Beyond the One and Only? – Understanding Non-Monogamy Through Attachment, Attitudes, and Communication

“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness” (attributed to Sigmund Freud).

But are those cornerstones unchangeable? Love hardly fits into neat boxes. Ideas of peace, freedom, prosperity and humanity may be faltering as social orders seem more unstable than they have in a long time. Revisiting inter-personal connectedness evidently seems—from a psychological point of view—more topical than ever; thinking about relationships cannot be apolitical, not today.

Consider this phenomenon: When you look around, it appears that the idea of one other person being the perfect match is engraved in the design of our world: Wedding invitations call for “plus ones”, hotel bookings generally start at 1-2 adults per room, and phrases like “significant other” or “my other half” are likely not foreign to you, either. Yet, while many of us may have grown up with fairy tales ending in “happily ever after” with one romantic/sexual partner, an increasingly visible number of people are exploring relationship constructs that challenge these narratives.

Ethical (also: consensual) non-monogamy (ENM/CNM) is increasingly visible in both popular culture and scientific research. The concept refers to individuals engaging in multiple romantic or sexual relationships with everyone’s knowledge and consent, against the background of their understanding of ethics, values, beliefs, their worlds, each other, and themselves. Both terms are umbrella terms distinguishing these consciously agreed-upon relationships from cheating (e.g., non-consensual or secret non-monogamy/infidelity). So, ENM/CNM entail much more than just the absence of exclusivity. Despite a growing interest, from a scientific standpoint, we know remarkably little about how these relationships unfold, particularly outside the United States.

There are several psychological variables that can shed a light on how different individuals navigate different relationships: Some of them are more person-related, e.g., attachment style and attitudes, others seem more related to interpersonal dynamics, e.g., communication patterns and conflict resolution.

Attachment Style: The Foundation of Relating

Attachment theory, first developed by British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s and 1960s, fundamentally changed how we understand human relationships. Bowlby (1969) proposed that early interactions with caregivers shape internal working models of oneself and significant others—mental blueprints that guide our expectations and behaviours in close relationships throughout life. His colleague Mary Ainsworth expanded this work in the 1970s through her famous “Strange Situation” experiments with infants, identifying distinct attachment patterns that would later be applied to adult romantic relationships (Ainsworth et al., 1978).

By the 1980s and 1990s, Hazan & Shaver (1987) pioneered the application of attachment theory to adult romance, proposing that the same patterns observed in infant-caregiver bonds manifest in how adults approach partnerships.

Modern attachment research typically identifies four main styles along two dimensions in self-report questionnaires or interviews: Anxiety (fear of abandonment) and avoidance (discomfort with closeness). Securely attached individuals score low on both dimensions, while anxiously attached individuals crave intimacy but fear rejection. Meanwhile, avoidantly attached individuals maintain emotional distance, and fearful-avoidant individuals experience both high anxiety and high avoidance (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Fraley et al., 2000).
The reason attachment within ENM research is especially interesting originates from a—perhaps somewhat provocative—idea:

Does attachment theory, built largely on assumptions of dyadic, sexually exclusive partnerships, equally apply to people who love “differently”, who love “many”?

Traditional attachment theory implicitly equates security with monogamy, but recent findings may suggest that this notion needs to be reexamined. Some authors state that individuals higher in attachment avoidance hold more positive attitudes toward ENM. This is possibly because multiple partners allow them to maintain emotional distance from any single person (Katz & Katz, 2022; Scoats & Campbell, 2022). Paradoxically, however, these same individuals aren’t necessarily more likely to practice ENM (Moors et al., 2015; Schrowange, 2022). Meanwhile, many people “successfully” engaged in polyamorous relationships exhibit secure or anxious attachment styles (Katz & Katz, 2022). So, the relationship between attachment and relationship preference seems more complex than previously assumed.

This precisely renders attachment style such a fascinating construct for ENM research. Attachment theory may, in itself, need to revisit some of its immanently mononormative assumptions.

