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

Welcome, Brett and Dr. Moors!

We are so excited to be welcoming back Brett Chamberlin, Founder and Executive Director of OPEN, along with Dr. Amy Moors, lead researcher for OPEN’s 2025 Community Survey Report, the largest non-monogamy survey to date.

Brett is the Founder & Executive Director of OPEN, a grassroots nonprofit advancing legal rights and cultural acceptance for non-monogamy. Under his leadership, OPEN has passed landmark non-discrimination protections in multiple cities and established itself as a leading voice in the rapidly growing movement for relationship freedom.

A repeat nonprofit founder with over a decade of movement-building experience, Brett has led global grassroots campaigns reaching millions, including for the Emmy-winning documentary film "The Story of Plastic." His work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, CNN, and NBC.

Dr. Amy C. Moors is an Assistant 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 44 Committee on Consensual Non-Monogamy. Dr. Moors has published more than 60 journal articles and dozens of educational materials on topics related to sexuality and consensual non-monogamy. Dr. Moors has received several awards for her pioneering research on polyamorous, swinging, and other forms of consensually non-monogamous relationships, including the Kenneth R. Haslam, MD, Relationship Diversity Research Award and the Distinguished Professional Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association Division 44.

Throughout this episode, our guests tackle the following questions and topics about OPEN’s survey, their thoughts on non-monogamy in the current climate, and their work in the non-monogamy advocacy sphere:

1. Why is doing research like this important?

2. Was this actually the largest study to-date of non-monogamous individuals? Tell us a bit about how participants were gathered and what the demographics look like.

3. Can you tell us a bit about the journey to where you are now, as perhaps the leading researcher on non-monogamy in the world? How did you get into studying this population? How has the research landscape changed over the years? How does this particular survey fit into the larger picture of non-monogamy research and your own research?

4. Going back to this particular study, it was not about polyamory specifically but about all kinds of non-monogamy. How did people identify their identities and experience and what data did we find?

5. Polyamory is the single most common self-identified practice (54.3% of the single-selection group). How does this compare with other research we have about the larger non-monogamous community? Does this reflect an overall trend within non-monogamy or does it mean this particular survey mostly reached polyamorous people?

6. Another section of the study asked participants about how important non-monogamy is to their life. Tell us a little bit about what we saw in those responses.

7. Let’s talk about openness: A question that has come up a lot over the years of producing our show, and something that non-monogamous people have to think about constantly, is how open to be. Not just with friends and family, but at work, with friends, and in other situations. What did this study show us about how open people are?

8. Why is it important to study stigma and discrimination?

9. What did this study show us about stigma and discrimination experienced by non-monogamous people?

10. There is a strong correlation between a person's "total openness score" and their likelihood of reporting lifetime stigma/discrimination. How should non-monogamous individuals, and the organizations that support them, balance the desire for advocacy (fighting for rights) with the very real risk of blowback and discrimination (fear of stigma)? Are there specific geographical or professional contexts where remaining discreet appears to be a necessary safety precaution based on the data (e.g., work supervisors, landlords)?

11. The survey asked people to prioritize what movements they think are the most important. The top two priorities ranked by respondents are "Passing laws to protect non-monogamous relationships and individuals" and "Creating media, cultural events, and more that normalize non-monogamy.” What is the current legislative landscape for non-discrimination and legal recognition, and what is the single most actionable recommendation you would give to an individual who wants to support these efforts? Going back survey responses, can you tell us a bit more about what you noticed in this area?

12. We definitely hope we can continue to grow this study for next year. Are there any areas of this year’s survey that you would like to explore more in the future?

Find Dr. Amy Moors on social media @professormoors, and visit www.open-love.org to find more information about Brett and his nonprofit, OPEN.

Transcript

If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Amy: 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. Right after that is their non-monogamous friends and network of community. 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.

Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast. I'm Jase.

Emily: I'm Emily.

Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker.

Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.

Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here for you.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory 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 Moors, the lead researcher, and Brett Chamberlin from OPEN. Brett Chamberlin 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. And then with that, we have Dr. Amy Moors as well. Dr. Amy C. Moors 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 44 Committee on Consensual Non-Monogamy, which we've also talked about before on this show. Dr. Moors has published more than 60 journal articles and dozens of educational materials on topics related to sexuality and consensual non-monogamy. And has received several awards for pioneering research on polyamory, swinging, and other forms of consensually non-monogamous relationships. We've referenced 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 Moors, thank you so much for joining us today.

Amy: Thank you for having me.

Jase: Yay. And Brett, thank you for joining us again.

Brett: Always a pleasure to be here.

Jase: All right, so I want to jump right into this and start off with 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 does this matter?

Brett: So research into non-monogamy is important for a number of reasons. First, it helps us understand some really important and foundational information about non-monogamy. Really basic questions that we didn't have much insight into even 10 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 non-monogamous 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 non-monogamy 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.

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

Amy: Yeah, I've been in a really fortunate position to make this my entire career. For the past over 15 years now, I've been studying the lives of people who practice consensual non-monogamy. And it started with probably delusional optimism and naivety 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 hierarchies in science and there's biases. And unfortunately, a lot of scientists are not necessarily objective. 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 helps 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 going to 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.

Jase: Yeah, absolutely. 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. For some people it could be that, but to 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. 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.

Emily: So was this actually the largest study on non-monogamy to date?

Amy: My best guess is yes. I do think so. I also collaborate with another researcher, Justin Lehmiller, 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.

Jase: Not a competition, but if it were, we probably won. Yeah. Okay, good.

Brett: It's certainly the largest of OPEN surveys. We've run this survey every year since our founding in 2022, making the 2025 survey our fourth annual survey. And the responses we've collected have grown every single year from 500 responses in that first year to over 5,800 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.

Emily: And Amy, can you talk a little bit about how the participants were gathered and then what the demographics tended to look like?

Amy: 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 Feeld 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 of volunteering their time to take part in science.

Emily: 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?

Amy: Sure, I'll try to make it brief, but gather around my trouser hems. The short version of the long story is it was, literally, 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 a 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 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. 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 peaked, and it just kind of grew from there. I had a great mentor in graduate school at a later degree when I earned my doctorate, who really supported this research. It was a big part of her work, and I've just never stopped studying non-monogamy. I think it's really interesting to study the human experience. That's great.

Jase: We've definitely noticed a big difference in terms of just the amount of literature out there about it. Since we started this show 11 years ago-ish, maybe a little more than 11 years now, and there was barely anything at first, kind of like you mentioned, when you first were trying to look into this and there were just 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, well, that's what people mean when they say relationships. But it's been great to see that grow over time. And we're glad that you were part of that and helping that to 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?

Brett: So I appreciate you flagging that this survey was about, I should say, a study, because in fact this year it was IRB approved. That means it was approved by an institutional ethics research board, which means that this really counts now as formal academic research. Amy will be publishing some of her findings in an academic journal, meaning that this in a different way than previous years surveys really counts towards that growing corpus of academic knowledge about non-monogamy. So forgive that diversion for a moment. But we really did focus on non-monogamous populations across the board. And that's very important to OPEN's mission 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, 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 100 different terms.

Emily: Wow.

Brett: 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 poly fidelity and so on. So it really demonstrates just the diversity of practices or identities within that big tent of non-monogamy.

Jase: 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.

Amy: It's consistent with my previous research as well as people who've been studying non-monogamy a lot longer than me. 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 monogamish are probably more common. It's just not necessarily essential of an identity or salient to people.

Emily: And so it might be more closeted.

Amy: Right, absolutely that too. And so they can sometimes be harder to identify to take part in research.

Jase: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And that's something that is really interesting about studying non-monogamy is that of how there's not just this one community of everybody altogether. That there are these disparate communities and places like OPEN are trying to encourage us to come together more and unite more on the things we have in common than the things that make us different. But yeah, it is a struggle that there are these very different communities. And so how do you find all these people to do research?

Brett: It's been easy. It's been a breeze, Jase. I don't know what you're talking about.

Jase: There's no friction. It's sure.

Emily: So easy.

