The data on Gen Z and non-monogamy looks contradictory until you read it carefully. On one side: 41 to 57 percent of Gen Z respondents, depending on the survey, say they're open to non-monogamous relationships. Feeld's Gen Z membership has grown 20 percent year-on-year. Nearly half of UK 18-to-24-year-olds, per a 2025 Rayden Solicitors survey, believe monogamy is an outdated concept.

On the other side: Gen Z is having less sex than any previous generation at the same age. They're forming relationships later and in smaller numbers. And in at least one Irish Times piece that went moderately viral last year, relationship researchers were quoting young people who described full committed monogamy as a romantic aspiration — the thing they actually wanted — with one researcher noting that for millennials the biggest fantasy was threesomes, while for Gen Z it's monogamy.

Both sets of data are real. Reconciling them tells you something interesting about what's happening in this generation's relationship landscape.

What the openness data actually measures

When a survey finds that 57 percent of Gen Z is "willing to consider" non-monogamy, the operative phrase is "willing to consider." This is attitudinal data — it measures openness, not behaviour or preference. Being willing to consider something is a much lower bar than actively wanting it, let alone doing it.

Gen Z has grown up in an environment where non-monogamy is more visible, more discussed, and more institutionally acknowledged than it was for any previous generation. It has appeared in their entertainment, their social media, their peer conversations. The willingness to consider it reflects normalisation — these are people who don't think of CNM as inherently bizarre or wrong — more than it reflects a generational preference for non-monogamous relationship structures.

This is actually significant. Normalisation of CNM as a legitimate relationship option, rather than a deviant or exotic one, is a meaningful cultural shift. But it doesn't mean Gen Z is, as a generation, particularly polyamorous in practice.

The "monogamy is unrealistic" finding

The UK data is similarly worth unpacking. When 42 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds say monogamy is an "outdated concept," and 27 percent of Londoners say it's no longer "realistic," what are they actually expressing?

Some of this is genuine openness to CNM. But "monogamy is unrealistic" can mean several different things that don't all resolve to "I want multiple partners":

  • Monogamy as a permanent, lifelong standard is unrealistic because people change and relationships end — a statement about relationship impermanence, not a preference for simultaneous multiple partnerships.
  • Monogamy is unrealistic as a practice because infidelity is common — a cynical observation about behaviour, not an endorsement of ethical non-monogamy.
  • The traditional relationship escalator (exclusive dating → cohabitation → marriage → children) is unrealistic given current economic conditions — housing costs, student debt, delayed career stability — a statement about lifestyle feasibility, not relationship structure preference.
  • Monogamy, specifically as defined by traditional institutions, is an outdated framework that doesn't reflect how people actually organise their emotional and sexual lives.

These are very different positions. Survey data that collapses them into a single number creates a much more dramatic headline than the underlying attitudes warrant.

The sex recession context

The piece of the puzzle that doesn't get integrated into the "Gen Z ditching monogamy" narrative is the sex recession. Gen Z is having less sex, forming romantic relationships later, and spending more time in romantic isolation than millennials did at the same age. This isn't a moral panic — it's documented across multiple studies in multiple countries.

Non-monogamy as a practice requires a certain baseline of social engagement and willingness to pursue romantic connections. A generation that is struggling with loneliness, dating app fatigue, social anxiety accelerated by pandemic-era isolation, and economic conditions that make shared living more difficult is not a generation that is, in aggregate, enthusiastically pursuing multiple simultaneous romantic relationships.

The "Gen Z monogamy is a fantasy" observation makes sense in this context. People who are struggling to form even one stable romantic connection are not, for the most part, experimenting with non-monogamy — they're aspiring to connection, and the simplest, most legible version of connection is a committed partnership. The fantasy isn't necessarily about monogamy as an ideology; it's about intimacy and stability, which monogamous partnership represents symbolically.

Who is actually doing CNM in Gen Z

The Gen Z people who are actively practising non-monogamy are a subset, not a representative sample. They tend to cluster in urban environments, in social networks with existing CNM presence, and in communities — queer communities especially — where non-monogamy is sufficiently normalised that the social cost of practising it is lower.

This is also true of CNM practitioners in every other generation. CNM has always been more common in cities, in progressive social networks, and in LGBTQ+ communities than in the general population. Gen Z is not unusual in this respect — what's changed is the visibility of CNM within the broader culture, not its distribution across the population.

The Feeld growth numbers (966 percent growth in CNM-identifying members since 2017, 20 percent Gen Z membership growth year-on-year) reflect a real expansion of the CNM-practising population and an increase in the proportion of CNM people who are using dedicated platforms rather than general apps. They don't reflect a wholesale generational shift toward non-monogamy as the dominant relationship mode.

What this means for how CNM is discussed

The "Gen Z is ditching monogamy" framing does the CNM community a subtle disservice. It presents non-monogamy as a generational trend — something young people are doing as an expression of their generational identity — rather than as a considered relationship structure that people of any age might choose.

Trend framing invites counter-trend framing. If CNM is a Gen Z thing, then when Gen Z moves on to the next cultural moment, CNM gets coded as passé. If CNM is instead a relationship structure that suits some people's genuine needs and that more people are now aware of as an option, it has a much more stable cultural position.

The better version of this conversation isn't "is Gen Z poly?" It's "what does it mean that a generation grew up knowing non-monogamy exists as a legitimate option, and how does that knowledge change the choices they make?" That's a more interesting question, and the honest answer — that it mostly affects attitudes rather than behaviour, except at the margins where it enables people who are genuinely suited to CNM to find each other — is more useful than either the "polyamory revolution" or the "Gen Z monogamy backlash" framing.