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How polyamory works, according to relationship researchers
Discover what researchers have learned about polyamory, what misconceptions people have about such multipartner relationships and how individuals actually navigate them
February 25, 2026
What science reveals about polyamorous relationships
Discover what researchers have learned about polyamory, what misconceptions people have about such multipartner relationships and how individuals actually navigate them
By Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rebecca J. Lester, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura
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Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.
For many of us, our mental picture of romantic love is a couple. After all, a firmly monogamous relationship between two people—ideally married—is often portrayed in popular culture as #goals. And to some degree that is reflected in American attitudes. A 2023 YouGov survey, for example, found that 55 percent of Americans preferred some form of fully monogamous relationship.
And yet that same poll found that roughly a third of Americans were interested in relationships that were something other than full monogamy. In fact, one in eight Americans said that, with their primary partner’s permission, they had engaged in sexual acts with someone other than that partner. But for many of us, our understanding of nonmonogamous relationships—especially polyamorous relationships, where people have multiple romantic relationships at the same time—remains murky.
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I talked with Rebecca Lester, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and a licensed clinical social worker who recently wrote about polyamory in the March issue of Scientific American, to shed some light on the topic.
Hi, Rebecca. Thanks for taking the time to join us today.
Rebecca Lester: I’m happy to be here.
Pierre-Louis: How did you get interested in the subject of polyamory?
Lester: I got interested in it many years ago through the process of my personal experiences in the dating world, actually. I had gone through a divorce, and I was back on the dating scene, and like most people these days I was on the apps, and it was something that I just kept seeing again and again on different profiles, people talking about nonmonogamy in all sorts of different ways. And so I got very intrigued by how just up front people were, how widespread it seemed to be, and as an anthropologist I got curious about what was going on.
Pierre-Louis: Can you give us a basic description of what polyamory is?
Lester: Yeah, so polyamory is a form of what is called consensual or ethical nonmonogamy, and it is a situation where people have more than one romantic partner—not just a sexual partner but an actual relationship, romantic partner—and everybody in the situation is on board and consents to what’s going on.
Pierre-Louis: So the U.S. is, by and large, at least socialized to be a monogamous society ...
Lester: Absolutely.
Pierre-Louis: And we often think that there’s only one true love for us out there.
Lester: Right.
Pierre-Louis: How do polyamorists see love and intimacy sort of differ from how we’ve been socially conditioned?
Lester: So in polyamory the idea is that we have many people that we can love and who can love us; there’s not just one true love out there that you seek, and you find, and then you live in married bliss forever—or monogamous, doesn’t have to be married. But in polyamory the concept is that, as humans, we’re wired to connect, we’re wired to love, we’re wired to receive love and that that can take all sorts of different forms with different people.
Pierre-Louis: Can we talk a little bit about how polyamory is perceived in popular culture and then talk about sort of, how you highlight in the piece, the lived reality kind of contrasts with that?
Lester: In popular culture the perceptions of polyamory generally are fairly negative, especially, you know, as it’s grown in popularity and had portrayals on different media and things like that. It’s something that doesn’t fit well with our common understandings of what relationships, quote, unquote, should be, right? This idea that you’re not just monogamous with one partner, but you have many partners is usually seen as something unethical in our society, right?
And so that kind of framework is placed on polyamory as well, whereas in reality it’s very different than the way that most people think about it. The people that I spoke with and that I, that I know in this world, ethics is really at the heart of what they’re doing, and so they take it very, very seriously that everybody be thoroughly informed and thoroughly consent to any arrangements that are happening.
And so that’s really different than the perception that it’s just an excuse to cheat or it’s a way to sneak around or whatever the case may be—just get sex with different people. Like, it’s very different than that, and unfortunately, that’s the way it’s often portrayed.
Pierre-Louis: People often assume that you can’t cheat if you’re in a polyamorous relationship, but in the piece you really lay out that cheating does exist. Can you talk about what it means to cheat in a relationship where you have multiple partners?
Lester: Absolutely, and I think this really illustrates the core of the focus on ethics and polyamory that yes, you can absolutely cheat. Just because you have multiple partners does not mean that anything goes and you can just do whatever you want all the time. Like I said, the focus is really on informed consent of all parties involved, so that means a really intense labor going into keeping open communication and making sure everybody is informed, right? That’s the heart of it.
So if somebody is not keeping their partner informed about what they’re doing or they do something that’s contrary to what they agreed upon, then that would classify as cheating, and within polyamory that’s seen as absolutely unethical, just like it would be in monogamy.
Pierre-Louis: I thought it was interesting, I think it was a woman in the piece, her [partner], I believe, had other partners outside of their marriage, but he was also meeting with the neighbor, and she didn’t know about the neighbor, and that’s cheating.
Lester: Exactly, that she knew about his other partners, and he knew about her other partners but then found out that he had had something going on with the neighbor, and that had not been disclosed, so that was cheating, yes.
Pierre-Louis: It’s interesting that even in the context of a relationship where you’re allowed to have partners outside of that relationship someone would choose to hide it.
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