Relationship Anarchy, and Online Dating at Consonance (Gleichklang)
Relationship anarchy is an alternative concept for how we can conduct and develop our relationships:
- Instead of using fixed relationship categories, relationship anarchy views relationships as constantly negotiable and developable together. Types, forms, and designs of relationships, as well as the roles we take on in them, can accordingly shift, with consensus and shared reflection being paramount.
The concept originates from queer contexts but can be applied to all types of relationships.
At Consonance, members who are open to the concept are not the majority, but a significant minority. In any case, significantly more people than on mainstream dating portals.
This allows us at Consonance to effectively support our members in finding a relationship anarchy:
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Relationships in the Age of Online Dating, Dating Apps, and Market Logic
Online dating, dating apps, and digital matchmaking services today greatly shape how people initiate relationships:
- The predominant model of online dating is organized along market lines, paradoxically putting the monogamous romantic couple relationship at the forefront while actually being structured toward short-term contacts, superficial exchange, collecting matches, and lowering willingness to commit. This creates relationships in the sense of “Liquid Love” as described by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, characterized by a lack of depth and reliability.
What is common to typical online dating is the clear differentiation between romantic relationships and other relationships such as friendships, acquaintances, or sexual contacts.
At Consonance, we handle this differently:
- With Consonance, we have been offering a psychologically sound counter-model to the now largely dominant online dating since 2006. At Consonance, members search for and find romantic relationships, including couple relationships as well as polyamorous relationships, friendships, projects, and communities. The transition between these different relationship types is possible at any time, and changes in all directions are possible and do occur.
Members of Consonance usually do not conform to the streamlined mainstream but think critically and reflectively about society. Politically, most are left-leaning, often showing an interest in spirituality or non-spiritual self-expansion in a dynamic relationship with this orientation.
Our task as a dating platform, matchmaking service, and friendship service is to find those individuals within this broad and heterogeneous field who can lead happy relationships with each other. In this societal tension, concepts like relationship anarchy are gaining increasing significance.
Consonance as a Dating Platform and Matchmaking Service in the Broader Sense
Consonance is a dating platform, a place for getting to know people, and a matchmaking service that explicitly does not limit itself to the classical model of the monogamous couple relationship:
- Most people search for romantic couple relationships with us. But a significant proportion is open to open relationships, polyamorous relationships, or friendship contacts. Others are concerned with relationship life itself and want to focus on the anarchic, shared development of relationships without hierarchical determinations and restrictions.
According to relationship anarchy, relationships develop permanently in a process of reflection and negotiation:
- At Consonance, we accommodate this approach because we do not limit ourselves to romantic couple relationships but give our members a broad scope for searching for partnerships, friendships, projects, or communities.
Although we must reproduce within market-liberal society to survive and be active, unlike most dating apps, other dating systems, and singles sites, we do not see ourselves as a market-oriented matching system but as a value-based, psychologically sound structure for getting to know people:
- The goal is to bring together people who are compatible in fundamental value questions, lifestyles, and relationship ideas. However, compatibility is not a static state but, for us, only a potential that members themselves must bring to life and continuously develop over the course of their relationships.
Partner Search, Relationship Search, and Relationship Anarchy
Relationship anarchy is an approach to relationship design that rejects fixed hierarchies, normative role assignments, and predetermined static relationship scripts:
- Relationships are not evaluated according to fixed categories such as partnership, friendship, affair, sexual relationship, acquaintance, or project, but according to the real inner-psychological and material significance they have for the individuals involved.
Relationships are not prioritized, are not considered higher or lower value, but emerge permanently from ongoing individual agreements and life experiences of the individuals involved.
The term anarchy here does not mean lawlessness but the conscious departure from normative expectations and the inevitable insertion into socially narrow templates.
The focus is on individuals who wish to connect with each other and view this connection as a process of ongoing shared experience and negotiation.
Free Love, Communes, and Early Experiments
As early as the 19th and early 20th centuries, anarchist, feminist, and social-revolutionary movements formulated their critique of marriage, possessive thinking, and state control over intimate relationships.
The idea of free love aimed at liberation from compulsory marriage, sexual double standards, and patriarchal order, but was often limited to the area of sexuality without reflecting on the possibilities of romantic relationships, friendships, or the interaction between these forms of free love and romantic relationships or friendships.
