Eleven Texts on Relationship Anarchy (Because Fuck 12)
Introduction
This work provides eleven introductory texts that discuss Relationship Anarchy as the explicitly political (anarchist) project that it is. They outline how the couple form, marriage, gender, romance, and all forms of relationship rules or ownership over others are more than personal identities or choices within individual relationships: they are part of larger systemic oppressions.
Most people familiar with Relationship Anarchy know of “The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy” by Andie Nordgren, published in 2006. Far fewer are familiar with Nordgren’s later work that expands on the manifesto. Furthermore, these ideas didn’t emerge de novo in the early 2000s; American anarchists were critiquing marriage, gender, and the couple form in the late 1800s.
In the two decades since publication of the manifesto, discourse on Relationship Anarchy has addressed the couple as a unit of control, inhibition of desire and eroticism in our lives, the challenges that atomised nuclear family units pose to robust communities, monogamous hetero-patriarchy as a form of colonialism, gender abolition, critiques of polyamory, and the powerful possibilities of rejecting sex and romance as primary ways to categorize and assign value to our relationships.
The resources in this anthology supply language to discuss these ideas and authors to pursue further. They suggest a liberatory praxis that extends anarchist politics to our interpersonal and intimate relationships. These ideas do not exist in isolation among one of two fringe groups; they have been developed over at least a century, building on work from political radicals seeking abolition of hierarchy and domination.
Hopefully these texts and historical context for the ideas within open possibility space for queerer, freer, and more politically-aligned relationships. Explore these opportunities to discuss and cultivate queer joys with others who share your desires and values. Build meaningful relationships in ways that challenge normative expectations of relating. Take “the personal is political” seriously — the ways we live and relate to each other are inherently political.
Nordgren’s Writings on Relationship Anarchy
By far, the best-known writing on Relationship Anarchy (RA) is “The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy” by Andie Nordgren. Originally published in Swedish in 2006, this piece is often credited as a founding text in whatever exists as an RA movement. The manifesto is wonderfully short and simple, but leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Unfortunately, in many spaces which acknowledge or discuss RA (like public Facebook and discussion groups, meetups, and queer gatherings), knowledge about RA literature stops here.
Analysis centered around the manifesto retains a neoliberal, individualist framework. Find your core set of relationship values justifies monogamy, straightness, and restrictive relationship rules. Customize your commitments is interpreted as total freedom to select from a range of equally-accessible relationship options (see the Relationship Anarchy Smorgasbord). However, this obscures the reality of a legal system, social institutions, and structural/systemic power that support normative relationships–monogamy, cohabitation with a romantic partner, housing tied to nuclear family, social scripts around dating, etc. It also fails to account for how erasure, obfuscation, or outright punishment of non-normative options make them more difficult to pursue.
People routinely leverage the vagueness of Nordgren’s manifesto to explain why their couple, polyamorous arrangement, or marriage are consistent with RA–the people involved chose to participate in them. While the manifesto suggests challenging normative models of relationships and expectations, it fails to clearly describe the systems of power that coerce our relationships. And many readers have consistently failed to do so either, in the following two decades of discourse.
Nordgren’s lesser-known 2018 essay “The Road to Relationship Anarchy” expands on the manifesto. This essay was only available in print until recently and thus has been excluded from nearly all conversations regarding their work. In it, Nordgren explains that RA avoids “defining relationships by attempts to exercise power over each other.” They also explicitly address polyamory:
Polyamory seemed, at least to us [Swedish counterculturists in the early 2000s], the very key which could open the cage door — but we soon found that this movement similarly caged love in, only finding room for more than two people inside. The rules sometimes seemed even stricter within the polyamorous relationships, where love was somehow both special and dangerous. Those who entered the cage willingly would both be subject to control by the other(s), as well as be forced to exercise control over the other(s) behavior. Our anarchist principles would tolerate no such cage, or wish to put any other person, especially those for whom we felt love, into such a cage.
Nordgren clarifies that Relationship Anarchy includes abandoning relationship models rooted in antiquated understandings of gender and sexuality and those which use rules to control or police others’ behavior. Even with these furtherances, the focus remains on individuals and the interpersonal features of their relationships. Nordgren’s exclamation to “Fuck all order and power relations stemming from these roots!” is powerful–and the surrounding text doesn’t go far enough.
