Ethical non-monogamy: what the term covers

You will see ENM and CNM — ethical and consensual non-monogamy — used interchangeably in profiles and articles. They mean roughly the same thing, and the second is now slightly more common in research.

What it covers

The umbrella includes swinging, polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy, hotwife and cuckold dynamics, solo polyamory and a range of other arrangements. What unites them is that everyone involved knows the shape of the arrangement and has agreed to it.

What it excludes is straightforward: anything involving deception. An affair is non-monogamy, but it is neither ethical nor consensual.

What makes it ethical

The label is not self-certifying. Calling an arrangement ethical does not make it so, and in practice a few things distinguish arrangements that deserve the word.

1. Informed consent from everyone affected — including the people outside the couple, who are entitled to know what they are part of.
2. Honesty about material facts — relationship status, other partners, health status, and what you are actually looking for.
3. Freedom to withdraw — anyone can stop, at any point, without penalty.
4. No coercion, including soft coercion — persistence, sulking and repeated raising of a settled question are all forms of pressure.
5. Care for third parties — the people you meet are not props for your relationship.

Where the term gets misused

The label is sometimes attached to arrangements that do not meet those conditions. Two patterns come up often enough to name.

The first is a partner who agreed under sustained pressure and is described as consenting. The second is a couple who present as ENM to the people they meet while concealing from those people something material — that one partner is unhappy, that the arrangement is on probation, or that there is an agreement they are being used to test.

In both cases the word is being used to launder something that is not consensual. It is worth being alert to that, both in others and in yourself.

The third-party question

This is the ethical dimension most couples think about least. When you meet other people, they are participants in your arrangement rather than instruments of it, and they are owed the same honesty you owe each other.

In practice that means telling them what you are looking for, not overstating your availability, and not using them to work out something between the two of you without their knowledge. The most common complaint from singles about couples in the scene is exactly this. More in unicorn hunting, done better.