"The Invite" lowdown. "This Is Poly" TV series. We get 9 minutes on ABC's Nightline. And a friendly but very real examination of modern throuples' messes

If you think polyamory and ENM have slowed their 15-year sweep into mainstream fascination — nope, ain't happened yet.

So, at what point does this thing. . . go too far? Are we already there? Repeat after me: polyamory is not for everyone. Not even, perhaps, for most who are now rushing into it.

I say this having evangelized for the possibilities of group romantic love since even before the Zell nest invented the word "polyamory" at the end of the 1980s.

●  The movie The Invite, an indie fave at Sundance last January, is now being mass-released in megaplexes to solid early box office. (Spoilers coming:) Its tantalizing early publicity — that it would show polyamory addressing a fraught dead-marriage situation — was a tease. Near the movie's end the "invite" falls apart, and the story stops just where it could have begun. This is mostly a very well acted bad-marriage comedy — with Oscar potential, some reviewers say.

The ENM on offer is not love-centric polyamory but what you might call enlightened swinging. The upstairs couple tell of their sex clubs where you pick your kinks from a menu, and they are running something like that themselves in their poorly soundproofed apartment. And Hawk's black ring, pointedly fondled and flashed to the camera near the end, is swing-world insider code.

But ENM-wise the movie does represent a positive new twist, as Marie Claire magazine points out (July 4):

The Invite gives ENM [ethical non-monogamy] the nuanced portrayal it rarely gets on screen. The story follows two couples whose dinner descends into arguments, flirtation and, eventually, a proposition. Yet, for once, the open couple aren't the dysfunctional one. Instead, it's the supposedly "normal" monogamous pair (Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen) whose relationship begins to unravel.

It's getting both good reviews (early Rotten Tomatoes: 9.8) and good audience-exit interviews. When I saw it the audience was sparse, but that was at 2 p.m. on a weekday. So far the movie is on track to become a summer hit.

A Guardian story (July 3) begins,

‘I feel both thrilled and ruined by this’: Olivia Wilde and Edward Norton on making sex comedy The Invite

Their movie about marital bed death is this summer’s buzziest, funniest film. ...

By Catherine Shoard

The good-example couple (right) offer something new to the fighting monos.

Earlier this week, Edward Norton took a night flight from New York to London and felt so dreadful the next day he decided to get a massage. “I hadn’t had one in such a long time,” he says. “And I almost started crying. You’re like: ‘Oh! Ah!’ ”

He has heard similar sounds from cinemas screening his new movie, The Invite, which is about the devastating impact of marriage on your sex life. “People are almost tearful. They’re like: ‘I haven’t had a good, adult laugh that made me feel seen in a long time.’ ” ...

Fanbolt says, How Olivia Wilde’s ‘The Invite’ Puts Polyamory in the Multiplex Without the Doom (July 10)

By Emma Loggins

Hollywood has spent decades treating non-monogamy as either a punchline or a plot device headed for catastrophe. ... The Invite lets an openly non-monogamous couple be the most appealing people in the room instead of a cautionary tale, even if the film itself gets cold feet before the credits.

...The marketing dangles an orgy the film has no intention of delivering, and once the night pivots from comedy into something closer to group therapy, The Invite pulls back right when it could have gotten savage. ...

So the framing that this is the film that finally makes polyamory the happy ending is not quite right. What it actually does is subtler and more interesting. It lets Hawk and Piña be desirable and emotionally intelligent rather than doomed, and it uses them as a mirror to expose everything calcified in Joe and Angela’s marriage....

The Cultural Moment Is Real, Even If the Film Hedges

...Intimacy experts keep pointing out that for a lot of viewers, movies and TV are their only window into what [ENM] relationships look like, so when the depictions are relentlessly negative, they warp public understanding of lives that are far less doomed than the screen insists. That is why a movie built to let a poly couple be the aspirational ones matters, even one that flinches. 

The Invite treats Hawk and Piña as people with something to teach rather than a threat to be survived, and that alone is a shift.

...The value here is in the framing, not the follow-through. ... That is a smaller swing than the trailer promised, and I wish the film had matched the audacity of its premise. But a mainstream comedy that can imagine a version of love not automatically ending in a single couple walking into the sunset, and that treats the alternative as attractive rather than tragic, is a real tell about where this is all heading.

Dozens more reviews.

 

●  Also new in mass-market media is (oh God) This Is Poly, a reality show on WeTV.  The trailer opens excitedly but turns cringy with "reality" drama (of course coffee is thrown with the perfect camera angle). Episode guide so far.

Confession: I don't watch reality TV, so find reviews elsewhere. And I don't trust AI, but this pithy summary of early reviews from Google's AI may save you time:

While intended as dramatic, trashy entertainment, [This Is Poly] is widely criticized for spotlighting dysfunctional, toxic, and non-ethical dynamics rather than healthy, consensual polyamory.

This from Reddit user Polyamorouspotato seems typical:

I just finished “This is Poly” and I have noted that every dynamic is entirely toxic. From “throuples” to harems. Rules and all the couples dating together. Also notes of poly under duress.

This show made me so angry lol. I understand the choices to show drama on tv but woof there isn’t a single example of ethical polyamory.

Almost all 63 commenters agree. One that didn't:

I LOVED it. It did not disappoint in the entertainment and cringe. I hosted a watch party of CNM folks which was the best way to enjoy the show. BQ and his friend Pauly may be my favorites for having the best douchiest lines of the show and providing me a ton of laughs. But the “999,000 bitches” roster girlies also brought the toxicity and the clipboards.

I Lost the Remote and Watched 'This Is Poly' — I Wouldn’t Wish That on Anyone (TV Fanatic, June 17).

One of the five polycules on the show told ShowBiz Cheatsheet what they underwent during filming: ‘This Is Poly’ Power Throuple on the ‘Pressure Cooker’ of Reality TV and the Importance of Hard Conversations (June 26). Trent admits the filming "was more than we bargained for." Says Nita (whose three DUI arrests and mugshot are now famous), "I feel like I could have [done] a lot better communicating through a lot of it." She could also have grasped that if you go on reality TV, of course your arrest record and mugshot will come to represent whatever you represent. Kami, having invested so much of herself in the show, tries to see the positive:  

...“One of our main goals for doing it was really to help people see that this is actually a really viable option and you can do it in a healthy way,” she said. “Yes, it might still be messy. There’s not a rule book for it, so it’s hard … it was really showing people that this can be a really beautiful thing. And it is something that if people really want to grow and expand and love, it is something that’s possible.”

●  On a rather higher level, the Presbyterian Church USA (the larger and more liberal branch of the split Presbytherians) just went through some tumult over polyamory, as has been happening in other churchs. A proposal to its recent General Assembly would have expelled ministers in non-monogamous relationships. This made the news.

