Relationship Anarchy: What It Is and Whether Therapy Has a Role
By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
I've written more broadly about what consensual non-monogamy covers as an umbrella term, where relationship anarchy gets a single mention in a long list of structures and nothing more. That's worth correcting properly, because relationship anarchy isn't a variation on polyamory the way an open relationship or a triad might be. It's a different starting point altogether, and it raises an awkward question for a profession built almost entirely around the couple as the unit of treatment. If someone doesn't organise their relationships into a hierarchy at all, what does couples therapy, therapy for a couple, even mean to them?
This question isn't hypothetical, and it isn't only relevant to a small, unusual population. It touches something most relationship therapy takes for granted without examining, that the two people who show up together are each other's most significant relationship, and that helping this specific bond is the obvious goal. Relationship anarchy is simply the clearest test case for an assumption that quietly shapes far more of the field than most practitioners notice.
What relationship anarchy is
The term was coined in 2006 by the Swedish writer Andie Nordgren, in a short pamphlet that became the founding document for a small but growing way of thinking about relationships. Its central claim is straightforward to state and harder to live by. Romantic and sexual relationships aren't automatically more important than friendships, family bonds, or other close connections. There's no default ranking, no assumption that a partner outranks a best friend, and no relationship escalator, the expected sequence of dating, exclusivity, cohabitation, marriage, that a relationship is supposed to move along to count as serious.
In practice, this shows up in specific, sometimes disorienting ways for people encountering it from outside. A relationship anarchist might live with a close friend rather than a romantic partner, prioritise a platonic commitment over a sexual one during a difficult period, or resist answering the question of whether a particular person is their partner at all, on the grounds that the question assumes a category that doesn't map onto what they've built. None of this is presented as more evolved than conventional relationships. It's simply a different set of starting assumptions, applied consistently rather than picked up occasionally when convenient.
This is a meaningfully different claim from anything polyamory itself makes. Polyamory expands who you can be romantically or sexually involved with, but it usually still involves categories, partner, metamour, primary, secondary, and most polyamorous people still treat their romantic relationships as a distinct, elevated category compared to friendship. A recent academic treatment of relationship anarchy as a political and philosophical position puts this precisely, describing it as a rejection of what researchers call amatonormativity, the assumption that a central, exclusive romantic relationship is a normal and superior goal for a human life (De las Heras Gómez, 2019). Relationship anarchy doesn't just widen the category of acceptable romantic arrangements. It questions whether romantic relationships deserve their own category at all.
An honest word on the evidence
This piece has less research behind it than most of what I write, and it's stated here plainly rather than dressing up thin evidence as settled fact. Polyamory itself remains under-researched compared to monogamy. Relationship anarchy specifically is newer and smaller again, a niche within a niche, and the first dedicated empirical study of people practising it was only completed in 2025. Most of what exists is theoretical and philosophical work, like the paper already cited, rather than the kind of survey and outcome research available for polyamory or open relationships.
One recent philosophical paper on the subject makes an argument worth carrying into the rest of this piece, that what makes a relationship count as a real, committed bond isn't its label or its category, but an ongoing, active practice of consent, communication, and mutual support (Eichel, 2024). On that account, a relationship earns its seriousness through what the people in it do together, not through where it sits in an assumed hierarchy. That's a useful frame to hold onto, since it matters directly for the question this piece is asking.
Why this is a harder question for therapy than it sounds
Most couples therapy, whatever specific model it draws on, is built around a working assumption that the two people in the room are each other's most significant relationship, or close to it. That assumption does real work. It's part of why sessions focus on this specific bond, why homework between sessions usually involves the two of you, why progress gets measured in terms of this particular relationship's health.
Relationship anarchists may not share that assumption at all. Two people who've been partners for years might not consider each other more significant than a close friend, a co-parent, or another partner who isn't in the room. Treating the dyad in front of you as automatically primary, when the people in it don't experience it that way, isn't a neutral starting point. It's importing exactly the amatonormative assumption relationship anarchy exists to reject, and doing it from inside the therapy room, which is a particularly unhelpful place for it to arrive unexamined.
This has a specific practical consequence. A therapist working from the unexamined assumption of hierarchy might, without meaning to, frame every difficulty as a threat to the primary bond, push toward reassurance and recommitment as the default goal, or treat a client's other relationships as background noise rather than active, relevant parts of the picture. None of that is malicious. It's simply what happens when a widely shared cultural default goes unquestioned, and it can leave a relationship anarchist client feeling like the work is quietly trying to convert their relationship into something more conventional, rather than helping with the thing they brought in.
Where therapy still has something real to offer
None of this means the tools are useless, and this is where the earlier philosophical point becomes practical rather than abstract. If what makes a relationship serious is the ongoing practice of consent, communication, and mutual support, as the research above argues, then those are precisely the skills most couples therapy models are built to strengthen. Two relationship anarchists navigating a specific, real difficulty, a conflict about time, a miscommunication about what was agreed, a rupture that needs repair, are doing exactly the kind of relational work couples therapy exists to support. The skills transfer. What doesn't transfer is the assumption of hierarchy underneath them.
