Huffington Post
by Douglas LaBier
A recent Pew poll found that millennials have a steadily declining rate of marriage. There are several possible reasons for this, but I think it highlights a broader, changing reality: We’re in the midst of a social and cultural evolution regarding the kinds of romantic, sexual and intimate relationships men and women seek and what they experience as fulfilling.
Some forms of this shift that I describe below trigger knee-jerk, negative reactions from those who see their own moral standards and beliefs as being threatened or under attack. However, I think it’s important to understand these emerging forms of relationship with an open mind to understand how and why some people may find them fulfilling and positive. Keep in mind that much of our thinking in psychology and mental health has evolved. For example, women’s menstrual “blues” and homosexuality were once defined as forms of mental illness, but no longer are.
Today, interracial marriage is no longer illegal, as it was for most of the previous century. LGBT relationships have moved past the threshold of acceptance by a majority of the population. And currently, we see emerging shifts towards what some define as desirable and healthy intimate partnerships, for themselves. For example:
Polyamory: The subject of an annual conference, polyamory relationships are those in which people have multiple partnerships at once with the full knowledge of all involved. A comprehensive report in LiveScience describes how jealousy works in polyamorous relationships, how children in polyamorous families experience them. It also explores several other new findings, including that some polyamorous people report feeling energized by their multiple relationships and say that good feelings in one translate to good feelings in others.
Open relationships: A variant of polyamory, open relationships received some attention in the 1970s among young baby boomers (e.g. the 1969 movie “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice”) and looks like it’s re-emerging in new form — now called consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships. In them, committed partners mutually agree not to be sexually and/or romantically exclusive to one another. Some recent research finds, for example, that up to 40 percent of men and up to 25 percent of women in a monogamous relationship said they would switch to a CNM if they lived in a world where everyone had open relationships. Currently, the research finds a continuum: some people are completely monogamous, others are completely nonmonogamous, and many more are somewhere in between. …