Nonmonogamy and Happiness – Carrie Jenkins

Key takeaways

• Happiness is not the same as comfort, ease, or constant positivity.
• Nonmonogamy is often judged unfairly by standards never applied to monogamy.
• Love can be meaningful even when it is challenging or painful.
• Expecting relationships to make us happy can undermine depth and resilience.

Love does not need to make us happy to be worth choosing.

Nonmonogamy and Happiness challenges one of the most persistent assumptions about relationships: that their primary purpose is to make us happy. Philosopher Carrie Jenkins approaches nonmonogamy not as a shortcut to joy, but as a context in which our ideas about happiness, fulfillment, and emotional success are exposed and tested.

What this book is about

Rather than offering advice on how to feel better, this book interrogates the cultural stories we tell about happiness itself. Jenkins argues that nonmonogamous relationships are often dismissed because they are assumed to be unhappy, unstable, or doomed—while monogamous relationships are granted the benefit of the doubt even when they involve suffering.

• The myth of happy endings. How romantic narratives equate love with permanent emotional satisfaction.
• Emotional range. Why meaningful relationships include grief, fear, uncertainty, and growth.
• Eudaimonic vs hedonic happiness. Distinguishing deep fulfillment from surface-level pleasure.
• Bias and stigma. How nonmonogamy is evaluated through distorted cultural expectations.

Nonmonogamy as an emotional mirror

Jenkins suggests that nonmonogamy does not create emotional difficulty so much as reveal it. Without the promise of exclusivity as reassurance, people are forced to confront insecurity, loss, and impermanence directly. This exposure is often mistaken for failure.

Why this perspective matters

By decoupling love from compulsory happiness, this book offers relief from the pressure to justify nonmonogamy as “better” or “easier.” It reframes relational success around honesty, agency, and meaning rather than comfort.

How it fits into the Essentials series

This volume complements Nonmonogamy and Jealousy by expanding the emotional frame. Where jealousy asks us to tolerate discomfort without shame, happiness asks us to stop measuring relationships by the absence of pain.

Related reading

• Nonmonogamy and Jealousy – Eve Rickert
• More Than Two, Second Edition – Eve Rickert & Andrea Zanin