Let me pull up my rocking chair for a moment, kids, and tell you all about how back when I first discovered that the thing I was doing was called “polyamory”, there was barely a whisper about it in any mainstream media. We’d get on AOL chatrooms and obsessively analyze/discuss a single 100-word mention in a magazine (usually about “WEIRD FREE LOVE FREAKS OMG”) like we were monkeys touching the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Now? It seems like everyone’s talking about all the alternatives to monogamy. It’s in the movies, on TV, and all over publications from Bustle to The Guardian. It’s especially gaining popularity among younger people, who are seeing relationships more as a Choose Your Own Adventure and less as a pilgrimage route to Mount Marriage. We get regular questions at the store from people looking for groups and workshops and resources as they explore opening up.

But there are a lot of ways to be consensually non-monogamous, and it can feel a little overwhelming to figure out what the difference is and how to describe the thing you’re interested in. To help you out, we put together this intro-level breakdown of a variety of lovestyles and what they are, as well as a list of some of the terms you’re likely to hear in your explorations.

A quick guide to ethically non-monogamous relationships and lifestyles

Ethical non-monogamy: This is a catch-all phrase that just describes any form of intimate (sexual or romantic) relationship style where everyone involved has agreed to be non-monogamous in a way that centers values like honesty, respect, compromise, and consent. You’ll also see this referred to as consensual non-monogamy and abbreviated as ENM or CNM. It’s a way to emphasize the fact that it’s not cheating on a partner.

Open relationship: This is another phrase that can mean a lot of things and is often just used in a general way to describe a relationship (usually a committed couple) where their sexual and/or romantic options aren’t limited to one another. It sometimes implies a structure where a married couple has long- or short-term sexual relationships with others (which is sometimes referred to as being “monogamish”), but there’s no real “official” definition.

Swinging: This tends to be a more structured, specific type of lifestyle that relies heavily on local communities and events and is very social/recreational in nature. Swingers are, generally speaking, people who look for individual sexual encounters that may be anonymous or one-time things or may be repeat encounters and/or with friends in the scene. It centers sexual freedom rather than romantic involvement or dating. Many swingers are heterosexual married couples, but it’s certainly possible to be—for example—both polyamorous and a swinger.

Polyamory: While this is still a pretty broad term, and there’s a lot of disagreement about whether it’s a lifestyle or an orientation, it refers a little more specifically to anyone who is philosophically committed to the idea that dating and marriage aren’t automatically limited to one partner at a time. It’s more of an ideal than a practice—someone can be single and polyamorous, or in a couple without other partners and polyamorous.

Polyfidelity: Kind of a subset of polyamory, and much more of a structure than an ideal, this is usually a long-term relationship among more than two people where one or more aspects of the relationship are limited to those partners. It can be anything from a triad of people who have decided to only be intimately involved with each other at all, to a situation where the partners may date outside the relationship but have agreed only to cohabit with each other.

Polygamy: Technically, this just means any marriage where there are more than two spouses, but it tends to be used mostly to describe relationships where religion is the reason for having multiple spouses, or as an anthropological term. If you want to get nerdy (and overly gendered) about it, polygyny is a marriage with multiple wives, and polyandry is one with multiple husbands. Bigamy, on the other hand, usually implies a criminal act of attempting to have more than one state-sanctioned marriage at a time (and also implies a situation where the families aren’t aware of each other), so don’t mix up “bigamy” and “polygamy”!

Relationship Anarchy: A much more recent term adopted by those who feel that “traditional” non-monogamy is still too strictly defined by heterosexual, monogamous norms and who prefer to avoid structures and definitions in their relationships. Relationship anarchists may be completely opposed to state-sanctioned marriage, and often see close friendships, “family of choice”, sexual partnerships, and romantic relationships as fluid states rather than fixed labels. They also tend to value relationships on their individual merits, allowing them to decide how to prioritize the people in their lives, rather than seeing (for example) a romantic partner as “more than” a friend. This is a more modern take on the concept of free love that originated decades ago.

