Decolonizing Love: Polyamory, Monogamy, and Reimagining Relationships on Our Own Terms
Updated: 1 day ago
Most of us learned what a relationship was supposed to look like long before we were old enough to choose one: find one person, fall in love, become exclusive, build a life together, perhaps get married, combine finances, buy a home, have children, and organize our most important relationships around the romantic couple.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that path. For many people, monogamy is deeply meaningful and genuinely aligned with how they want to love. However, there is a difference between choosing a relationship structure because it fits you and inheriting one because you were never told there were other possibilities.
Decolonizing love invites us to become curious about that difference by examining how culture, colonization, religion, capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and mononormativity have shaped what we consider a “real” relationship—and then deciding more intentionally what we want to carry forward.
For some people, that exploration leads toward polyamory or consensual non-monogamy (CNM). For others, it leads back to monogamy, but with a different understanding of autonomy, community, commitment, and care. The goal isn't to discover the most progressive way to have a relationship; it's to create relationships that are chosen rather than simply inherited.
What Does It Mean to Decolonize Love?
Decolonization has a specific political and historical meaning rooted in resistance to colonial domination, dispossession, and cultural erasure. Because of that history, we should be thoughtful about using “decolonizing” as shorthand for anything unconventional or personally liberating.
At the same time, colonial systems have profoundly influenced gender, sexuality, family structures, religion, property, and which forms of kinship receive social and legal legitimacy. European colonial powers did not encounter a world in which every society organized relationships and families identically; across cultures and historical periods, human beings created varied systems of kinship, caregiving, marriage, sexuality, communal responsibility, and family.
Colonialism frequently imposed European Christian ideas about gender, marriage, sexuality, and family while suppressing Indigenous and local practices that did not conform to them. A decolonized approach to therapy—and to relationships—therefore invites us to notice which beliefs we have come to experience as natural or universal when they may actually have histories.
Instead of asking only, “Is my relationship normal?” we might ask, “Who taught me what a relationship is supposed to be?” and, perhaps more importantly, “Does that definition still serve me?”
Monogamy Isn't the Problem. Mononormativity Can Be.
Decolonizing relationships does not require rejecting monogamy. Monogamy can be loving, expansive, feminist, queer, culturally meaningful, and intentionally chosen.
The issue is mononormativity: the cultural assumption that exclusive romantic partnership is inherently more legitimate, mature, committed, or meaningful than other forms of intimate connection. Mononormativity doesn't simply present having one partner as an option; it creates a hierarchy in which a romantic partner may be expected to become your primary confidant, sexual partner, emotional support system, co-parent, financial partner, social companion, vacation partner, emergency contact, and eventual family, while friendships and other forms of intimacy become secondary.
We can internalize these expectations without consciously agreeing to them, which is why questioning mononormativity can be useful even for people who ultimately choose monogamy. You might remain happily committed to one romantic partner while questioning why friendship is treated as less important than romance, building stronger chosen-family networks, maintaining greater financial or personal autonomy, or challenging gendered expectations about caregiving.
Decolonizing love isn't necessarily about changing how many people you love; it can be about changing the assumptions that organize that love.
What Does Capitalism Have to Do With Relationships?
Probably more than we realize. Capitalist cultures often encourage us to think through the language of scarcity, productivity, ownership, and exchange, and our relationships don't exist outside those ideas.
We talk about whether someone is “worth” our time, worry about investing years in the “wrong” relationship, evaluate whether someone is contributing enough, and sometimes treat romantic success as another milestone of successful adulthood alongside education, career, homeownership, and financial stability. Even the idea of finding “the one” can carry an expectation that a single person should satisfy an extraordinary number of human needs.
None of this means that wanting commitment, marriage, stability, or exclusivity is capitalist. It means that we can become curious about the ways our larger economic and cultural systems shape what we expect from intimacy.
A scarcity mindset may tell us that if our partner loves someone else, there must be less love available for us; if another relationship matters, ours must matter less; or if our partner can meet a need somewhere else, perhaps we are failing. Polyamory can challenge some of those assumptions by suggesting that intimacy does not always need to operate as a zero-sum system, but that doesn't mean jealousy, insecurity, attachment needs, or unequal power disappear. They still need care.
Polyamory Can Challenge Ownership—But It Isn't Automatically Liberatory
One of the potentially transformative ideas within polyamory and CNM is that commitment does not have to mean ownership. Your partner can deeply love you without belonging to you, their autonomy doesn't have to threaten your connection, and their capacity to experience desire, intimacy, or love beyond you does not automatically diminish what exists between you. For people raised within rigid expectations around romantic exclusivity, that can feel radical.
