How ENM and poly values "counter authoritarianism and improve collective well-being." Yearnings grow for non-nuclear chosen family, poly or not. And more.
● Relevant to the present moment: 5 Ways Non-Monogamous Values Counter Authoritarianism and Inspire
Collective Well-Being. This is by relationship coach Aria Diana on her
Navigating Non-Monogamy
substack (Nov. 12).
She's talking especially about family- and community-style polyamory — the
kind where the people in a polycule are all there for each other, regardless of its sub-configuration of sex and romance. Platonic friends might be part of the family too.
How non-monogamy’s principles of collaboration and mutual care challenge hierarchical power structures.
Aria Diana
My heart feels heavy right now.... The recent U.S. presidential election underscores that, as a society, we are far from okay. We’re witnessing the damaging effects of a deeply embedded supremacy mindset that teaches domination as the norm, prioritizing control and power over collective well-being. In these times, envisioning an alternative path (and then building it, together) feels more crucial than ever.An increasingly authoritarian America stands to learn profoundly from the transformative values of non-monogamy, compersion, and abundant love. The work we’re doing to unlearn toxic monogamy and cultivate healthier, more expansive relationship ecosystems transcends the personal—it’s a direct challenge to the hierarchical, scarcity-driven systems embedded in our culture.Non-monogamy teaches us flexibility, empathy, and a commitment to relational abundance and collective care, values that stand in stark opposition to the harmful frameworks that dominate mainstream society. Embracing these principles of ... shared well-being confronts the corrosive narrative of rugged individualism and resource hoarding.......Non-monogamous values challenge these norms by fostering interconnectedness, openness, and a reimagined sense of community. ...We create networks of love and support that honor autonomy and nurture a more embodied sense of security, dignity, and belonging... opposing the scarcity-driven, hierarchical frameworks where billionaires hoard wealth while [many or most] struggle to survive.
...Here are five powerful ways non-monogamous values counter authoritarianism and inspire collective well-being:Letting Go of Ownership: Non-monogamy disrupts the notion of ownership within relationships, encouraging appreciation, gratitude and respect.... Extending this principle beyond relationships, we can challenge harmful attachments to ownership over land, resources, and people. Let us shift from a mindset rooted in control and divisive “us versus them” thinking to one grounded in respect for autonomy, dismantling the forces of exploitation... that fuel a culture of extraction and inequality.Reconceptualizing Security and Power: In American culture, security is often equated with dominance, surveillance, violence, mandates, power struggles, and resource hoarding. Non-monogamous relationships, by contrast, demonstrate that security is built on trust, care, mutually created agreements, openness and vulnerability. When we project control onto others, we may actually undermine the... safety we hope to create....Promoting Abundance Thinking: Compersion and non-monogamy show us that love and connection are limitless, contrasting the scarcity mindset often reinforced by the isolated nuclear family model. ... Rather than viewing resources as finite and hoarding them, we can embrace collective stewardship....Embracing Compersion Over Competition: ...A society that celebrates others’ successes without competition and rivalry fosters empathy and interconnectedness. ...Cultivating Emotional Intelligence and Non-Violent Communication: Non-monogamy requires deep self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and the ability to have respectful, open dialogue to find mutually acceptable solutions that can work for many people with different needs. ...Despite what’s happening on the national level, let’s continue to work together with our neighbors, polycules and wider local relational ecosystems to create regenerative communities rooted in collective support, abundance — and the understanding that when we care for one another, everyone can truly flourish....
● On that theme of community, a writer in USA Today observes,
USA Today
By David Oliver (Nov. 15)Family is everything for Chaneé Jackson Kendall. But her family doesn't look like what society has told us it should. That's because she's Black and polyamorous; the influencer space and mass media might make you think most polyamorous people – like families – look the same. White...."We've been polyamorous for a while," says Ebony Hagans, a polyamory expert and creator of the @marjanilane Instagram account. "It's not something that we just started doing two days ago." They saw a "huge gap of education between the Black community and just a general nonmonogamous community." [Here she is talking about "mistakes I've made as a polyamorous person":]
Some argue "as polyamory gains interest and becomes more accessible, Black, queer femme and nonbinary individuals should be centered," says a recent research paper by polyamorous psychologist Manijeh Badiee and personal coach Evita Sawyers; "they are enhancing polyamory discourse by discussing marginalization beyond queerness and providing strategies for survival and resistance." ..."I personally do not date white folks in the polyamory community, because my experience has not been too great," Oliveira says. "There's definitely an aspect of being fetishized that is really wild to me."Sawyers adds: "We tend to think of racism as looking a particular way, but fetishization is a form of racism. And so I may not experience going to a polyamorous event and someone calling me something (derogatory) or saying some kind of microaggression, although that has occurred, but what I will experience is people fetishizing me."Of course, not everyone has negative experiences. "In general... in the poly community that I've been part of in whichever city, I've definitely seen most of the white people have been really understanding, and they they want to learn," adds Abhijith Asok, who is polyamorous. "They really want to learn more. So they do ask questions and those things like that. But at the end of the day, the job of teaching them also falls on you." ...If you have another polyamory story you'd like to share, email doliver@usatoday.com.
