Fifty-five percent of American adults say their ideal relationship is completely monogamous — which also means 34 percent say they’d prefer something other than complete monogamy, according to YouGov’s polling of 1,000 U.S. adults. That’s a meaningfully different question from asking who’s actually living that way, and the gap between the two numbers turns out to be the more interesting story. Stated preference and lived practice move at different speeds, and YouGov’s own polling across the past several years shows exactly how wide that gap really is.
What People Say They Want
Preference for non-monogamy isn’t evenly distributed. In the same YouGov poll, women under 45 said they preferred complete monogamy at a much higher rate than men in the same age group (46 percent versus 35 percent), while men were far more likely to describe their ideal relationship as falling somewhere in between fully monogamous and fully open (46 percent versus 28 percent for women). Age matters too: in an earlier YouGov poll, 25 percent of Americans overall said they’d be interested in an open relationship, but that ranged from just 12 percent of Baby Boomers up to 41 percent of Millennials, according to a 2021 YouGov survey of over 23,000 U.S. adults.
What People Say They’re Actually Doing
Interest doesn’t automatically translate into practice. In that same YouGov poll on interest in non-monogamy, 67 percent of respondents said they would not be okay with a partner wanting sexual activity with someone else, and only 5 percent said they’d be fully comfortable with it. A separate, slightly earlier YouGov poll found 32 percent of Americans described their ideal relationship as non-monogamous to some degree, yet just 23 percent of people currently in a relationship said that relationship was actually non-monogamous, according to YouGov’s 2020 report on the topic — and of that smaller group, only 8 percent called their relationship “completely” non-monogamous rather than open in some limited way.
The Self-Selected Sample Looks Completely Different
For contrast, it helps to look at people who are already practicing non-monogamy rather than just entertaining the idea. A 2025 community survey conducted with a Chapman University researcher collected responses from 5,885 self-identified non-monogamous people across 65 countries, run by the advocacy organization OPEN. Unlike YouGov’s representative national samples, this was a self-selected group of people who already identify as non-monogamous — and unsurprisingly, they describe far deeper commitment to the practice, with 71 percent saying their non-monogamous identity is “very” or “extremely” important to them and two-thirds having practiced it for four years or more. The same survey found 61 percent had experienced stigma or discrimination tied to their relationship structure at some point in their lives, and 40 percent within just the past year.
Two Very Different Pictures, One Real Trend
Line these datasets up and a coherent story emerges. Representative national polling consistently finds that roughly a quarter to a third of Americans express some openness to non-monogamy in the abstract, that this interest skews younger and skews male, and that actual practice trails stated interest by a wide margin — most people who say they’re open to it aren’t currently doing it. Meanwhile, the much smaller population that has actually built a non-monogamous relationship reports something closer to a durable identity than a phase, alongside real social costs for being open about it. The honest answer to “how many Americans want an open relationship” depends entirely on whether you’re measuring curiosity or commitment — and right now, curiosity is running well ahead of practice, not because people are lying to pollsters, but because wanting something and restructuring your actual relationship around it are two very different asks.
