That threesome hookup in the Olympics opening ceremonies. USA Today on babies in polyfamilies. Advice columns on babies in polyfamilies. And other poly in the news.

● If you watched the Olympics opening ceremonies with your polycule, I bet you whooped at the unexpected. You weren't the only ones. For instance, in Us Weekly: Threesome Bit at Olympics Opening Ceremony: ‘Little Hot and Bothered’ (July 26)

...“We are transitioning from the Liberty portion, which got us a little hot and bothered in the pouring rain,” [NBC Olympics announcer Savannah] Guthrie joked during the Friday broadcast of the opening ceremony....

During the Liberty segment of the “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” demonstration, three dancers in a library [France's Bibliothèque nationale] ran past a book titled Le Triomphe De L’Amour — "The Triumph of Love." The trio ran out of the library and into the streets of Paris. They found themselves in a building where they ran up a spiral staircase.

After one female dancer nearly kissed both of her fellow dancers on the stairs, all three performers snuck into a room, got cozy and shut the door on the camera.

“We are uninvited, OK,” commentator Kelly Clarkson said, before joking “That was just rude.”

The three are M, F, and gender indeterminate, and of course you want the video. Here it is. (I would embed it here but that would mean paying Xitter.) Below is a still. 

 

During the performance, NBC Olympics primetime host Mike Tirico shared a little insight about the inspiration behind the performance.

“So the artistic director, Thomas Jolly, decided to lean into some of the clichés about France,” Tirico explained. “The City of Light, known as a romantic city. So much literature written or set here involves love. So in this segment, love and literature the twain shall meet. Or maybe we should say trois.”

Guthrie and Clarkson weren’t the only viewers who had some thoughts about the cheeky performance.

“I didn’t have the Olympics opening ceremony celebrating polyamory among their celebration of love, but I’m here for it,” one user wrote via X. ... 

As News.com in Australia noted (in Viewers stunned by threesome in Olympics opening ceremony, July 27), 

The official Olympic Games X account shared an image of the trio with a quote from legendary author Victor Hugo: “The freedom to love is no less sacred than the freedom to think.”

Lots more. US right-wing sites had a meltdown about it — kids will find out there are threesomes! — even amid everything else they've got going on right now.   

●  Speaking of kids, two days earlier USA Today published a long feature article: Polyamory, pregnancy and the truth about what happens when a baby enters the picture (online July 24). 

By David Oliver

Ashley Hefley didn't have a second baby on her 2023 bingo card. She and her husband hadn't planned on expanding their family – they already had one child together – but that May, fate drew up other plans. ...

What else wasn't on her bingo card? A third baby right around the same time. No, Hefley wasn't having twins. She and her husband were also in a relationship with another woman, Anna. The polyamorous throuple found out Anna was pregnant, too, a few months later.

"Ashley Hefley and her partner Anna found out
they were pregnant within months of each
other. (Courtesy Ashley Hefley)" 

"Don't worry, he's getting a vasectomy," Hefley, 29, joked over a recent phone call. She's laughing now, but wasn't then. Two women with morning sickness. Pregnancy brain. Exhaustion. But also a rare, cool opportunity.

Hefley's story is one of many. Polyamorous relationships, while not new, have become more prominent and commonplace in the last several years. As these relationships flourish, and years pass, babies are becoming part of the equation. The reality is that having a child is the start of a life-changing journey that requires crystal clear communication from all parties involved – no matter your relationship structure. And many in the polyamorous community want people to know that pregnancy does not suddenly disqualify someone from being ethically non-monogamous.

"Having a baby is challenging for a plethora of emotional, physical, mental and logistical reasons," says Grace Lawrie, licensed professional counselor. "I've known polyamorous people for whom having the extra support of additional partners was crucial for them to have children. As the old adage goes, it takes a village."

