Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:05] Why does a romantic partner automatically outrank a best friend of 20 years?
[00:00:10] Not because you decided that carefully on purpose, based on what that specific relationship actually needs. Because a script handed you the ranking before you were old enough to even question it, and you've been living inside that ranking ever since. Perhaps probably without ever once looking directly at it.
[00:00:29] Relationship anarchy asks a genuinely radical question. Underneath all the discourse and the Internet arguments about the term, what if you built every single relationship in your life from scratch based on what the actual people in it want, instead of inheriting a hierarchy that you never chose in the first place?
[00:00:50] Today we're diving into relationship anarchy in practice. Not the theory, not the manifesto. What it actually take in your body to live this way. Welcome to untamed ember. I'm Dr. Misty. We just spent eight episodes building a foundation. Jealousy, attachment compersion, co regulation, working with your actual nervous system instead of against it. Today we start using that foundation to look at the structure itself.
[00:01:17] Not just how many partners you have, but the entire architecture of ranking escalators and default hierarchy most of us inherited without ever agreeing to it.
[00:01:27] Relationship anarchy is one of the most misunderstood terms in this whole space.
[00:01:32] So let's start by clearing out what it actually means and then get honest about what it actually asks of your nervous system to live it for real first, the biggest misconception, because it derails almost every conversation about this topic before it even starts. Relationship anarchy is not the absence of commitment.
[00:01:53] It's not code for avoiding responsibility, avoiding labels, or refusing to care about anyone deeply. Some of the most intentional, carefully tended relationships I've seen in my practice belong to people practicing relationship anarchy exactly as it was designed to work.
[00:02:10] What relationship anarchy actually rejects is the default hierarchy baked into how most of us were taught to organize the people we love. Romantic partner above friend, nesting partner above non nesting partner long term above new, sexual above platonic.
[00:02:28] That ranking gets presented as natural as simply how relationships work, when it's actually a specific cultural script. The same escalator model that assumes every relationship is either climbing toward marriage and cohabitation or somehow failing to.
[00:02:45] Relationship anarchy asks you to build each relationship structure, its level of commitment, its expectations, its place in your life based on what the actual people in that specific relationship want and need, rather than what its category is supposed to dictate.
[00:03:02] A deep decades long friendship might carry more day to day significance than a newer romantic relationship, and relationship anarchy says that it's allowed to just be true instead of something to apologize for or hide.
[00:03:17] This isn't a rejection of structure itself. It's a rejection of inherited, unexamined structure. You can absolutely have agreements, commitments, and expectations inside relationship anarchy. They just get built on purpose, relationship by relationship, instead of assigned automatically by a label.
[00:03:37] I want you to meet someone who spent years assuming relationship anarchy meant no structure at all, before discovering that the actual practice asks for more intentional structure, not less.
[00:03:49] I'm calling them Wren.
[00:03:51] They're a composite drawn from patterns across a number of clients, not one specific person with every identifying detail changed.
[00:04:00] Wren came to Relationship Anarchy in their early twenties, drawn to it mostly because the existing hierarchy in their life had never made sense to them.
[00:04:09] Their closest friend of over a decade consistently mattered more to their day to day life than any romantic partner had. And they were tired of feeling like they had to downplay that friendship every time a new relationship became romantic or sexual, as though the friendship automatically had to step aside. But Ren's early attempt at relationship anarchy ran into a wall almost immediately. And understanding that wall matters before we get into what actually worked.
[00:04:39] Relationship Anarchy is not the same thing as avoiding commitment out of fear.
[00:04:44] That distinction matters clinically because the two can look identical from the outside while running on completely different internal engines.
[00:04:53] Someone genuinely practicing relationship anarchy might commit deeply to several relationships simultaneously, each with its own real agreements. Someone avoiding commitment out of fear of loss or engulfment. Or might use relationship anarchy's language as cover for never actually building depth with anyone, calling their avoidance of philosophy instead of naming it as fear.