Jase: Yeah.

Emily: There was another section of the study that asked participants about how important non-monogamy is to their life. Can you talk a little bit about what you saw in those responses?

Brett: 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 non-monogamy is very important to them. Specifically, about 70%, just over 70% of people responded that non-monogamy 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, less constrained in terms of the roles or forms that relationships are expected to take compared to mononormative society. But it also illustrates that those relationships within non-monogamy can be incredibly rewarding. And finally, it illustrates that non-monogamy is for many people a core part of their identity. As Amy was just alluding to, for some people and some practices, generally some subpopulations of non-monogamy can be more of a practice, a lifestyle, a thing that I do. But for many people, as this data evidences, non-monogamy 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, not only for our own rights and protections, but as I've shared on this podcast before, we want to see that constituency mobilize to really turn up for intersecting and overlapping movements. And I think that there's a theory within 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 others, for our neighbors, for our peers, for our siblings and so on.

Jase: Yeah, I actually found that looking at that part of the study was surprising. 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 I've done a podcast about it for a long time, but 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. 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 monogamish-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, I also LARP on the side. It's like, no, this is 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. I could see how you would strongly identify with LARPing.

Emily: 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.

Jase: 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 to our community, which you can do at multiamory.com/join. As a thank you for your support, we have access to our amazing Discord and Facebook communities, as well as ad-free episodes. So go check that out at multiamory.com/join or listen to our sponsors and use their promo codes if they're interesting to you, because that also helps support our show.

Amy: Sure thing. So we used a measure that's really popular among people who are part of the LGBTQ community to assess the amount of openness or another way put in the science we call disclosure. And so we asked people about a variety of different categories of people. So are you open to your immediate family? Co-workers, your older term friends who practice monogamy. So maybe people you went to elementary school with or high school, these longer term friends. 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 going to vary greatly depending on different circumstances. It's funny, when Brett and I were talking about the results, we see them in a different way, even though they're the exact same results. I mean, 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, broadly, almost half of people or 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. So I guess to briefly sum up 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 telling people if you want, or another way put, 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.

Jase: And Brett, what's your different take on it?

Emily: I was like, wait, can you talk about your pessimism in this part of the study?

Brett: I was surprised to hear myself referred to as an optimist.

Jase: Thank you.

Brett: Very charitable with that, Amy. One of my personal mantras is often, attributed to this Italian communist and it's pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. So perhaps this was my pessimistic intellectual assessment that allows for my optimistic who will of trying to organize around it. What I see is certainly it's true that there are large chunks of people that are disclosing 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 not openness can look like. And Jase, you spoke to this a little bit, but just to go deeper, right? There's the classic example of you're standing around the water cooler at work on a Monday, or more contemporarily, perhaps you're in the all team channel on 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 this real part of your soul, your spark that gets a little smushed to not be able to be fully open and share. Then there's also the calculus of, 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 examples in particular really illustrate how if you're not fully open with everyone and feel safe being open, you're not really out at all because there's always going to 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 real burden on people. Amy has done some research that perhaps you can speak to, Amy, about the implications of that self-censoring.

Amy: Right. And so ample research, mine included, shows that when we keep parts of ourself 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, I don't even know if that quite captures it. Like, the entire legal system is set up to benefit monogamy and all social norms prioritize doesn't seem quite, I don't know, intense enough of a word.

Jase: Yeah.

Amy: 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, 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 going to find peace if you were to just let everyone know in your life you do this, because there can be consequences that are social reputation or legal or financial for people as to why they have to keep this a secret.

Jase: 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 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've found has come up for me 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? There's still that, I don't know if I just want to mess with this at all, even if I don't have an acute fear. So I think one is sort of this, is it that I want to avoid the trouble or is it that I have a real fear of consequences?

Amy: Right?

