Consensual Nonmonogamy (CNM) Definition: a relationship structure in which participants make an intentional agreement for someone and/or their intimate partners have the choice to direct their energy toward more than one intimate relationship.

Added context from Hanna & Lizzie:

When people have consented to participate in nonmonogamy, their relationship style is called Consensual Nonmonogamy (CNM), and the people are consensually nonmonogamous. Both pieces of this term are critical: consent and nonmonogamy. If you started your journey on the outskirts of the word web and ended up here, congratulations! We hope you have a good idea of what both of these words mean in this context. If you’re just beginning your journey here, bon voyage! We wish you the best of luck in dismembering these terms and putting them back together again. There are no stories in this section alone, as all stories in all other sections encompass what it means to be consensually nonmonogamous.

You may have heard the term “Ethical Nonmonogamy” (ENM) before and wonder why you have not seen that term here yet. Ethical Nonmonogamy was the more commonly used umbrella term for nonmonogamous relationships in the past. However, the community is shifting toward Consensual Nonmonogamy rather than Ethical Nonmonogamy. Language often changes naturally as a community grows and evolves, but we want to unpack this change in particular since we have been very intentional in our word choice. Ethics are subjective, so what may be considered ethical for someone could be deemed unethical by someone else. Thus, for our purposes of wanting to provide clear definitions, consent is more of an objective term than ethical.

Further, the term “ethical nonmonogamy” suggests the existence of “unethical nonmonogamy” which most folks presume to be cheating within monogamous relationships. However, cheating within monogamous relationships is really “unethical monogamy” and we don’t want folks to associate monogamous cheating with nonmonogamy in any way. This is not to say one cannot cheat within nonmonogamous relationships. Certainly, agreements can be broken in any relationship structure, but our key point is that we don’t want to ascribe moral value to any particular relationship structure. Instead, we want to emphasize that in the nonmonogamy we intend to discuss, all parties have consented to participating in nonmonogamy.