[00:05:17] Relationship anarchy is also not the absence of rules.
[00:05:21] Every relationship anarchist I've worked with clinically has rules, just rules built collaboratively for that specific relationship, rather than imported wholesale from a cultural template.
[00:05:34] The manifesto this philosophy grew out of, written by Andy Nordgren in the 2000s, was explicit about this. It argued for customized agreements built out of trust and communication, not for the absence of agreements altogether.
[00:05:49] And relationship anarchy is not inherently more evolved or more radical than hierarchical polyamory. This is worth saying plainly, because some corners of the community treat it that way, and that framing recreates exactly the kind of moral hierarchy relationship Anarchy is supposed to dismantle in the first place.
[00:06:09] Hierarchical polyamory, practiced consensually and honestly, is a legitimate structure. Relationship anarchy is a different legitimate structure. Neither one is a more advanced level of the other.
[00:06:21] Ren's early mistake was treating the absence of default hierarchy as the absence of any structure at all.
[00:06:28] Without a ranking to fall back on, and without yet having built anything to replace it, several of Wren's relationships drifted into ambiguity that felt at first like freedom, and within a few months felt more like nobody actually knowing where they stood with anybody.
[00:06:46] One specific moment crystallized this for Ren. A partner asked casually, what are we exactly? Expecting an easy answer. Given how invested in relationship anarchy Ren had been, Wren found they genuinely didn't know how to answer. Not because the relationship wasn't real, but because nothing had ever been said out loud about what either of them could actually expect from each other, and the absence of hierarchy had somehow been mistaken by both of them for a reason not to ask.
[00:07:18] That drift into ambiguity is exactly where the clinical work begins, because tearing down an inherited structure is the easy part.
[00:07:27] What your nervous system needs in order to build something real in its place is a different question entirely.
[00:07:33] I want to widen the lens here, because relationship anarchy discourse tends to stay narrowly focused on romantic and sexual partners, and that framing recreates the exact hierarchy it claims to reject.
[00:07:47] If we're only applying this philosophy to people we're dating, we've just built a smaller, trendier version of the same escalator model. With romance still sitting at the center of the universe by default.
[00:07:59] The people most affected by default hierarchy are often not partners at all. They're close friends, chosen family, community members, people who show up for us in ways that would qualify as primary partner level commitment in any honest accounting, except for the label never existed to describe them this way.
[00:08:18] This lands with particular weight for queer folks who have often built entire support systems outside biological families specifically because those systems failed to show up. And for anyone whose culture already treats friendship as something less serious than romance by default, Wren's whole entry point into this work was exactly this friendship, the one that mattered more day to day than any romantic relationship had, and that had no adequate language available to describe its actual significance.
[00:08:52] Relationship anarchy practice honestly has to include that friendship on equal footing with any romantic relationship, structurally and practically, not just in a sentimental toast at some point down the line.
[00:09:06] Here's the piece that gets skipped in most relationship anarchy discourse. Default hierarchy, whatever else is wrong with it, does one thing efficiently. It provides a nervous system with predictable information.
[00:09:19] If your partner is by definition your top priority, you don't have to actively negotiate that. Every time uncertainty creeps in, the script does the reassuring for you, even when the script itself is limiting.
[00:09:32] Remove that script and your nervous system loses a source of automatic predictability that it may have been relying on more than you realized.
[00:09:41] For a nervous system with a strong baseline capacity to tolerate ambiguity, that's a fair trade.
[00:09:48] More freedom in exchange for building your own Structure for a nervous system that already runs anxious, that already scans for signs of where it stands. Removing the automatic ranking without replacing it with something equally clear can genuinely destabilize things.
[00:10:04] Not because relationship anarchy is flawed, but because ambiguity itself is a real physiological cost and someone has to actually pay for it.
[00:10:15] This connects directly to attachment patterns we talked about back in episode five.