Jase: 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 OPEN is really fighting to get. More legislations to do at the city government level. But I was able to get my work to add that, and they were very open to it. 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 I'm in a very privileged place there with work, right? I'm not fearful of losing my job over it. But still that, I don't want this to be a thing that's coloring how certain people think about me, or that could be awkward in certain situations. 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 want to have to explain. I don't have the energy to spend an extra 20 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 what are the reasons for people and how much is that? I just don't want to waste my time explaining all this to you and how much is real fear and how much is more that in-between fear of, I just don't want them to be weird to me about this. Not that I actually fear a real consequence, but that middle ground. 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.

Amy: No, I'm completely unaware of research. I'm going to make a note this time next year, we'll have answers.

Jase: Awesome.

Emily: I love that. Excellent.

Brett: The way that we frame this question in the survey is stigma or discrimination, right? And there are important differences between stigma and discrimination. So stigma tends to be more social, tends to be more soft, albeit still consequential. It's a snarky comment, it's judgment, whereas discrimination tends to be more materially consequential, right? It's 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 you don't know where it's going to fall down on that line. So yeah, Maybe it could be that your coworker makes a snarky comment that you're going to 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 might work in a very open workplace and have bosses who end up being very supportive, as was the case with your employer, Jase. But if you don't know, I think people could be very forgiven for just choosing not to roll the dice every time.

Jase: Absolutely. Yeah, very much how I feel a lot of the time. This isn't a person I'm going to get close enough with that I don't want to bother. It's just not worth it. And that's definitely a thought that has to come up pretty often.

Brett: In every Uber ever, I still work in the plastic pollution nonprofit sector because.

Jase: it's just easier and I'm.

Brett: going to the airport at 5:00 a.m.

Amy: We have different Uber experiences.

Dedeker: They love hearing about your research.

Amy: Oh, it makes the best bar talk. I'm friends with so many random people on my socials.

Jase: Nice.

Emily: 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. They could Google any one of us, certainly, and 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?

Brett: 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 non-binary 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 white.

Amy: 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 asked them in the past year, because our memory works like that, we can remember what's happening in the past year. And then we asked 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? Housing, so wanting to rent or buy a home or in government services or social settings, maybe from friends, because 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.

Jase: 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 a little bit lower number. It's 40% on average, which still to me is really high for just within the last year, 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 this interesting risk reward calculation I could see going on of 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. But it's just interesting to me to look at, 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?

Brett: It absolutely does. And in fact, we have a theory for why that is. So we did a cross analysis where we looked at how open people were comprehensively across all of the areas of their life. We basically totaled up the 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 report on the OPEN 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 returns to the conversation we were just having. Because the consequences are potentially so high in the workplace, people are far less likely to be open in the workplace, which we also have data to illustrate. And as a result, they are less likely to experience stigma or discrimination in the workplace. But these experiences 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's a rounding error. But if we consider the size of the non-monogamous population, hopefully listeners are by now familiar with the 4 to 5% 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 3% of them experiencing, again, being denied a promotion, being fired, losing your healthcare on the basis of this relationship, we're talking about very, very consequential experiences that thousands of adults are facing every year.

Jase: And I think you hit a key point there in terms of how out people are in different areas, because 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's 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 3% is 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 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. Because it actually might paint a very different story in that case. We may actually see that family settings are actually less than employment or something when you base that on how open people are. Because when it comes to their families, people actually are more than half open, right? 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. So that's a very different relationship that we have.

Brett: You're really revealing yourself to be a data nerd through this process, just so I know.

Jase: Oh, I am.

Dedeker: You have no idea.

Jase: Yeah, very much.

Amy: I'm like, oh, I'm actually going to work on a paper about this very topic.

Jase: I love that.

Emily: 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 fear of stigma?

Brett: Sure. You know, there's a real strategic challenge there, and that is that 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 protections. 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 at the stigma and make it safer for other people to follow. It also points to the importance of advocacy within professional organizations, for example. You referred earlier, Jase, 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 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. 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 continuing education and so on to really help people that maybe graduated from therapy school, got their degree decades ago before non-monogamy was quite as well understood, catch them up to where we're at now in these conversations.

Jase: Yeah, absolutely. And I think a step toward that, I mentioned a little bit earlier on with the Division 44, the Committee on Consensual Non-Monogamy within the American Psychological Association, within the APA. And so hopefully that can continue and that through the continuing education, we can actually get more of these people to understand. I think 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. Even if they don't really know how to talk to it, at least they're 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.

