Are You a Relationship Anarchist?

We typically consider the person we have sex with as the most important partner in our life; why is that?

“Whatever, love is love,” actress Maria Bello’s son Jackson said to her when she told him that she had fallen in love with a longtime family friend — a woman.

In her Modern Love essay and her book, Whatever … Love Is Love: Questioning The Labels We Give Ourselves, Bello explores the many ways we define ourselves and each other, and who we consider a partner.

Bello has a romantic, sexual relationship with Clare and a nonromantic, nonsexual relationship with Dan, the father of Jackson, and a lot of other important people in her life. Why do we consider the person we have sex with as the most important partner in our life, she asks. What if we stop having sex with that person, but still remain married or in a relationship with him or her — does that change anything?

Those are good questions. And an increasing number of people are questioning that. They call it relationship anarchy— rethinking the way we privilege romantic/sexual relationships over every other type of relationship.

Maybe we shouldn’t.

“In RA, the idea is that all kinds of relationships are important,” Meg-John Barker, a…