Open relationships get written off as either a utopian escape from jealousy or a fast track to emotional disaster. The reality, as with most things involving humans and their feelings, sits somewhere much less dramatic and way more complicated. The problems that ruin them aren’t unique to non-monogamy—and the things that actually help aren’t either.
A new study published in Evolution and Human Behavior surveyed 512 people across 62 countries, split between those in monogamous and consensually non-monogamous arrangements. The focus was a concept psychologists call mate value discrepancy—how attractive, successful, or desirable someone feels relative to their partner. In monogamous couples, feeling like the less impressive half reliably produces insecurity, conflict, and controlling behavior. The study wanted to know whether the same applied when the relationship structure was deliberately open.
People in non-monogamous relationships did report less jealousy on the whole—something researchers have observed before, with polyamorous individuals generally showing higher trust and lower jealousy than monogamous counterparts. What the study also found, though, is that feeling less desirable than a primary partner produced the same conflict and insecurity it produces anywhere else. Consensual non-monogamy changes a lot of things. That particular dynamic isn’t one of them.
What Actually Makes Open Relationships Work, According to Experts
Where it gets truly interesting is what the study found about hierarchy. Ranking partners—assigning primary and secondary status, treating one relationship as more legitimate than another—predicted more jealousy, more resentment, and more conflict across the board. The structure people assume provides clarity produced the opposite. Dr. Francesca Miccoli, who completed her doctorate on the legal recognition of polyamorous families, has noted that stability in non-monogamous relationships comes from honesty and clearly communicated boundaries—not from rank.
The single biggest factor associated with fewer problems in both groups was communication—talking openly about attraction and jealousy rather than secretly managing it alone. In non-monogamous relationships, something called compersion also played a significant role. The term originated in San Francisco’s polyamorous community in the 1990s and describes finding genuine joy in a partner’s happiness with someone else—the emotional inverse of jealousy. Research suggests people in polyamorous relationships report feeling less jealousy and more compersion over time, though getting there requires active effort rather than assuming the structure handles it automatically.
Neither side of the open relationship debate comes out of this looking great. The assumption that non-monogamy breeds chaos and the assumption that it dissolves jealousy are both wrong, and the study makes that pretty clear. What actually determines whether these relationships work has nothing to do with the agreement itself — it comes down to whether people are willing to have uncomfortable conversations, resist the urge to rank their partners, and stop treating a relationship structure like a substitute for honesty.
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