Estimates and Correlates of Engagement in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships

We conducted our initial literature review in Scopus, searching for peer-reviewed, English-language articles published between January 2012 and March 2017 with the keywords nonmonogamy, non-monogamy, nonmonogamous, polyamory, polyamorous, polyfidelity, swingers, “open relationship,” or “non-exclusive relationship.” The initial search yielded 250 articles. The first author read through the abstracts and excluded papers on irrelevant topics, theory papers, ethnographies, and case studies. This reduced the list to 39 articles, which we obtained and read in full to confirm their relevance to prevalence of CNM. At this stage, we also excluded papers with sample sizes less than 50 (as they cannot provide meaningful information about prevalence), those using samples not from North America and those that did not specifically ask about the nature of their participants’ relationship agreements (as such studies cannot distinguish between CNM and infidelity). We were left with a final list of 16 papers (marked with a bullet [•] in the References), for which summary demographic information is reported in Table 1.