My thoughts on the OPEN 2024 Community Survey Report

One of the things I’m proud of at the moment is recently joining the committee of the UK Polyamory Association (UKPA). Over the next few months, I’ll be posting updates as we continue to develop strategies and work with people and organisations to advance the cause of polyamory in the UK.

Meanwhile, in the US, our more-established sister organisation OPEN (Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy) has recently published their 2024 Community Survey Report. I continue to be extremely impressed with OPEN’s range of activist resources, their curating of the international Week of Visibility and, in conjunction with PLAC (Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition), their work on legislative advocacy for polyamorous people in the US.

The report is really good. I encourage you to read the whole thing, mainly because it contains many excellent graphical representations of the data, as opposed to my rather dry notes below.

Regardless — these are my personal thoughts!

Loath as I am to start on a bit of a downer, I’m slightly disappointed that the report doesn’t contain links to the survey questions (e.g. are the questions longitudinal), methodology (e.g. how the survey was circulated) and doesn’t say whether requests can be made for access to the raw anonymised data so researchers can draw their own conclusions. Also, in various sections of the report, it states that some of the calculated statistics don’t include data from respondents who self-report as having practised polyamory for less than a year. While this is admirably clear and up-front, it doesn’t explain why this is done or what number of otherwise relevant people are excluded from that particular piece of analysis.

Overall, 4,554 people completed the survey, which is a truly impressive number. While I suspect that the overall number of poly people in many countries is significantly higher than is generally reported, finding such individuals and communities can be very difficult while high levels of stigma still persist (see later analysis). This is only the third year of the survey and the number of respondents has significantly increased each time: ~500 in 2022, ~2500 in 2023 and ~4500 this year.

This year’s survey had people from an amazing 71 different countries. This shows the impressively wide reach that OPEN has. It’s even more impressive as I’m assuming the survey was only available in English. Given the active polyamory communities in places like Norway and Portugal, it would be excellent if OPEN could work with local groups in other countries to produce translated versions in future (although I appreciate that translating the results back to English to combine the data would be not only a lot of work but also introduce mistranslation risks).

People from the US made up 70% of the completed surveys, with 52 states and territories having at least one person responding. California had the highest participation, making up 19% of total respondents.

The age breakdown of participants clearly shows that younger people are much more likely to self-report as polyamorous. 67% of respondents were between the ages of 25–44. It’s certainly possible that this isn’t because of a major change in how people live their lives but because of how, over time, a larger number of poly people feel they can be “out” about their relationships, despite the ongoing stigma.

I personally found the gender and sexual orientation demographics both surprising and interesting. The majority of participants self-identify as female (43%), followed by male (35%) and other (21%). This surprised me as it potentially puts paid to the idea that men are naturally more desirous of having multiple romantic or sexual relationships. 76% of people identified as cisgender, 9% as trans and 15% as other. The majority of participants (67%) identified as members of the LGBTQ+ community. Again, it would be very interesting to see if this correlation remains the same in future surveys of larger portions of different countries’ populations.

In terms of race, 60% of respondents were white, with each of the other options polling under 10%. I suspect that this is less to do with the actual racial demographics of polyamorous people and more about which communities the survey was able to reach. Once more, it’ll be very interesting to see how this breakdown changes in future surveys.

After demographic information, OPEN next reported on how people define their relationship practice. To be honest, I found this section a little confusing. There’s a question where people were given a list of relationship practices and asked to tick each one that applied to them. In that, 65% of respondents included ethical non-monogamy / consensual non-monogamy, with a very similar number ticking polyamory. Open relationship recorded 35%, relationship anarchy and solo poly were both around 25%. There were five additional options. Then there was an additional question where they asked people to pick which relationship practice best defined them, but that question had a different set of options. There may be a very good reason for this but it wasn’t clear to me. I have a suggestion for OPEN as to how to address this at the end. In the latter question, when all the different types of poly are combined, that answer hit 46%, with ENM / CSM at 17%.

One of the potential additional issues in the survey, and a subject of discussion at the latest London Poly Coffee, is that there are a lot of terms that people use to self-identify in some categories. While this is, of course, entirely valid, it can make data analysis very difficult. In the sexual orientation question alone, ten terms are used for non-straight individuals and I’m sure a non-trivial number of people participating will use others. Additionally, “other” as a response to the gender questions is doing a lot of heavy lifting but may very well be the best option for such surveys. One of the things I hope the UKPA can do over the next few years is work with the UK Office for National Statistics to propose some standards for terms relating to relationship-practice to start making at least the analysis of that simpler in future.