However, simply having multiple partners doesn't automatically dismantle hierarchy, patriarchy, racism, capitalism, or coercion. Polyamorous relationships can reproduce the same inequities found anywhere else: people can use “freedom” to avoid accountability, couples can exert power over newer partners, racialized sexual stereotypes can shape dating experiences, gendered emotional labor can persist across multiple relationships, and financial privilege can make non-monogamy considerably easier for some people than others.
Even supposedly progressive polyamorous communities can center white, middle-class experiences while overlooking how race, disability, immigration status, parenting, religion, class, geography, or LGBTQIA+ identity affect someone's ability to practice non-monogamy openly and safely.
So the more meaningful question isn't “Is polyamory decolonial?” but rather, “How are we practicing our relationships—and what systems of power are we reproducing or resisting within them?”
For people exploring these questions, polyamory- and CNM-affirming therapy can provide space to examine relationship structures without assuming that monogamy is the goal or that non-monogamy is inherently healthier.
What About Jealousy?
One of the quickest objections to non-monogamy is often, “But what about jealousy?” Jealousy is real, and experiencing it doesn't mean you've failed at polyamory, haven't “done enough work,” or secretly aren't suited for consensual non-monogamy.
Jealousy can contain many emotions at once, including fear, grief, comparison, insecurity, anger, longing, attachment needs, or concern about losing something important. Rather than treating jealousy as evidence that non-monogamy doesn't work, we can become curious about what the emotion is communicating: perhaps it reveals a need for reassurance, indicates that an agreement genuinely isn't working, reflects feelings of exclusion or being deprioritized, or signals that an old attachment wound has been activated.
Sometimes jealousy is simply jealousy—an uncomfortable human emotion that doesn't need to dictate what happens next. We've explored this more deeply in The Ethics of Jealousy: Understanding and Managing Jealousy in Polyamorous Relationships.
Relationship Liberation Also Means Questioning Hierarchy
Another useful part of decolonizing love is examining which relationships society teaches us to value most. Romantic partnership typically sits near the top, while friendships, community relationships, chosen family, former partners, queer kinship networks, and other forms of intimate connection may receive far less recognition—even when they are among the most sustaining relationships in someone's life.
For many LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, immigrant, and marginalized communities, chosen and extended family networks have long provided forms of belonging and survival that cannot be neatly contained within the nuclear family. Queer communities in particular have repeatedly created family beyond biological or marital ties when families of origin and institutions failed to provide safety or acceptance.
Polyamory can make these relationship hierarchies more visible, but you don't have to be polyamorous to question them. Decolonizing relationships may mean asking:
Which relationships receive most of my time and care—and why?
Do I treat romantic intimacy as inherently more valuable than friendship?
What does commitment mean to me beyond exclusivity?
Where have gender roles shaped what I expect from myself or my partner(s)?
Which expectations genuinely reflect my values, and which ones am I following because they feel compulsory?
What would family look like if I were allowed to define it for myself?
There aren't correct answers; the value is in being able to ask the questions.
Culture Can Make These Questions Complicated
For BIPOC, Latinx, immigrant, first-generation, LGBTQIA+, and multicultural people, questioning relationship norms can carry additional layers. Our cultures and families may be sources of profound belonging, resilience, wisdom, and care while also holding expectations around marriage, gender, sexuality, religion, children, and family obligation.
Choosing something different can therefore create complicated emotions. You may genuinely value your family's traditions while disagreeing with some of its expectations, want greater relational freedom without wanting to reject your culture, feel guilt about disappointing parents or elders, or practice polyamory privately because being open could threaten family relationships, employment, housing, custody arrangements, religious community, or personal safety.
That complexity deserves more than a simplistic message of “just live authentically.” Authenticity doesn't occur outside systems of power, and sometimes people make careful decisions about what to disclose, where to be visible, and which parts of themselves feel safe to share. Those decisions can be forms of wisdom rather than evidence that someone isn't living openly enough.
There Is No Single “Liberated” Relationship Structure
This may be the most important point: polyamory is not more evolved than monogamy, monogamy is not more committed than polyamory, relationship anarchy isn't automatically more radical than hierarchical polyamory, marriage isn't inherently oppressive, and choosing not to marry isn't inherently liberating.
The structure alone cannot tell us whether a relationship is healthy. What matters more is what happens inside that structure: whether there is meaningful consent, whether people can express needs without punishment, whether agreements are negotiated rather than imposed, whether boundaries can change, whose needs consistently receive priority, how race, gender, money, disability, parenting, citizenship, and other forms of power operate within the relationship, whether the people involved have genuine agency, and whether relationships are rooted in care rather than possession.
These questions can apply to a married monogamous couple, a triad, a polycule, an open relationship, a solo-poly person, a queerplatonic partnership, or someone who isn't interested in romantic partnership at all.
