Relationship Anarchy

Andie Nordgren - The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy

Andie Nordgren - The Road to Relationship Anarchy

Years after writing the manifesto, Andie revisits the aspects of relationship anarchy he finds to be the most important:

  • creating loving relationships that do not cage people in;
  • resisting shaping relationships through norms of gender or sexuality;
  • acknowledging power dynamics and working to create relationships where people do not constrain one another, but rather come together through their free will.

This is a very short, clearly-worded text and can be a good introductory reading.

Ole Martin Moen, Aleksander Sørlie - The Ethics of Relationship Anarchy

When people talk about anarchism, what they have in mind is typically political anarchism, that is, the view that there should be no state. As the philosopher and anarchism scholar David Miller observes, however, anarchism itself is a more general view, namely the view that there should be no rulers. Miller writes that “although the state is the most distinctive object of anarchist attack, it is by no means the only object. Any institution which, like the state, appears to anarchists coercive, punitive, exploitative or destructive is condemned in the same way”—including, for example, religious institutions, schools, or economic systems (Miller 1984: 8). In this sense, one can be an anarchist about different things. Relationship anarchy is anarchism about personal relationships.

Two queer men, an activist working on trans- and sex workers’ rights and a philosophy professor write about relationship anarchy as an ethical framework. The text relies heavily on the premise that it is unethical to constrain and control others, and analyses the practices of monogamy, polyamory and relationship anarchy starting from this premise.

This essay is more detailed than “The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy” by Andie Nordgren, and adds a philosophical dimension to it. The two texts fit well with each other and could be read together.

Total Liberation

The text focuses on the interconnected struggles of live under capitalism. It is an excellent introduction to liveable anarchy. Examples of past struggles are provided throughout the text.

The Thinking Aro - Relationship Anarchy is not About Sex or Polyamory

The Thinking Aro explains what relationship anarchy is to them. They define it primarily in terms of applying anarchism, as an ideology and political practice, to connections between people. The author stresses that RA isn’t just another term that defines the ways in which people engage intimately with one another and that it is essentially different from polyamory because it invites practitioners to be mindful and deliberate about creating communities, instead of merely perpetuating the couple form.

The tone of this text is conversational and it can be a good first-read on the differences between relationship anarchy and polyamory, as the author envisions them. It contains a bit of strong language.

Juan Carlos Pérez Cortés - Relationship Anarchy. Occupy Intimacy!

Tools

Relationship Arnarchy Smorgasbord

The RA smorgasbord is a tool that can help in finding what aspects you want or don’t want to have in your relationships and liberate it from societal norms.