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...By the time [Jessica] Daylover got pregnant, five years into the marriage, they were comfortable practicing polyamory. Their household – who they "nest" with, in polyamory terms – has since grown. It now includes their 6- and 3-year-old children and two partners (one with Jessica, and one with Joe). Jessica calls Joe's partner her metamour, or a platonic connection you have with someone with whom you share a romantic relationship.

This living arrangement makes both logistical and emotional sense: "There's a big difference in the experience of adding children between polyam folks who are organized as multiple partners together in one household versus polyam folks who are organized as a dyad with 'outside partners; who live elsewhere," says Sheila Addison, a family and marriage therapist. ...

"Dana Hare (middle) has been remarried for a little over five years to her husband Eli and they have another partner, Gaby (right). (Courtesy Dana Hare)"

...[Diana] Adams says it can be helpful to lawyer up. [But first] a lot of questions need to be worked out when it comes to polyamory and starting a family: How long does a parent need to be dating someone before they meet a child? Should they be joining for family dinners multiple times a week, or for holidays? Not to mention considerations about shared values, like money, and what everyone's definition of infidelity is.

"I do create legal agreements for people, whether that's a co-parenting agreement or a financial agreement about how they want to share finances," Adams says. "But I see those conversations as even more valuable for keeping people out of conflict."

In their practice, Adams finds that usually polyamorous people and queer families tend to be very cautious and understanding. And a breakup doesn't necessarily have to get nasty, especially when you prep for it in the fine print.

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...Sarah Stroh, 35, started exploring non-monogagmy in 2016 and lives with her partner of four years. They have an almost 6-month-old together. They've dated other people but have never had a committed, long-term partner other than each other.

...Actor Nico Tortorella and his partner, too, grew monogamous as their family grew, he shared in a recent podcast.

"When you're focusing all of your energy on creating life, you really have to give it your all," he said, "especially if it's not working. And then, sustaining life – being a father's the most important role I've ever played in my life. There's nothing that will come close."

Adams, however, found it worked well to stick with polyamory while growing their family, especially as they endured multiple miscarriages and a long struggle with infertility. Adams was "grateful that I had more than one partner as well as a robust chosen family of people to be in mutual support and in community with me and with my co-parent." It allowed for time to grieve with more people, too. ...

And then, IMO, comes something pretty questionable:

Who's the biological father? For some, the answer doesn't matter.

Another question that often comes up – and impacts everyone differently – is who are the biological parents of the child? Particularly the father. Some families have no interest in knowing, and others a vested interest. Some go out of their way to know for sure.

Daylover, for example, "did not have sex with other partners anywhere near my fertility window."

But that's not the case for others in the community, she says. "Just as adoptive parents or step parents will be like, 'that is my kid.' There are polycules that are like, 'we all had sex, and we all weren't using protection, and we were all hoping a baby would come in one of the sessions, and it did and we don't need to know, because we are all the parent.' "

And that can lead to bad places, not just in my opinion but lawyers' and doctors'. One obvious issue — in addition to medical issues, custody rights and obligations, and the kid's rights if things ever go south — is this: I've observed that in polyfamilies with two dads, it becomes clear pretty soon which father the child looks more like. If the grown-ups pretend they don't see or know, it becomes an increasingly obvious elephant in the room for them and for everybody who knows the family. Room elephants wreak destruction in poly groups.

Have a DNA test done in the hospital at birth when everyone is happy and together. If you really don't want to know yet, seal the test result without looking at it and put it on file with a lawyer or in a safe-deposit box.

If nothing else, you owe this to the child and adult the baby will become. Especially if one of the dads is gone by then and can't be found when the testing becomes necessary.

...Just because some parental duties may be easier to handle [with three or more parents] doesn't necessarily mean it's smooth sailing for the relationship. Hefley and her husband are actually getting a divorce in order to make things more equitable for their third partner.

...Poly relationships, like any relationship, experience high highs and low lows. Pregnancy and newborns, in particular, can result in "polysaturation," when non-monogamous people "reach the maximum number of romantic or sexual relationships that they can comfortably and sustainably manage," Lawrie says.

