"Not widely accepted yet, but interesting, and who knows what the future may bring?"

Fox-25 TV (Boston)

Following last Sunday's excellent, six-page article in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine (see previous post), the article's author, Sandra Miller, appeared on the Morning News show at Boston's Fox TV affiliate. She was respectfully interviewed for nearly five minutes — and she gave the accurate, level-headed assessment of who we are and what we're about that the mainstream world needs to hear. This is another one you can bookmark to send to your worried mom.

Host: It's a new year, and it seems that more couples, even more than we know, are experimenting with a new lifestyle. For many, loving many seems to be working for them — or as it's officially known, polyamory. But what is it?

Sandra Miller of the Boston Globe magazine wrote about this lifestyle this past weekend and recently joined the FOX25 Morning News to talk more about it.

Miller: ...There's complete disclosure about what's going on — full truth-telling about who's doing what with whom. This is also not just about recreational sex. These are real relationships with the full array of benefits and complexities that that implies. It just so happens there are more than two people in the relationships.

Host: ...So Sandra, tell me, what is the benefit here?

Miller: Many people say one of the benefits is, it allows them to have close intimate relationships with a variety of people. Many of them just completely eschew what we're socialized to believe, which is that there's one person who should fulfill all of our needs, sexual, emotional, spiritual, physical.... So they like the idea of loving many. Sure, there's sexual exploration going on here, but this is really about building intimate relationships with different people.

...I spoke with people who are members of Poly Boston.... These people are very well educated professionals, I spoke with two medical doctors, people who are Yale-educated, MIT-educated, these are not people who are dwelling on the fringes of society....

Host: Not widely accepted yet, but interesting, and who knows what the future may bring?

Watch it here (Jan. 4, 2010).

Do I have a quibble? Only that Miller may give the impression that poly is only about people who are "dating around" with everyone's knowledge and consent. For some, it's about something more radical: full three-way, or n-way, group romances or group marriages. But with the Globe's strict rule of profiling only people willing to be identified by name, she apparently found no such group that she could include more than one of.

Meanwhile, the Poly Boston site has been getting lots of hits, its chat list has sprung to life, and a bunch of new people (I'm told) showed up at the informal weekly hangout last light.

More fallout from the article, on the news aggregator "dscriber":

Gay marriage is so last decade; polyamory is in, newspaper says

By Ginger Q. Lawless | January 6, 2010

This news isn't going to go over well at Focus on the Family: the new way to live the dream, perhaps, is polyamory, which means “many loves.” Those who practice it have multiple lovers and “poly” as it’s also called, has a very full spectrum of possibility. You might have a couple in a primary relationship who then have one or more secondary relationships. There’s also polyfidelity, in which three or more people are mutually exclusive. There are also love circles where the possibilities are endless.

It sounds like a racy topic, but it is mainstream enough to have recently been featured in The Boston Globe.

What makes polyamory different from cheating boils down to the C-word (no, not that one): Consent. Each and every member of a polyamorous chain, whether with three links or thirty, knows about everyone else....

A blogger for the conservative journal American Spectator:

A New Frontier in Marriage Redefinition

By David N. Bass (Jan. 5, 2010)

Same-sex marriage is so last decade. Polyamory, or "responsible non-monogamy," is the wave of the future. At least, that's the gist of a Boston Globe article that explores the confusing intricacies of this "new frontier" of love....

Not content to leave this moral aberration (and chaos) in the private sphere, look for "polyamorists" to begin pushing for legal recognitions similar to those sought by homosexual couples. If society no longer roots marriage in the historical and Christian definition, then it has no basis to deny marriage rights to any "love arrangement" the human brain can devise, no matter how bizarre.

Please, stop the insanity.

Some folks on our side are gamely piling into the comments there, amid rants from the other side such as "Polygamy increases the odds of terrorism." Go join in, but please remember to represent us well; "be a credit to your kink."

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P.S.: A couple weeks earlier, as part of a New Year's wrapup, a different part of the Boston Globe illustrated a bunch of science-fictiony things we were supposed to have by 2010. Along with flying cars and the 3-day workweek was "marriage a trois (or more)", with a nice illustration of an MFM wedding triad. "Forty years ago... many believed that by now, there would be a lot more choices on the Western matrimony menu, starting with polygamy." (The longer version in the printed newspaper went on to express skepticism: "There's a lesson here for prospective futurists: Sometimes, when the culture sees the next wave on the horizon, it runs the other way.") Though, as we know, multi-marriage actually is happening more now, a little....

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