The New Yorker:

Once the province of utopian free-love communities, consensual non-monogamy is now the stuff of Park Slope marriages and prestige television.

By Jennifer Wilson

On Season 1 of HBO’s “Succession,” the telecom heiress Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) shocked her social-climber partner, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), by sharing her misgivings about monogamy—on their wedding night. “I’m just wondering if there’s an opportunity for something different from the whole boxed-set death march,” she confesses, still in her gown. Committed to marrying up, Tom pretends to be down with the whole thing, but, a season later, he backs out of a threesome aboard the family yacht, and out of the arrangement altogether, claiming that Shiv “shanghaied” him “into an open-borders free-fuck trade deal.”

A brief scan of popular culture will tell you that Tom, save for his critique of laissez-faire capitalism, is behind the times. Marriage has been drafty lately. Everywhere you turn, the door couples close behind them when they enter the sanctum of matrimony is being left ajar. Bored with the old-fashioned affair, prestige TV has traded in adultery for a newer, younger model, mining open relationships for drama. In fiction, consensual non-monogamy has appeared in a spate of recent books, including “Luster” (2020), by Raven Leilani, “Acts of Service” (2022), by Lillian Fishman, and Maggie Millner’s “Couplets” (2023), a novel whose title plays with the overlapping nature of coupledom among polyamorous young Brooklynites. In cinema, the couple has been made passé by the au-courant throuple, with films like “Passages” (2023) and next year’s “Challengers” chasing the thrill of the third. In March of 2023, Gucci premièred a perfume ad featuring Julia Garner, Elliot Page, and A$AP Rocky all staring amorously into one another’s eyes to the fifties doo-wop tune “Life Is But a Dream.” The video is captioned “Co-create a world of openhearted bliss in the new Gucci Guilty campaign.” The ménage à trois has become so trendy that, in the fifth season of Netflix’s “The Crown,” Princess Diana’s famous quip to Martin Bashir regarding her husband’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” misses the sting of the original. If anything, by today’s standards three’s not enough company. “Riverdale,” the CW’s adaptation of the classic Archie Comics, ended its series run by revealing that Archie, Veronica, Jughead, and Betty were all in a romantic “quad.”

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