Relationship Anarchy: What it is and why I love it!

[Emrie]

So I recently came across this concept of relationship anarchy and I have fallen in love with it, it is so great.

Firstly let me make clear that it is NOT about chaos, avoiding responsibility, doing whatever you want because there are "no rules" or any of that. I find that a decent amount of people associate a lot of negative things to the term anarchy and that is NOT what we're doing here.

The short 1-liner definition I can try to give to RA is that individuals are autonomous, there are no inherent hierarchies to relationships, and each relationship is unique and customized specifically by the people involved.

This is a short video introducing RA.
This here is the original manifesto for RA and it states the general principles of RA.
And this is a nice 60-minute podcast on RA 101, they go through the manifesto and go a little deeper on each principle.

What I love about it is that you're actually sitting down and putting conscious thought into exactly what each of your relationships look like. And this does not apply to just romantic relationships but every relationship. So you may even ask yourself "okay so what kind of relationship do I have with my boss? With my coworkers? With my dad?"

Another thing that I love is that you're replacing prescriptive hierarchies with descriptive hierarchies and rules with boundaries. So a prescriptive hierarchy might be "my spouse is more important than my friend, therefore, if there is conflict between the two, I'll always side with my spouse", whereas a descriptive hierarchy might be "I am sharing finances with this person, so therefore it is important to me that this person's decision making power regarding financial decisions is higher than other peoples'. I am therefore going to make this a priority with everyone that might be involved in that regard and we'll come to an agreement".

And this is where boundaries might come in as opposed to rules, where a rule might be "you are not allowed to talk to me about financial decisions because that person's opinion is the only one that matters regarding this subject" and a boundary might be "because we are sharing finances, it is important to us that you respect this hierarchy, you may choose not to, you're a grown adult and we don't have control over your life, but if you do, we are going to remove ourselves from this relationship, or we'll de-escalate and find a new structure for this relationship".

A big part of discussing and designing the relationship is good-faith communication. So taking the example above, when discussing the subject of finances all three people involved will sit down and discuss the terms to come to an agreement that works for everyone, so the two people know what's important to them, that the descriptive hierarchy regarding finances be respected, and they might even have specific examples of how that would look like day-to-day. And they might come to the third person and say "this is what we want, what do you want and how can we accommodate you?" And an agreement can be formed, or not and perhaps the relationship ends.

So it creates these amazing dynamics where people are always very open, honest, communicative, and even vulnerable, but we all act from a place of love, community, companionship, pooling resources and creating something beautiful together, all of us. And we treat everyone with a lot of attention and care and we really see everyone as whole complex human beings equal to one other that all have a lot of value and love to offer.

We essentially decide to challenge quite literally everything that we might have learned previously and build our relationships from a blank slate. And it is truly an amazing thing that I can't wait to start now.