In some communes, liberation even led to a new unfreedom, as fixed guidelines were again imposed that merely replaced the previous norms instead of entering into a process of open-ended and never-ending exploration.
After the October Revolution of 1917, there was a brief phase of experimental openness in the early Soviet Union. Marriage laws were liberalized, divorces made easier, and traditional family models questioned. In these brief moments of radical opening in the relationship sphere, communes, threesome and foursome relationships, and forms of shared sexuality emerged. With the Stalinist turn from the 1930s onward, all these liberating approaches were ended and a conservative family model was once again imposed.
However, the idea never ended:
- In the 1960s and 1970s, Western counter- and protest cultures once again took up alternative relationships and placed them at the center of experimental practices. Communes, free love, and collective forms of life with multiple relationships, rotating relationship constellations, or open sexual structures were practiced. However, most failed due to new authoritarianism and a lack of reflection, renegotiation, and assumption of responsibility. Power relations were not abolished but continued unreflectively, or new power relations emerged.
It was precisely from these experiences, however, that impulses developed to once again bring alternative relationships to the forefront, but to couple them with individuality, reflection, and negotiation without making prescriptions.
Modern Relationship Anarchy
Modern relationship anarchy developed in Scandinavia and stems from queer associations and lifestyles. In the seminal and term-defining text by Andie Nordgren “The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy“ from 2006, the central aspects of relationship anarchy are set out as follows:
- All relationships are equal and can be designed consciously, individually, and without predetermined hierarchy. All forms of relationships are included here.
- The goal of relationships is a consensus with each other, achieved through communication and respect for mutual autonomy. Such relationship-anarchic constellations emerge from institutional specifications and collective norming, allowing all individuals to negotiate, design, and develop their relationships with each other.
In practice and theory, relationship anarchy overlaps with polyamorous relationships but places its emphasis on dehierarchization and structural individualization.
Relationship anarchy is not a political ideology but a concept of relationship design. Due to its radical and critical approach, however, it is often connected with anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, anarchist, and queer-feminist currents among those involved. A central basic assumption is also that attachment arises not through possession but through ongoing voluntary decisions.
Relationship anarchy takes no explicit stance on spirituality or religion but opposes all authoritarian structures. In individual relationship-anarchic units, however, references to spirituality can arise, for example, as a practice of conscious mindfulness.
How Relationship Anarchy Is Lived in Concrete Terms
People who are in a relationship-anarchic connection with each other orient themselves around the following processes:
- Romantic or sexual relationships have no structural priority over friendships, chosen families, project relationships, or political communities. Meaning arises from the lived relationship itself, not from its category. Corresponding categorizations that those involved assign to their relationships can therefore also change.
- There are no primary relationships or secondary relationships, but interpersonal relationships are a dynamic field of diverse interactions. Relationships are not drifted into and not maintained passively, but consciously designed on the basis of explicit agreements, conversations, and authentic communication. Those involved decide what is relevant for them; fixed and predetermined forms do not exist.
- In addition to reflection, the unconditional foundation is voluntariness as a prerequisite for closeness in any form. The focus on voluntary decisions replaces possessive thinking, fear, and social expectations. Relationship forms remain as long as they are supported by all involved and can change at any time.
- The autonomy of individuals is crucial. In relationships, we remain independent and self-responsible individuals who voluntarily enter into connection with each other. Explicit conversations are important. Individual agreements are never final and can be adapted to changed life situations and needs at any time.
- Couple relationships are possible, but they are not automatically assumed. Conflicts or jealousy are not suppressed but are assigned a central function as indicators of needs, vulnerabilities, or options for action.
Relationship Anarchy, Partner Search, and Relationship Search at Consonance
Relationship anarchy itself requires a high degree of readiness for reflection on the part of those involved and mutual interest in explicit agreements that are constantly renegotiated. In this sense, relationship anarchy is an ongoing process of intellectual-emotional exchange that is not limited by normative permanent status.
As an alternative form of partner search and getting to know people, we at Consonance have built a community in which people motivated by the idea of relationship anarchy can meet and implement a relationship-anarchic life together.
Even though the majority of our members do not see relationship anarchy as their guiding concept, there are many approximations and significantly more than on other dating sites and meeting platforms, individuals who orient themselves toward relationship anarchy in their relationship models and their relationship experience.
Against this background, there are good prospects at Consonance for establishing and developing relationship-anarchic relationships:
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