We must name the systems we aim to oppose: Capitalism, Sexism/Patriarchy, Family, Gender, Colonialism, Ableism, and Amatonormativity, among others. While not coined “relationship anarchy” until the early 2000s, the political framework examing intersectional effects of these systems on gender, family, economic power, and freedom were part of anarchist discourse at least a hundred years before Nordgren wrote the Manifesto.
Before Relationship Anarchy: American Anarchists of the Early 20th Century
Some of the earliest writings come from Emma Goldman. Goldman is prolific for anarchist writings and speeches, especially regarding wellbeing and freedom of women. However, the ways Goldman intertwined women’s oppression with marriage is less-discussed. Beyond legally-binding matrimony, Goldman also objected to relationships of a similar form which exhibit codependence and power imbalance. Goldman’s essay “Marriage”, published in 1897, highlights these ideas:
Marriage. How much sorrow, misery, humiliation; how many tears and curses; what agony and suffering has this word brought to humanity. From its very birth, up to our present day, men and women grown under the iron yoke of our marriage institution, and there seems to be no relief, no way out of it…. Some progressive people are trying to reform and better our marriage laws. They no longer permit the church to interfere in their matrimonial relations, others even go further, they marry free, that is without the consent of the law, but, nevertheless, this form of marriage is just as binding, just as “sacred”, as the old form, because it is not the form or the kind of marriage relation we have, but the thing, the thing itself that is objectionable, hurtful and degrading. It always gives the man the right and power over his wife, not only over her body, but also over her actions, her wishes; in fact, over her whole life.
Voltairine de Cleyre, a compatriot of Goldman, gave a speech in 1907 called “They Who Marry do Ill” as a response to the (much more socially-acceptable) “They who marry do well” by Dr. Henrietta P. Westbrook. De Cleyre’s speech discussed the couple as a unit of control, regardless of whether the bond is officially bound by Church and State. De Cleyre says:
The ceremony is only a form, a ghost, a meatless shell. By marriage I mean the real thing, the permanent relation of a man and a woman, sexual and economical, whereby the present home and family life is maintained. It is of no importance to me whether this is a polygamous, polyandric or monogamous marriage, nor whether it is blessed by a priest, permitted by a magistrate, contracted publicly or privately, or not contracted at all. It is the permanent dependent relationship which, I affirm, is detrimental to the growth of individual character, and to which I am unequivocally opposed.
Another piece that speaks to similar concepts is “Marriage or Free Union; Which?” by John Rusell Coryell. This was published in the anarchist journal Mother Earth in 1908. Coryell describes the subjugation of women under the institution of marriage, both directly by their spouses and by other women who scorn or shame attempts to escape or challenge their role as woman, wife, and mother. This essay also challenges the alleged “freedom” of a free union [modern: unmarried couple, or common law marriage] and questions how this practice functions as false reform rather than liberation. Coryell writes:
A free union! Can one be free in a union? I can conceive of two free persons associating together, but the word and the clear meaning of union trouble me as much as the old marriage idea….
Does the woman take your name, and do you go together to occupy the same house, the same room, maybe? And you say you are free? You pretend to believe she is free?…. Perhaps the only difference between you and Mr. and Mrs. Conservative is that they were so narrow that they had a priest make them man and wife, while you were so broad that you enslaved yourselves.
Would you of the free union frankly practice polygamy? Or do you believe in monogamy? And if you do believe in monogamy, do you believe in it for yourself alone, or for her also? It is important to know these things, for it may very well be that the free union is only a euphemism for slavery. Anyhow it must be clear that if two believers in slavery enter into a free union, they will not thereby become free.
Over a century later, many of the same issues around monogamy, family, couples, and gender still divide and oppress us. Decades of writing and thought from feminists, political asexuals and aromantics, and generations of queer ancestors have continued these conversations. While earlier authors emphasized economic power relations between cis men and cis women, modern conversations demonstrate broader understandings of gender and economic exploitation. Reproductive and emotional servitude of women for men through marriage is still pervasive today; current writings also recognize coercion and obligation in many forms unrestricted by marital status or gender. The older understanding of marriage (including ‘free union’) as the primary manifestations of monogamy have broadened to questioning the concepts of dating, romance, and partners altogether.
