Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Pena Guzman.

Welcome to Overthink.

The podcast, we're two friends who are also professors, put philosophy and dialogue with the everyday.

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

Ellie, I recently read that only 50% of millennials want to be in a monogamous relationship. So many people in our generation still want a primary intimate relationship, but they also want to explore connections with others. So they want open relationships. Yeah, the uptake of this seems relatively recent. It's starting to get adopted more and more by a variety of people. I think even in my exposure to college students by virtue of being a professor, students seem to be having a lot more discussions about open relationships than they were, say, when I was in college, when it was like not talked about at all.

Open relationships are also starting to get adopted more by mainstream

heterosexual relationships after having been predominantly a queer phenomenon for a long time.

So, for instance, 32% of gay men are consensually non-monogamous. And I think an increasing

number of other groups are as well. Yeah, it almost seems like a return to, you know, that moment in the 1970s when suddenly

everybody was a swinger.

The swingers era.

Yes, exactly.

It's just that it's not happening in the same way.

I mean, the 70s swinger thing was more about just like having sex with people, right?

It followed directly from the free love hippie movement.

And I think one thing that is really different about our era is that our generation is less

interested in distinguishing sex from love and intimacy. We tend to see them as more intertwined.

So obviously our generation believes that casual sex can be distinct from love,

of course, but we don't necessarily think that that means that there are no feelings involved.

We also have less sex than our parents' generation, which is a statistic my dad literally refuses

to believe, despite evidence.

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