From the Associated Press, in many newspapers: As polyamory gains visibility, monogamy faces a vote in the Presbyterian Church USA (via Religion News Service, June 12)

By Katheryn Post

A proposal that would require ordained clergy to be monogamous is on the docket at the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s General Assembly this summer.

The overture, CON-10, has generated strong reactions online but not yet earned broad support from PCUSA groups. A separate proposal asks for theological studies on gender and sexuality, life-giving relationships and the Christian vocation of family that would support the denomination’s commitment to inclusion of different familial realities. Together, these overtures show that as polyamory gains visibility in broader culture, it may have policy implications, especially in theologically progressive Christian denominations.

“I think it is the next big conversation that most mainline denominations will have,” said the Rev. Claudia Aguilar Rubalcava, director of engagement for the LGBTQ-affirming nonprofit More Light Presbyterians.

 La Fabbrica Dei Sogni/ Unsplash/ Creative Commons

More Light Presbyterians released a statement last month, saying the proposal on monogamy targets queer communities. “It centers a single model of relationship as the only faithful expression of Christian life, ignoring both the breadth of biblical witness and the lived realities of many faithful people,” the statement says. ...

Last month, More Light Pres­by­teri­ans hos­ted a “Faith­ful Polyamory 101” train­ing that framed the Trin­ity as mod­el­ling the kind of mutual, over­flow­ing love that can be reflec­ted in polyamory. ... Chris­tian advoc­ates for polyamory often point to the range of rela­tion­ship mod­els in the Bible — though many con­trast poly­gamy, which often has hier­arch­ical implic­a­tions, with mod­ern forms of polyamory — and emphas­ize the import­ance of safe, con­sen­sual rela­tion­ships with clear bound­ar­ies.

...Aguilar Rubalcava told RNS that at speaking engagements, she routinely encounters polyamorous Presbyterians hungry for support. Kate Davoli, who serves as co-moderator on the board of More Light Presbyterians, told RNS they were dismissed from the denomination’s ordination process for being openly polyamorous. 

...As polyamory gains exposure, other mainline denominations have begun to confront their stance on it. At least three Episcopal priests have renounced their ordination vows due to tensions between their church roles and family structures, and in 2024 the Episcopal Church considered, but did not advance, a resolution intending to study diverse family structures. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada voted in 2023 to create national resources to support conversations that include “ethical non-monogamous relationships.”...

Two for the record:  God’s love is not scarce: A Presbyterian case for polyamory, by Dr. David W. Congdon (The Presbyterian Outlook, June 23). The other side: One flesh, one spouse: A clear standard for Presbyterian ministers, by Rev. Alexander Haines (same issue).

---------------------

The outcome? The assembled Presbyterians punted. They voted 433-44 to send the proposal to a committee for more study.

You church-going polyfolk reading this (yes there are quite a few of you), please make yourselves known if you can. Your silence lets TV shows like "This Is Poly" represent you in the eyes of your church.

-- Lots more Poly and Christian coverage from a while back.

-- My own church, the Unitarian Universalists, voted overwhelmingly at its 2014 General Assembly to add "relationship and family structure" to its list of Welcoming Congregation protections. That drive was led by the Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness, which still lives on as a Facebook group: the UU Polyamory Alliance.

●  Just out is a landmark newspaper feature on the boom in people forming throuples and the emotional swamps they often mire in:  ‘They said to me, You were the best sex toy we ever had’: the pain, pleasure and paranoia of life in a throuple (The Guardian, July 12, in its US, UK, Europe, Australia, and International editions.)

This story is long, deeply informed, and friendly to us. But romantic triads have a reputation for being an especially hard dynamic to make work well for everyone, and the writer doesn't hold back about the crises she saw throuples going through across six months.

Rant ahead: Now that we're squarely in the mass-market era of poly and ENM, way too many people try to glide past the steep standards that "ethical" actually requires here. Or, triads don't think to train up, as a group, in both speaking and listening fearlessly. This thing really is, as is often said, "graduate-level relationshipping." The good odds are for people who are brave, secure, and self-examining; and no-nonsense but genuinely good-hearted and motivated by poly ideals. And who are ready for big changes. Did we mention being naturally honest, clear about boundaries, and unusually emotionally intelligent? Such people are willing to let the relationships be what they are, un-mandated and unforced. Because no two relationships are ever alike, and that's okay.

And you don't have to be a naturally low-jealousy compersive meltyheart about your metas. But it helps.

Nevertheless, there are exceptions to every poly rule. You sometimes find happy, easy-functioning, long-term throuples who took every "wrong" approach and are doing great. People can surprise you. (Just not often.)

End of rant. I've been saying this sort of stuff ever since my Central Park bandwagon speech in 2008.

Excerpts from the throuple article:

From Hollywood movies to confessional memoirs, three-person relationships are everywhere. But is it really possible to keep everyone satisfied? Happy trios, bruised couples and rejected lovers tell all.

By Kitty Drake

Priscilla can pinpoint the moment she realised that her throuple was falling apart. Her fiancee, Kiara, had started kissing their shared girlfriend, Olivia, in a way that went on for just a little too long. One night, after the three of them had gone out for a romantic dinner in Savannah, Georgia, where they live, Olivia and Kiara started kissing in the front seats of the family car and it seemed as if they were never going to stop. About 10 minutes in, Priscilla tried to reach out and touch her fiancee’s shoulder, but her seat belt was buckled. Unbuckling and leaning forward felt intrusive. And, anyway, Kiara and Olivia seemed to have forgotten all about her. Watching the kiss unfold, squashed into the back with all the baby seats and toys, Priscilla thought about how by rights it was her turn to sit up front. She was always in the back seat. She felt a flicker of something competitive. “I worried, am I desired less than her?” she recalls now. “Will I be replaced?”

In the early days, Priscilla felt giddy with the excitement of being in a throuple. She and Kiara had been together for eight years, and adding a third person to their relationship felt like a way of exploring non‑monogamy without losing one another, because every new romantic experience would be shared. Olivia was an old friend, so Priscilla and Kiara’s children were comfortable with her. When the kids were in bed, they would walk to the beach holding hands as a three, to watch the sunset. At night, they would curl up to sleep together, and form a kind of cuddle chain. Priscilla would cuddle Olivia, and Olivia would cuddle Kiara.

Priscilla (left) and Kiara, who are engaged, had a shared girlfriend who
left them earlier this year. Kendrick Brinson/The Guardian

Sometimes in the night, Priscilla would wake up alone on one side of the bed, and see Kiara and Olivia cuddling without her – at first this didn’t bother her. “I felt a little left out, but I was happy that Kiara was happy,” Priscilla says. The problems really began when both Priscilla and Kiara moved beyond lust, and began to fall deeply in love with Olivia. “The thing about throuples is that when real emotions get involved, things get more complicated.”