[00:10:20] Someone with an anxious attachment history often relies heavily on external legible signals of security, like verbal reassurance, defined labels, clear relational rank. Precisely because their nervous system learned early that security couldn't be assumed and had to be actively tracked, Relationship anarchy removes several of the most common external signals at once.
[00:10:46] That doesn't make it wrong for someone with an anxious history. It means the internal work has to do more of the load bearing than the external structure used to handle.
[00:10:57] Ren, it turned out, had exactly this kind of history.
[00:11:00] And in that first stretch of practicing relationship anarchy, without realizing what it actually required, the removal of hierarchy didn't feel liberating. It felt like standing in a room with walls taken down and no idea where the new boundaries were supposed to be.
[00:11:17] Understanding why the walls matter is the first step. What replaces them if not a ranking is the actual clinical question this whole episode is trying to answer.
[00:11:28] If relationship anarchy removes the automatic script, the thing that has to fill that space isn't nothing. It's explicit, actively maintained agreements, negotiated relationship by relationship, revisited regularly rather than assumed to hold indefinitely. This is more labor than inheriting a script, not less.
[00:11:50] And that trade off deserves to be named honestly instead of romanticized.
[00:11:56] Explicit agreements give a nervous system something real to track, even without a ranking attached to it.
[00:12:03] What do we consider ourselves to each other? What do we expect regarding time exclusivity, information sharing, crisis support?
[00:12:12] None of those answers are assumed by relationship Anarchy's philosophy itself.
[00:12:17] They have to be built, named, and critically actually communicated clearly enough that both people's nervous systems have something solid to stand on.
[00:12:27] This is where a lot of relationship anarchy attempts quietly fail.
[00:12:31] Not because the philosophy is flawed, but because tearing down the old hierarchy is loud and visible, while building explicit replacement agreements is slow, unglamorous, ongoing work that never announces itself as finished. Ren spent the first several months doing all of the tearing down and almost none of the building, which is a completely understandable order to do things in and also exactly backward from what actually creates stability.
[00:13:02] Watching what actually shifted once Ren reversed that order tells you almost everything you need to know about making this work in practice.
[00:13:11] In year one, Wren had torn down hierarchy across the board. No partner was Designated as primary, no relationship had an assumed rank over any other. On paper, it matched the philosophy exactly in practice. Several of Wren's partners, and Wren himself, had no idea what to actually expect from week to week, because nobody had replaced the old script with anything concrete.
[00:13:37] The turning point came after a specific rupture. One partner assumed a level of priority during a personal crisis that Wren hadn't actually agreed to purely because that partner had unconsciously imported old hierarchy assumptions in the absence of any explicit alternative.
[00:13:56] Ren, meanwhile, had been quietly assuming their closest friend would be the one showing up for that same crisis based on nothing anyone had actually discussed. Both assumptions felt obvious to the person making them and were invisible to everyone else.
[00:14:13] That rupture became the catalyst for Ren's real relationship anarchy practice, the one that actually worked.
[00:14:20] With each significant relationship, Wren started having an explicit, sometimes uncomfortable conversation. What do we actually expect from each other? Specifically, not generally. Who do we each turn to during a crisis? How much advance notice matters for plans? What, if anything?
[00:14:40] What, if anything, are we exclusive about?
[00:14:43] None of the answers were assumed to be identical across relationships, and that was the entire point.
[00:14:51] With their closest friend, the answer included being a primary crisis contact, something no romantic hierarchy would have officially permitted. But that had always been true underneath the surface.
[00:15:04] With one romantic partner, the agreement centered on a high degree of day to day entanglement.
[00:15:10] With another, the agreement was intentionally looser, built around occasional high quality time without much daily coordination at all.
[00:15:19] Every relationship ended up structured differently, deliberately.
[00:15:23] Instead of structured identically by default or structured by nothing at all.