And Now, The Texts…
This piece is not advocating another option, another “choice” of relating for couples. It is rather a recognition that our “common project” — the abolition of all power relations includes the abolition of coercive/closed relationships. these are those relationships with fixed stature, those relationships with rules or permanent contracts. these relationships cannot really be part of a free society. and just as with other coercive relations at odds with our freedom they must be confronted by all who seek such freedom and communities.
This piece discusses “rule relationships’’ in contrast to free or open relationships: those which lack rules and are not defined by possession or control. While eco-anarchist communities are often accepting of relationships without rules, there is also widespread endorsement of restricted relationships. This ultimately harms our ability to form communities over couples and live in trust not fear. Though people consent to rule relationships, the existence of rules indicates fear and a need to exert (perceived) control. Consent does not equate to desire, and is not equivalent with liberation–after all, many people consent to jobs and rent under capitalism. To respect or uphold others’ relationship rules is to perpetuate a system of control incompatible with freedom for all. If we as anarchists desire a freer society then we must actively rebel.
Editor’s note: This piece includes some outdated language, most notably the r-slur.
2. Relationship Anarchy is not Post-Polyamory by R. Foxtale
Point is: Relationship Anarchy isn’t just “non-hierarchical polyamory.” It’s not even “customize your own relationships outside the bounds of amatonormativity.” Relationship Anarchy is a politic and, as both politic and practice, it’s actively anti-monogamy, anti-marriage, and anti-contracts/rules/policing. In a certain way, Relationship Anarchy is exactly what the Poly Movement has spent the last couple of decades trying to convince people its NOT.
This blog post discusses differences between Relationship Anarchy (RA) and polyamory. While some people use the term RA as a superficial label for its aesthetics or to distance themselves from undesirable stereotypes about polyamory, others envision it as something “beyond” polyamory. While polyamory refers to a variety of multi-partnered relationship arrangements, it often retains the rules and negotiations of monogamy. However, RA is a specific philosophy that rejects relationship rules entirely, both making them and abiding by others’. RA rejects the idea of lover-as-possession, and thus is not against cheating or so-called “stealing” of partners. Identifying as a relationship anarchist expresses the intersections of one’s interpersonal relationships with broader anarchic political goals like opposing police, government, and other systems of power and oppression.
3. Relationship Anarchy is not About Sex or Polyamory by The Thinking Aro
Real relationship anarchy is political. There’s just no way around it. How could it be otherwise, when it has roots in political anarchism? Relationship anarchy is not about getting your dick wet and looking cool while you do it…. You can do polyamory without any political consciousness whatsoever, and you can definitely do monogamy without it. You can be mono or poly in service of the capitalist hetero-patriarchy. Most people are. But you can’t do relationship anarchy without some awareness of the socio-political context you’re operating in and how you’re attempting to go against that grain out of a genuine belief in certain concrete principles.
Relationship Anarchy (RA) certainly affects people’s attitudes and behaviors around sex. However, the author of this piece has noted a pattern of straight men using the label in the context of casual sex to avoid emotional negotiation or responsibility for how their actions affect other people. RA isn’t just a progressive label or identity, but a specific philosophy of applying anarchist politics to one’s interpersonal relationships. While one can practice polyamory or monogamy without any political consciousness (and indeed, most people do), RA is political by definition. RA is about building relationships in ways that actively challenge capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, and romance as oppositional to friendship. RA doesn’t require multiple concurrent sexual relationships and isn’t just polyamory without labels. It’s about centering community over couples and building relationships without coercion or hierarchy. To use it as a cover for sex-centric, romance supremacist, commodifying, or objectifying behavior is “inaccurate, apolitical, and ignorant.”
