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Louise Thomas

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When is cheating not cheating? Perhaps when it’s rebranded under a new notion currently doing the rounds: “tolyamory”.

The word – a portmanteau of “tolerate” and “polyamory” – describes when a person accepts their partner’s infidelity, not as part of an agreed arrangement, more with a degree of private resignation. You discover your girlfriend is sleeping with a colleague and you simply let it happen. You realise your husband has a long-term lover and you hold your nose and allow it. According to the Savage Love podcast: “These people aren’t fools or dupes. They’re not to be pitied – they know what they signed up for and long ago made peace with what they got.”

These are people who don’t want an open relationship, neither do they want their relationship to end. If it sounds a bit stark, well I agree: it is.

Once, when I was cheated on, the fling happened in a different country with a totally random person that my then-partner was almost certainly never going to see again. If you’ve never had a partner tell you about an affair before, believe me that you really form your judgement in milliseconds. In that moment, I knew I would ultimately tolerate it. I acted in a tolyamorous way.

But it’s also hard to put the genie back in the bottle once you know your partner has that capacity – which is why from my experience, “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationships, where you agree to infidelities but don’t want to know any details of lovers or encounters, often don’t work out so well. They create so much suspicion and turmoil that the anxiety often outweighs the sexual freedoms gained. At least DADT is a mutual decision, though. The lack of any mutuality or communication in tolyamory is problematic, to the point where it starts to erode the existence of a relationship at all.

Whether it’s emotional cheating, actual cheating, flirting or paying for sex work like a lap dance, tolyamory demands that a person simply accepts that their partner has erotic desires beyond them. According to Dan Savage, whose podcast has made him an eminent voice on modern sexology, there is meant to be a reciprocal benefit of sorts. A partner who is cheated on will, he hopes: “Focus on all the ways their spouse demonstrates their commitment and shows their love” as a way to make the cheating “tolerable”.

But crucially, unlike the better-known alternative relationships being explored in the 2020s, it’s an unspoken arrangement. These relationships are all the rage right now, with both single, partnered and married people considering whether lifestyles such as polyamory, relationship anarchy (ie, doing away with rules altogether), friends with benefits and ethical non-monogamy (ENM) might work for them. We’ve lived through a subtle, under-reported yet palpable attitude shift in the past five years or so. Yet there’s something almost alarmingly retro and backward about the idea of tolyamory.

Tolyamory doesn’t involve “doing the work” in a way that being polyamorous or ENM does. There is no requirement to actually talk and understand your partner. It’s the unspokenness of it that rings the most alarm bells – especially to someone like me who has been living a mostly sane and orderly non-monogamous life for the past four years.

Whether I’m dating or in a relationship, I know I don’t want to be totally exclusive for the foreseeable future. I also know I prefer dating people who themselves date other people. In my experience, these scenarios don’t work without being able to talk and understand each other. Not just once either, at several points along the relationship, you desperately need to check in and make sure that all parties feel the same. This might sound like a passion-killer, but in the real world, sex isn’t just about having your genitals jostled. People who live this way frequently share a feeling of also loving the honesty and candour of talking about their multiplicitous sex life. Beyond just having sex with several partners is the joy that comes from not having to hide their libido or feel shamed for their desires.

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Compare that liberated feeling with the mental toll that an unspoken tolyamorous relationship would surely take. If you’ve been cheated on, you’ll know the carousel of anxiety that swirls in your mind: the anguish of not knowing who the object of your partner’s desires is. Are they taller than me, do they dress better, are they funnier, cooler, fitter? Are they discreet? Do all my friends know? Do they have unprotected sex?

Another problem with crafting a zeitgeisty name for the rather old-fashioned act of tolerating indiscretion to save a marriage or relationship is that it sidelines the need for consent. In an era where we talk more and more about the importance of establishing consent – in sex, relationships and so much more besides – tolyamory is unhelpfully vague as a modern concept. At what point does a partner “consent” to tolerating their partner’s infidelity? And how is that conveyed exactly, if ever? While we strive for consent to be communicated and for it to be crystal clear, tolyamory seems to wallow in a deliberate state of concealment that, again, sets off alarm bells.

Tolyamory supposes that the cheating partner is essentially a good person, and is either fulfilling a noble cause or a small-time desire. In his podcast, Savage talks of “someone willing to turn a blind eye to a lap dance or a brief affair after years of marriage” by way of an example. But this seems naive to me. Not everyone cheats in order to grow and expand as a human being: some people cheat because they’re just a***holes. Greedy, selfish, narcissistic people who like to create carnage, havoc and hurt are sadly everywhere. Cheating done in this spirit should never be tolerated. Yet “tolyamory” as a concept doesn’t have any mechanism to distinguish between types – it just creates a badge for them to be falsely labelled by. “Don’t worry about my wife,” a cheating husband might say. “She’s tolyamorous…”

While alternative relationships have had lots of press inches recently and seem very buzzy, the truth – based on endless chats and queries – is that few people seem to register that the key to making non-monogamy work is clear and honest communication. I fear that tolyamory, with its disregard for this, is modern sexuality’s “jump the shark” moment – a concept so fanciful and ridiculous that it risks undoing the credibility of this decade’s advance into a world of safe sexual discovery.

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