When asked how long they had been practising polyamory, 60% of respondents said less than six years, with a clear majority peaking at around three years. It would be extremely interesting to run a crosstab of length of participation with age of respondent to see if there’s any cohort correlation.

By, presumably local-jurisdiction, legal definition, 42% of respondents are married, 10% each are divorced or in a “domestic partnership” and 39% are single. Again, these results weren’t clear to me. I hope the “domestic partnership” option was well explained in the related survey question. Also, seeing 39% of people self-identifying as single is rather surprising as polyamory is literally defined by having multiple relationships! (This may be people reporting solo-poly but that’s difficult to tell without access to the underlying data.)

Unfortunately, it’s not at all surprising that the majority of respondents aren’t open about their relationship practices across a range of the domains in their life. In this instance, the data is too complex for me to describe, so I’ll just include a snippet of the report (you should really read the whole thing).

It’s great to see the majority of people feel they can be fully out with their close friends (although it’s likely that that group is self-selected for that reason). A quick note to OPEN, by the way, that the numbers add up to over 100 on that line! The highest area where people are unlikely to be open about their relationships is with their landlord.

People will have a variety of reasons for not being “out” in the various parts of their lives but, sadly, a considerable part of that will be due to ongoing social stigma. A majority of respondents (60%) reported experiencing stigma or discrimination on the basis of their non-monogamy identity in at least one area, with higher rates among people with non-privileged identities. 50% of participants reported issues with family, 40% with their local community, 24% in healthcare,15% in divorce or child custody (so high!) and 10% each in employment and government services.

Unsurprisingly, people were much more likely to suffer from discrimination if they were also members of other marginalised groups, such as women, trans people, part of a racial minority or LGTBQ+.

Moving the barometer on social acceptance will be a long steady progression, following the lessons learned from the LGBTQ+ community over recent decades, especially about positive representation in the media. One thing is clear, though; this really highlights the importance of the work being done by OPEN and PLAC with flagship US local governments to make it illegal for organisations like housing providers to discriminate on relationship practices. It’s my strong wish for the UKPA to, in time, be able to do the same in the UK.

At this month’s London Poly Coffee, it was lovely to meet people who really appreciated being able to find a community of like-minded people for the first time. OPEN asked a question about community as part of this survey. About 30% of respondents said they were either in at least one informal or membership online-only group. 22% said they were part of a membership group with in-person meetings. I’d love it if OPEN asked people to list these organisations in future! Sadly, 20% of respondents haven’t yet found a community that feels right for them to join.

The final question asked people to rank a list of priorities for OPEN to focus on. The respondent-sorted list looked like this:

• Passing laws to protect non-monogamous relationships and individuals against discrimination.
• Creating media, cultural events, and more that normalise non-monogamy and promote acceptance.
• Developing tools and resources that speak to diverse non-monogamous experiences.
• Producing virtual and in-person educational events on non-monogamy.
• Organising virtual and in-person events to build community among non-monogamous people.
• Developing tools and resources for non-monogamous parenting.
• Passing laws to legalise plural marriages or domestic partnerships.

This isn’t the order I personally would put this list in. I was very surprised that working on legalising plural marriage was at the bottom, but that’s exactly why it’s important to get input from across the community to find out what the plurality of people find most important.

The recommendations from the report were as follows (it’s a little odd that OPEN is doing recommendations to, er, itself 😄):

• Implement legislative protections
• Increase public awareness
• Support inclusive policies
• Foster community support
• Encourage research and data collection

I very strongly support all of these, particularly the last one. I’d be very interested in the UKPA working with OPEN in 2025 to either markedly increase UK participation or to conduct our own UK-specific survey. This would be in addition to my hope that, in 2025, the UKPA will be able to undertake a high-quality professional survey of the general UK population to discover both the prevalence of polyamory and societal attitudes towards it.

Before finishing this essay, I have a few quick suggestions for OPEN for 2025.

• When publishing the survey, do a brief explainer video on your YouTube channel. Hopefully, that could address some of the issues around clarity that I personally had that I listed above.
• If they’re not doing so already, it would be great to encourage survey participants by working in partnership with some of the well known polyamory online influencers, many of whom have Instagram, YouTube, podcast and other channels that reach very large numbers of people. In the UK alone, some of the top polyamory influencers can reach over five thousand people and the US-targeting ones will likely be considerably higher.
• Consider a crowd-funder to commission a professional national survey on polyamory practices and attitudes towards them across the US. This is certainly something I’m going to be discussing with my UKPA colleagues for next year in the UK!

OPEN is an excellent organisation. If you personally practise polyamory / ethical non-monogamy, regardless of your country of residence, I encourage you to check them out. Their Discord can be found here.