Untangling Love: What Is Relationship Anarchy Anyway?

By Christina Song, LMFT-S, LMHC-S,

“Love is abundant and every relationship is unique.”

— Andie Nordgren, The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy (2006)

What if you could step off the well-worn path of how relationships should look — and build your own map instead?

Relationship Anarchy, often shortened to RA, is a way of relating that resists the idea that love must follow a single, pre-written script. Instead, RA invites us to see relationships — romantic, platonic, sexual, familial — as collaborations shaped by the people in them, not by social rules alone.

Roots and Lineage: Queer, Feminist, and Anarchist

The term Relationship Anarchy is widely attributed to Swedish activist Andie Nordgren, who wrote a brief but powerful manifesto in 2006 outlining its core ideas: autonomy, freedom from hierarchy, and the belief that love is not a finite resource to hoard but an abundant practice to share intentionally.

But the ideas behind RA have older roots. Many scholars and activists point to queer theory and feminist critique of compulsory monogamy as its ancestors. In the 20th century, queer communities and radical feminists questioned why the nuclear family was positioned as the only “real” form of love worth protecting by law or religion.

As scholar Angela Willey writes in Undoing Monogamy (2016), “The couple form is a privileged site for imagining intimacy and kinship.” RA disrupts that privilege, asking: What if we decenter the couple entirely?

What Relationship Anarchy Actually Means

At its heart, RA is less a set of strict rules and more a praxis — a lived commitment to designing relationships without default hierarchies. Instead of ranking romantic partners above friends, or friends above community ties, RA practitioners ask: What does this connection need to thrive, on its own terms?

And while RA often overlaps with non-monogamy, it is not synonymous with it. Many people practice polyamory — the open practice of having multiple loving, consensual relationships — but still carry unexamined assumptions: that a romantic partner must come first, or that intimacy must be sexual to “count.”

RA invites us to unlearn that. For some, that means having multiple partners. For others, it means centering friendships or chosen family as life partners — or even designing a monogamous relationship that feels intentional and anti-possessive.

How RA Praxis Can Shape Monogamy Too

One of the most misunderstood parts of RA is that it “requires” non-monogamy. In reality, RA principles can deeply inform monogamous relationships — especially for people who want more freedom from traditional scripts.

A monogamous RA practitioner might:

• Reject possessiveness and control, viewing commitment as freely chosen, not enforced by jealousy.

• Prioritize honesty about needs and boundaries, even if those needs challenge cultural expectations.

• Make conscious space for non-romantic intimacies — deep friendships, community care, queer kinship — without fear that they “threaten” the primary bond.

As Meg-John Barker, a scholar of relationship diversity, writes in Rewriting the Rules (2013): “We do not have to accept the default settings of our culture. Instead, we can write our own relationship agreements.”

RA reminds us that the goal isn’t more partners — it’s more consent, more care, more choice.

Why It Matters for Mental Health

For many, practicing RA can be deeply healing — especially for those who’ve felt harmed by rigid family systems, religious control, or the cultural demand that one person must meet all needs forever. When you step away from the “relationship escalator” — dating, moving in, marrying, reproducing — you open the door to define commitment, love, and belonging for yourself.

But RA also brings its own complexities: boundary work, vulnerability, learning to navigate jealousy and social stigma. It can be freeing and unsettling, which is why grounding in community, mental health skills, and ongoing self-reflection is so essential.

A Question to Sit With:

If you could love without the rules you were given — what would your relationships look like? Who would you choose to build life with? Where would you find family?

In the next post, we’ll look at the emotional and relational skills that help relationship anarchy work — from boundary scripts to practical tools for self-regulation and radical consent.

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References:

• Andie Nordgren, The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy (2006)

• Meg-John Barker, Rewriting the Rules (2013)

• Angela Willey, Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology (2016)