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Non-Monogamous People Talk About Cheating More Than Monogamous Couples Do

On the promises we think we’ve made, the ones we’ve only assumed, and why the conversation nobody has is the one that matters most.

✦ BY LUNA ROSE

OCTOBER 9, 2026

Non-Monogamous People Talk About Cheating More Than Monogamous Couples Do

Photo by NIKITA SH

My monogamous friends love to talk with me about my non-monogamous lifestyle. I mean, it’s juicy; I get it. Sometimes they seem open to it, sometimes a bit judgemental, but the curiosity is always there. Lately, I’ve found it really interesting to ask them a specific question when non-monogamy comes up. I ask them what they and their partner have actually agreed to.

And to be honest, most of them can’t answer it. Not because they’re careless people or they are in careless relationships, but because the question isn’t something they have been asked before. They’ve agreed to be together. They’re monogamous. What else is there to say?

Then I ask some follow-ups. Is it cheating to have a close friendship with someone you’re attracted to? To message them late at night about things you haven’t told your partner? To keep a conversation going for months that you’d delete before handing over your phone? Is it cheating to be in love with someone and never touch them? To touch someone once and feel nothing? What about watching porn, or a long flirtation at work, or a lunch you didn’t mention?

The answers vary wildly, even between two people in the same relationship. Even couples who’ve been together ten years or more often haven’t compared notes. And I think that’s exactly why the line around cheating gets so blurry.

What We Think We’ve Agreed To

The main reason that this question is so hard for most monogamous couples to answer is that they haven’t made an agreement. They’ve inherited one. They’ve signed an invisible contract to a cultural template that arrives fully assembled. In it, there is exclusivity and a whole set of assumptions about attention, disclosure, friendship, desire, and more.

The trouble with an inherited template is that neither person has checked what the other thinks it contains. Most often, people agree to monogamy as a concept, not as a set of commitments. And, sorry to say, a concept is not an agreement.

What does this mean? This means that, very often, two people discover that they were never actually operating from the same place. One person thought the line was physical, and the other believed it was much earlier, at the point of concealment or emotional investment. Maybe nobody even broke a rule, exactly, because the rule was never articulated and agreed to. But either way, something real was broken, and somebody got hurt.

Why It Isn’t About Sex

The reason I’m confident cheating isn’t fundamentally about sex is that I’ve watched a lot of people respond intensely to situations that had no sex in them at all.

For example, the person who found a six-month message thread between his partner and a close friend and was devastated, even though nothing physical ever happened. The person who was crushed when they found out their partner had been hiding a huge crush on a coworker from them for over a year. The couple that could have survived the affair, but not all the small lies it took to keep it going.

It seems like in these examples, and the ones I see in my personal life, monogamous people are, almost always, reacting negatively to the discovery that they were operating under false information about their life. That the person they were building something with had a whole territory they either weren’t invited into or that they didn’t know existed. That’s what hurt the most. The sex is often just the evidence that turned up first.

This means that the thing that feels like betrayal the most isn’t really exclusivity; it’s honesty! And, even though we’ve been told that these two things are inextricably linked, they are not.

What Non-Monogamy Forces You to Do

Now, I don’t want to claim the moral high ground here, because people practicing ENM break agreements too, sometimes really badly. But there is one thing this way of living does structurally, almost by accident. And I think it is genuinely important to highlight here!

It makes having the hard and important conversations completely unavoidable. You cannot be non-monogamous without getting into the nitty-gritty details with your partners. Or at least, you really shouldn’t. Plus, there’s no inherited template to fall back on, no cultural default, so you have to actually sit down and create it from scratch. You have to come up with your own agreements about things like:

How much detail you actually want to hear afterwards
What happens if one of you starts falling for someone
Whether friends, exes, or coworkers are on the table
Sexual health: testing, protection, and what you disclose to new people
Who gets to know about your relationship structure, and who doesn’t
What happens if one of you needs to pause or close things for a while

And while these conversations may not be very sexy and can sometimes even feel tedious, they are so important! Once you’ve had them, you come away with actual agreements. Agreements you’ve built with your own words that are specific to the two (or more) of you. Plus, the remarkable thing about an agreement like that is that you can tell when you’ve broken it. There’s no ambiguity to hide in. You know, and so do they.

The Conversation Worth Having Anyway

So I guess this is the thing I actually want to say, to monogamous readers more than anyone. It’s that this piece isn’t an argument for opening up your relationships. It’s an argument for having the conversation that non-monogamy forces and monogamy lets you skip.

You probably won’t be deciding rules around other partners and dates with other people. But there are so many other things to discuss! To start with, sit down with your partner and find out what you’ve each been assuming. Ask the specific questions: the friendship one, the late-night messages one, the in-love-but-never-touched one. I strongly believe that you will find places where your answers differ. Even though it might be uncomfortable to talk about, it is much better to find out in that conversation than later down the line.

Because here’s the part I keep coming back to. Most couples think they’re keeping the same promise, when really they’re each keeping their own version of it. And that can work fine for years, right up until the day the difference between the two versions actually matters.

The point was never exclusivity. It was always honesty. And honesty requires that you both know what you’ve actually committed to.

That conversation is available to anyone! You don’t have to change a single thing about how you love to have it.

I’d love to know what you and your partner have actually agreed to (or continue to agree to), and how you came to make your agreements. Comments are open.