By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
I have 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 deserves correcting, because relationship anarchy is not a variation on polyamory the way an open relationship or a triad might be. It is 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 does not organise their relationships into a hierarchy at all, what does couples therapy, therapy for a couple, even mean to them?
This question is not hypothetical, and it is not only relevant to a small, unusual group of people. It touches something most relationship therapy takes for granted without examining, which is that the two people who show up together are each other's most significant relationship and that helping this bond is the obvious goal. Relationship anarchy is the clearest test case for an assumption that shapes far more of the field than most practitioners notice.
What Relationship Anarchy Is
Relationship anarchy is most often traced to a short manifesto by the Swedish writer Andie Nordgren. Its central claim is simple to state and harder to live by. Romantic and sexual relationships are not automatically more important than friendships, family bonds or other close connections. There is no default ranking, no assumption that a partner outranks a best friend, and no relationship escalator, the expected sequence of dating, exclusivity, cohabitation and marriage that a relationship is supposed to follow in order to count as serious.
In practice this shows up in specific, sometimes disorienting ways for people meeting it from outside. A relationship anarchist might live with a close friend rather than a romantic partner, put a platonic commitment ahead of a sexual one during a difficult period, or decline to answer whether a particular person is their partner at all, because the question assumes a category that does not map onto what they have built. None of this is presented as more evolved than conventional relationships. It is a different set of starting assumptions, applied consistently and not picked up when convenient.
This is a different claim from anything polyamory itself makes. Polyamory widens who you can be romantically or sexually involved with, but it usually still involves categories such as partner, metamour, primary and secondary, and many polyamorous people still treat romantic relationships as a distinct, elevated category compared with friendship. An academic paper approaching relationship anarchy as a philosophy of love and a political position, from a queer feminist angle, describes it as questioning a set of linked hierarchies, including amatonormativity (the assumption that a central romantic relationship is the normal and superior goal for a human life), the centring of sex, and couple privilege (De las Heras Gómez, 2019). Relationship anarchy does not only widen the range of acceptable romantic arrangements. It asks whether romantic relationships deserve a category of their own at all.
How Much We Know
There is less research behind this article than behind most of what I write. Polyamory remains under researched compared with monogamy, and relationship anarchy is newer and smaller again. Most of what exists is theoretical or philosophical, and I would not want anyone to take my description of it as more than that. What follows is clinical thinking, alongside the research that does exist on how consensually non monogamous clients experience therapy.
Why This Is a Harder Question for Therapy Than It Sounds
Most couples therapy, whatever 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 is part of why sessions focus on this bond, why homework between sessions usually involves the two of you, and why progress is measured by the health of this particular relationship.
Relationship anarchists may not share that assumption at all. Two people who have been partners for years may not consider each other more significant than a close friend, a co parent, or another partner who is not in the room. Treating the pair in front of you as automatically primary, when they do not experience it that way, is not a neutral starting point. It brings in exactly the assumption relationship anarchy exists to question, and it does so from inside the therapy room, where it can arrive unexamined.
This has a practical consequence. A therapist working from an unexamined assumption of hierarchy might frame every difficulty as a threat to the primary bond, push towards reassurance and recommitment as the default goal, or treat a client's other relationships as background noise and not as active, relevant parts of the picture. None of that is malicious. It is what happens when a widely shared cultural default goes unquestioned, and it can leave a relationship anarchist feeling that the work is trying to turn their relationship into something more conventional, when they came for help with something else.
Romantic and sexual relationships aren't automatically more important than friendships, family bonds, or other close connections.
Where Therapy Still Has Something Real to Offer
None of this means the tools are useless. Two relationship anarchists working through a specific, real difficulty, such as a conflict about time, a miscommunication about what was agreed or a rupture that needs repair, are doing exactly the kind of relational work that couples therapy exists to support. In my experience the skills transfer. Honest communication, repair after conflict, and clarity about what each person needs and has agreed to are valuable whatever shape a relationship takes. What does not transfer is the assumption of hierarchy underneath them.
In practice this tends to mean the same techniques with a different frame. Structured communication tools work whether or not the people using them consider each other primary. Conflict de escalation does not require a marriage or an escalator to be useful. What changes is the therapist's posture. That means not treating the relationship in the room as more important than relationships outside it, not steering towards escalator milestones as though they were the obvious goal, and being willing to hold more than two people, or configurations that do not map onto a couple at all, as the real unit of work.
