Polyamorous life might have an unlikely training ground: nerd culture. Turns out being the person who owns 14 dice sets, knows every Star Wars timeline and has strong opinions about fictional characters may come with an unexpected relationship skill: being extremely good at managing people.
RELATED: Sexual Roles by ZIP Code: Where You Live Matters
New data from Feeld suggests nerds may be more likely to practice non-monogamy, with tabletop gamers 65 percent more likely to be non-monogamous than non-tabletop gamers. And the overlap goes both ways: polyamorous and ENM Feeld members were 121.7 percent more likely to play tabletop games than their monogamous counterparts.
So maybe the stereotype has been wrong all along. Maybe the nerd isn’t socially awkward. Maybe they’re just busy coordinating six calendars.
D&D prepared you for the poly group chat
Feeld also found that ENM and polyamorous members had an 80 percent higher rate of video-game play than monogamous members. Anime and cosplay fans were 38 percent more likely to be non-monogamous, comic readers 50 percent more likely, and sci-fi fans 83 percent more likely.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean your favorite guy at the comic shop is secretly running a five-person relationship.
RELATED: Seattle’s Polyamory Proposal Could Expand Civil Rights Protections
It does, however, raise an amusing question: what if years of nerd hobbies have been accidentally preparing people for ENM and polyamory?
Think about D&D.
Before anyone even gets to the fantasy adventure, there are rules to discuss, schedules to coordinate, boundaries to establish and approximately 900 messages in a group chat trying to figure out when everyone is free.
Sound familiar?
Dating expert and D&D player Hunt Ethridge says: “Dungeons & Dragons is all about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, mainly your own character, who goes on escapades you could never dream of, and understanding a strange world from their perspective.
“It’s about vulnerability, emotional intelligence, group-think, problem solving, and laughing when it all falls to pieces, as it inevitably will.
“All skills that will help you navigate more complex human relations, such as ENM and polyamory.”
And honestly, if you can survive a campaign where nobody can agree on what happens next, you may already have some experience with poly relationship negotiations.
Apparently, poly people like rules too
The biggest misconception about ENM is that it’s just an excuse to throw the rulebook out the window. Quite the opposite.
Non-monogamous relationships can involve plenty of conversations about boundaries, intimacy, time, safer sex, disclosure and expectations. Feeld’s research into relationship anarchy also found that practitioners were more likely to identify boundaries, honesty, empathy and self-awareness as important skills. Which makes the D&D comparison weirdly perfect.
Both require people to actually talk about the rules instead of assuming everyone knows them.
And if you’ve ever watched a D&D player spend 15 minutes explaining why their interpretation of a rule is technically correct, you know nerds are already very comfortable with that concept.
Gen Z is already rewriting the relationship rulebook
The crossover is happening while interest in non-monogamy is growing, particularly among younger Feeld users. Thirty percent of Feeld members listed ENM as an interest, compared with 53 percent of Gen Z users. For polyamory, the gap was 42 percent among Gen Z users versus 15 percent overall
So perhaps the real connection isn’t that playing games makes someone poly. Maybe people who already enjoy questioning fictional worlds are simply more comfortable questioning the rules of real life, too.
You spend enough time creating imaginary universes, choosing your own characters and deciding which rules make sense, and eventually you might start looking at the default relationship script and think:
Wait. Who said we have to play it that way?
At the very least, nerds appear to have one undeniable advantage in the world of non-monogamy: they already know that getting everyone together on the same night is the hardest part.