● Widening the
theme: Good Housekeeping magazine, an American family tradition for
139 years, presents Non-Nuclear Families — Out of Necessity — Are Sought After, and on
the Rise (Sept. 1). Quoting at length:
What if we organized our “village” in a different way?By Rachael Rifkin
The app will function similar to a dating app, with the security and background checks of nanny-finding platforms like SitterCity and Care.com. ...Phil recently started the social real estate platform LiveNearFriends, which helps people find homes that are within a short walk of friends and family. ...Rhaina Cohen, a producer and editor for the NPR podcast Embedded, discussed the importance of having a variety of different close relationships in her book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. ...“We're taught that a romantic relationship is only successful if it functions as a one-stop-shop — where we can meet our needs for a confidant, co-parent, roommate, best friend and more,” she adds. “If a couple feels overwhelmed by all the responsibilities that fall to them, they may fault their relationship or themselves as individuals, rather than realize that we need larger support networks. One person is not enough to share all of life's burdens and joys.”We weren’t always so focused on individual family units.
The benefits of having a village cannot be overstated. Studies have shown that healthy people who are more socially connected live longer, and that communities who engage in social connection regularly enjoy better health outcomes than communities who don’t. And according to the Harvard Happiness study, your relationships predict your happiness and healthiness later in life. It makes sense — villages are about taking care of each other and making sure everyone gets what they need.Historically, having a village is also how we survived. “Anthropologists believe that for 95% of human history, we evolved within an egalitarian social structure. This shaped us to thrive on close social bonds, mutual support and shared responsibilities. We are hardwired to seek connection, collaboration, and fairness,” wrote Andie... who has a degree in anthropology and goes by Ancestral Habits on Instagram, in a May 20, 2024 post, citing evidence in How We Got Stuck: The Origins of Hierarchy and Inequality and Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress. ...---------------------------------...Sam and Ben are polyamorous and in a triad with Allie Long (they all date each other, and are open to dating others as well), who moved in with them in June 2023. All three co-parent together. “After my divorce, I was coming to terms with the fact that I might not have kids,” Allie says. “It all took shape at once. Sam's parents have been incredibly welcoming and wonderful.”Allie is a musician, as are Sam’s parents. Before Allie moved in, Sam’s parents had gotten out of the habit of playing music. Now all three play their instruments after dinner, which is something Sam’s parents used to do when Sam was growing up. “It means a lot to them to have so much music back in the house,” Sam says.
Sam’s parents also appreciate knowing that there are three adults living at the house. “Both Allie and Ben work remotely, so there's almost always at least one of us there during the day. I think that’s really comforting to them,” Sam says. “And with so many adults there, Ben and I have more time for ourselves and our hobbies, so we can feel like more than just parents.”Ember Cooley lives with a platonic partner who is aromantic, which means having little to no romantic attraction to others, and they often open their home to their village of loved ones.They once lived with a roommate who has a young daughter. “When this child lived with us, caring for her became a community effort, involving people dear to us, including my partner's father, who we rent from and lives upstairs, and some neighbors,” Ember says. “Eventually, they found good housing far away, so we text and video call her daughter regularly, and have her stay with us on school breaks.”They consider each of their loved ones irreplaceable. “Each deserves regular conversation about our needs and expectations, even if we have never been romantic or sexual. I value all the types of love I'm lucky enough to receive, equally,” Ember says.Families have to be intentional about their organization.
Though the American family has changed, tax breaks, healthcare, citizenship and protection against discrimination still mainly applies to the nuclear family.Lawyer Diana Adams thinks that U.S. laws need to expand to include protections for a diversity of families, and has helped spearhead efforts to do so in a variety of states. Most recently, they were part of the coalition that drafted and passed bills in Oakland and Berkeley to extend non-discrimination laws to cover individuals with diverse family and intimate relationship structures, including multi-partner/multi-parent families and relationships, step-families, multi-generational households, non-nuclear family structures, consensually nonmonogamous relationships and platonic partnerships, including asexual and aromantic relationships. “It benefits all of us to allow for the kinds of families that exist and give them the support they need to be stable,” Adams says. ...No matter what kind of family or village you have or want to have, setting up agreements and really getting to know each other ahead of time is important. In particular, Adams encourages people and potential communities to make co-living agreements and parenting agreements, which are out-of-court agreements that you can make through contract law.“What's important is that people make really clear what their expectations are,” they add. “If you don't make a plan for how you communicate with each other, the loudest person is always going to be the default leader. It’s important that we be mindful about the power dynamics of gender, race, and class too, and think about what our decision making process is going to be and what our shared values are.”Another thing to keep in mind: Before you make agreements and get started, you go slow. “Make sure that you've had your first fights and worked on a major project together that's going to be stressful and intense to see and develop that level of trust first,” Adams says. ...
