My Journey from Monogamy to Relationship Anarchy
For most of my twenties I thought I understood what love was supposed to look like. One partner, one house, one shared last name somewhere down the track. That script was handed to me through Sunday arvo dinners in Adelaide, through Neighbours storylines I watched with my mum, and through every chick-lit novel I devoured on the train between Flinders Street and Richmond. Monogamy was not just the default setting; it was the air I breathed, and I never once questioned it.
What I have come to call relationship anarchy involves something quite different. It is a philosophy of relationships built on radical autonomy, honest communication, and the deliberate rejection of hierarchies like primary/secondary or romantic/platonic. This is the story of how I moved from the relationship blueprint I was given to a way of loving that feels truer to who I am, and the conversations I am having with readers and guests on FlossDoesLife.
The Monogamy Blueprint I Inherited
I grew up in a suburb south of Adelaide where most of my friends' parents had met at university, married by their late twenties, and stayed together through thick and thin. That model was held up as aspirational without ever being interrogated. Cheating was the worst thing a person could do, and breaking up meant you had failed at something. When I moved to Melbourne for uni and started dating properly, I carried that model with me like a packed suitcase.
Australian family law also quietly reinforces monogamy as the norm. The recognition of de facto relationships under the Family Law Act 1975 means that living together romantically with one partner, sharing finances, and presenting as a couple is what the system understands. Property settlements, superannuation splits, and Centrelink entitlements are all calibrated around couplehood. Long before I had any idea about relationship anarchy, the scaffolding of Australian law was nudging me toward the monogamous default.
What I also absorbed was the idea that romantic love was the most important love of all. Friendships were nice, family was important, but a partner was the be-all and end-all. Hobbies, communities, and other connections were tolerated as long as they did not intrude too much on the couple. Looking back, I can see how suffocating that was, even before I had words for what was missing.
When the Blueprint Started Cracking
The first real crack appeared in my late twenties. A long-term partner and I opened our relationship after years of slowly accumulating resentment and unspoken desires. We talked about jealousy as if it were a problem to be solved, drew up rules on a whiteboard in our Brunswick share house, and tried to date separately. It was messy, often painful, and frequently absurd, but it opened a door I could not close again.
Through that experience I discovered the Melbourne kink and poly communities. There were potlucks in Fitzroy where people spoke openly about their metamours, play parties in Collingwood warehouses, and workshops at a community centre in Footscray where consent and communication were treated as skills to be practised. I read everything I could find, listened to podcasts, and slowly realised that the couples-only script I had inherited was just that: a script, written long before I was born, and one I could choose to stop performing.
I also started to notice how much of my distress had come from comparing my relationships to a template that did not actually fit my life. Jealousy, I learned, was often a symptom of believing I had to compete for a partner's attention rather than a sign that something was wrong. That realisation did not fix everything overnight, but it loosened the grip of the old story.
Embracing Relationship Anarchy
The term relationship anarchy was coined by the Swedish writer Andie Nordgren in 2006, and the principles have spread worldwide through zines, blogs, and community workshops. The manifesto is short enough to print on a business card and radical enough to upend centuries of romantic convention. Its core ideas are that love is abundant, that relationships should be built on consent and mutual care rather than obligation, and that no connection is automatically more important than another because of its label.
What drew me in most was the absence of hierarchy. A partner is not more important than a friend, a play partner is not automatically less important than a spouse, and a casual lover is not ranked above a long-distance chosen family member. Each relationship is negotiated from the ground up, with its own agreements, its own boundaries, and its own rhythms. That framing felt like cool water after years of choking on the assumption that romantic love should always come first.
I will not pretend the philosophy solved my problems. Relationship anarchy is not a cure for poor communication, unexamined entitlement, or simple incompatibility. What it did offer me was a vocabulary and a permission structure. I could now say to a partner, "I love you, and I also want to spend Tuesday nights with my writing group, and I do not want to negotiate that as a loss." That kind of clarity, repeated often enough, has reshaped how I move through the world.
Putting Anarchy Into Daily Practice
Living this way in practice looks far more ordinary than the manifesto might suggest. It involves a lot of texting, a shared Google calendar that is colour-coded by relationship, and regular check-ins that feel almost clinical until they become a habit. It involves telling a new date on a Tuesday night that I have two other partners and a network of close friends, and watching how they respond. Some people swiped right for a different kind of life; others lean in with relief.
When I first started dating openly, I was terrible at profile photos. I agonised over them, hired a friend with a good camera, and still ended up with images that felt either too polished or too staged. The advice in tasteful profile photographs finally helped me present myself honestly, in lighting that flattered me without pretending to be someone I was not. Authenticity matters when the whole point of dating this way is radical honesty.
Practical life requires paperwork too. I keep a living document of agreements with each partner, reviewed every six months, that lists things like sexual health boundaries, what to do if one of us wants to escalate with a new person, and how we handle conflict. Some of my partners are also legally married to other people, and we have had honest conversations about what that means and does not mean. None of this is romantic, all of it is necessary, and most of it was missing from the monogamous relationships I had before.
Living Anarchy Under the Southern Cross
Australian conditions shape how I live out these ideas in ways I could not have predicted. The country's evolving consent law reforms, including affirmative consent legislation passed in New South Wales and Victoria, have shifted conversations in kink and poly spaces as well as the broader public. Workshops now lean heavily on the language of enthusiastic agreement, which sits beautifully with relationship anarchist ethics. Brisbane's casual sex-positive meetups and Sydney's Inner West community organisers have built gatherings where explicit, ongoing consent is treated as the baseline rather than an aspiration.
Geography matters too. The tyranny of distance across this continent means that some of my most important relationships are maintained through voice notes and the occasional marathon flight between capital cities. The cost of living crisis, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, also complicates the picture. Finding affordable spaces for intimate gatherings or simply a quiet flat to host a date can feel like a part-time job. Relationship anarchy does not exist in a vacuum, and the everyday realities of renting in Newtown or Carlton shape how free any of us actually are to design our lives.
The law, meanwhile, is catching up slowly. Reforms to recognise polyamorous and multi-partner households for things like superannuation and family law are being debated in various state parliaments, and anti-discrimination protections in some states explicitly cover relationship status. None of this is settled, and it pays to be aware of where you stand legally, especially around de facto declarations and parenting orders. An anarchist in love is still a citizen with paperwork.
The most important thing I have learned is that relationship anarchy is not a destination. It is a daily practice of choosing, again and again, to relate to the people I care about with honesty rather than assumption. It will look different in Perth than it does in Hobart, different at twenty-five than at fifty-five, and different in ten years from how it looks today. What stays constant is the commitment to consent, to autonomy, and to refusing the lazy scripts I was handed. Hold onto those three things, and the rest will keep moving.