4. Against the Couple-Form by Clémence x. Clémentine and Associates from the Infinite Venom Girl Gang
Most opt for the sadness of the couple over the alienation of being cut loose from its grasp. Capital lends a shoulder at every turn, suggesting you watch a rom com with your girlfriends when heartbroken or providing endless ways to personalize your wedding dress. Similar to the framework of electoral politics that limits the scope of critique to the wrong people being in office, the couple-form attributes women’s problems to dating the wrong man rather than to the couple itself…. Rather than a subversion of heterosexual social relations, assimilationist, liberal homosexuals have fought for the right to fit into the logic of the couple — to get married, to wear a wedding dress, to create familial nuclei able to protect property relations.
Originally published in LIES, a materialist feminist journal, this creative prose explodes the Couple with colorful imagery and radical suggestions. This piece names and explores the couple-form as a specific tool by which men dominate, oppress, and control access of women. The atomization that the couple produces and its prevalence as a social structure shapes our social spaces, relationships to each other, and how we view ourselves. By reducing the problems of patriarchy and couples to individual ones (rather than systemic), people are led to believe that they must only find the “right” partner for personal fulfillment and insulation from economic threats. Though a main focus of this piece is women under patriarchy, the logic of the couple is also seen in same-sex relationships and their push for assimilation through the rights to get married and recreate the same visions of nuclear families. Even though many in queer communities may not demonstrate cis-male-cis-female coupling with strictly binary gender roles, the practices of objectifying an individual in the name of love and suppressing our capacity for broader solidarity and resource distribution remain.
5. Kill the Couple in Your Head from Ungrateful Hyenas
The Couple splits us off from ourselves and the living web of relations, restricting care, material and emotional support, affection, and intimacy to this codependent unit. What we are calling ‘The Couple’ is only mutual control, management, and governance. It is the extension of the colonial logic of land privatization, the objectification of our inter-subjective relationality… the form itself serves to capture free love and desire and contort it into something that is productive for society — an intelligible unit that is easily controlled…. As soon as a Couple contract is established, the Relationship becomes a private affair, surgically removed from the friendships it was once embedded within and exempt from the critiques we otherwise apply to our shared lives.
This zine delves into how Gender, Family, Couples, and Sex are institutions that capture our desires and energies and recapitulate State power, allowing us to be controlled and control one another. It critiques the Couple as a way of privatizing our insecurities and sources of comfort. Instead, we can create networks of mutual aid that create possibilities for escaping Couples and making up for their shortcomings. Gender and Romance also uphold idealized fantasies and lead us to police each other and ourselves. Neither polyamory nor hyper-individualist dating address the harmful logic of the Couple; focusing critique on individual behaviors fails to address the systems and institutions that reproduce hierarchy and domination. To address these systems and how they appear in our interpersonal dynamics requires personal reflection, vulnerability, fear, and risk. Facing this trauma and uncertainty allows us to live without needing “a Couple or a child, someone to control.”
6. “On Monogamy” by Rotten Zucchinis
What I’m going for isn’t non-monogamy: it’s anti-monogamy — a complete rejection of Monogamy’s framing and foundations with respect to all things, including the limitation of focus to romantic and sexual relationships, and including the framing of persons-as-property…. individual choices aren’t magically “apolitical” when they’re about personal relationships.
This piece outlines the ways Monogamy functions as an institution. It shapes our interpersonal relationships and society around couples, people-as-property, and romantic/sexual relationships as priority. What people typically refer to as monogamy–a monogamous relationship, in which two individuals are romantically/sexually involved with only each other and have rules to enforce that behavior–is a superficial manifestation of systems and institutions. To represent this as an individual “apolitical” choice reinforces the current system and its harms. This piece also addresses the concepts of cheating, artificial scarcity, social conditioning, polyamory as another manifestation of Monogamy, friendship, ableism, and romance/amatonormativity. Building alternatives to Monogamy and couple-centric relating is difficult, but worth doing.
7. “Against Monogamism, For Liberation! Anti-Monogamy as Anarchist Praxis” by Your Friendly Local Anti-Monogamists
The neoliberal ideal of private life is that people freely choose what (supposedly) “works for them,” and everyone else in the community is expected to validate and support their “personal” decisions. This approach, promoted relentlessly by individualist consumer capitalism, ignores the broader political context and interpersonal consequences of our “personal” decisions. This is by design; denying the existence of these structures stifles our ability to identify and mitigate the harms we do to each other while making these choices.