Breakups are often messy. Now imagine multiple people in a relationship, and you've got a much bigger mess on your hands. It's much more tricky when children are involved.

"Having a child was always a high priority
for Sarah Stroh. (Courtesy Sarah Stroh)

After giving birth, Stroh was wary of her partner dating again. Their dynamics shifted. She was the one stuck at home breastfeeding.

She didn't realize this discrepancy would impact her "ability to date and and meet people and be non-monogamous, or enjoy the fruits of non-monogamy." Stroh "naively thought I would be able to keep up being a fun, free, sexy person, but I didn't really feel that way a lot of the time, especially later in my pregnancy."

It's different for everyone: "Sex may become an issue when a pregnant person is in a non-monogamous relationship − if their partners have other partners to turn to for sex, it may bring up feelings of jealousy or of being 'replaced,' Addison says. "On the other hand, it might be a relief that their partners have other sexual relationships, and the pregnant person is too exhausted or ill or uncomfortable before birth, or recovering from birth postpartum, and doesn't want to or isn't able to have sex."

Stroh ultimately felt comfortable with her beau seeing an on-and-off partner of his own.

[Diana] Adams points out people sometimes opt for monogamy briefly. In the 17 years they've been in a polyamorous partnership, the only time [Diana and her husband] have been monogamous was while pregnant. Mainly due to the STI risk.

"I still had dates with other partners that were platonic and still about connecting and felt tremendous amounts of support through my pregnancy, because we took that factor off the table as one of the things to be stressed out about, for me as an anxious lawyer mom," Adams says. ...

●  In my last post, remember those advice columns in the Washington Post and Slate? The same day that USA Today spotlighted polyfamilies with babies, another advice columnist replied to another uncomfortable older parent writing about a polyfamily with their grandkid on the way. Dear Abby: I don’t know where to put my son and his 2 girlfriends during a visit (week of July 24).

My 25-year-old son lives with his two girlfriends, who are also romantically involved with each other. They share a single bedroom. One of them has a baby due this week, and the other has made noises about wanting a child.

I don’t approve of this arrangement and can’t see it ending well. I love my son and I have a good relationship with all three of them, but it flies in the face of my upbringing and beliefs.

My question: How do I deal with this threesome if they come stay at my house? I don’t want this going on under my roof, but I don’t know how to assign bedrooms. ... I think my son knows me well enough to (hopefully) make that decision before coming here. I’m afraid if I assign bedrooms according to my convictions, it will lead to a falling-out. Any advice?

– Conflicted Dad in Ohio

Read Dear Abby's take.

●  A different advice-column query, this time to Rich Juzwiak's queer-positive sex column "How To Do It" in Slate: Ethical for Who? (July 21). A young, primary open couple are in trouble with their more-evolved-than-thou poly critics. Thankfully, Juswiak gets this right.  

Dear How to Do It,

My wife (25 F) and I (25 F) have recently started experimenting with non-monogamy as a natural extension of our journey with kink, and our desire to find new kinds of queer community. ... My question is in regards to the ethics of our ethical non-monogamy. We feel strongly that there is a distinction between our relationship and the relationships we have with other partners, and our relationship comes first. We really care for our partners and consider them close friends, but we’re building a life together, we have a mortgage, and eventually will have kids. We also only have sex with partners if both my wife and I are present (solo non-sexual hangouts are fine).

This type of hierarchical setup, I have come to find out, does not sit well with many people more experienced with polyamory. We’ve been told our arrangement indicates a possessiveness around love and sex, and a less evolved understanding of polyamory and relationships in general. ... So I guess I’m wondering, is our dynamic inherently toxic because it incorporates aspects of monogamy? How can we go about hierarchical polyamory with the maximal respect for the wonderful people we are getting to know?

—Ethical for Who?

Dear Ethical for Who?

