Abundance and scarcity mindset

Also: abundance mindset, scarcity mindset, love is not a finite resource

Two contrasting orientations toward love and connection. A scarcity mindset treats love and attention as finite and competed-over; an abundance mindset holds that love is not a zero-sum resource — a frame many practitioners credit for making non-monogamy workable.

1 min read · Reviewed 2026-05-24

Scarcity and abundance describe how a person frames the resources at stake in a relationship. A scarcity mindset assumes that love, desire, and attention are finite, so a partner's connection with someone else is necessarily a loss to you — every unit they give away is taken from your share. An abundance mindset holds that love specifically is not zero-sum: loving a second person doesn't subtract from loving the first, the way having a second child doesn't mean loving the first less.

The distinction is one of the most-cited mental shifts in polyamory writing, because so much jealousy turns out to be scarcity thinking applied to love. Reframing toward abundance is often what makes compersion possible at all. The community's shorthand for this is 'love is not a finite resource.'

Honest writers add an important caveat: love may be abundant, but time, energy, attention, and money are genuinely finite. A mature abundance mindset distinguishes between the resource that isn't scarce (love) and the resources that really are — which is exactly why polysaturation, scheduling, and resource-fairness remain real concerns even for people who've fully let go of scarcity thinking about love itself.

Where this term fits in the wider picture

Ethical non-monogamy is a network of overlapping practices, identities, and structures — and Abundance and scarcity mindset connects to several of them. The neighbouring terms below show how this one sits alongside the rest of the vocabulary practitioners actually use; the guide at the end is the longer-form treatment of the same territory.

Closely-related vocabulary

Compersion
The felt-sense of joy at a partner's joy with another partner — sometimes described as the emotional opposite of jealousy.
Polysaturated
Having as many partners as your time, energy, and emotional capacity can support — not open to forming additional connections at present.
NRE
The intense, heady, infatuated feelings of a brand-new romantic connection — a real phenomenon with predictable effects that polyamorous people learn to handle deliberately.
Wibble
A small spike of jealousy or insecurity — the polyamory community's term for a passing wobble that does not warrant restructuring anything, just acknowledging.
Ethical non-monogamy
An umbrella term for relationship structures in which everyone involved knows about, and consents to, the participants having more than one romantic or sexual connection.

Questions practitioners actually ask about this

Continue reading

The longer treatment of this territory is in the guide Polyamory and attachment: building security with more than one partner — How attachment theory explains the emotional weather of polyamory — why non-monogamy activates old fears, and how to build felt security across multiple relationships.

New to ethical non-monogamy? Start with the glossary for vocabulary, the structures index for the named relationship configurations practitioners actually use, and the guides for longer-form treatment of the common questions.

Sources & further reading