Four people sat in my office, or rather in four windows of a telehealth screen, having built something they were proud of, which was an agreement that no one ranked anyone, that the word primary had been retired from their shared vocabulary on purpose, and that every person in the polycule held equal standing in every decision that touched more than one of them. They had been operating under this agreement for two years and it had worked, more or less, until the night one of them went to the emergency department at two in the morning and the person who drove them there, sat in the waiting room for five hours, knew which medication had caused the reaction last spring, and had the insurance card in their wallet, was the partner of eleven years and not the partner of seven months, and the seven-month partner found out at nine the next morning from a group text.

Nobody had broken a rule, which was the part that made the conversation difficult, because the agreement had been honored to the letter and the outcome still looked exactly like the thing the agreement had been written to prevent.

This vignette is a composite. It does not describe any individual client, couple, or polycule, and identifying details have been constructed rather than altered.

When folx in ethically non-monogamous structures talk about hierarchy, they are usually talking about a rule, and specifically about a rule that gives one person authority over another person's relationships, which is the version that deserves the scrutiny it gets, because veto power and secondary status and the whole apparatus of couple's privilege have done real harm to real people who were told they mattered and then discovered the fine print. That critique is correct.

What I am saying is that it addresses one kind of hierarchy and leaves the other one entirely untouched.

The other kind is not written down anywhere. It is the eleven years of knowing which pharmacy, which sibling not to call, which tone in the voice means the day has gone badly, which foods will be refused, what the hospital admission in 2019 did to this person's relationship with medical settings, and how they respond when they are frightened at two in the morning. None of that was granted by an agreement. It was deposited by time, one ordinary day at a time, and it cannot be redistributed by consensus any more than a language you have spoken for a decade can be handed to someone who started studying it in the spring.

I call this pragmatic time, and the hierarchy it produces is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It describes what is, and it makes no claim at all about what anyone deserves.

The standard move in the non-hierarchical literature, and I am thinking of the framing that runs through More Than Two and parts of The Ethical Slut, is to treat hierarchy as an ethical failure that can be corrected by removing it from the agreement. Strike the word primary from the vocabulary, distribute decision-making evenly across everyone the decision touches, refuse to grant anyone a veto over anyone else's relationships, require that new partners be met rather than described, and the structure is supposed to become egalitarian.

I want to name Opening Up here too, and I want to name it carefully, because it is the volume I hand to clients more than any other, it does the best job in the literature of describing structures as they operate rather than as they ought to, and it still carries a version of this error in the places where it treats the flattening of hierarchy as the direction of moral travel. The book I recommend most is the book I am arguing with, which is usually a sign that the book is worth the argument.

This works on the prescriptive layer and does nothing to the pragmatic one, and the reason it fails is that it misidentifies where the hierarchy lives. You cannot legislate away accumulated experience, because accumulated experience was not produced by legislation. What happens instead is that the hierarchy goes unnamed, which does not mean it goes away, and unnamed hierarchy is considerably more dangerous than the named kind, because the newer partner has been told that the playing field is level and will therefore experience every ordinary consequence of arithmetic as a betrayal or as evidence that they are being lied to.

The description they were given of the agreement was accurate, and the description they were given of reality was not, and those two things came out of the same mouth in the same conversation without anyone intending the discrepancy.

There is a body of work on pair bonding that gets cited in these conversations, and it is worth being careful with it. The comparative research on prairie voles and montane voles, and the work of Sue Carter and Larry Young on oxytocin and vasopressin, established that bonding has neurobiological machinery behind it and that the machinery varies between species in ways that track with mating system. Helen Fisher's three-systems model separates lust, attraction, and long-term attachment into systems that can run independently, which is why a person can be in the grip of new relationship energy and still be attached elsewhere without either state being fraudulent.

Jessica Fern's Polysecure did the work of bringing attachment theory into non-monogamous structures explicitly, and her framing of attachment as something that requires nurturing over time is the piece that bears directly on pragmatic time.

The limits of that literature matter here. The popular framing of oxytocin as a love hormone is not what the research says. Oxytocin's effects are context-dependent, it does not uniformly promote bonding, and in some contexts it sharpens in-group and out-group distinction rather than generalized warmth. If you want to use the neurobiology to argue that attachment accumulates, the literature supports you. If you want to use it to argue that the eleven-year partner holds a chemically privileged claim, it does not.

The simpler version of the case does not need the neurobiology at all, since eleven years of shared experience is eleven years of shared experience whatever is happening at the receptor level, and that observation does not require a citation to survive scrutiny.

The distinction that resolves most of the conflict I see around this is between two things that get collapsed into one word.

Equity of worth says that every person in the structure has equal moral standing, equal claim to honesty, equal claim to care, and equal claim to a say in what affects them. That is the floor.

Equity of experiential history says that every person in the structure has the same accumulated weight with every other person, which cannot be made true by agreement and will stop being true the moment anyone in the structure has known anyone else in the structure longer than someone else has.

A polycule that holds the first and pretends to the second has built a contradiction into its foundation, and the contradiction will be discovered at the emergency department at two in the morning rather than at the kitchen table where it could have been handled.

The move I recommend, and the one that shows up in the relationship contract framework in the book, is to measure and name time hierarchy at origination, meaning that the agreement states plainly what has accumulated and what that accumulation practically entails.

That looks like naming who holds medical history, who is on the paperwork, who has the logistical knowledge, who has the years, and what specifically follows from each of those and what specifically does not. The partner of seven months is being told what already exists rather than being told they matter less, and the telling happens in advance, at a moment when nobody is frightened, which gives them the information they would need to decide whether this structure is one they want to be in.

What naming it does not license is neglect. Pragmatic time explains why the eleven-year partner had the insurance card. It does not explain why the seven-month partner found out from a group text nine hours later, and that second thing is a failure of communication that had nothing to do with hierarchy at all. People reach for pragmatic time to justify behavior that is just carelessness wearing a theory, and that misuse is exactly what makes newer partners suspicious of the concept when it is raised honestly.

The confounds in this argument are real.

The duration argument is confounded with cohabitation, financial entanglement, legal status, and shared children, and in most real cases the eleven-year partner has several of those in addition to the years, which means I cannot cleanly separate what time built from what cohabitation built. The honest version of my claim is that these accumulate together and that disentangling them is not usually possible in a clinical setting.

The couple's privilege critique applies to me here. Pragmatic time can be used as intellectual cover for exactly the kind of prescriptive hierarchy the community has spent twenty years working to dismantle, and a couple that wants to keep its privileges now has a vocabulary that sounds descriptive and clinical. The test is whether the hierarchy is being described or enforced, which requires good faith from the people applying it, and bad faith will exploit it.

There is also a survivorship problem in the polyamory literature generally, which is that the structures we study are the ones that lasted long enough to be studied, and the ones that ended at month eight do not appear in the sample.

And there is a real counter-position, held by people I respect, which is that naming hierarchy at all makes it more solid than it would otherwise be, and that the discipline of refusing to name it produces more equal structures over time. I do not find that persuasive, because I think the naming reflects rather than creates, but it is a serious position held in good faith.

This article is educational and general in nature. It is not a substitute for individualized clinical guidance about your relationship, your agreements, or your mental health.

Well wishes. 🙏

Mx. Love C. Dialogos, LMFT | Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist | Buddhist Chaplain | Pronouns: They/Them

This piece draws on Chapter 6 of Relationship Styles: An Experiential Guide to Relational Dynamics, available this fall.

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