Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Don't Ask, Don't Tell agreements borrow their name from the 1990s US military policy on sexual orientation, and the parallel is intentional: the structure works by making certain knowledge officially absent from the relationship. Each partner accepts that outside encounters happen but agrees not to ask about specifics, and the other agrees not to volunteer them. The arrangement is most common when partners have very different desire levels, when one partner is monogamous-leaning and the other is not, or when geographic separation makes traditional open-relationship logistics unworkable.

The ethical debate within the broader ENM community is sharp. Wikipedia's polyamory article notes that arrangements requiring "don't-ask-don't-tell" policies are generally seen as a less than ideal model within polyamorous communities, on the grounds that the framework conflicts with the transparency norms most of those communities are built around. Critics argue that the structure makes informed consent harder for outside partners (who may not know the arrangement's terms) and rewards plausible deniability over honest communication.

Defenders, including some sex therapists who work with non-monogamous clients, frame DADT as a legitimate jealousy-management strategy when both partners enter freely and the framework includes baseline safety rules — barrier protection, no shared social circles, no secondary relationships that escalate into emotional partnerships. Non-Monogamy Help's primer walks through how working DADT agreements typically include explicit ground rules even though the day-to-day operates on silence.