This is How You Dismantle Couple Privilege

If polyamory is dinner, you are the host who sets the table, not society, and you decide how fairness gets served.

You’ll hear people say there are natural, inevitable hierarchies in relationships, so claiming to practice egalitarian polyamory is being dishonest. That argument might make sense to some but it conflates several things at once.

There is no such thing as a natural hierarchy. I’ve written here about how this idea entered Western thought and why it still circulates despite being wrong. Humans form attachments, dependencies, and commitments, but none of those inherently produce ranked human worth or automatic authority over others. Claiming a social hierarchy is natural is also a fabulous cop-out, because if you believe social hierarchies are inevitable, you don’t have to do the hard work of introspecting and dismantling the privileges you hold.

And that brings me to the most important point I want to make right now: this entire argument mistakes couple privilege for relational hierarchy. They aren't the same, and mixing them up is how a lot of polyamorous people wind up hurting the very partners they claim to love.

The word hierarchy is being used to mean two entirely different things in that argument, and differentiating them changes everything. There are social hierarchies within this system we are born into that operate on us whether we consent or not. Then there is relational hierarchy, which is the personal choice to enforce ranked power inside our own relationships. One is structural. The other is a decision.

Couple privilege is structural. Relational hierarchy is a choice.

Couple privilege comes from a social hierarchy built by the world around us. Couple privilege is what society hands to an established, recognized couple whether they ask for it or not, because our culture is built around monogamy and only recognizes a two-person relationships as valid. So you see this expressed in legal marriage, tax breaks, employer benefits plans, automatic recognition at hospitals, default standing in estates, immigration sponsorship and holiday packages priced for two like “His and hers” everything. Additional partners in a polycule receive none of this.

That is privilege rooted in a social hierarchy. It is not, on its own, a relational hierarchy.

A Relational Hierarchy is the choice to take that structural advantage and wield it as power over someone else’s relationship. A social hierarchy is a massive, unfair system built by the world around us; a relational hierarchy is a personal choice to bring those power dynamics into your private life. It looks like a primary partner having veto power over a secondary partner. It looks like a hinge partner defaulting to the wants (not needs) of their spouse over their other partner, instead of weighing the situation fairly. It looks like agreements made about a relationship by someone who isn’t even in it. That is always wrong, because everyone has the right to ongoing consent in their own relationships.

Think of it this way: privilege is what society does to you whether you like it or not. Hierarchy is what you choose to do to your partners.

This is not a new distinction. We already understand it when it comes to white privilege or male privilege. If you’re white, you didn’t choose the advantages society gives you because of that. If you’re a man, you didn’t personally create male privilege either. Those privileges exist whether you acknowledge them or not.

But having privilege isn’t the same as being oppressive. Living in a society with a racial hierarchy doesn’t mean every white person is secretly a white supremacist who believes white people should hold power over people of color. Just as living in a patriarchy doesn’t mean someone with male privilege is a misogynist who believes men should have power over women.

Since the end of World War II and the defeat of Nazi ideology, it is widely accepted that racial hierarchies are not natural. Outside of the manosphere and the extreme religious, almost nobody claims gender has a natural hierarchy either, because all social hierarchies are human constructs and completely unethical.

What privilege from a social hierarchy does create is responsibility. It means recognizing the systems that gave you unearned advantages and working to challenge and dismantle them rather than pretending they don’t exist.

We have whole shelves of books on how white people can be allies, how men can build healthier masculinity, how cis people can show up for trans liberation. But we have almost nothing on how those of us with couple privilege can dismantle it inside our polycules.

This essay is about dismantling couple privilege in practice.

Below are fourteen concrete things you can do, ranked roughly from the easiest internal shifts to the hardest structural ones. Some will be uncomfortable, and the very last one is definitely going to cause some friction if that’s your situation.

🔒 The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers.

You’ll get all fourteen practices, the approach I use with clients who are dating someone with couple privilege to figure out if they’re experiencing just internalized mononormativity or actual neglect, the legal questions poly couples should ask themselves, and what it actually takes to practice egalitarian polyamory and avoid being sneakyarchical.

You’ll leave with a clearer framework for thoughts and feelings you’ve probably had before but didn’t yet have the language or know how to navigate.

Paid subscribers also get full access to the Decolonizing Love archive.