…And a quick guide to some of the terms you’ll hear as you explore ENM

• Comet: An occasional lover or partner who, for whatever reason, passes through your life now and then with an understanding that the level of intimacy will stay the same every time that happens, even though it’s not necessarily a formal relationship.
• Compersion: The pleasure experienced by seeing your partner’s love for another partner.
• Cornflakes: The qualities or personality quirks that all your partners tend to have in common. It comes from a tongue-in-cheek metaphor about how newly ENM people who have one partner assume that any new partners will all be different—like you’ve been eating cornflakes for breakfast every day and now you’re going to try other cereals—but you quickly discover that you’re drawn to similar things in other partners too, so it’s more like you find yourself eating different brands or varieties of cornflakes.
• Fluid bonding: Negotiated agreements about with which partners and under what circumstances you’ll exchange bodily fluids (such as barrier-free sex). Sometimes also referred to as a condom contract.
• Google calendar: You’ll often hear ENM folks joking about Google calendars when it comes to time management among multiple partners—and it’s true that shared calendars are very common for keeping track of things like date nights. (I guess we’re just not iCal people.)
• Kitchen table: A style of polyamory that views a network of partners-and-their-partners as a family and emphasizes all involved people relating to one another that way, even ones who aren’t dating one another—the idea being that everyone often gathers around the kitchen table together.
• Metamour: Your partner’s other partner, when describing their relationship to you. (It can also be used in extended form, for example, your boyfriend’s girlfriend’s husband can also be called your metamour.)
• Nesting partner: Describes the partner(s) with whom you cohabit or “nest”. Coined as a way to make a distinction between partners you share finances or other daily life resources with and those you don’t, without assigning a hierarchy (see “primary”).
• NRE: Means “new relationship energy” and refers to the euphoric high someone experiences at the start of a new relationship.
• OSO: Means “other significant other” and is a way to describe another of your committed partner’s long-term partners. (That person is your metamour, and your partner’s OSO.)
• Play parties: Depending on the context, this can be anything from an orgy, to a swinger’s sex party, to a BDSM-focused event.
• Polycule: A play on “molecule”, it’s a general term to describe everyone you’re connected to in your polyamorous network of relationships. (For example: “Our polycule got together for dinner last week.”)
• Polysaturated: A humorous way of saying that you have all the partners you can manage in your life right now.
• Primary: A term used to describe your most serious committed relationship, usually one that has special status because it involves legal marriage, kids, or cohabitation. Other relationships are more often referred to collectively as secondaries, rather than secondary, tertiary, etc. It’s fallen out of favor with many ENM folks because hierarchical structures often lead to relationships unfairly being treated as “lesser”.
• Relationship escalator: Usually, you’ll hear people talking about wanting to get off the relationship escalator. It refers to the expectation we’ve been programmed to have, that once you start dating someone, you’re expected to be on an “escalator” towards marriage, which is considered the measure of a relationship’s “success”. People who want to get off the relationship escalator may not be looking for marriage, or may measure the success of a relationship by what it brought to their life rather than whether it led to marriage, for example.
• Spice: Sometimes used (often humorously) as a plural of “spouse”.
• Triad: A committed relationship among three people, usually who are all intimate with each other. Sometimes called a throuple or a delta.
• Vee: Describes a relationship where two people are seriously involved with a third person, but not with each other.
• Veto: An agreement within a partnership that one or more partners can exercise control over each other’s potential new partners if they object to the new partner by “vetoing” them, and that potential relationship will be shut down. Not all ENM relationships use or agree with this, and when it’s used, it’s usually under pre-negotiated conditions.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg when you’re learning about ENM for the first time, but think of it as your Duolingo crash course into this whole new world. Looking for more resources? Drop a comment here with your questions, or contact us to let us know what you’re looking for. We’ll be programming more workshops around ENM lovestyles, and we want to know what you want to know!