In a throuple, three people commit to forming a romantic unit together – just like a couple, but with one extra person. In other forms of non-monogamy, you might have multiple partners, but you are typically only ever in bed with one partner at a time. Throuples are different, because they date and have sex and sometimes even raise children as a three. ...

-----------------

On screen today, you see throuples everywhere. ... But as the throuple becomes more commonplace, there seems to be a growing backlash against this relationship structure. Recent research suggests that younger generations are rejecting the complications of polyamory and beginning to yearn again for the perceived safety of traditional coupledom. An analysis of sexual fantasies by the Kinsey Institute suggests that gen Z are turning away from polyamory, with 81% fantasising about monogamy instead.

Being happily polyamorous requires a daunting degree of patience and thoughtfulness, because you have to continually debrief with your lovers to check that their needs are being met – but throupledom seems to require even greater reserves of emotional maturity. Managing the desires and insecurities of three people at once is a feat, and even within polyamorous circles, throuples have a reputation for being fraught. ...

I have spent the last six months talking to people who have been in throuples that have gone spectacularly wrong (and some that are going spectacularly right) about how to manage infighting and rivalry in three‑person relationships. How can you make a throuple work? And what happens when a throuple implodes?

In The Ethical Slut, the authors write that in any menage a trois “there are actually three couples, A&B, B&C and C&A”. What makes the throuple unstable is that, at any time, the mini-couples within the throuple can become more estranged, or entwined, and there can be dramatic reversals in allegiances. In Priscilla’s throuple, it was initially she and Olivia who were the closer pair – and Kiara who felt excluded. In the first weeks of the relationship, Kiara discovered that Priscilla and Olivia had been having sex while she was at work. Sex as a twosome wasn’t technically against the rules of the arrangement, Kiara tells me, but “it was very hurtful and it broke a lot of trust”. ...

-----------------

I speak to Alissa for the first time over the phone from her home in Connecticut, and we have to pause the conversation a couple of times because I can hear her teenage son coming in and out. Alissa and her husband, Rob, have got five children aged 14 to 22, and, while the older children are aware that their parents have experimented with an open relationship, they don’t know the details.

After 21 years of marriage, Rob revealed to Alissa that he was bisexual. Experimenting with another man together seemed like a way to cope with that revelation without it breaking their marriage. Initially when they met Michael, 33, who lived in a neighbouring city, Alissa felt anxious. She worried that Michael was only pretending to feel an attraction to her in order to get to Rob, and remembers one awkward early date where Michael was all over Rob in a cab, and the two of them barely looked at her at all. But as the relationship progressed, Michael and Alissa developed an intense bond, and Rob felt increasingly threatened.

One night when the three of them were in bed together, Alissa and Michael started kissing, and Rob became so distressed he had a panic attack. Alissa had put on new underwear, and Rob started interrogating her about why he had never seen this lingerie before. “He was, like, ‘Well, you haven’t put that on for me lately!’ – but the truth was that Rob and I hadn’t been having sex with each other because we saw Michael two times a week, and who is having more sex than that?”...

Initially, Rob hadn’t wanted to talk to me because he found the breakup too painful to revisit, but a few weeks later the couple call me together so that he can offer his perspective. “I was madly in love with this guy,” Rob says. “Head over heels.” He is speaking to me from his car speakerphone. He says that it wasn’t simply the case that he was feeling possessive over his wife; he also felt horribly rejected by Michael. ...

When a throuple is going right, the amount of love feels almost unquantifiable, because you are “chosen and loved by two people and have two people to love”, Rob reflects. “Having him as part of our equation, I could love her 150% and him 150%”. But when a throuple breaks down, you have to deal with the inverse of that exponential love: exponential rejection. At times, Rob says, he didn’t feel “chosen” by anyone.

Alissa says that her and Rob’s marriage has survived the whole experience, but only just. Sometimes she feels resentful because dating another man wasn’t originally her idea, it was Rob’s. “I was pissed because I had this little tiny seedling that I didn’t even want in the first place and I gave it all the sunlight and all the water, and then when it started to grow Rob was ready to end it.”

-----------------

...The criticism of [Lindy] West’s memoir [Adult Braces this spring] was often cruel, but I think the intensity of the reaction speaks to a real fear many of us have that, as polyamory becomes more mainstream, terms such as “throuple” and “ethically non-monogamous” will be wielded by faithless partners who want to legitimise their desire to cheat. However, having spoken to real-life throuples, the picture looks more complicated because the dynamics in the triad chop and change. The wife who was initially reluctant might end up being the most adored and enthusiastic member of the throuple. The husband who initially begged for it might wind up desperate to leave.

Even within the polyamorous community, throuples are considered messy and potentially unethical – not necessarily because they disrupt an existing couple, but because [they have a reputation that] they exploit the third person who enters the relationship. On polyamorous online message boards, couples who post that they are looking for a third person to join their relationship are often criticised for being “unicorn hunters”. ...

...Caitlin, 31, from London, tells me [such] a story about feeling used and discarded by a couple she met while living in Marseille.... “You know what they said to me? ‘You were the best sex toy we ever had.’ ”

-----------------

I spoke to happy throuples while I was researching this article, and most of them told me that when you feel intensely heartbroken or hurt by a particular member of your triad, the key is to acknowledge it. Rather than leaving the throuple, or exercising a “veto” because you feel threatened, you have to talk through the pain as it comes up.

Rachael, Aaron and Kasey, a throuple from the Tampa Bay area of Florida who have been living together for seven years, say that they attribute their success to diligent emotional housekeeping. The first time I speak to them is in early April on a video call, and they are in exercise gear, ready for an early morning workout together at the gym.

Steady as they go: Aaron, Rachel, and Kasey . . .

Rachael, who describes herself to me as a “type-A, high-achiever, highly organised person”, tells me that these qualities are very helpful in a throuple. “It’s just 33% more – more to schedule, more to plan, more money to divvy up,” she says. Rachael and Aaron are in their 40s, and were together for 20 years before they met Kasey, 35, but they have worked hard to make sure she has equal standing within the throuple. They have created a trust that outlines Kasey as a beneficiary, and have given her medical power of attorney, should anything happen to either of them. They apply the same organised, thoughtful approach to hashing out emotional issues in the throuple, too. “We joke that if monogamous couples talked half as much about their feelings as we do in our throuple, the divorce rate would plummet,” Aaron says.

