Polyamory life stories newly in the media

  

●  Erez Benari is an enthusiastic poly activist, highly accomplished in the tech industry and a former stand-up comedian. He was instrumental in getting poly domestic partnerships formally recognized for the 182,000 employees of Microsoft and, more recently, for the 18,000 employees of Nvidia. We'll be hearing more about him; he's in plans for an upcoming project that will benefit the poly movement as a whole. News coming fairly soon.

Meanwhile the Bellevue Chronicle, of Bellevue next to Seattle, just ran a long profile of his lifelong journey into polyamory, and his discovery of the word and the movement by way of Seattle's Center for Sex Positive Culture: Erez’s Journey to a Polyamorous Lifestyle (Sept. 3).

By Elizabeth Katona

Growing up as an outcast in Israel and showing no interest in traditional “boy” activities like sports and guns, Erez Benari preferred the company of the fictional characters he read about in science fiction novels to his classmates. ... Battling with self-esteem issues and living with neglectful parents, Erez found comfort in frequenting his local library, where he discovered and devoured any book written by [science fiction] author Robert Heinlein.... As Erez grew into a teenager in a society dominated by monogamistic values, Heinlein’s ideas shaped Erez’s personality and he began to embrace the notion that love is not something that should be limited to one person.

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. – Robert Heinlein

Commentary here by me: These days you find few polyfolks who were set on their path by Heinlein, but a generation ago they formed a significant part of the then-tiny movement. Heinlein's seminal book launching poly ideas into the science-fiction world was Stranger in a Strange Land, mostly written in the 1950s and published in 1961. The book has aged poorly IMO, with its casual sexism and its wildly wrong science-fiction assumptions about the late 20th century. Nor was it ever useful as a model for real-world poly among humans; its group of multi-loving initiates rely for nearly everything on magic psychic superpowers learned from Martians. But the central ideas in Stranger seized the hearts of countless readers, including me at 17, with almost religious conversions, and it became one of the books credited with making the Sixties happen — to the extent that in 2012, the Library of Congress included it in an exhibition of Books That Shaped America. See my 2010 article Polyamory, Robert Heinlein, and his definitive new biography.

In his late teens, Erez conformed to society’s monogamist notions, dating only one person at a time and entering a relationship where he would feel unfulfilled, but too shy to disrupt the social norms, until he met Dalit. ... His relationship with Dalit helped him to explore the world of non-monogamy and open relationships outside of what he read in Heinlein’s books. This exploration also allowed him to look internally at his own values and the type of relationships he wanted in life.

During his relationship with Dalit, Erez had already been forming a friendship with the woman who would later become his wife. ... Several years into the marriage, Erez met and became close friends with a lesbian woman. She introduced Erez to the world of LGBTQ and the spectrum of sexuality. It was then that Erez realized he was likely bisexual.

...[Later after they moved to America] he found an event called “Kink Lab”. ... During [an] event, Erez was able to get to know other participants, and many of them would speak to him or each other about visiting the “CSPC”.... Erez looked up what the “CSPC” was, and found that it’s short for The Center for Sex Positive Culture, a non-profit organization that has a club in Seattle.

...To Erez, the CSPC felt like home; a place where for the first time in his life he could feel free in his element, interact and talk with people in the community about any topic, and explore himself and his desires safely. His regular attendance at the club over the next year was filled with non-sexual group cuddle sessions and socializing with others in the community about the different types of relationships they had with each other and outside the CSPC.

In 2016, at the age of 42, Erez Benari finally begun to explore the possibility of having polyamorous relationships.

The whole article.

Another profile of Benari in the area, focusing on how his wife left him after deciding she wanted monogamy: Dissolution of Marriage Opens the Road to a New Life (Northwest Magazine, Sept. 7). 

●  Perhaps your relatives were watching a few days ago when local TV news programs around the country (for example ABC News 7 in Denver and CBS 6 News in Richmond, Virginia) aired this four-minute report: Study finds consensual non-monogamy is more common than people realize (Sept. 1).

It mostly centers on a happy FFM closed triad. Yes, the stereotyped couple-finds-bi-woman triad sometimes works out just fine for everyone — if all of them are right for it, and if all of them go into it clear-eyed and know what they are doing, the unicorn especially. Watch here:

If that video fails you can watch it on the page of this accompanying article, which is mostly a transcript of the video. Portions:

Reported by Elizabeth Ruiz

 

Aaron Meir, Rachael Meir, and Kasey Kershner are in a closed poly triad. The Meirs are married and Kershner is their girlfriend. They call themselves Triad and True on social media. The three of them have been in a consensual non-monogamous relationship for more than two years.

“A triad specifically is three people who are in a relationship where we are all connected," Kershner said. "So we each have relationships in addition to our relationship altogether.”

Rachel, Kasey, Aaron

The three are exclusive with each other, which is why they call themselves a "closed poly triad."

Their story starts with the Meirs who got married 14 years ago. They say they had a very happy and healthy relationship. However, Rachael is bisexual, so they decided to search for another partner.

