Last summer, a survey commissioned by a family law firm found that more than one in four Londoners — 27 percent — believe monogamy is no longer realistic in modern relationships. Nationally, the figure was 31 percent. Among 18-to-24-year-olds, it reached 42 percent. The headlines wrote themselves: Britain is questioning monogamy, young people are abandoning the traditional relationship model, London is leading a romantic revolution.

The number is real. The interpretation is almost certainly not.

What "monogamy is unrealistic" can mean

Survey questions are blunt instruments. "Do you think monogamy is realistic in modern relationships?" is a question that different people answer with completely different things in mind — and the range of things they might mean extends well beyond "I want to be in a consensually non-monogamous relationship."

Consider the range of positions that could produce a "no, it's not realistic" answer:

Scepticism about permanence. Lifelong exclusive partnership with a single person is an aspiration that a lot of people have genuinely tried and found impossible to sustain. Someone who has been through a divorce, or who has watched serial monogamy play out among their peers, might say "monogamy isn't realistic" meaning "the idea that most people will successfully maintain one exclusive partnership for sixty years is not consistent with the evidence."

Cynicism about fidelity. Cheating is endemic in monogamous relationships. Studies consistently find that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of people in ostensibly monogamous relationships have had extra-relationship sex. Someone who reads those numbers and concludes that "monogamy isn't realistic" is making an observation about behaviour, not expressing a preference for consensual non-monogamy. They might still want a monogamous relationship — they're just sceptical that one is achievable.

Economic and logistical realism. The traditional relationship escalator assumes a degree of stability — housing, income, timing — that is harder to achieve than it was for previous generations. People on precarious contracts, carrying student debt, unable to afford to buy in London, perpetually renting in a city where a single-income household can't sustain a decent flat — these people may say monogamy is unrealistic meaning the full package (exclusive partnership, shared home, marriage, children) is economically out of reach, not that they want to sleep with multiple people.

Genuine preference for non-monogamy. Some of the 27 percent do mean this. They've either practised CNM or considered it seriously, and they've arrived at a position where non-monogamy is what they actually want rather than what they're settling for.

Any given survey respondent could hold any of these positions. The survey can't tell us which.

Why this matters for reading the data

The headline "27% of Londoners think monogamy is unrealistic" implies something much more dramatic than the actual data supports. It suggests that more than a quarter of London is questioning the foundational structure of romantic relationships. The underlying positions are more varied and more banal.

A significant chunk of the 27 percent are probably people who believe, based on their own experience or observation, that cheating is common enough that expecting lifetime fidelity from a partner is naive. This is a statement about human nature, not about relationship structure preference. These people might desperately want a monogamous relationship — they just don't trust they'll get one.

Another chunk are people for whom the economic conditions that enabled the traditional monogamous life don't obtain. They can't afford to live with a partner, they're not stable enough to commit to a long-term structure, the circumstances that made the traditional path legible don't exist for them. They're not opting out of monogamy — they're being priced out of the conditions that make it work.

The actually-CNM portion of the 27 percent is real but probably smaller than the headline implies.

What is genuinely changing

Underneath the statistical noise, something real is shifting — just not as dramatically or as simply as the headlines suggest.

The social cost of being non-monogamous is genuinely lower than it was ten years ago, particularly in urban environments. In London, in particular, the density of people who know about CNM, have tried it, or are at minimum non-judgmental about it has increased substantially. The threshold for disclosure is lower. The community infrastructure — groups, events, therapy, online resources — is more developed. This is real progress.

The proportion of people for whom consensual non-monogamy is their genuine first preference has probably increased modestly, mostly because visibility increases the likelihood that people who were always oriented this way can find their way to it. The person in their twenties who is discovering that they're genuinely polyamorous has a much clearer path to that realisation now than they would have had in 2010.

The monogamous majority is also thinking about relationships differently — more explicitly, more deliberately, more aware that the default path has alternatives. This is probably the most significant and most durable change. Even people who choose monogamy are increasingly choosing it rather than defaulting to it, which changes what monogamy looks like in practice.

The London specifics

London does have a meaningful CNM community relative to UK cities. It has the event infrastructure, the density of practitioners, the dating app populations that make meeting people easier, and the social liberalism that reduces the reputational cost of being out as non-monogamous. By most measures, London sits alongside Amsterdam, Berlin, and the major coastal US cities as one of the more CNM-normalised urban environments in the English-speaking world.

But the survey finding that 27 percent of Londoners consider monogamy unrealistic does not mean that 27 percent of Londoners are polyamorous or even considering it. It means that 27 percent of Londoners, for a range of reasons and with a range of meanings, gave a "no" answer to a blunt survey question. The actual practising CNM population in London is probably somewhere in the range that research consistently finds for urban Western populations — somewhere between 4 and 8 percent, with a larger proportion who have tried it or would consider it under the right circumstances.

That's still significant. But it's a different kind of significance from "a quarter of London is questioning monogamy." It's the significance of a community that is large enough to have genuine infrastructure, visible enough to have social legitimacy, and growing gradually rather than dramatically.

What the survey actually tells us

Strip away the dramatic framing and the survey is telling us something more modest but still interesting: a substantial minority of Londoners, including a large proportion of young Londoners, have some form of doubt or scepticism about the monogamous model as an ideal. That scepticism takes many forms. It's driven by several different things. It doesn't all resolve to CNM as a preference.

But scepticism about the monogamous ideal — even when it's scepticism about fidelity rather than scepticism about exclusivity as a structure — creates cultural conditions in which CNM is easier to discuss, easier to practise, and easier to build community around. That's the real change the data is pointing toward, even if the headline doesn't quite capture it.