...and outside their bunglaow in Gulfport, Florida.
(Zack Wittman / The Guardian)

The throuple have a weekly date night, but Rachael has a regular one-on-one night with Aaron, too. She also has a regular night with just Kasey. And Aaron and Kasey have their own scheduled one-on-one time. The idea behind the one-on-one nights is to make sure that all the individual bonds within the throuple continue to grow. Rachael explains that she usually leaves the house for the evening when Kasey and Aaron have their couples night, and that re-entering the home at the end of the evening isn’t always easy. She doesn’t feel jealousy, she says: “It’s almost more like I know that they’ve had a very connecting moment, and me coming back to it feels intrusive. It feels like they almost have to baby me and say, ‘Oh, come back in.’ ” Rachael has been completely open with Kasey and Aaron about these feelings. She has developed a system where, instead of greeting them when she comes back at night, she takes a shower and even considers sleeping in the guest room. Then they “wake up and have a fresh day as a three”.

...In a way, people who form throuples are just braver than the rest of us. The fear of the third haunts most relationships. Throuples choose to invite the third into the relationship and live through all the difficult emotions the rest of us are trying to bury. Recently, Priscilla and Kiara told me that they are thinking about trying to form a new throuple. Kiara is wary, but Priscilla is excited. “We’re still discussing it,” she says. “But I think it will be an adventure.”

●  Meanwhile, happy triads continue to represent proudly in public. On ABC News Nightline last night (July 13) came this 9-minute video report: Throuple opens up about their polyamorous relationship. It's lovely!

The creators of “Camp Throuple” open up about their polyamorous relationship. Kevin Jankay, Alana Underwood and Megan Smith say their non-monogamous relationship is the best one they’ve ever had.  

They live in Colorado and are in their sixth year as a closed polyfi delta triad. What fine, great-hearted, smart people these seem to be. Watch and learn.

(If the embed above doesn't work here's the link. I don't find a transcript.)

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Elsewhere in the world... The current changing tide of the Ukraine war shows how, when a free people don't give up, fortune may swing their way.

If you still don't get what this war means to our own future as free cultural weirdos — not to mention to the whole rest of the world — you need the long view.

BTW, the logo of PolyamoryUkraine:

 

...while in Russia, speaking up for "nontraditional sexual relations" is a crime punishable by up to 12 years in horrible Russian prisons under the "anti-extremism" laws. "Extremism" meaning whatever the emperor dislikes.

And BTW, The Invite's first international release was in Ukraine.

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Polyamory in the News is back. Why we've been away. And lots of new coverage.

Okay, we're back.

Polyamory in the News was on pause for several months for a tragic reason.

Two years ago my wife Abby Hafer, "Sparkle Moose," was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. We held it at bay for a year and a half, thanks to Harvard's world-beating Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. But her cancer was a fast-evolving ecology of mutating cells. As an evolutionary biologist she knew what that probably implied. It finally evolved around every barrier and broke through our defensive lines.

Sparkle Moose
1958 – 2025

In her final months Abby, always strong-willed, chose home hospice care until nearly the end. The nurses taught us to do all the things. I camped on the living-room floor next to her hospital bed for companionship as much as for care. On the night of July 30th we moved by ambulance to the Care Dimensions hospice house. I snuggled next to her there and eventually drifted off. Around 4 a.m. a nurse gently wiggled me awake: "She has passed." She was warm as life under my arm, but utterly motionless, unresponsive, still. It was as if she had simply decided, in her matter-of-fact way, it was time to switch off the lights. She was 67. We were together 29 years.

Abby was extraordinary: a PhD zoologist, professor of human anatomy and physiology to nursing students, a loud and proud feminist atheist, and an in-demand comic-educational speaker championing reality, nature, and reason against religious malarky and disinformation. She wrote two books,

The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why evolution explains the human body and intelligent design does not, and Darwin's Apostles: The men who fought to have evolution accepted, their times, and how the battle continues (with David Orenstein). And chapters in Women v. Religion, The Case Against Miracles, Christianity in the Light of Science, and the massive Oxford Handbook of Humanism. She was recruited to be a director of the American Humanist Association; here's the memorial article in its magazine. The author classes her with "luminaries like Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett".

Along with me Abby cofounded The Polyamory Foundation, which makes grants to projects that advance understanding and recognition of ethical poly and serve the community. She immersed herself in nature, adventure, friends, our dear heart-sharers, our beloved Unitarian-Universalist church, sci-fi cons, and other interests too many to list. Her superpower was putting people together who ought to know about each other.

The closing line that she chose to be the coda for her life was Louis Armstrong's song "What a Wonderful World". She was the best thing that ever happened to me.

So that is why I've been out of commission. Now I'm getting my mojo back. 

------------------------------------

●  Let's start with this big, upbeat Sunday newspaper feature: Forget love triangles. Meet the ‘polycule’ with 80 people in it.

The article paints our nearby city of Somerville, Massachusetts, as the poly-friendly capital of the world. (Seattle, Portland or the Bay Area might disagree.) The story appeared far away: in the UK's Sunday Times Magazine (online Sept. 4, print edition Sept. 7), illustrated by this idyllic concept of a Somerville neighborhood. Enlarge for details.

 Janne Iivonen

Polyamory is on the rise — especially in one US city where romantic partners have organised themselves into ever expanding networks. Yes, it can get complicated.

By Megan Agnew

On a suburban street in Somerville, Massachusetts, there is a white clapboard house with a note next to the doorbell. “If no answer at No 3 please ring No 4,” it reads. “And vice versa.”

On the top floor lives Jay, 56. In the bedroom next door is his partner of 12 years, Ash, 44. Next door again is Ash’s husband of 19 years, Chris, also 44. Chris spends a lot of time in the connected apartment downstairs where his “sweetie”, Cal, 36, lives. Ash also has a boyfriend more than 3,000 miles away in California (they date over video calls), as well as a “sweetie” over the state border in Connecticut. Jay has another partner 1,000 miles away in Chicago. And he recently split up with a live-in girlfriend who has moved out. Are you keeping up?

...Somerville, a northern suburb of Boston, is the most polyamory-friendly city in America, a haven for people and their girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, “them-friends”, “hunnies” and “sweeties”. It’s a left-leaning place with “smut slam” dirty poetry readings in church halls and yonic sculptures on front lawns. With the universities of Harvard and MIT down the road, this is where people thrash out the politics of relationships, creating an experimental idyll away from the confines and pitfalls of monogamy.

In 2023 it became the first city in America to legally protect people in polyamorous relationships against discrimination. Three years earlier the city had extended the definition of a “domestic partnership” to include relationships involving more than two people. This grants nontraditional families similar rights and privileges as married couples under city law.... It has made Somerville the Las Vegas of polyamory, with poly people from around the country travelling to its city hall to obtain domestic partnership certificates.

