This is an awesome chart I found over at the data-visualization blog Information is Beautiful. It serves to situate all of the different types of nonmonogamous relationships on a sort of map, and is something of a reminder that there are many, many ways to have intimacy, and not all involve dyads or dichotomies. Too often, people think of relationships in terms of being “one or the other”—friends vs. lovers, open vs. monogamous, kinky vs. vanilla, cheating vs. fidelity, sexual vs. emotional. What I see here is that reality is a lot less “black and white” than that, and while the use of handy-dandy exclusive categories in which to sort our intimacy might be easier on our brains, there are as many different types of intimate relationships as there are people to be intimate with.
Side note: Boo for the use of Comic Sans. Yay for the inclusion of “Con Sex” as a separate category—from what I hear, the big cons are like Vegas for nerds. I’m planning on attending my first this year (Minneapolis-St. Paul’s CONvergence, taking place the weekend preceding July 4th) and I’m hoping it’s every bit as wonderfully debauched as it’s made out to be.