A made up example shows how this can look. Imagine two relationship anarchists who have been together for several years without living together or using the word partner. They come in over a specific rupture. One felt sidelined when the other began spending a lot of time with someone new, not because new connections break any agreement between them, but because the way it happened felt like a breach of an understanding they thought they shared about communication. This is an ordinary therapy problem, an unmet expectation and a gap between what was assumed and what was said. It does not need the therapist to hold an opinion about relationship anarchy as a philosophy. It needs the same careful unpacking of assumptions and agreements that any rupture requires, without assuming the answer has to look like exclusivity or a reassurance of primacy.
What Tends to Go Wrong When It Is Not Held This Way
The most common complaint I hear from people in non traditional relationships about therapy is not that the techniques fail. It is that the therapist kept steering the conversation back towards monogamous, hierarchical assumptions. That can look like asking when the relationship might become official, treating other partners as a threat to be managed and not an accepted part of the person's life, or measuring success by how closely the relationship comes to resemble a conventional one.
The research on consensually non monogamous clients points the same way. A study of 249 people in consensually non monogamous relationships found that their perceptions of therapist practices, whether affirming of non monogamy or biased and inadequate, predicted how helpful they rated therapy and whether they ended it prematurely. Clients valued therapists who had, or went looking for, knowledge about non monogamy and who stayed nonjudgmental (Schechinger et al., 2018). A small UK qualitative study of 19 people in consensually non monogamous relationships who had used mental health services, and who had told their practitioner, identified themes of stigma, pathologisation and barriers to openness with the therapist (Swindlehurst et al., 2024). Neither study was about relationship anarchists specifically, and the UK study is small. They do describe the experience of feeling that your relationship structure has become the presenting problem, and I would expect people practising relationship anarchy, who are rarer and less understood even within non monogamous communities, to meet the same difficulty at least as often.
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 do not require a label to take the work seriously, and they do not 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 real shape of what is being worked on, and being comfortable that the goal is whatever the people involved say it is, not a more legible, more monogamy shaped version of their relationship.
A few questions can help you judge whether a therapist is likely to be a good fit.
Have they worked with people in consensually non monogamous relationships, and are they comfortable with structures that do not follow a couple model?
Do they ask how you define your relationships before they decide what the work should be?
Are they open to having more than two people in the room if that suits what you need?
Does it feel as though they are curious about your life, and not trying to correct it?
This overlaps considerably with good practice for polyamorous and open relationships more broadly. Polyamory and mental health and the difference between open relationships and polyamory cover related ground, and jealousy deserves more room than this piece can give it, which is why I have written about it at greater length in the context of non monogamous relationships. Relationship anarchy sits at a further edge of the same underlying issue, a structure that does not fit the assumptions most services, forms and providers are built around, with less research and less cultural familiarity to fall back on when things get hard.
If This Is New to You or Your Partner
If you are meeting this idea because your partner has just used the term about themselves, or you are wondering whether it describes how you already live, a few honest questions tend to be more useful than reading a manifesto from cover to cover. Do you already, in practice, treat some non romantic relationships as equally significant to romantic ones, or would that be a shift for you? Does the idea of having no default hierarchy feel like relief, or like the ground disappearing from under you? Neither answer is right or wrong, but they point in different directions. One suggests relationship anarchy may fit something you already are, and the other suggests a larger negotiation about what you both want.
It can help to talk about this slowly and to write down what each of you would need in order to feel secure. Security in a relationship without a ranking tends to come from clear agreements, reliable follow through and honest conversations when something changes. Those can be built whatever your orientation, gender or relationship history, and they are as relevant to a queer friendship network as to a long partnership.
Relationship anarchy can also be used well or badly, like any framework. Used well, it brings real clarity, specific agreements in place of assumed ones, and honest conversations about what each relationship needs. Used badly, it can become a way of avoiding commitment to anyone while calling the avoidance a philosophy, sometimes without much awareness that this is what is happening. A pattern worth checking against your own history, whatever your structure, 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 are a relationship anarchist, or exploring what that might mean for how you live, the work does not need to start with defining or defending the structure. It can start with whatever difficulty brought you in, such as a conflict, a miscommunication, or 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 the work and not its subject, unless you want it to be.
Where more than two people want to be in the room together, that is workable too and does not need to be squeezed into a format built for exactly two. The aim is to understand the actual shape of what you are navigating, not to translate it into something more familiar.
If now feels like 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 to 660. https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418811965
Schechinger, H. A., Sakaluk, J. K., & Moors, A. C. (2018). Harmful and helpful therapy practices with consensually non monogamous clients: Toward an inclusive framework. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 86(11), 879 to 891. https://doi.org/10.1037/ccp0000349
Swindlehurst, S., Sweet, J., & Hoelterhoff, M. (2024). Room for growth: A qualitative study into the therapeutic experiences of consensually non monogamous clients in the United Kingdom. Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 23(2), 115 to 138. https://doi.org/10.1080/15332691.2023.2294856