(You don't have to live in Somerville to get one of those, though its validity is unlikely to be recognized elsewhere. Instead, people frame it on their wall.) 

I spent a week in Somerville, a tight-knit small world made even smaller by the fact that so many people in “the community” are dating each other, or have done. Meet the polys.

--------------------------

Jay, an IT consultant and self-confessed computer nerd, grew up in suburban New Jersey and became interested in polyamory at the age of ten after reading Robert A. Heinlein sci-fi books featuring sexually promiscuous open marriages. His first teenage relationship was nonmonogamous. “I was poly before poly was a term,” he says, blue hair tied back, maroon nail varnish on his toes.

...He moved to Somerville in the mid-1990s to find many people he knew coalescing around Boston’s university hub — either tech nerds he’d met in online chatrooms or those who attended the sci-fi conventions he would frequent. Large numbers of them were interested in polyamory.

“We had all independently been working on this thing [polyamory], and we found each other and we had a lot to talk about,” he says. He started attending casual poly meet-ups in people’s homes, applying the same academic rigour to discussions about romance as they did to technology. “How do you handle jealousy? How do you handle getting a new partner when you’ve had one for a while?”

--------------------------

...Jealousy can be a problem, Ash admits, recalling the arguments when one of Jay’s girlfriends moved in during Covid soon after they first occupied the property: “I was mad as I thought he and I were gonna get a nesting period. And then there was this other person around who was very exciting and sparkly and taking a lot of his time.”

Tensions mounted over sleeping arrangements: Jay’s partners had their own bedrooms and he was switching between the two, without a room of his own. “There were points when each of them was, like, ‘Go away, I want to have the bed to myself,’ ” he says. “And points where each of them was, like, ‘I want you and I’m not getting enough cuddle time with you.’ So there were continuous adjustments. We say often in poly that love is infinite but time is not.”

Many of the people I speak to share complicated Google calendars with their various partners to co-ordinate schedules.

--------------------------

...“There’s a popular view that polyamory should only be nonhierarchical, seen as the purest, most progressive and equitable, almost social justice-oriented,” says Jennifer Schneider, a Massachusetts-based relationship therapist.

Others find this oddly prescriptive. Kathy Labriola, 70, was at the centre of the gay rights movement at Berkeley in the 1960s and 1970s, and is in two concurrent romantic relationships, each 50 years long. “There is no utopian way or morally or ethically ‘right’ way to be polyamorous,” she says. “It’s strange and ironic to me that some of these folks who are so into this nonhierarchical model are so puritanical and judgmental about it. It makes the individual king.”

--------------------------

...Willie Burnley Jr, 31, a socialist [city] councillor and polyamorous mayoral candidate for Somerville [update Nov. 5: he lost to the more establishment liberal Jake Wilson], rejects any hierarchy in any relationship and describes himself as a “relationship anarchist”. We meet at the Diesel Cafe, a famous meeting point for poly folk in the area.

Burnley was “ardently and passionately monogamous” until 2015, when he had a shattering heartbreak. “I felt so bad that the relationship failed,” he says. “I realised the monogamous view of romance was very self-destructive. I realised my most important relationship is with myself. And frankly I’m a bit indulgent — I don’t like the idea of denying myself something that I want and could potentially have, just because society says no.”

Surely there are some hierarchies in his relationships — is he closer to some friends than others? “Oh, certainly,” he replies. “But saying that you’re closer with someone isn’t saying that you will always be closer to someone.” Isn’t this just an exercise in semantics? “No, it’s an exercise in building life in the way that you want to build your life.”

We walk out of the café and on to the street. “They’re another person in the community,” he says, waving to someone loading their shopping into the car. Does polyamory get complicated in a small place? “Oh, certainly.”

--------------------------

...In another suburban home about ten minutes’ walk from the high street is another polycule. Ryan Malone, 39, a biochemist, lives here with his girlfriend, Emily, 31, a veterinary nurse. “Four cats is too many,” says Malone, 39, as their pets go scampering down corridors covered in fake vines, psychedelic art and fairy lights.

Emily has a girlfriend, Anna, living nearby, whom she met while Anna was dating Malone, a bouncing labrador of a man with a jaunty quiff and bright blue patchwork denim trousers. Among Malone’s many lovers is a “comet” partner in Toronto — so called because they only see each other about four times a year — another lover, Marissa, and a married woman in Vermont who has children aged 11 and 9. “I’m like an uncle to the kids,” Malone says. “She’s very open about it, they know that their mom’s poly. The oldest son and I read the same books and play chess together.”

In an apartment upstairs live Nick and his “nesting partner”, Kit; they’re both 39 and trying for a baby. Kit is an occasional romantic/sexual partner of Malone and also has a number of other lovers.

...“There are probably over 80 of us in our polycule,” Malone says. One member — “a data nerd at Harvard” — tried to build a 3D map of all their romantic connections but it got so convoluted that it stopped being able to show information meaningfully. “It was just showing how complicated everything was,” Malone adds.

How does he manage having so many partners? “I have a comfort with complexity,” he says, grinning widely.

--------------------------

...Their polycule was “formed after a failed orgy”, Kit says. “A bunch of us rented a cabin, one person didn’t get the memo and invited some co-workers. We had to wait each night until they went to bed before the shenanigans could happen. It was very awkward. But we were, like, OK, we have to be more intentional about this.”

...Though their polycule doesn’t have formal membership, people have to be vetted and sometimes interviewed before attending a party or meet-up. “We try to find out if this person has any history of problematic behaviour in terms of consent violations,” says Kit, one of the main organisers. “For example, we found out one person would constantly drag people in to dance [on a dancefloor] and not take no for an answer. And we’re, like, that’s kind of a red flag. It shows that you just don’t really respect someone’s bodily autonomy.”

Another person who organises social events in Somerville, who wanted to remain anonymous, tells me it can be a “slow and selective process” to make friends here.

“You almost need ten references for whether you’re going to be invited to a group hangout,” they tell me. “There is also this social ostracism, this call-out culture, which I’m not sure is as productive as people often hope it is. Every so often there will be a Facebook post that circulates that’s, like, ‘Just so everyone knows, this person did this thing on this date and I no longer feel safe around them and you shouldn’t either.’ It feels like we’re boycotting people the same way we boycott companies.”

--------------------------

...“Seeing others has been really inspirational — you can do something weird and out there and have a loving family,” Nick says. In fact the sense of community the polycule provides was one of the reasons he decided to have children in the first place. It takes a village to raise a child, after all. “What stressed me out about monogamous relationships is that you had to be co-parents, lovers, owners of a home, friends all in alignment. And if one stops working, then that’s a problem that could crater the whole relationship. Being able to not need all of those things, all the time, from one person feels very freeing.”