“If there was any void or anything that was missing, it was simply because Aaron isn’t a girl," Rachael said. "He can’t change that.”

They ultimately decided they wanted to have a deep, emotional connection with a third person in their relationship. They found Kershner on a dating app. After some serious conversations, they formed a triad.

“Rachael and I are very different people, and it’s great that Kasey is almost in the middle like from a day-to-day perspective," Aaron said. "Kasey and I love sports, Rachael hates sports, Rachael and Kasey like rom-coms, I don’t like rom-coms. It’s really nice to have that dynamic.”

Just recently, they started sharing their story with family, friends, and the world.

“It’s one of those things that you don’t get to see what relationships like ours look like because so many people hide it and it’s all very behind closed doors, smoke and mirror type of things, and it really is so much more common than people know,” Kershner said.

Researchers conducted a study to find out how common it really is. Dr. Amy Moors is a co-chair on the Committee of Consensual Non-Monogamy with the American Psychological Association.

“In this study, we found that about one out of five people in the U.S. have engaged in a consensually non-monogamous relationship at some point during their life," Dr. Moors said. "And to help put that into perspective, that’s as common as how many people own a cat in the U.S.”

Dr. Moors says her study found that one in 20 people in current relationships are engaged in a non-monogamous relationship, and one out of nine people say a non-monogamous relationship would be ideal for them.

“People engaged in consensually non-monogamous relationships [often] have really satisfying and committed and trusting relationships," Dr. Moors said. "Yet people believe that they don’t so that’s part of why the stigma is so robust surrounding these relationships.”

Kershner says she experienced the negative mental health impacts of being secretive about their triad until they finally came out. ... Now, the three say they feel a sense of relief being their true, authentic selves and they’re able to cast the hatred and misunderstandings from other people aside.

“There are fears around ‘Kasey’s 10 years younger, is she just going to replace me, is Aaron just ready for something new, is she going to come to take our money... and we’re just very open to say ‘Those are all fair, legitimate, valid questions and no, we’re just three individuals created a unique, different, non-traditional lifestyle because we have different sets of interests or different wants,” Rachael said. ...

The study discussed in the report has no particularly new news for readers here. Its sample was large (N = 3,438) and was derived from the US Census to be demographically representative, but it was limited to single people. And unfortunately, the questionnaire for the subjects defined polyamory as being "in a committed, sexual and romantic relationship with multiple people at the same time" — inexplicably leaving out a key definition of all form of consensual non-monogamy, even as stated in the body of the paper itself: with the knowledge and consent of all partners. This lapse in the questionnaire muddies the results by including secret cheaters and livers of double lives.

I don't know all the research literature, but the best attempt I have seen to determine the prevalence of actual polyamory, as sharply defined in several different ways, is this one by Alicia Rubel and Tyler Burleigh. It used data gathered in 2013 but wasn't published until 2018. I'm sure the numbers in a 2021 repeat would be greater, especially the number of Americans who self-identify as poly by the standard full-knowledge-and-consent definition. Someone ought to replicate that study today (hopefully with a larger sample).

● In New York magazine's "The Cut," a time-of-covid quint didn't (spoiler here... ) survive the reopening that was afforded by them all getting vaxxed. I Dated My Entire Quarantine Pod (Sept. 3). "Our polyamorous fivesome kept me sane during the pandemic. Then the world opened up again."

By Rachel Cromidas

Plenty of other people developed pods, tight-knit groups of two to ten people who exclusively gathered together before there was a vaccine. But ours was different. Over the course of 2020, my pod became a committed, closed, polyamorous fivesome — a relationship structure that implies some exclusivity, like monogamy, except with more than two people involved. I don’t just mean a fivesome as in just sex between five people, but a full relationship, with agreements, expectations, and regular date nights that formed a protective shell against the apocalyptic world around us. It was as unlikely as anything else about 2020. ...

Read on. 

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"Polyamory in the Pacific Northwest"

Seattle has long been known as Poly Capital of the World, but Portland now holds the title according to locals quoted in a 5,000-word article that just appeared in Cascadia magazine (a non-profit "dedicated to telling the diverse stories found in the Pacific Northwest through quality journalism"). Others, however, would hold out for the San Francisco Bay Area.

(The lead photo. Talk about couple-centric?)

 
The Pacific Northwest offers rich material on the history and growth of the modern poly movement, back to Stranger in a Strange Land days and a founding nucleus in Seattle that that book inspired. But the Cascadia article, despite its length, doesn't pick up on this opportunity. It's mostly a Poly 101 for people new to the subject, centering on profiles of current practitioners. These tend to be couples and daters, not the kitchen-table communitarians from whom the scene arose. Still, it's an informative and well-done read.

Is non-monogamy becoming the new normal across Cascadia?

By Karin Jones

Brittany and Scott live in a cookie-cutter development on a hill above a small city north of Seattle. It’s the kind of suburban neighborhood that triggers both repulsion and envy in me. ...

