The labels available for non-monogamy, polyamory, swinging, open relationship, relationship anarchy, solo poly, kitchen table, and so on, are useful shorthand but imperfect fits for most people's actual situations. Many people who practice CNM don't fit neatly into any single category, and trying to force their actual desires and circumstances into a pre-existing model can create more problems than it solves.
Why templates have value and limits
Templates have value: they represent accumulated experience of what tends to work, they give people shared vocabulary, and they provide a starting point for people who don't know where to begin. Reading about solo polyamory gives someone who's been struggling to articulate their preferences a framework they can test and refine.
The limits: templates are built from common patterns, not universal ones. Adopting a template wholesale without testing whether it actually fits your specific desires, circumstances, and values tends to produce friction. The structure may work in its standard form for many people while not working for you in particular.
Starting from actual desires rather than categories
A more generative approach: start from what you actually want, without first deciding which label it falls under, and work toward a structure that fits your genuine desires. Some questions worth working through:
What are you actually looking for in connections? Not what non-monogamy is supposed to provide, but specifically what you want: emotional intimacy, sexual variety, specific kinds of partnership, companionship, intellectual engagement? Different answers point toward different structures.
What can you actually sustain? Knowing your own capacity for emotional investment, time, and relational complexity is important for designing something you can genuinely maintain rather than something that looks good on paper.
What does your life look like in practice? People with demanding careers, kids, significant health challenges, or other substantial time constraints need structures that fit within those realities, not around them.
What does the specific person or people you're interested in actually want? Structures are negotiated, not unilaterally designed. The ideal structure for one person may require someone else to accept terms that don't suit them.
Common custom configurations
Some structures people arrive at that don't fit standard templates:
A committed couple who have agreements about specific kinds of outside connection (sexual only, travel only, conference relationships) but not general openness. This isn't typical swinging or typical open relationship, but it works for them.
Someone who is fully emotionally available for multiple romantic connections but doesn't want any of them to involve cohabitation or financial integration. This overlaps with solo poly but may include deeply committed relationships that just don't escalate on certain axes.
People who practice relationship anarchy with most connections but maintain specific, explicitly defined commitments with particular partners. Mixing RA philosophy with some structured commitments is coherent even if it doesn't fit a pure version of either.
A polycule that has a shared domestic life without anyone being "primary" in a formal sense, but where specific bilateral relationships have distinct characters and don't try to be equivalent to each other.
Letting structure evolve
The structure you design when you first open or first articulate your CNM approach may not be the one that fits you best a few years later. Treating your structure as a working hypothesis that gets refined through experience rather than as a commitment to a particular model allows for the kind of evolution that actually matches how relationships change.
This doesn't mean constant renegotiation or instability. It means building in explicit checkpoints, periodic "is this still working?" conversations, and genuine openness to changing what isn't working rather than maintaining it because you named it.
The practical requirement: everyone involved agrees
Custom structures can be whatever you can genuinely negotiate with the people involved. The constraint isn't labels or community norms; it's genuine mutual agreement from everyone whose life the structure shapes. A bespoke arrangement that everyone involved has genuinely consented to is more ethical than a standard model that someone has been pressured into.