While attachment theory explores the psychological roots of how we tend to relate to others, attitudes toward and willingness to engage in ENM represent a more conscious, evaluative dimension of relationship choices.

Do I Want What I Like, and Do I Like What I Want? From Attitudes to Willingness as Psychological Gateway to Relationship Diversity

The psychological study of attitudes—how people evaluate objects, ideas, or behaviours—has a long history dating back to the early 20th century (Briñol & Petty, 2012). However, attitudes specifically toward non-monogamy only became a serious subject of systematic scientific inquiry relatively recently (Gupta, 2024; Scoats & Campbell, 2022).

Measurement of attitudes toward consensual non-monogamy emerged primarily in the 2010s as researchers recognised the need to distinguish between cognitive evaluations (what people think about ENM), affective responses (how they feel about it), and behaviour (whether they would consider or are practicing it). Moors et al. (2015) developed some of the first validated scales to assess these dimensions, recognising that attitudes toward ENM exist on a continuum rather than as a simple binary of acceptance or rejection.

Importantly, one can dissociate attitudes toward “something” from the willingness (behavioural intentions) to do said “something”. Conscious attitudes toward ENM are typically measured through Likert-scale questionnaires where respondents indicate their agreement with statements such as “I believe it is possible to love more than one person at the same time” or “Romantic relationships should involve only two people”. Willingness to engage in ENM is often assessed separately, asking participants to rate how open they would be to various non-monogamous arrangements under different circumstances (Moors et al., 2015). This distinction matters: Someone might hold positive attitudes toward ENM in general while still preferring monogamy for themselves, or conversely, might intellectually oppose non-monogamy but feel personally drawn to it.

The research interest in attitudes and willingness stems from an attempt to understand the gap between belief and behaviour. In the United States, approximately 5% of individuals report currently engaging in consensual non-monogamy (Moors et al., 2015), yet studies suggest that 20% or more express some willingness to try it (e.g., Haupert et al., 2017).

What explains this discrepancy? Cultural norms, stigma, lack of information, or perhaps the practical challenges of managing multiple relationships all likely play roles. This might raise the question: Are individuals able to choose their genuine preferences, or what is presented as the contextually/normatively respectable option?

Context, Culture, and Stigma

“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.” (Fromm, 1942, p. 218)

Attitudes toward ENM are shaped by cultural contexts, religious beliefs, exposure to diverse relationship models, and personal experiences (e.g., Anderson, Bondarchuk-McLaughlin, et al., 2025). Throughout Europe, cultural attitudes toward relationship diversity may vary. By examining attitudes across countries, an untangling of more general versus more culture-specific aspects of experiences within and beyond non-monogamy becomes possible.

Understanding attitudes also matters for combating stigma. Non-monogamous relationship systems continue to face discrimination in housing, employment, child custody decisions, access to healthcare, and social acceptance (e.g., Moors et al., 2015). Research on psychosocial and cultural factors that foster acceptance towards relationship diversity among both monogamous and non-monogamous individuals can deepen an understanding of normative bias and stigma processes. Such findings, in turn, can inform policies and interventions aimed at reducing structural discrimination against relationships beyond what may be considered a norm.

Communication and Conflict: The Daily Work of Love

If attachment provides the foundation and attitudes shape consciousness, communication patterns may be understood in terms of representing the actual mechanics of how relationships unfold on a day-to-day basis.

The scientific study of communication in romantic relationships has roots in family systems theory and marital therapy research from the 1960s and 1970s, but became particularly sophisticated with the development of behavioural observation methods in the 1980s.

John Gottman’s groundbreaking research beginning in the 1980s (e.g., Gottman, 1994) provided means of understanding relationship communication. Through detailed observations of couples discussing conflicts, Gottman identified interaction patterns that predict relationship success or failure with remarkable accuracy. His work introduced concepts like the demand-withdraw pattern (where one partner pursues discussion while the other avoids it) and the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling)—communication behaviours particularly predictive of adverse relationship outcomes.