[00:15:31] The conversation with their closest friend was the one Ren dreaded most. Oddly enough, more than any romantic negotiation, naming out loud that this friendship functioned at a level most people reserve for a spouse felt exposing in a way Ren hadn't expected.
[00:15:50] Their friend's response was simple. Of course. I've thought of it that way for years. I just never knew if you wanted to say it out loud.
[00:15:59] That one conversation alone reorganized how confidently Ren showed up in the friendship afterward.
[00:16:06] The romantic conversations were easier in some ways and harder in others.
[00:16:11] One partner, upon hearing Rin, wanted a looser, lower coordination agreement, initially heard it as a demotion, a smaller version of what they'd assumed they already had.
[00:16:21] It took several conversations to establish that looser wasn't a ranking at all, just an accurate description of what actually worked for both of their lives and schedules.
[00:16:32] That partner eventually said, the clarity itself, even about something looser than expected, felt better than the vague uncertainty that had preceded it.
[00:16:43] Wren didn't end up needing less Clarity, they ended up building it on purpose instead of either inheriting it from an old script or hoping it would simply emerge on its own from the absence of one.
[00:16:56] Here's what building genuinely intentional hierarchy free structure actually looks like, whether you're new to this or like rent already mid course correction.
[00:17:07] Building relationship anarchy on purpose doesn't mean every relationship gets to keep everything it once had.
[00:17:14] Sometimes an explicit conversation reveals a real mismatch. One person wants a level of closeness, the other one genuinely doesn't. And no amount of intentional structure changes that underlying gap.
[00:17:26] It's relationship anarchy, doing exactly what it's supposed to do rather than failing at it, surfacing what was previously hidden underneath an inherited assumption. But surfacing it doesn't remove the grief that can come with it. Wren had one friendship shift significantly once explicit conversations began. Not because anything went wrong, but because the honest agreement turned out to be smaller than the assumed one had been. That loss was real and worth grieving, even though the process that revealed it was healthy.
[00:17:59] Something relationship anarchy discourse tends to gloss over is. Maintaining several explicitly individually negotiated relationships takes ongoing cognitive and emotional labor. Maintaining several explicitly individually negotiated relationships takes ongoing cognitive and emotional labor. That inherited hierarchy, whatever its flaws, doesn't demand in the same way a default script runs largely on autopilot. An intentionally built structure requires periodic attention, renegotiation, and active tracking of what was actually agreed with each person.
[00:18:38] Wren described this cost honestly, especially in the first year of doing things explicitly. Some weeks it felt like relationship management had become a part time job.
[00:18:48] That cost didn't mean the approach was wrong. It meant the labor that hierarchy outsources to an unexamined script had simply become visible, done consciously rather than automatically. Over time, the labor became more efficient, not because it disappeared, but because Wren got better at doing it the same way any skill gets easier with repetition.
[00:19:13] For anyone considering this structure, it's not a lower effort alternative to hierarchy.
[00:19:19] It trades one kind of effort, the effort of building and maintaining a system you did. Neither effort is smaller, they're just different, and only one of them is actually yours.
[00:19:30] First, replace assumed hierarchy with an explicit conversation, relationship by relationship.
[00:19:38] What are we to each other? Not what category does this fall into, but what do we actually want from this specific connection named directly rather than inferred from how the relationship started?
[00:19:51] Second, get specific about the categories that used to be handled automatically by rank, crisis, support, day to day coordination, information sharing, exclusivity. If any, vague philosophical agreement on relationship anarchy as a value isn't the same as functional clarity about what happens on a hard Tuesday?
[00:20:12] Third, expect these agreements to need revisiting.
[00:20:16] Explicit structure isn't a one time conversation that holds forever. Relationships change capacity changes, and an agreement that worked six months ago might need updating not because anyone did anything wrong, but because static agreements don't actually match dynamic relationships.
