The cost of living crisis did not arrive at CNM's door politely. For people practising ethical non-monogamy in expensive cities — which describes a disproportionate share of the community — it quietly restructured what's practically possible. The polycule utopia of a shared house with shared costs is one version of that reality. The other version is solo polyamorous people paying for hotel rooms every time a partner's nesting partner is home.
Where CNM can be cheaper
Polycule cohabitation, when it works, has genuine economic logic. Rent divided across four or five salaries rather than two. Groceries, utilities, and subscriptions shared across more people. The practical advantages of communal living that many cultures have understood for centuries, but that Western individualism has systematically dismantled, are available to CNM practitioners who can make cohabitation work.
People who practise kitchen-table polyamory — where metamours are genuinely part of an integrated social unit — sometimes find that shared housing emerges naturally from the closeness of the structure. When everyone already spends significant time together, splitting a large house often makes more practical sense than everyone maintaining separate expensive flats.
Where CNM is more expensive
The other story is less often told. Ethical non-monogamy involves more social infrastructure than monogamy: more dates, more travel between partners in different parts of a city or different cities, more overnight costs when you don't have a home to bring someone back to. The cost of living crisis didn't change these structural realities, but it made them significantly more expensive.
Solo polyamorous people, and anyone whose partners have nesting partners, often face the specific bind of needing hotel rooms or paying for shared spaces that didn't cost this much three years ago. The "ethically non-monogamous stressful expense" isn't a niche complaint — it's a structural feature of how CNM operates for a large fraction of practitioners.
Dating in CNM contexts also has upfront costs. More people to date means more early-stage investment before knowing whether a connection will develop. This isn't unique to CNM, but it scales in a way that monogamous dating doesn't.
Polycule economics as a driver of opening up
Economists have started paying attention to a correlation that CNM practitioners have noticed without needing data: as marriage rates fall and housing costs rise, non-traditional living arrangements become more attractive on purely practical grounds. A household with three or four contributing adults looks economically different from a household with two, particularly in cities where housing costs consume a large fraction of income.
Whether economic pressure is actually driving CNM adoption is harder to establish. The more honest framing is probably that economic conditions have shifted so that the traditional monogamous household, already under pressure from declining marriage rates and rising individual debt, looks comparatively less compelling as a sole model. CNM's practical economics aren't the reason people open their relationships — but they're not a deterrent in the way they might have been when a couple could afford a comfortable private space on one income.
The honest tension in polycule housing
Shared polycule housing has consistent failure modes. It tends to work when at least one person has enough financial stability that the arrangement isn't load-bearing for them — so that if the relational dynamics deteriorate, they can leave without crisis. When everyone needs the arrangement to keep working financially, relationship problems fester because the exit costs are too high.
This isn't an argument against polycule cohabitation. It's an argument for being honest about the financial dependencies the arrangement creates before entering it, and for building structures where people can leave if they need to.
What this means practically
The CNM practitioners who navigate the current economic environment most stably tend to be those who've made explicit decisions about finances rather than drifting into them. What does each person contribute to shared costs? What happens if a relationship ends and the living arrangement has to change? Who covers date costs, and how are hotel stays handled?
These conversations are uncomfortable in proportion to how much financial interdependence already exists without them having happened. The earlier they happen, the less fraught.