--------------------------

...[James] has since learnt there are two types of people who enter polyamory: those who feel it has always been innate and generally find it easy, and those who have to unlearn everything they thought they knew and battle through extreme discomfort, after which, he insists, comes a sort of nirvana. James was in the latter group, reading books and listening to podcasts and talking and talking, trying to reason his way through the jealousy and fear.

“I felt like I was on fire all the time, in both a good way and a bad way,” he says. “I went through a long process of figuring out why these things were so upsetting and then changing myself so they were not upsetting any more.” ...

● That article must have been successful for the Times, because three weeks later the paper followed up with Everyone could learn from polyamory — and I should know (Sept. 27)

By Leon Craig

...After getting burnt by non-monogamy, in the past year I’ve somewhat reluctantly hung up the glittery fairy wings and am now prioritising a more traditional arrangement — or at least the lesbian approximation of that. Still, I miss the ready influx of strangers into my life, with exciting anecdotes and new perspectives — one strong reason for my not being monogamous for so long was that I like meeting new people and feel a strong curiosity about what makes them tick. I’ve built a good number of genuine connections from dates and hook-ups.

Instead of regretting time wasted, I hope that what I’ve learnt practising non-monogamy will stay with me into the future. What has been helpful was being made to look at all the individual components of a relationship, from sexuality to cohabitation to finances, and to assess individually what I wanted those to look like, instead of receiving a set of assumptions and just going with those. ...

●  More Somerville: Two weeks after the UK Times ran that big Somerville story, a more thoroughly reported long news feature appeared in the magazine of the student-run Harvard Crimson: Love and the Law: A Look at Polyamorous Camberville (Oct. 18.) "Camberville" is localspeak for Cambridge and Somerville; they're socially similar and share a long border.

●  A fifth municipality to enact poly rights? West Hollywood Considers Recognizing Polyamorous Relationships in Domestic Partnership Ordinance (WEHO Times, June 18). It would follow Somerville, Cambridge, Oakland, and Berkeley. 

By Paul Murillo

The West Hollywood [CA] City Council is set to consider updating its domestic partnership ordinance to allow for legal recognition of polyamorous relationships, including throuples and other non-traditional family structures.

...This proposal follows a related initiative by Mayor John Erickson, who earlier this year introduced a measure to amend the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance to prohibit discrimination based on family or relationship structure. That measure was approved in May and is currently under legal review.

If adopted, the update to the domestic partnership ordinance would complement the non-discrimination amendment and expand legal protections to residents engaged in diverse relationship structures.

...The West Hollywood City Attorney’s office will lead the legal review, with assistance from city staff. The proposed directive is expected to have minimal fiscal impact and will not require significant staff time. ...

Update October 30: Action still pending.

●  LGBTQ+ partners in polyamorous relationships are slowly winning legal recognition and rights (LGBTQ Nation, July 2). It's a quick review of the state of play.

Poly partnerships have always existed. A new generation of activists is fighting to protect them and their families from social [and legal] stigma. ...

●  Normalization, continued. And another new book. Natalie Davis edits the large, curated Polyamory Today section of Medium, with 74 writers. A year ago she wrote there of her experiences emerging from the closet: Coming Out as Polyamorous Has Not Been What I Expected (Medium, Aug. 29, 2024). Friends, family, and employer were not only unshocked, they were mostly uninterested. As poly becomes normalized, we no longer turn heads like we did.

“Hey, Natalie! It’s so good to see you!”

My friend smiled brightly and stood up from the table where she had been scanning the menu. We hugged hard. It had been almost a year since our last lunch.... “So, what’s the writing project you’ve been working on?”

...I made myself look at my monogamous friend across the table. “I’m polyamorous, and I’ve been writing a book about that part of my life.”

You can preorder.

Her face showed no change in expression. Had she heard me?

I continued, “I gave the first 150 pages to my husband to read. I didn’t realize how anxious I was about whether he would be angry or hurt at the public revelations about our life, but he was supportive and had only a few editorial suggestions.” I smiled nervously and added, “What a relief!”

...After a delightful two-hour lunch, we embraced warmly and parted ways.... When I got home, I told my metamour, “I came out as poly at lunch today.”

“How did that go?”

“Anticlimactic,” I said. ... To be honest, I was a little disappointed.”

...My meta mused, “You’re finally in a position in your life where it doesn’t matter to your livelihood who knows, because the morals clause at work doesn’t apply, and you now find out it doesn’t matter. It’s kind of ironic.”

------------------------

...My married cousin, making polite conversation, had said, “I understand you guys moved into a new house.”

“Yes, it’s bigger than we need, but we like the location. We have someone living in the second master bedroom.”

“Sounds smart,” he said. “If you don’t mind my asking, who lives with you?” ...

“My husband’s girlfriend lives with us,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he responded, frowning slightly in sympathy.

“Don’t be. We’re polyamorous, and she’s my metamour.” I smiled. “She’s great.” ...

“Okay,” he said. Then, we talked about his house, his kids, and the upcoming presidential election.

------------------------

...When my husband’s girlfriend came out as poly to her older married brother, after much angst about doing so, he interrupted her when she started to explain that as her metamour, I was her partner’s partner. He rolled his eyes dismissively. “I know the polyamory lingo.”

------------------------

When my husband told his boss that he was polyamorous and had a girlfriend, his boss joked, “Is she hot?”  Not missing a beat, my husband said, “You can judge for yourself. She’s meeting me at the office happy hour tonight. That’s why I am telling you now.” ...

That book she was writing is Saying Yes: My Adventures in Polyamory. Its publication date is January 13, but you can preorder now.

●  New novel out: Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela. From the publisher's description:

The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the dream: He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. ...

With a big heart and just the right dose of the anxieties that define the modern era, Middle Spoon skewers the unspoken rules we still live by ...offering a surprising perspective on love, loss, and reinvention. ...

From a review by Thane Tierney on Book Page:

...The narrator ruminates: “Maybe there’s something worthwhile in unorthodox relationships and atypical family structures. Maybe the world should adapt to us and not us to it.” His nearly unshakable faith in the viability of this belief forms the beating heart of this funny, perceptive and ultimately gratifying love story. 

If you've read the book (I haven't) send me your thoughts (alan7388@gmail.com) and I may add them here.

●  An indie film has been making news: Splitsville: A Comedic Proof of Polyamorous Dysfunctions (High On Films, July 13). Splitsville presents a caustic, mocking view:

It’s glossy, slightly smug, and packed with styled emotions, echoing the trend of self-consciousness we’ve been cultivating—but Splitsville works, mostly because it doesn’t ask you to believe in the couple, but rather laugh with the confusion. Michael Angelo Covino seems to be working toward a doctorate in infidelity and distraught breakups (within romance, at least), letting friendship run alongside and strain under the weight of love’s detritus. Friendships are messy, unfiltered, and strangely durable. Somehow, friendship survives the wreckage romance leaves behind.