This text names and describes Monogamism, the system that prioritizes certain forms of intimate relating–the sexual and romantic, coupled, monogamous relationships ascending the relationship escalator. It discusses Monogamy as a public institution, enshrined in our legal codes and social norms. Even in spaces where non-monogamy is accepted, or even the norm, Monogamist rules prevail. Monogamism also intersects with other systems of power including ableism, sexism/patriarchy, capitalism, racism/white supremacy, and more–each of these are described with specific questions to guide liberatory praxis. Because of the dominance of Monogamism and its systemic influence in our lives, a framework of “anti-monogamy” captures the sentiment that we must oppose this system as part of a comprehensive anarchist political strategy.
8. Settler Sexuality: Resistance to State-Sanctioned Violence, Reclamation of Anti-Colonial Knowledges & Liberational for All Created with the knowledge shared at the K’é Infoshop in Tségháhoodzání, Dinétah (Window Rock, AZ) and among the indigenous students living in Quinnipiac, Mashpee Wampanoag, Pokonoket Wampanoag, and Narragansett territories
The idea of universal relations persists throughout many Indigenous lifeways. Everyone is connected to everything and everyone; we are all in relation. Therefore, love was expressed without ownership of another person’s body; some societies practiced non-monogamous companionship and approached intimate relations collectively rather than individually. Emphasizing the importance of maintaining universal relations ensured a strong collective of informed individuals.
This zine describes how the settler-colonial project of land theft and capitalization is intertwined with monogamous hetero-patriachy and colonial understandings of gender and sexuality. Many Indigenous practices around gender, sexuality, and relationships accounted for fluidity, horizontalism, and intimacy without ownership. Meanwhile, the colonial concepts of binary gender, sex, and sexuality as a defining aspect of identity brought centuries of extreme violence to anyone deviating from those norms. Systematic erasure and subsequent “study” of Native cultures by non-indigenous scholars have led to an incomplete understanding of indigenous lives and relationships, even within indigenous communities. Decolonization includes recognizing our interconnectedness and rejecting concepts of property and ownership. Uplifting indigenous feminisms and challenging settler sexuality allow us to imagine and build a different future.
9. Looking for Love in Too Many Languages… Polyamory? Relationship Anarchy? Dyke Ethics? Significant Otherness? All my Relations? by Kim TallBear
Like monogamy, I see fundamental aspects of polyamory to also involve imposing onto relationship categories and rules forged historically to manage society in hierarchical ways and which facilitate the coercive work of colonial states that always privilege the cultures and rights of whites over everyone else, the rights of men over women, and the rights of the heterosexuals over queers. Of course, state-sanctioned, heterosexual, one-on-one, monogamous marriage is tied to land tenure in the US and Canada, and helped bring indigenous and other women more fully under the economic and legal control of men. Polyamory only partly challenges settler sexuality and kinship… it still often in practice privileges the married couple as primary, other relationships as secondary, and continues to invest in couple-centric and often nuclear forms of family that are deeply tied up with colonialism.
This article is an exploration of decolonizing relationships, how we refer to those, and ways that modern polyamory and ethical nonmonogamy fail to sufficiently challenge settler sexuality. Polyamory often replicates the same “ethically distasteful” features of monogamy, especially relationships that involve marriage, cohabitation, and co-parenting bundled by two individuals. TallBear’s indigenous perspective is critical of white, hetero- and homonormative forms of love, sex, and marriage. These forms of settler sexuality limit the broad possibilities and fluidity of our relationships. Closeness should not be dictated by sex or physical intimacy–and it can include humans, nonhumans, and entities that a Western framework would consider inanimate. Through reflection on a close personal relationship, TallBear describes the process of unlearning colonial monogamist conditioning and instead creating intentional networks of care and relationships.
Editor’s note: Though Kim TallBear uses the term ethical nonmonogamy (ENM) in this piece, they also describe monogamous norms as unethical and cheating as a symptom of systemic problems of monogamy. ENM (instead of non-monogamy or anti-monogamy) supports monogamy apologism and anti-cheating rhetoric by assuming monogamy is ethical by default, so I would discourage its use entirely.
