More Than Two (2nd Edition): Cultivating Nonmonogamous Relationships with Kindness and Integrity — Eve Rickert & Andrea Zanin

When More Than Two first landed in 2014, it quickly became the book people thrust into your hands the moment you whispered polyamory. It was sweeping, idealistic, and heavy on autonomy. A decade later, Eve Rickert returned to the work with editor-turned-co-author Andrea Zanin and rebuilt it for the world we actually live in now. The result is not a light tune-up. It is a re-grounding in kindness, accountability, and community, with new material and a noticeably different centre of gravity. Rickert’s announcement lays out the intent clearly: fix the problems people raised about the first edition, add new content, and shift the ethic toward dignity, compassion and integrity. (Brighter Than Sunflowers)

What It’s About

The second edition keeps the big question — how do people actually practice non-monogamy well — but reframes the how around care.

• Values and stance
  The book foregrounds empowerment, agency, kindness, compassion, honesty and integrity as explicit guiding values, and names past issues around sexism, cisnormativity and privilege that readers flagged in the first edition. It is less memoir, more principled guidance.
• Scope and structure
  It maps the terrain from anchor or nesting partnerships to relationship anarchy, and weaves recent thinking on attachment and relationship diversity into practical guidance. The Audible and publisher listings emphasise that this is a fully revised text aimed at a modern topology of non-monogamy.
• Community and accountability
  Where the first edition often read as a climb toward radical autonomy, this one takes seriously how our choices land in the lives of partners, metamours and communities. That includes clearer attention to abuse dynamics, repair, and power.

What Changed From the First Edition

Let’s be specific.

• Authorship and framing
  First edition: Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert, 2014.
  Second edition: Eve Rickert and Andrea Zanin, 2024, with Thornapple Press. Rickert acquired sole rights and chose to substantially revise with Zanin as co-author.
• Ethical centre
  First edition often landed on radical self-ownership of feelings and choices. Second edition explicitly balances autonomy with accountability, and speaks to the impacts our behaviour has on others. Rickert names this shift directly.
• Language and inclusion
  The revision tackles binary language, heteronormative assumptions and privilege. It updates terminology and examples, and pares back personal disclosures in favour of clearer, broader applicability.
• Content mix
  Significant cuts, additions and rewrites. Less personal narrative, more distilled principles, and integration of newer ideas such as attachment-aware practice. Publisher copy positions it as a full rebuild rather than an errata pass.
• Series context
  The new edition sits inside the More Than Two Essentials line, which curates focused, topical guides. The series framing matters: it places the book among titles on jealousy, neurodiversity, happiness, death, sex work and more.

Strengths

• Clearer ethics
  The values are on the table. Consent, care and accountability are treated as skills you practice, not just ideals you declare.
• Modernised lens
  Updated language and examples make this far easier to hand to readers who bounced off the first edition’s blind spots.
• Situated in community
  The book respects that non-monogamy happens in networks. It speaks to harm, repair and power with more nuance than most mainstream guides.

Weaknesses or Caveats

• Less confessional storytelling
  If you loved the first edition’s personal voice, this version is more measured and less diaristic by design
• Heavier preface and politics
  Some readers describe the opening as manifesto-ish. Personally, I think the stakes are appropriate, but newcomers hunting only for quick tactics may prefer to skip to the numbered chapters.
• Not a how-to cookbook
  It offers frameworks and judgement, not plug-and-play rules. Pair it with a practice-heavy text if you want exercises on day one.

Why It Still Matters

Because the culture has changed. Communities asked for a version of More Than Two that addresses harm, centres dignity, and reflects a decade of growth in queer, kink and ENM spaces. Rickert and Zanin did the work. It is recognisably the same project — helping people design many-love lives with integrity — but the ethic is kinder, wider, and frankly wiser. If you bounced off the first edition, try this. If you loved the first edition, read this to see how the conversation has evolved. Publisher announcement and catalogue pages confirm the timing, authorship, and intent of the overhaul.

Publisher announcement: More Than Two (Eve’s Version) — all about the new edition on Brighter Than Sunflowers.
Book page: Thornapple Press listing.

Related reading

These pieces continue the same thread around books and resource reviews.

• More Than Two (First Edition) – Franklin Veaux & Eve Rickert
• The Polyamory Toolkit – Dan & Dawn Williams
• Ethical Non-Monogamy – Silvia Sanz