ABSTRACT
This chapter is a critical account of the mono-normative conditions and practices of relational commitment through which, it is argued, both traditional and non-conventional couples are similarly brought into view, authenticated and secured. In particular, it is argued that a liberal-humanist freedom from a monogamous and married-like contract of commitment is no simple matter of people self-determining the conditions of a revamped commitment, as current theorizing and the popular discourse of non-monogamy would suggest (e.g. Giddens, 1992; Weeks, Heaphy & Donovan, 2001; Bauman, 2003; Weeks, 2004; Adam, 2006). What is alternatively expounded in this chapter is the view that the freedoms and truths that people in non-monogamous relationships can give account of in constructions of a non-contractual commitment serve to challenge yet also reproduce aspects of the mono-normative relationship and individual. In critically exploring understandings of a negotiated and allegedly freer commitment in the (western, middle-class) non-monogamous relationships accounted for, the aim of the chapter is to shed some light on existing understandings and practices of consensual non-monogamy and to provoke thought about ways in which alternative relationships may move closer to the realization of difference.
