perhaps it is helpful for us to note that the American society is already amidst a kind of diversification of the intimate relational landscape. Representation of ethical non-monogamous relationships have been featured on main stream media outlets such as The Red Table Talk or HBO’s Trigonometry and Insecure. Additionally, in 2020 Sommerville, Massachusetts legalized the extension of rights typically reserved for spouses in a marriage to multiple party unions. Cambridge, Massachusetts became the second municipality to legalize domestic partnerships between multiple party unions shortly thereafter in 2021. Relationship diversity needn’t be a cost of losing identity talk around relationship anarchy.
I realize that to suggest that talk of RA as an identity should be done away with is to challenge non-monogamous self-definition. In the face of the tensions that I have raised here, I don’t know what to say about self-definition. Perhaps if these tensions are relaxed, then I could be convinced of the possibility of RA being represented as an identity of sorts. And it is from this optimism that I leave you with this musing.