Today, communication patterns are measured through various methods. Self-report questionnaires ask partners to describe typical interactions during conflicts (e.g., Christensen & Heavey, 1990; Crenshaw et al., 2017). Behavioural observation involves coding videotaped discussions of actual disagreements (e.g., Brock et al., 2020), though this method may be more resource-intensive and less common in large-scale studies (e.g., Thorson et al., 2024). Physiological measures may even track stress responses during couple interactions (e.g., Packheiser et al., 2021), providing objective data beyond self-perception.

Considering communication in ENM research seems particularly compelling because non-monogamous relationships—theoretically—require even more sophisticated communication skills than monogamous ones already do. A variety of non-monogamous agreements evidently raises the question of differences in communication outcomes by subtypes of non-monogamyous relationship constructs. Indeed, Conley & Piemonte (2021) showed that individuals in open relationships report lower relationship satisfaction and communication quality than those in polyamory and swinging. Managing multiple partnerships, negotiating boundaries, addressing jealousy, coordinating schedules, navigating care tasks, considering living spaces, and—more broadly—ensuring all partners’ needs are met evidently demand explicit, ongoing dialogue. Some researchers hypothesize that these necessities require people in ENM relationships to employ more refined communication strategies and dynamics on average (Veh et al., 2025).

Indeed, individuals practicing consensual non-monogamy—on average—report higher levels of communication satisfaction and demonstrate greater conflict resolution abilities through negotiation and compromise, compared to monogamous couples (Veh et al., 2025). However, this research track remains—for now—in its infancy and methodologically questionable, still relying on small, self-selected samples that might not represent the broader ENM population. Here, targeted sampling is an especially suitable strategy to avoid undersampling from target populations in comparative research (Anderson, Hinton, et al., 2025).

Weaving it Together: Why These Variables Matter

These four variables—attachment style, attitudes and willingness, and communication patterns—offer an inter-connected system for psychologically understanding relationship diversity.

Attachment shapes our fundamental capacity for intimacy and potential reservations around it. This may influence both our attitudes toward different relationship structures, and our ability to communicate effectively about needs and boundaries. Positive attitudes toward ENM may motivate individuals to develop stronger communication skills to ensure relationships work. Simultaneously, successful communication experiences in ENM might reinforce positive attitudes and even provide corrective emotional experiences that potentially shift attachment patterns over time.

By examining these variables together across different countries beyond the US, the current project revisits assumptions built into the previously taken-for-granted psychology of close relationships. Can attachment theory, developed in contexts assuming monogamy, robustly explain outcomes and interpersonal dynamics in non-monogamous relationships as well? To what extent do communication patterns follow similar dynamics across relationship structures and cultures? How do cultural contexts shape attitudes toward and willingness to explore relationship diversity?

The prospective answers matter academically and practically. Approximately one in twenty people practice non-monogamy, yet stigma persists. Mental health professionals receive little training in supporting these relationships, and research lags far behind lived experience. By bringing scientific rigor to understanding ENM through these psychological variables, researchers can build evidence-based perspectives that inform therapy and reduce discrimination. Moreover, ultimately expand our understanding of how humans create meaningful, satisfying intimate connections.

Love, it seems evident by now, may not fit into neat theoretical boxes any better than it fits into fairy tale endings. And that’s exactly why—even more in these times—it deserves our most careful, culturally sensitive, scientific attention.

References

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About the Authors

“Reimagining (non-)monogamy: Cross-country study on relationship diversity regarding attachment, attitudes, and relationship experiences in Italy, Turkey, Austria, and Germany” is part of EFPSA’s Research Programme 2025/2026 under the supervision of M.Sc. Heiko Westerburg (University of Cologne, Germany). The team consists of Belgin Akpınar (Türkiye, Dogus University), Çiğdem Yaman (Italy, University of Padova), Magdalena Weber (Austria, Seeburg Castle University), Bastian Grobmann (Austria, University of Graz), Zeynep Sönmez (Türkiye, University of Padova), Nicole Rajinder (Italy, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore). You can contact them at researchoffice@efpsa.org or heiko.westerburg@outlook.de for questions, concerns, or feedback about the project.