A growing segment of millennials and Gen Z are forming “anti-hierarchal” relationships with multiple partners and friends, according to a new study by the dating app Feeld.
By Jason Parham
“People are sick of the rules of society,” Lavvynder says over the phone from their home in Salt Lake City on a recent Monday afternoon. “Monogamy has become the default. Straight cisgender patriarchy is the default. A lot of us want to do things our own way—not have a government or religion tell us what to do.”
I had asked Lavvynder, 30, who is trans nonbinary and practices polyamory, why they think “relationship anarchy”—an egalitarian philosophy and approach to dating—is getting more popular among young people. According to a new study conducted by the dating app Feeld and sex educator Ruby Rare, author of The Non-Monogamy Playbook, relationship anarchy is on the rise among millennials and Gen Z as a remedy to the loneliness epidemic.
Relationship anarchy (RA) is a relationship philosophy built around clear values: it is anti-hierarchal and anti-capitalist, prioritizes mutual care, and is all about cultivating relationships based on consent. The term, according to Feeld, was coined in 2006 by Swedish writer and activist Andie Nordgren, who said in her manifesto that relationship anarchy “questions the idea that love is a limited resource that can only be real if restricted to a couple.” Though the lifestyle has quietly emerged as a prevailing relationship framework among communes in San Francisco and across Europe in the past decade, it is again finding a wider audience in our current era of romantic upheaval, where young people are staying single for longer and polyamory has become far more common.
