free love

noun

1. the doctrine or practice of having sexual relations or living together without legal marriage or continuing obligation.

free love

noun

1. the practice of sexual relationships without fidelity to a single partner or without formal or legal ties

Word History and Origins

Origin of free love¹

First recorded in 1815–25

Example Sentences

A simple newspaper listing from a simpler time in a gloriously complex place – 1970s San Francisco, where revelry and free love reigned.

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And like so many in the late 1960s, he had fetched up in the Haight-Ashbury district, drawn there by the alluring swirl of spiritual questing, political activism, experimental theater, free love and psychedelics.

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The colony, The Times wrote, believes it can solve “without socialism, free love, and other vagaries of theorists, the ideal conditions of human life and association.”

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In the late 1950s in New York City, a group of therapists founded the Sullivan Institute, which promoted free love and communal living and attracted hundreds of followers, including the painter Jackson Pollock.

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Woodhull later ran for president on a platform that included free love.

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