2023's subversive relationship trend: monogamy
Poly is out, doing it 1:1 like our great-grandparents did is in
Last year, if you were in a stylish social setting and you asked anyone remotely relevant - e.g. under 40, not quite employed, technically residing in the more expensive parts of Williamsburg, Greenpoint or Bushwick but actually flitting between CDMX, Lisbon and Nosara - about their relationship status, they’d launch into they-splaining why having two or many more significant others was vastly superior to having just one. They’d tell you that being with just one person was an unrealistic construct forced upon us by religion and habit, and that humans evolved to have multiple meaningful partners concurrently. After pausing to do a bump of K and ask someone what deep house set was playing on the Sonos, they’d go on to assert that the more evolved and secure one becomes, the more natural it feels to be in an open relationship, a throuple or a polycule. Jealousy is a sign that it’s time to do more self-work and yoga, they’d conclude, eyeing you for signs of dissent. You might have reflected on your many failed relationships and wondered if they’d have been more fulfilling if there’d been a bunch more people in them. But along with higher prices and much higher anxiety, 2023 has brought a much lower body count within the average relationship. The coolest people in the world are now experimenting with a concept called monogamy.
Unlike polyamorous relationships, which have no boundaries and impose vague, capricious rules that mean different things to each member of the relationship, which isn’t actually a relationship, monogamy is when two people decide to be together and aren’t with other people at the same time, either openly or secretly. Monogamy is what happens when two people don’t feel like they’re settling and don’t need to hedge their bets, and actually like each other enough to be with just each other, potentially for a long time (i.e. greater than three months).
Before digging further into this new concept of monogamy, it’s worth taking a look at the origin of polyamory. Like everything that was once creepy and weird that ultimately becomes breathlessly cool and globally on-trend, polyamory was born in Brooklyn.
There were a number of factors that led to the ubiquity of polyamory in Brooklyn.
There was a time - prior to 2008 - when no one in Brooklyn was attractive enough to have sex with more than a few times without introducing lavish distractions, such as lots of other mildly attractive people in the same double bed. People would meet each other at coffee shops that only sold drip coffee with cow milk and unethically sourced sugar in granulated format, talk about their favorite Proust passages or quote their favorite lines from the movie, Sideways, and then find themselves having mediocre, clenched-eyed sex in someone’s double bed with beige sheets and foam pillows followed by bodega burritos and Seinfeld reruns on their medium-blue sectional sofa.
These furtive pairs rarely woke up together, partly because double beds, but also because large pores in unforgiving morning light. Inevitably, they would grow to like each other enough to spend time together, but would need additional stimulation to continue having sex. This is why the sadly discontinued Craigslist Personals was invented: to find other people to spice up these three- or four-week-old relationships that had gone stale because of terrible facial hair choices and cankles. Polyamory became a way for couples, who had the same obscure interests and could share a unisex American Apparel wardrobe, to tolerate their sex life.
Polyamory was also a practical solution to the resource scarcity that defined Brooklyn up until the past few years. There were no restaurants that served mezcal negronis or truffle fries, so dates were exceptionally dull, and since everyone in Brooklyn was a freelance urban planner, a Human Design practitioner or a spoken-word poet, no one really had the money to go out on dates anyway. The residents of Brooklyn resorted to neighborhood pot-luck dinners, which featured rice and beans in various shapes of yard sale pots, and all different shades of dark homemade beer. These parties were ostensibly low-cost ways to socially eat, but everyone knows that potluck dinners always were and still are just wholesome pretense for polyamorous play parties where throuples are born of attrition.
Another less obvious cause of polyamory is ayahuasca. For those of you who don’t live in Brooklyn or California, ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic tea made from the bark of a Peruvian tree that makes you regret your entire life and compels you to torch everything the moment you get back from the jungle or Upstate. Taking the medicine has many prerequisites, chief among them interrupting one’s dependence on brain and nervous system medications - like SSRIs and attention-deficit disorder prescriptions. Everyone in Brooklyn is on one of these, because everyone in Brooklyn thinks they have anxiety, depression or ADHD. Around 2012, everyone in Brooklyn started sitting in ayahuasca ceremonies, and after being forced to stop taking their meds by their shamans, they decided prescription medication was for people who hadn’t seen the secrets of the universe in a yurt after throwing up for 90 minutes. Fueled by their new delusions of wisdom and entirely unsedated, having sex with lots of people at the same time and talking openly about it with everyone except for their parents suddenly seemed correct, transcendent and essential. Hence, ayahuasca as a root cause of polyamory.
So, because Brooklynites were poor, ugly and attention-deficient, polyamory became de rigeur.
But when attractive people who lived in Manhattan lost a lot of money in 2008, they moved to Brooklyn in shell-shocked droves, and they brought their facial symmetry, yoga bodies and shiny hair to these potluck-dinner-cum-play-parties. Like spiking rusty-pipe tap water with Spindrift, Brooklyn got incrementally hotter, but the romantic constructs remained the same, because migrating Manhattanites are always desperate to ape whatever is indigenously cool in the lower-cost place to which they retreat. Good looking people kept moving to Brooklyn even after white collar incomes stabilized, which meant not only synthetic mylk lattes, truffle fries and mezcal negronis but also shockingly attractive polycules all over Brooklyn…but especially in the more expensive parts of Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick.
Because Brooklyn was suddenly the coolest place on the planet, polyamory became cool.
Fast forward to today. Everyone in Brooklyn is poor again, because its sources of prosperity have evaporated: crypto was revealed to be one massive ponzi scheme, NFTs are now understood to be worthless jpegs, you can basically buy weed at CVS, no one can afford a new logo, and the rates of Human Design practitioners have plummeted to zero dollars an hour because it was dumb to begin with. With Brooklyn’s sweeping gentrification and soaring prices, dating multiple people has become far more expensive than the humble days of beans and rice potlucks, and everyone has become ridiculously good looking (except in Park Slope). The pandemic eliminated hallucinogenic tourism, so people stopped taking ayahuasca and needed a drug to tell their friends they were taking on the reg, so they renewed their Adderall and Zoloft prescriptions.
With the three root causes eliminated, polyamory is no longer necessary, and its many challenges are suddenly more apparent and seem super stupid when recreational drugs wear off. Monogamy offers a practical solution to all of them:
It’s way cheaper
Only one name to remember
Only one that-one-thing-that-gets-them-off to remember
Only one name to shout when you (pretend to) come
Agreeing on the rules is pretty intuitive and don’t require a 5-day workshop in Rhinebeck with a $300/hour moderator to write
Max of two types of milk / mylk in the fridge
You know you’re the primary partner
Holidays with family who don’t live in Brooklyn or Santa Cruz are slightly less of a cortisol-bath dumpster-fire sham-fest clusterfuck
Only one person whose IG stories you are required to ❤️ / 😂
Only one person to dump when it get boring
Polyamory had a good run, right alongside chlamydia, that quirky little bacteria that rose to prominence underneath Z Cavaricci jeans and neon boy shorts in the 90s and was passed around modern Brooklyn like a dodgeball in gym class. But these sobering, penurious times require a simpler, more efficient romantic container for a more beautiful, gym-fit, botoxed and face-lasered population. We thank polyamory for the wild memories, ceaseless drama and poorly edited art films, but the next few years will find bleeding edge hipsters walking the gangplank above the perilous waters of a flailing economy and detonated geopolitical climate into the Noah’s ark that is their parents’ Greenwich guest house in pairs of only two. Long live monogamy…at least long enough for the favorable terms of the prenup to kick in.
This essay was made possible by a generous donation by the Divorce Attorneys Special Interest Association (DASIA)