10. An Aromantic Manifesto by Yingchen and Yingtong
although often constructed otherwise, romance is not a ‘natural’ feeling people have for each other. it is first and foremost a political system: romance only gains intelligibility within the (neo)liberal dichotomisation between public and private life…. romance is privatised insofar as nobody should intervene in who others choose as romantic partners, even if these choices betray a pattern of systemic inequality.
This zine explores how romance is a system of oppression that coerces how we relate to each other. Most queer people want to date and consider same-gender intimacies queer because they reformulate romance to include more than just cis men with cis women. However, promoting “queer” romance (via homonormative roles, coupledom, and gay marriage) is an individualist, assimilationist approach to public queerphobia and hierarchies of intimacy. Romance is not an innate, biological phenomenon; it is a political system that privatizes affection and suggests idealized romantic fantasies as the solution to unhappiness. Our romantic and sexual preferences are considered private and individual, despite the fact that they mirror systemic inequities (white supremacy, ableism, fatphobia, etc.). Aromanticism does not reject intimacy and affection. On the contrary, it aspires to love people in different, queerer ways that enable authenticity and trust while challenging insecurity and possessiveness.
Editor’s note: Zine content also available in plainer text format on the Anarchist Library.
11. Marriage Will Never Set Us Free by Craig Willse and Dean Spade
Same-sex marriage has been framed through a paradigm of “choice,” that some of us can do this if we want to, and those that don’t want to should back off and let us plan our weddings already. But such choices take place in a field of limited options already structured by legal and cultural systems. Coercive systems distribute rewards and punishments– marriage punishes those who do not participate in it. Saying that marriage is an individual choice hides this. Marriage is part of a system where the government chooses some relationships, family structures and sexual behaviors as the gold standard and rewards them, while others are stigmatized and/or criminalized.
The ways we relate to each other extend far beyond the bounds of marriage. However, almost a decade after the US Supreme Court case legalizing same-sex marriage, this is still celebrated as a huge win for queers in the mainstream. Groups like Gay Shame and Against Equality have been critics of queer assimilation via gay marriage for years. And while many people recognize that deep bonds don’t have to be codified by a legal contract, getting married (or not) is still often represented as an individual choice rooted in love and celebration of a relationship. However, as described in this article, marriage has always been a tool of control over economic and race relations. It is an institution with systemic impacts. Though some argue this has led to a positive cultural shift, these benefits are only available to those who are most able to assimilate; the inequitable system of rewards and punishments based on marital status remains the same. Branding marriage as “inclusive” ignores all the ways it deliberately excludes the most marginalized from the benefits it promises, or coerces them into pursuing this legal contract at all costs.
Conclusion
Our relationships are political, just like every aspect of our lives. The concept of analyzing interpersonal and intimate relationships through a political lens is not new. Threads of Relationship Anarchist praxis and discourse have roots in early 1900s American Anarchism. While some of those threads have evolved, we still face the same oppressive systems. Many writings from that period feel surprisingly relevant today. Maybe the next hundred years will bring critiques that challenge axioms we who practice RA currently hold dear. Or perhaps by then we will have broken free of this “oppressive nonsense,” as R. Foxtale calls it! In any case, the fight against assimilation, capitalism, and neoliberalism remains ongoing, including in our everyday choices and relationships.
This anthology was created to spotlight a handful of meaningful texts, expand on Nordgren’s well-known manifesto, and counter the neoliberal appropriation of Relationship Anarchy. These works provide context to modern discourse on Relationship Anarchy and its inherently political nature. Hopefully they identify starting points to explore exciting liberatory ideas–like aromanticism, decolonizing love, gender nihilism, and family abolition–and how anarchists are putting these into practice.
Good luck on your journey toward relationships founded in joy and mutuality–without rules, scripts, coercion, or obligation.
For additional relevant resources, visit the Relationship Anarchy Resource List and bit.ly/RADContentLibrary.
Feedback and suggestions are welcome at RelationshipAnarchy@protonmail.com.