...What’s most effective here is that the script refuses to deepen its characters too much. ... 

●  Another new indie film: Michael Doshier Talks Throuple and Why Polyamorous Stories Matter (Instinct, July 13)

Following a successful theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles, Throuple – a raw and refreshingly honest film from writer, star, and queer indie musician Michael Doshier – is now available to stream on major platforms including Dekkoo, Amazon, and iTunes.

Loosely inspired by Doshier’s own life, Throuple follows a lonely gay singer-songwriter who finds himself romantically entangled with a married couple while fearing he’s losing his lifelong best friend to her new girlfriend. As he navigates the complexities of desire, jealousy, and shifting relationships, he’s forced to confront what he truly wants from love, and from himself. 

...Rather than reducing polyamory to a gimmick, Throuple explores non-monogamy as a valid and deeply human structure, and since its festival debut, the film has struck a powerful chord – particularly with queer and polyamorous audiences. 

At its heart, Throuple is about connection, and Instinct recently caught up with Doshier to talk more about the pivotal moment he realized these personal experiences from his life needed to be told on screen. ...

●  Another upbeat local-focus piece: How a Canberra couple built a community around consensual non-monogamy (HerCanberra, Oct. 1)

“We can’t remember who brought it up exactly, but we both have always had wonderful communication, and we started having a lot of feelings which – looking back – were compersive feelings,” says Abbey.

...Abbey realised that she liked the idea of Liam being intimate with other women (and vice versa), and the couple began thinking seriously about the logistics of taking the fantasy into the real world while maintaining their deep, connected bond.

...Luckily, they were living in New York at the time – where there’s a thriving non-monogamous community – and it was easy to anonymously discover what they really wanted. ... They spent their twenties in New York – coming home only to get married and live in Sydney for six months before jetting off again – surrounding themselves with an open and like-minded community where they were free to explore.

But everything changed when they decided to move back to Canberra to raise their young son.

From private conversations to public platform

Arriving back in Canberra at the end of 2019, it was while reconnecting with old friends and chatting about relationships ... that Abbey realised there might be a space for her to share her stories as someone in a consensual non-monogamous relationship.

When she decided to tell friends and family about how she and Liam approach their marriage, their response shocked her.

“To my surprise, they were really open-minded and curious, and they wanted to know more about it,” says Abbey.

“So, I started a little private Instagram page....

Writing about her own experiences with Liam and sharing her perspectives on the topic, as more women requested to follow her, Abbey decided to launch The Evolving Love Project – a public Instagram page and Substack where she dives into the dynamics, emotions and everything else involved in open relationships.

Abbey and Liam (Jeremy Wikner photo)

From there, the logical next step was the Evolving Love podcast.

“I started hosting women’s circles – conversation evenings about these different concepts. Then we opened it up and started having conversation nights for anyone interested,” Abbey explains.

“It’s a beautiful way to meet people interested in the non-monogamous environment, through a purely conversational lens… it has been a wonderful experience. We’ve had many people reach out to us or email me about my writing that we decided to start a podcast.”

...“I think without compersion, even from a values perspective, there’s no real point to non-monogamy.”

Building community and changing conversations

Supported by friends and family as well as the community they’ve built, Abbey and Liam are proud to have created a safe space for those interested in consensual non-monogamous relationships to explore this nuanced topic.

...“It doesn’t feel like it’s as taboo as it used to be, but that also might just be me living in a bubble. But it’s all about the importance of sharing stories. Storytelling is so important, and by podcasting and writing, we’re destigmatising it.” ...

●  Also from Australia: It’s official: Melbourne is in the world’s most polyamory-friendly country (Beat Magazine,"Melbourne's voice in music, arts & culture", Oct. 2).

That title is an overclaim. This project surveyed only 17 countries, the sponsor was a London adult-toy company with perhaps a commercial interest, and the metrics for assessing a country's poly-friendliness were too broad: "Pornhub category rankings, average lifetime sexual partners, search interest, divorce rates, moral sexuality scores."

Nevertheless, 

Australians... showed the strongest search rate at 257 searches per 100,000 people for open relationship and polyamory terms.

●  In The Guardian: ‘It’s risky business emotionally’: the social shift towards open relationships (Oct. 31)

With a rise in people opting for non-monogamy, experts suggest the idea of the traditional couple is radically changing

By Jessica Murray 

...Juliet Rosenfeld, a psychoanalyst and author of Affairs: True Stories of Love, Lies, Hope and Despair, said the growth of open relationships was part of a wider societal trend in which “the idea of the couple is shifting radically”.

“It’s a challenge for therapists because there is a much wider range of ways to be in a couple now,” she said. “A monogamous lifelong relationship is simply not what a lot of people, in particular women, want.”

...People choosing to open up their relationship after one partner has had an affair, or doing it in order to “fix” something, are cause for concern. “It’s bound to be problematic going down that route,” [Katherine] Cavallo [psychotherapist and spokesperson for UK Council for Psychotherapy] said.

...Katerina Georgiou, a psychotherapist and senior-accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, said there was an important distinction to be made between people who identify as polyamorous, and heteronormative couples choosing to do this. ...

● Traditional polygamy survives in various African cultures, with varying legal status. In African news media I've noticed increasing attention to modern polyamory vis a vis the old way.

For instance, here's a thoughtful, personal essay in Nigeria's Vanguard newspaper: Polygamy not new but its meaning no longer same (Aug. 2). She contrasts traditional, high-functioning tribal polygamy with its often degraded state today, and she recommends polyamory's values as an upgrade.

By Stephanie Shaakaa

What once stood as a system of communal survival, built on cooperation and collective responsibility, now trembles under the weight of secrecy, betrayal, and broken trust. Our forefathers practised polygamy with a kind of order that baffled logic, multiple wives, one compound, children everywhere, and yet, somehow, harmony found a way. But today, that same institution is cracking at the seams, not because it is outdated, but because its essence has been replaced by ego, deception, and silence.

...In the 21st century, we see polygamy re-emerging not necessarily through formal polygynous households, but in polyamorous communities, co-parenting cobbles, and digital matchmaking platforms. The heart isn’t limited to binary partnerships, and neither is commitment. While the law clings to monogamy, reality increasingly drifts toward multiplicity.

A cartoon with the story. (Laobis O.)
 

Yet polygamy is not a silver bullet. For many women, it signifies unequal power, emotional overload, and perpetual comparison. Where income disparities exist, polygamy can reinforce patriarchal privileges. Moreover, when children from different mothers share resources, questions of inheritance, guardianship, and social equity become painfully salient.