In practice, this tends to mean the same techniques applied with a different frame. Structured communication tools work whether or not the two people using them consider each other primary. Conflict de-escalation doesn't require a marriage or an escalator to be useful. What changes is the therapist's own posture, not treating the relationship in the room as more important than relationships outside it, not steering toward escalator milestones as though they were the obvious goal, and being willing to hold more than two people, or configurations that don't map onto a couple at all, as the actual unit of work.
A concrete example makes this more tangible. Two relationship anarchists, together for several years without cohabiting or using the word partner, come in over a specific rupture, one felt sidelined when the other started spending significant time with someone new, not because new partners are against any agreement between them, but because the specific way it happened felt like a breach of an understanding they thought they shared about communication. This is a completely ordinary couples therapy problem, an unmet expectation, a gap between what was assumed and what was said. It doesn't need the practitioner to have an opinion about relationship anarchy as a philosophy. It needs the same careful unpacking of assumptions and agreements that any relationship rupture requires, applied without assuming the answer has to look like exclusivity or reassurance of primacy.
Romantic and sexual relationships aren't automatically more important than friendships, family bonds, or other close connections.
What tends to go wrong when it isn't held this way
The most common complaint relationship anarchists report about therapy isn't that the techniques don't work. It's that the therapist kept subtly redirecting the conversation toward monogamous, hierarchical assumptions, asking when the relationship might become official, treating other partners as a threat to be managed rather than an accepted feature of the person's life, or measuring success by how closely the relationship came to resemble a conventional one. Given how much minority stress research on polyamory already shows about the cost of feeling pathologized by a healthcare provider, and how much smaller and less understood relationship anarchy is even within non-monogamous communities, it's reasonable to expect this experience is at least as common, and probably more so, for people practising it (Witherspoon and Theodore, 2021). That study was conducted with polyamorous participants specifically, not relationship anarchists, so this is a reasoned extension rather than a direct finding, but the underlying mechanism, feeling like your relationship structure itself is the presenting problem to a provider, doesn't have an obvious reason to stop applying at the more marginal edge of non-monogamy.
What to look for instead
A therapist who can work with this well tends to ask what the relationship is to the people describing it, rather than assuming. They don't require a label to take the work seriously, and they don't treat the absence of a conventional structure as itself the problem to be solved. Practically, this often means being willing to see more than two people together where that reflects the actual shape of what's being worked on, and being comfortable that the goal of the work is whatever the people involved say it is, not a more legible, more monogamy-shaped version of their relationship.
This overlaps considerably with good practice for polyamorous and open relationships more broadly, and jealousy in particular deserves more room than this piece can give it. I've written about it at greater length specifically in the context of non-monogamous relationships, including the difference between compersion and its absence. Relationship anarchy sits at a further edge of the same underlying issue, a structure that doesn't fit the assumptions most services, forms, and providers are built around, with less research and less cultural familiarity to fall back on when things go wrong.
If this is new to you or your partner
If you're encountering this as someone whose partner has just used the term about themselves, or you're wondering whether it fits how you already live, a few honest questions tend to be more useful than reading the manifesto cover to cover. Do you already, in practice, treat some non-romantic relationships as equally significant to romantic ones, or is that a shift you'd need to make. Does the idea of not having a default hierarchy feel like relief, or does it feel like the ground disappearing from under you. Neither answer is right or wrong, but they point in different directions, one toward relationship anarchy fitting something you already are, the other toward a genuine, larger negotiation about what you both want.
Relationship anarchy can also be used well or badly, like any framework. Used well, it forces real clarity, specific agreements instead of assumed ones, honest conversations about what each relationship needs rather than defaulting to a script. Used badly, it can become a way of avoiding commitment to anyone while calling the avoidance a philosophy, sometimes without much self-awareness that this is what's happening. A pattern worth checking against your own history, structure aside is whether the relationships involved are consistently receiving care, communication, and follow-through, or whether the absence of structure has become a convenient absence of accountability.
How therapy can help
If you're relationship anarchist, or exploring what that might mean for how you live, the work doesn't need to start with defining or defending the structure. It can start with whatever specific difficulty brought you in, a conflict, a miscommunication, a question about how to handle a change in one relationship without treating it as automatically more significant than another. The structure is context for that work, not the subject of it, unless you want it to be.
Where more than two people want to be in the room together, that's workable too, and doesn't need to be squeezed into a format built for exactly two. The aim is understanding the actual shape of what you're navigating, not translating it into something more familiar to fit the furniture.
If you feel like now might be the right time to talk this through with a therapist, I offer a free 30-minute consultation in person (in London) or online.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist working in person across central London, from rooms in Pimlico, Kensington, and Angel. He works with couples, individuals, and polycules on relationship issues including jealousy, affairs and betrayals, sex problems, and considered separation. His practice is integrative, sex-positive, and affirming of all relationship structures and identities.
References
De las Heras Gómez, R. (2019). Thinking relationship anarchy from a queer feminist approach. Sociological Research Online, 24(4), 644–660. https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418811965
Eichel, K. I. M. (2024). Beziehungsanarchie – Liebe ist Liebesbeziehung [Relationship anarchy – love is a love relationship]. Zeitschrift für Ethik und Moralphilosophie, 7, 541–560. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-024-00195-0
Witherspoon, R. G., & Theodore, P. S. (2021). Exploring minority stress and resilience in a polyamorous sample. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 50(4), 1367–1388. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-01995-w