I’m familiar with the philosophy behind the negative feedback you’ve received, and I respect your detractors’ idealism. They have a point of view and it’s their right to live according to their morals. When they cross the line into insisting that you adopt their way of doing poly is where they go too far for me. Beware of people who think they have it all figured out. Inevitably, they don’t. ... I have to wonder if the people who have read you for filth have truly achieved poly nirvana. Does their method really come without drama, hardships, and breakups? Highly doubt it. Besides, isn’t this anti-hierarchical attitude … kind of hierarchical? ... It’s snobby, at the very least.

The people who tell you that you’re possessive and unevolved are not your people. ... There’s no one way to do poly. ... What matters the most here is how you and your wife feel, as well as the people you are seeing. If they don’t feel used, there’s no problem there. If you can conduct loving relationships with them while they understand exactly where you and your wife are at with the whole poly thing, fantastic. 

●  Lastly, gamers into The Sims are all over a new upgrade that lets you define your characters' relationship boundaries in ways that enable realistic polycules. These may succeed or blow up, depending on your wits and maybe your emotional intelligence, or what the machine considers to be emotional intelligence. Google Alerts is feeding me a lot of buzz from the gaming world (including complaints of technical bugs).

For instance in PC Gamer magazine, We made 5 types of polyamorous families with The Sims 4's new romantic boundaries system and most of them actually work (July 26).

With its new romantic boundaries system, The Sims 4 finally allows you to play polyamorous families without watching relationships crash and burn in the flames of cheating accusations any time one of them gets slightly flirty with a crush. The system hinges on jealousy being a spectrum, and allows you to get pretty granular with whether your Sim is okay with their partners being flirtatious or physical with other Sims and whether they're up to changing their boundaries through gameplay and conversations.

But as with all things in The Sims, sometimes you need a bit of inspiration. You could play a solo Sim with totally open relationship boundaries dating around, but the real fun is in managing a bigger family with its own quirks and challenges.

The magazine recruited knowledgeable people to test-drive five setups: Non-hierarchical triad, Non-hierarchical hinge, Mono-poly, Hierarchical polycule, and Non-hierarchical polycule.

The reviewers had, for instance, this to say about the non-hierarchical polycule, which included the characters pictured above.

Sarah: Inside this style of household are a variety of diverse relationships—and not everyone is in one with everyone else, some people may just be metamours and roommates. Most critically, both the household and relationships inside it are egalitarian, with nobody being above anyone else. 

Lauren: This household is fun to make but chaotic to play! Kieran and his wife Hailey, who have open relationship boundaries, live with Kieran's long-time besties Gavin and Elise who are newly dating. The latter two have closed boundaries but are open to talking about changing that—which they'll need to, because Elise is also catching feelings for Hailey.

...Remember to make use of other personality traits like "jealous" or "romantic" or "loyal" to shape each relationship, or use the "romance dynamic" setting for each relationship if you have the Lovestruck expansion. ...

Sarah: Honestly, this result is the most surprising to me, simply because I didn’t imagine something so complex to manage in real life could be replicated. With that, it really nails 'fun but chaotic,' which is what a busy relationship life can sometimes feel like.

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Meanwhile, because this situation is absolutely not going away,

    

Here is why I've been ending posts to this polyamory news site with Ukraine: I've seen too many progressive movements die out, or get wiped out, because they failed to scan the wider world accurately and understand their position in it strategically. 

We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Increasingly powerful people call us a threat to society and nation — because by living successfully outside of their worldview, we expose its incompleteness.

Our freedom to choose our relationship structures, and to speak up for ourselves about the truth of ourselves, is just one way we depend on a free and pluralistic society that respects people's dignity to create their own lives, to access facts, and to speak of what they know.

Such a society is possible only where people have reasonably good power to govern themselves, combined with legal structures that are at least supposed to guarantee the rights of all.

Innovative people, communities, and societies who create their own lives, and who insist on the democratic structures and legal rights that enable them to do so safely, infuriate and terrify the authoritarians who are growing in power around the world and in our own United States. Now with direct mutual support that is increasingly stated out loud.