Now contrast this with modern polyamory where consent, equality, and open communication are central. Some families share parental duties across multiple homes. Some couples have spendthrift days with one spouse, quiet evenings with another. These arrangements speak to a generation seeking relationship fluidity that reflects their broader values.

Globally, the legal response varies. While countries like Iran, Ghana, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia allow men multiple wives, many Western nations penalize it even amongst equally consenting adults. The human rights lens complicates this. ...

Evolving gender consciousness is challenging the very foundation of polygamy as a male-centered tradition. ...

●  Similarly, also in West Africa: Polycule: The modern love web you are just hearing about (Guardian Nigeria News, no relation to the UK's Guardian; Oct. 16)

Freepik

By Suliyat Tella

...One of the latest terms gaining attention in modern relationship talk is polycule. A word that captures how complex love networks can be.

...While polycules are more visible in Western societies, they are not entirely new ideas. Some compare them to traditional African polygamy, though there are key differences. Polygamy is often gender specific and tied to marriage, while polycules are gender neutral and based on mutual choice rather than cultural or religious expectation.

For believers of polycule, it represent emotional honesty. The idea that one person may not meet all of another’s romantic or emotional needs, and that’s acceptable as long as there’s transparency. ...

●  And lastly: Buzzfeed, an internet behemoth whose business is virality, often asks redditors to send in their life experiences: Your best-ever revenge on a bad boss. The worst horror you've seen working a fast-food kitchen. The stories are out of control.

Now comes People With Polyamorous Parents Are Sharing What It Was Like Growing Up, And It's So Fascinating (Oct. 4). The 29 (!) accounts in the collection are almost all positive or at least no-sweat. One example, by reddit/u/rroowwannn: 

"My parents were poly since well before they got married and I was born. Mostly, it was just boyfriends or girlfriends who would visit. I didn't know anything about sex; they didn't tell me anything inappropriate, although they did make sure that I wouldn't gab about who slept in what bed when I was young. They were dead scared of child services getting involved.

One of the many happy stock photos Buzzfeed used.
(Oliver Rossi / Getty)

"One of my mom's boyfriends became a lot more serious, and he moved in when I was about 8 or 9. It was a lot like having an uncle move in. He became part of the family, drove me and my brother to places, and got involved in our interests. I told people he was my uncle. He had another girlfriend aside from my mother, too, openly. He broke up with my mother in a big way (which they kept private from me) and moved out when I was maybe 14 or so. It might have been hard for my mother, but it wasn't traumatic for me. We kept in touch for a few years until he moved farther away for a new job. It wasn't like a divorce experience, more like my uncle moving out.

My dad had a serious girlfriend too, but she was also married with a kid my age, so she never moved in with us, but we went and visited as a family a few times a year. She's great friends with my mom to this day. Her kid and I were good friends for a while and drifted apart as we got older, a lot like cousins."

Another:

"It's waaaaaaay more boring than most people would think. Most of the time, my mom wouldn't introduce a partner to me unless it was a long-term relationship, so most of the time, I got the single mom experience. I think the most exciting thing was going out for dinner to meet someone new, and occasionally my mom would date someone who had a kid my age....  Really, for the most part, it was so completely average, other than knowing my mom had two girlfriends, and eventually, I also got a stepdad."

"The worst part was around 6th-8th grade when kids found out and started bullying me for it, asking all kinds of disgusting sexual questions about my parents (no one wants to think about their parents having sex). Eventually, I learned to just not tell anyone unless we were close and I knew they were cool. I only ever had one person I trusted enough to actually come to a family picnic where my mom's partners would all be there. My mom's partners aren't my parents, but they are part of my life and my family. They're wonderful and supportive, and have helped me through some horrible dark spots in my life. I'm grateful to have such a wonderful, loving family. So yeah, not very exciting, I know. But it's my life!"

And as usual, Buzzfeed asks for more:

Did you grow up with polyamorous parents? Or if you're poly yourself, what's it like raising a family? Tell us in the comments. Or, if you prefer to remain anonymous, leave a submission in the form.

----------------------------------------------------

BTW, it's very much time to read this afresh. 

    

For more than three years I've ended these polyamory posts with Ukraine. At first some of you didn't get the connection. Now that frankly fascist-adjacent patrimonialists are smashing what we thought were the constitutional limits of power in America, more of you do.

We're in a world struggle for whether free and open societies, or brutal illiberal oligarchies, will rule the 21st century. What's happening in America is only a part. Authoritarian rulers around the world have been linking up with direct mutual support that is stated out loud.

I've seen too many progressive movements die out, or get wiped out, because they failed to scan the environment accurately and understand their position in it strategically. We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Our freedom to choose our relationship structures, and to speak up for ourselves about the truth of ourselves, depends on a free and pluralistic society that respects people's freedom and dignity to create their own lives and identities, to access facts, and to speak of what they know.

Innovative people, communities, and societies who create their own lives, who "choose to live within the truth" per Vaclav Havel, and who insist on the democratic structures and rights to do so safely, infuriate and terrify the world's authoritarians. 

Authoritarians seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, by stacking courts and agencies, by legal erasure, by shifting ever more wealth and power upward, and sometimes, eventually, by artillery and glide bombs.

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, at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom, liberalism, and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. All sides worldwide are watching what we will do about it.

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. 

Here's an easy start: Get on the 50501 email list. Join No Kings and your local Indivisible or at least download Indivisible's guide for practical good-citizen strategies and tactics. Read and follow the personal guidelines that have been learned from history in Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny. 

Stop moping and buck up. Play this, and this, and this, by people heading into a scarier part of the fight than you or I will face. Another: "My Son, Hold On."  Sixteen thousand more of those, sorted just for that one background song by Shadow Phoenix. (lyrics)

Some people on the Western world's eastern front trying to hold onto an open society. (TW: war is awful.) Maybe your 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 1939 through early 1943.

Some Americans have felt called there because they were more able than most. By comparison, you and I have it easy.

Remember, the Ukrainians say they are doing this for us too. They are correct. In the global struggle between a brighter future and a fearful revival of the dark past that's shaping up, the outcome is again uncertain. 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. 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. 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 throughout society. As of November 2025, 70,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, not just in support roles and as drone pilots but 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 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. "We Won't Win This War Without Women". War changes things.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our full support for it to win its security, freedom, and future. Speak up for it. Like, right now.

                                     

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

PPS:  U.S. authori-tarians, such Pete Hegseth and Ted Cruz, say that allowing even the most capable women into 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, a junior lieutenant who commands a mortar platoon, recounting one of their many battles.

Update 2025: Three years later Vidma is still alive, still at the front, and posting TikToks. Her mortar unit has graduated to heavy artillery. 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.

             

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