What Would Your Relationships Look Like If You Got to Choose?
Most of us will never completely separate ourselves from the cultures and systems that shaped us, nor should that necessarily be the goal. We are relational beings who inherit traditions, stories, wounds, values, ways of caring, and ways of belonging from the people who came before us.
Decolonizing love can instead mean developing enough awareness to decide what we want to keep. Maybe you choose monogamy intentionally rather than automatically, discover that polyamory or another form of consensual non-monogamy feels more aligned with you, reconsider how much responsibility you've placed on romantic partnership and begin investing more deeply in friendship and community, recognize that some of your jealousy comes from fear rather than incompatibility, or renegotiate a relationship agreement that once made sense but no longer does.
Or maybe you simply start asking different questions. That is part of the work too.
Polyamory- and CNM-Affirming Therapy in Atlanta
People practicing polyamory and consensual non-monogamy shouldn't have to spend therapy defending or explaining their relationship structure.
At Aguirre Center for Inclusive Psychotherapy (ACIP), we provide culturally responsive, LGBTQIA+-affirming, sex-positive, polyamory- and CNM-affirming therapy for individuals, couples, partners, and polycules. Our therapists understand that relationship concerns within non-monogamous relationships are not automatically caused by non-monogamy itself, and ACIP currently offers relationship counseling that explicitly includes therapy for polycules and non-monogamy.
Our Atlanta office is located on Peachtree Street near Midtown, Ansley Park, Brookwood Hills, and Buckhead, with an additional office in Decatur. Online therapy is also available throughout Georgia. ACIP's broader approach is culturally responsive, trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, and affirming of BIPOC, Latinx, LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, polyamorous, and CNM communities.
Therapy can be a place to explore jealousy, boundaries, attachment, communication, relationship agreements, hierarchy, cultural expectations, opening a relationship, closing or restructuring a relationship, or simply figuring out what kind of relationships feel right for you. You don't have to arrive with the answer; you get to be curious.
Perhaps that's one of the most meaningful parts of decolonizing love: giving ourselves permission to ask whether the relationships we've inherited are the relationships we actually want.
If you're looking for affirming support as you explore polyamory, consensual non-monogamy, or relationships outside traditional frameworks, connect with ACIP. We offer a free 15-minute phone consultation to answer questions, learn what you're looking for, and help you determine whether one of our therapists feels like the right fit.
Frequently Asked Questions about Decolonial Practices & Polyamory
What does decolonizing love mean?
Decolonizing love involves examining how colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, mononormativity, capitalism, and other cultural systems have influenced our ideas about relationships, family, gender, commitment, and intimacy. The goal isn't to reject every traditional relationship practice, but to make more intentional choices about which expectations align with our values.
Is polyamory a decolonial practice?
Polyamory can challenge ideas about romantic ownership, exclusivity, hierarchy, and the nuclear family, but being polyamorous does not automatically make a relationship decolonial or anti-oppressive. Polyamorous relationships can reproduce many of the same racial, gender, economic, and interpersonal power dynamics found in monogamous relationships.
Is monogamy colonial or oppressive?
Monogamy itself is not inherently colonial or oppressive. Many people intentionally choose monogamy and build relationships rooted in autonomy, equality, care, and shared values. Decolonizing relationships is more about questioning compulsory norms and power structures than rejecting monogamy.
What is mononormativity?
Mononormativity is the cultural assumption that monogamous romantic relationships are the normal, ideal, or most legitimate form of intimate relationship. It can also contribute to romantic partnerships being valued more highly than friendships, chosen family, community relationships, and other forms of meaningful connection.
Can I explore polyamory without knowing whether it's right for me?
Yes. Exploring consensual non-monogamy doesn't require committing to it. Individuals and partners can examine their values, attachment needs, boundaries, jealousy, expectations, and reasons for considering non-monogamy before deciding what relationship structure feels right.
Can therapy help with polyamory and consensual non-monogamy?
Yes. Polyamory- and CNM-affirming therapy can support individuals, couples, partners, and polycules with communication, jealousy, boundaries, attachment, relationship agreements, hierarchy, cultural or family pressures, and relationship transitions without treating non-monogamy itself as a problem.
About the Author
Dr. M. Sophia Aguirre, Ph.D., CGP, FAGPA, is a licensed psychologist and the founder and director of Aguirre Center for Inclusive Psychotherapy in Atlanta. A Chicana/Latina psychologist and Certified Group Psychotherapist, she specializes in culturally responsive and affirming therapy for BIPOC, Latinx, LGBTQIA+, and high-achieving adults navigating anxiety, depression, trauma, identity, relationships, neurodivergence, and systemic stress. Learn more about Dr. Aguirre and her clinical approach.
