There is a new buzzword in the sexosphere: “tolyamory.” According to to a flurry of recent articles on the topic, tolyamory “refers to an age-old situation where one partner tacitly consents to the other having a sexual relationship or flirtation with someone else. It’s an agreement, but it’s unspoken.”
I have another word for this: cheating. Giving it a funny name won’t change what it is.
Worse! Giving it a name that leans into the language around polyamory is a deeply manipulative attempt to negate the seriousness of what’s going on here. If you are having an affair, you are not a “tolyamorist”. You are a big, fat cheating liar. This isn’t an alternative lifestyle arrangement, it’s a toxic dumpster fire of a relationship, kept alive only through dishonesty, deceit, and disrespect.
Genuine polyamory, meaning the practice of openly engaging in multiple romantic/sexual relationships, requires openness, honesty, and a lot of self-reflection. It can take many different shapes, ranging from the occasional threesome to multiple lovers all living together, but what they have in common is honesty and mutual respect. There is no respect in a situation where one person is lying, and the other is in denial.
It was relationship expert Dan Savage who first coined the term “tolyamorous” in his podcast Savage Love. Dan has a rather more positive take on the concept than I do, saying: “These people aren’t fools or dupes… they know what they signed up for and long ago made peace with what they got.”
Rather than being victimised by their partner playing away, Dan believes that it is possible for cuckolded spouses to focus on the good aspects of their relationship and let the cheating go. I do appreciate what he is saying, and this may be very true for some people, but I just can’t bring myself to co-sign the suggestion that pretending you don’t know your partner is cheating is ever a good idea.
It’s interesting that The Times refers to tolyamory as an “age-old situation,” evoking images of “Mad Men types having affairs with their secretaries,” because there is a good reason that people (mostly women) have put up with a partner’s philandering in the past. They couldn’t leave.
For thousands of years, women have not been able to earn their own money, own their own property, get an education, or control their reproductive systems. All that was on offer was marriage to a man who could “provide” the things she couldn’t get for herself. So, it’s really not that women were happy with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation in times gone by, it’s that they had nowhere else to go. Tolyamory is not progressive – it is deeply regressive.
Thankfully, many women can now provide for themselves, but that doesn’t mean that many people don’t still find themselves feeling trapped in a relationship. This is especially true when there are children and shared assets in the mix. One 2019 survey by Direct Line Life Insurance found that 22 per cent of parents said they had stayed together for the kids. It’s not easy to leave your home, your children, and the lifestyle you have become accustomed to and start over. I get that. But is this really a reason to allow yourself to be treated so poorly?
According to my research on tolyamory, not wanting to rock the marital boat is the primary motivator for quietly putting up with infidelity. Julia (49), who was featured in The Times, discovered her husband was cheating with the au pair. She said: “We had three young children and I wasn’t actually up for discussing it or breaking up…It would have been carnage.”
Julia! What on earth are you doing? I can understand the not wanting to get a divorce, but to not even call her husband out on his appalling behaviour? He just got to hump his kid’s nanny and still play at happy families? It’s so disrespectful.
For me, it’s not even the cheating that I find so abhorrent here. It’s the lack of respect. There are all manner of reasons why people stray. It’s sad, but it happens. Once the infidelity has been discovered, many people can actually come through it stronger than ever, but crucially that takes work and a determination to be open and honest about what happened. To just quietly endure your partner putting it about and pretending all is well speaks to serious self-esteem issues, or maybe even a fear of that partner on some level.
Even if you could tolerate this emotionally, there are physical implications to consider. If you don’t actually call out what’s going on, how do you know your partner is practising safe sex? Is your health in danger?
I’ve focused a lot on the person who is pretending they don’t know their partner is cheating, but what of the cheater? I have yet to read an account from someone who says they know that their partner knows they are cheating. Is there anyone out there telling themselves that in order to justify what they are doing? If there is, that’s just wildly entitled, deluded behaviour. How would you even know that anyway? And if you do know and you also know that they know you know, is it even “unspoken” anymore?
The very fact that this whole tolyamory thing is almost entirely focused on the experience of the person having to put up and shut up shows that this is not a new and exciting lifestyle choice, but an arrangement which can involve a worrying dynamic. One that only works when someone is willing to repress their own needs and wants to enable their partner to cheat on them with impunity. Either that, or they really don’t care about the sanctity of the relationship anymore. In which case, surely everyone is best off out of it?
I can understand someone not wanting to rock the boat or risk a divorce. I also understand that the spark can go in a long-term relationship and that it is all too easy to look for that with someone else. I don’t think that’s a justification for cheating, but I do get it. But here is where the concept of tolyamory loses me completely. If you genuinely don’t care that your partner is seeing other people, as is being claimed in a lot of these accounts, then why not just say that? Why not call it out, say what you know, and become a polyamorous couple. Make that transition together and do this openly! If you don’t mind your partner sleeping around, then why is there any need for secrecy at all? Name it and set up some much-needed ground rules.
For me, that is the most obvious proof that this is not a happy, healthy relationship dynamic. Anywhere there is lying, there is a problem. No one should have to tolerate infidelity in their relationship, not for the kids, not for the house, and certainly not to keep a partner happy.
What worries me about the tolyamory label is that it may be used to justify and normalise some truly awful and even abusive behaviour. I wouldn’t want anyone to read that word and think it applies to them, and that this is some kind of sex-positive relationship dynamic. Let’s just call it “tolerating” and leave it at that, because that’s what this is. “I am tolerating this relationship.” “I am tolerating being treated like crap.”
If it has got to that point, it’s time to leave, isn’t it? Please don’t kid yourself. This isn’t tolyamory – it’s tolerating bad behaviour.