[00:20:35] Fourth, if you notice yourself defaulting to old hierarchy patterns without meaning to, that's not a failure of your relationship anarchy practice. It's your nervous system reaching for a familiar structure under stress. Which is exactly what nervous systems do. Notice it, name it to the people involved, and rebuild the explicit agreement rather than treating the slip as proof the whole philosophy failed.
[00:21:00] And fifth, if ambiguity itself is triggering significant distress, treat that as useful data about your nervous system's current capacity, not as evidence. Relationship anarchy isn't for you.
[00:21:13] Building more explicit structure, more frequent check ins, and more concrete agreements is still relationship anarchy.
[00:21:20] It just means your version needs more scaffolding right now than someone else's might, and that's allowed.
[00:21:28] Sixth, apply this explicitly to friendships and chosen family, not just romantic or sexual partners. If a friendship carries real weight in your life, it deserves the same intentional conversation about expectations that a romantic relationship would get, rather than being left as an unspoken given.
[00:21:47] And seventh, expect grief to show up sometimes, even when the process itself is healthy. An honest conversation can reveal a real gap between what one person wants and what another can offer. That gap is worth grieving directly rather than either minimizing it or treating it as proof the whole practice failed.
[00:22:08] And eighth, remember that explicit doesn't mean rigid.
[00:22:12] An agreement built on purpose can still be simple, even casual in tone, as long as it's actually been named out loud rather than assumed.
[00:22:21] The goal isn't bureaucracy, it's honesty, specific enough that everyone involved has the same accurate picture.
[00:22:29] One practical skill Most relationship language is saturated with hierarchy assumptions.
[00:22:35] Primary, secondary, main partner, just a friend. Practicing relationship anarchy often means building new vocabulary or at a minimum, using existing labels more carefully so you're not accidentally re importing rank through the words you use, even after you've done the harder work of removing it. Structurally Wren started using each person's actual name rather than a relational category whenever possible.
[00:23:02] And when a category was genuinely useful shorthand, attach the specific agreement behind it rather than assuming the label carried a universal standardized meaning. It's a small habit, and it does real work because language shapes expectation, even when nobody intends it to.
[00:23:20] This week I want you to look at one relationship in your life, any kind, and ask honestly whether its current shape reflects an actual conversation you had or an assumption you both inherited without ever examining it. You don't have to change anything yet. Just notice which one it is.
[00:23:40] Next episode, we're staying with this and going further into structure itself. Hierarchical versus non hierarchical polyamory, and the actual ethics underneath that choice. Because relationship anarchy is one valid answer to today's question, and it's very much not the only one.
[00:23:59] Before we close, I want to give you somewhere to land with this.
[00:24:03] Think of the people who matter most to you across every category. Romantic, platonic, chosen family notice without judgment whether the order they came to mind in reflects an actual choice you made or a script about which categories are supposed to matter more.
[00:24:19] You're not being asked to tear anything down today, just a notice. Honestly, what's actually structure you built on purpose and what structure you inherited and never looked at directly.
[00:24:31] If a friendship or a chosen family member came to mind during that noticing. Sit with that for a moment. Notice whether that relationship has ever gotten the direct, explicit acknowledgment it actually deserves, or whether it's been quietly carrying enormous weight without ever being named out loud.
[00:24:50] Whatever shape your relationships take, hierarchical, non hierarchical, somewhere in between.
[00:24:56] The goal was never a specific structure. It was a structure you could actually account for. One you chose with open eyes instead of one that was simply handed to you before you knew there was a choice at all.
[00:25:09] This has been untamed. Amber, I'm Dr. Misty. Relationship anarchy isn't the absence of structure, its structure built on purpose, relationship by relationship, instead of assigned automatically by a label you never chose.
[00:25:24] Subscribe to the Untamed Ember newsletter @untamed ember kit.com for deep dives, bonus material and the behind the scenes content that doesn't make it into the episode.
[00:25:34] Next episode, we're talking about hierarchical versus non hierarchical polyamory and the ethics underneath that choice.
[00:25:43] We'll see you next time.