Such rulers and would-be rulers seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, repressive laws, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, weaponizing police abuse, stacking courts, and sometimes, eventually, artillery.

For what it's worth, Polyamory in the News received more pagereads from pre-invasion Ukraine over the years (56,400) than from any other country in eastern Europe.

For those of us born since World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, linking up at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it. Starting with China, with its eyes on Taiwan.

Background: "The United States has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think."  More: "If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster."

The coming times may require hard things of us. We don't get to choose the time and place in history we find ourselves born into. We do get to choose how we respond to it. 

Need a little help bucking up? Play this. Another version. More? Some people on the eastern front trying to hold onto an open society. (TW: war is awful.) Maybe your own granddad did this from a trench facing Hitler's tanks — for you, and us, because a world fascist movement was successfully defeated that time, opening the way for the rest of the 20th century.

But the outcome didn't look good for a couple of years then, either. Popular history remembers the 1945 victory over the Nazis and the joyous homecoming. Less remembered are the defeats and grim prospects from 1941 through early 1943.

Remember, these people say they are doing it for us too. They are correct. The global struggle between a free, open future and a fearful revival of the dark past that's shaping up, including in our own country, is still in its early stages. It's likely to get worse before it gets better. The outcome is again uncertain, and it will determine the 21st century and the handling of all its other problems.

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, ‘A Big Step Back’: In Ukraine, Concerns Mount Over Narrowing Press Freedoms (New York Times, June 18, 2024). And it has quite the history of being run by corrupt oligarchs — leading to the Maidan Uprising of 2013, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Zelensky's overwhelming election in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate. So they're working on that. And they're stamping hard on the old culture of everyday, petty corruption.  More on that.  More; "Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies."

Writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

Here was a country with a tragic history that had at last begun to build, with great effort, a better society. What made Ukraine different from any other country I had ever seen—certainly from my own—was its spirit of constant self-improvement, which included frank self-criticism. For example, there’s no cult of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine—a number of Ukrainians told me that he had made mistakes, that they’d vote against him after the war was won. Maxim Prykupenko, a hospital director in Lviv, called Ukraine “a free country aspiring to be better all the time.” The Russians, he added, “are destroying a beautiful country for no logical reason to do it. Maybe they are destroying us just because we have a better life.”

They have a word there, with a deep history, for the horizontal, self-organized, mutual get-it-done that grows from community social trust: hromada. It's been keeping them going  to the extent they've been able. We polyfolks often dream of creating something like that community spirit in miniature, in our polycules and networks. Occasionally we succeed.

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Social attitudes in Ukraine are mostly traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But in the last generation the ideal of modern European civil society has become widely treasured. The status of women has fast advanced, especially post-invasion. More than 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — including as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, snipers, and infantry. Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our full material backing for as long as it takes them to win their security, freedom, and future. Continue to speak up for it.

                                     

A Russian writer grieves: "My country has fallen out of time."

Women defenders on the world's eastern front

PPS:  U.S. authori-tarians, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, say that allowing women in front-line roles is a woke plot to weaken America's armed forces. Ukraine puts that shit to bed. Do you have a relative who talks like that? Send them this video link to Vidma, who commands a mortar platoon, recounting the story of one of their battles near Bakhmut.

Update July 28, 2024: Almost two years later Vidma is still alive, still with her mortar unit, and posting TikToks. They are now at the front in, it looks like, the battle to hold Chasiv Yar, an afternoon's hike east of Bakhmut. A young girl who looks high-school age showed up to join them. Another vid. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us. 

And maybe our own? Says Maine's independent Senator Angus King (Jan. 31, 2024),

Whenever people write to my office [asking why we are supporting Ukraine,] I answer, 'Google Sudetenland, 1938.' We could have stopped a murderous dictator who was bent on geographic expansion…at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths.

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