Amy: Yeah, that's my beloved committee. I actually just rotated off a couple months ago, so I'm no longer the co-chair. I'm still actively a part of it. 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 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, 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 refer the person to someone else in a really kind way that doesn't seem 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.

Jase: Yeah, I love that. That's great. We're always looking for more interventions and things to be able to talk about. Because I feel like we're often on the other side of that, of taking research or psychological interventions and then translating them into more everyday. How can you apply that in your everyday life? And so I love that we can go back and forth and 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 going to 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/join. You can join on a sliding scale so it's available for anybody and we would love to have you as part of community.

Emily: So to move on, the survey asked people to prioritize what movement 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 non-monogamy. 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?

Brett: Sure. So those two priorities that people indicated 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 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 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 multigenerational families, blended families with step parents and step kids, in addition to multi-parent 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 US that have these protections in place, starting with Cambridge and Somerville, which passed them in 2023, followed by Berkeley and Oakland in 2024. And OPEN has really made this 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 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 within the first half of 2025. And actually on the date that I think this episode is coming out, we will be seeing the final passage of the protections in Olympia, Washington, and we hope to see Seattle 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 front edge of things. In terms of what people can do, 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. 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 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, Multiamory, essential tools for modern relationships to their catalog. It's really about identifying an area in your life or in your community 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.

Jase: 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.

Emily: 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?

Amy: Sure. Our participants and the good people who took part in our survey really were skilled at making recommendations about how to move things forward, in addition to giving us recommendations. Brett had talked about this a little bit earlier, but if we start to think about issues related to people who practice non-monogamy, so whether they be workplace issues or interacting with mental or physical healthcare 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 U.S. You basically can bring a domestic partner or 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, because 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 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 making these recommendations and also the way that we worded the questions in the closed 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 sexuality or LGBTQ issues or women's rights issues.

Jase: 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?

Amy: 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 going to 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 care for your workplace that much. 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 right for the taking. So Brett and I swooped in and we have a good idea about what's going on. So I'll give you a couple of top level findings. When we asked 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 80s, 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 who practice non-monogamy highly satisfied with their life and similar to other Western or industrialized populations.

Brett: Wow.

Amy: 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 gave me 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 metamores and their partners partners. We asked about immediate family members, and we asked people to fill out eight questions 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? 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? Who would you want to go and call and give exciting news to? Or if you had a problem, who are you going to give advice to help you solve it? And I did some calculations to 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 longer term friends who identify as monogamous. And then their non-monogamous 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 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, 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-monogamous friends and network of community.

Jase: So like that community even more than their family and their other monogamous friends.

Brett: Wow.

Amy: 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.

Jase: Yeah, and that should be coming out in about a month or so. So definitely everybody keep an eye on that. Check out OPEN's site for the 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.

Emily: 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?

Brett: Well, let me start by just repeating my thanks for the Multiamory team for co-sponsoring this research. They really made it possible for us to go deeper, for us to work with Amy. So listeners, please give them the ups that they deserve. And Multiamory was joined by our friends at the Feeld 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/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 90% community funded. 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 all the things that it takes to change laws and policies. So again, that's open-love.org. Wonderful.

Amy: I'm a nerdy professor. I do have a social media presence. You can follow me at Professor Moors. Moors is my last name. On Instagram. I also have a website where I post the copyright free version of my research. 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 pre-print 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.

Jase: Nice. That's great. And what's your site where we can find that?

Amy: Oh, perfect. Great. I'm just naming it without the, just find me. It's amycmoors.com.

Emily: Excellent.

Jase: Yeah, highly recommend that. I love anytime 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 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.

Amy: Thank you for having us. Thank you for supporting us.

Jase: Awesome. So we also want to thank all of you listening at home 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 Moors 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/join. In addition, you can share publicly on Instagram @multiamory_podcast. Multiamory is created and produced by Dedeker Winston, Emily Matlack, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our production assistants are Rachel Schenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode’s page on multiamory.com.