Monogamish

Dan Savage coined "monogamish" in his July 20, 2011 Savage Love column in The Stranger, applying the term to his own marriage and arguing that many ostensibly monogamous couples already negotiate small exceptions without naming them. The Wikipedia entry on Savage's column records the coinage and the working definition — couples who are mostly but not strictly exclusive, with an explicit allowance for some sexual contact outside the pair-bond.

Where the word does useful work is in the gap between a closed marriage and a fully open one. A monogamish couple might agree on vacation play, an annual hall pass, occasional threesomes, or sex-only encounters at a club, but explicitly rule out ongoing outside relationships, sleepovers, or dating. The Advocate's profile from the same period highlights how the framework appealed to long-term couples who wanted to acknowledge attraction to others without restructuring the rest of their relationship.

Compared to lifestyle swinging, monogamish arrangements typically operate at much smaller scale: a few encounters a year rather than a regular calendar of clubs and takeovers, often with one partner more enthusiastic than the other. The label is also frequently used by couples who would not identify as swingers at all — they keep the social and aesthetic markers of monogamy but carve out specific exceptions. Savage's argument was less that everyone should adopt the model than that pretending it does not exist forces couples toward either dishonesty or rupture when desire wanders.