Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with bisexual-identified practitioners of
polyamory in the UK, this article shows that love, intimacy and friendship are
salient themes in polyamory discourses. An exploration of the question of how
respondents define polyamory with regard to different ‘styles of
non-monogamy’ reveals that the boundaries of polyamory are contested
within the movement that has formed around this concept. The prevalent definition of
polyamory as ‘responsible non-monogamy’ usually goes hand in
hand with a rejection of more sex- or pleasure-centred forms of non-monogamy, such
as ‘casual sex’, ‘swinging’, or
‘promiscuity’. The author argues that the salience of the
relational ideologies of love and intimacy hampers the potential of polyamory to
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