Read
the whole thing.
● Meanwhile, Throuples becoming more prevalent as family law plays catch-up (Toronto Sun, Nov. 17). Although the article is from Canada,
this law firm's recommendations apply to U.S. polyfamilies too.
Even just writing down your group's agreements without a
lawyer (each person keeps a copy signed and dated by all) is much better than
nothing.
By Denette Wilford
“We know that there are more people choosing to live in polyamorous relationships,” said Alyssa Bach, an associate at Shulman & Partners. “What we are still understanding is how it may play out when these relationships end. It’s definitely not straightforward, and without some type of agreement it can be complex and confusing....“As family lawyers, we advise individuals, couples and families, including anyone living in a polyamorous arrangement, to have an agreement in place to reduce potential conflict in the event of a breakup,” Bach recommended.
Getty She added people can change the description of the relationship after they walk away, creating possible “complexities in the event of a breakup and request for support.”However, to help navigate these, for the most part, unchartered waters, Shulman & Partners suggests those in polyamorous relationships should be proactive with discussions and have an agreement in place detailing daily living and the rights and obligations of all involved.They also point out that the possibilities of a separation should be considered, so each individual involved should factor in support payments, how property is handled and whether contact with non-biological children will continue. ...
The lawyer is
interviewed intelligently
on AM talk radio (it's Canada), one of her many media appearances.
● Here's more about the
attraction people may feel to a couple's or polycule's
relationship, not just to one or more of its members:
What to Know About Symbiosexuality, by Zachary Zane (Men's Health, Nov. 11).
It's especially worth a read by poly dogmatists who say this isn't real.
As for implementing it wisely... that's a different question.
It's not an attraction to an individual or even to a couple, but to a couple's dynamic.
“Symbiosexual is a term to describe an individual who is attracted to the energy, dynamic, or connectedness between people in an existing relationship,” explains queer sex educator Gabrielle Kassel. Most commonly, the term refers to a single (or non-partnered) person interested in or turned on by the idea of joining a pre-existing couple. “However, this term could also refer to someone enchanted by the dynamics of a pre-existing polycule or throuple.” ...
Getty
Boyle has been doing bookstore talks, podcast appearances, and social
media. She writes,
The book tour has been wonderful, with engaged and engaging crowds all over the US and on my recent trip to London, where Ro Moed and I did an event. I’ve been absolutely humbled by the messages I’ve received from folks who have found the book helpful in planning moves in with their partners, or in finding new angles to consider problems of long standing in their households based on the ways people I spoke to in my survey had handled them. Seeing that [item in] the New York Times among a number of books I admire a lot, after I took a moment to remember to breathe, is also great. I hope a lot of people find the examples and information in the book useful, for themselves and for clients if they’re in helping professions.I’ve got interviews with a few magazines and papers in the wind 🤷♀️. I also recorded an interview for a segment of an NPR Planet Money podcast but they haven’t confirmed if they’ll use it.
Her interview on the Evolving Love podcast (Nov. 9) gives an idea of
the serious but playful brains here. Polycule Practicalities with Laura Boyle:
For the book, Boyle collected surveys from 468 polyfolks who were or had been living in
households of three or more adults. She then did deeper-dive interviews with
128 of them. The book is packed with
frank, often unexpected realities of polygroup living and the sometimes surprisingly inventive
solutions that her vast number of interviewees have come up with. Much here will be useful to platonic chosen-family households
too.
-------------------------------------------------------
And as more realize what's at stake . . .
I've put this Ukraine piece at the end of most posts
here since March 2022, in one version or another. At first some
readers complained it was "off topic" and didn't see the tie-in. Now more get it.
Especially with last week's appointment picks announced in Washington, which
resemble a
decapitation strike.
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, religion, and nation.
Because by living successfully outside 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
okay 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 linking up 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, stacking agencies and 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.
And now, about ourselves.
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 are 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 Western world's 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. The outcome is again uncertain, and it will determine the 21st
century and the handling of all its other problems.
----------------------------------
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."
Wrote US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic early in the war,
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 what'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.
----------------------------------
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. Like, right now.
A Russian writer grieves: "My country has fallen out of time."
|
|
Women defenders on our world's eastern front |
Update Nov. 1, 2024: Two years later Vidma is still
alive, still with her mortar unit, still at the front, and
posting TikToks. A young girl who looks high-school age showed up
to join them. Another vid with her. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us.
And maybe our own? Says Maine's independent Senator Angus King,
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.
Labels: #Black&Poly, #ChosenFamilies, #CommunityVsFascism, #GroupLiving, #IntentionalCommunities, #polyfamilies
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