I feel out of place here. ... This suburban neighborhood feels as though I ought to conform. Brittany and Scott appear to fit right in. On the surface at least.

...But one evening, over a quiet dinner, Scott mustered the courage to ask Brittany, “Does it ever make you sad that you’ve had your last first kiss?” Her reaction wasn’t anger or horror. Her reply was, “Yes.” ...

When people ask you about the prevalence of polyamory, keep this next paragraph from the story on hand to give them:

It’s estimated that over 21 percent of the US population has engaged in some form of Consensual Non-Monogamy (CNM), defined as having two or more intimate partners at the same time with the knowledge and consent of all parties. Furthermore, around 5 percent of the population identify primarily as non-monogamous, cited in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, and is quite possibly an underestimation. CNM is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of relationships styles: including polyamory, swinging, and other non-exclusive intimacy (depending upon the degree to which those involved are seeking a sexual encounter or an emotional connection). It’s become a nationwide talking point, covered now in even the most mainstream publications like TIME magazine.

And there's this:

The most comprehensive list of CNM groups [This is debatable –Ed.] can be found on Facebook, where local chapters are listed by state and province, as well as countries outside the United States (US) and Canada. Though most US states now have CNM Facebook groups, there are a few, like Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, whose citizens have yet to create any. Meetup is also a good resource, listing 406 CNM groups worldwide. California far exceeds every other state in the number of groups organized around CNM. But when you look at Cascadia as a region, we’re not far behind.

And then we get into the profiles:

Charyn Pfeuffer, who writes extensively on all matters related to sex, dating, and relationships, is a self-proclaimed drum-beater for owning your own pleasure. ... In Seattle, Pfeuffer socializes with a wide variety of people who are consensually non-monogamous. She feels it’s an easy city in which to be honest about being open; Seattle’s sizable art and Burning Man communities often go hand in hand with CNM. ...

Pfeuffer is active on the PNW Polyamory Facebook group where she participates in a wide variety of discussions. ... Administrators approve participation and oversee strict codes of conduct regarding posts and comments. “It’s a safe place to explore love and sex and consent. Conversations that are pretty much mainstream, now. And I’m seeing more families who are coming out and raising children while being openly poly.”

...Another woman I corresponded with, who chose to remain anonymous because she runs a business in a small town between Seattle and Tacoma, is active in a Seattle group that has grown to over a thousand members through connections made on OKCupid. They started out as a game night gathering of self-proclaimed “nerds” and have since morphed into multiple subgroups, such as poly parents or movie lovers. She writes, “It’s not like we’re recruiting new members, they just come in as they’re invited by existing members. ...Once they’re invited, they’re required to attend at least one in-person event. This ensures everyone has at least a little skin in the game, and because our focus is on actual real-life events [rather than just online discussions] we hope that this will discourage contentious online interactions. It’s harder to be rude to someone online when you think you might see them at the barbecue, right?”

...“I never felt I had my own tribe,” this woman tells me when we speak by phone. “This is the first time in my life I’ve had this kind of community. If I broke down on the side of the road, there’s at least a dozen people I know [through this group] who would come to my rescue.” ...

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

Though Portland is the smallest of Cascadia’s big cities, most of the people I spoke with agree that the City of Roses has a reputation as the most nonmonogamy-friendly place in the Pacific Northwest.

A quick discussion search on Reddit uncovered these gems:

A friend who lives in Portland says you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting part of a triad there. As someone that lives in Portland, we frown on swinging dead cats because that’s not very vegan-friendly, but otherwise the statement is true.

...The 2018 Sex Survey by the Portland Mercury reports 13 percent of respondents identify as non-monogamous whereas 38 percent say they consider themselves “monogam-ish”.

“Portland, more than Seattle or Vancouver, has more active non-monogamous communities per capita,” says John Sickler, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) psychotherapist living in Portland since 2004. “In Oregon you have deeply held beliefs in the politics of personal freedom, personal expression, sexuality, and libertarianism.” ...

A pullquote in big print, which I second:

It’s easier to learn from other’s mistakes. We’re finally getting a feel for what works and what doesn’t. A lot of mistakes will be made along the way if you don’t engage with a community.

The whole article (September 2, 2019).


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

● Speaking of Poly 101s, this nice one just appeared in Women's Health, a mainstream magazine that's been doing good public poly education for a while: 8 Rules You Should Be Following If You're In A Polyamorous Relationship, by assistant editor Aryelle Siclait (Sept. 7).

The title says Rules. Does the author grasp rules versus agreements and boundaries? She's getting there; right at the top she writes,

I put "rules" in quotes because, let's be real, no one wants to be held to strict expectations or standards in matters of love. These rules are more like guidelines for you and your partners to go over at the start of and throughout your relationship, and they ensure that you’ll have the necessary measures in place to set and stick to boundaries across all parties.

Here are her 8 section titles. And yes, they're couple-centric.

1. Establish how much you want to share with each other.
2. Make time for just the two of you.
3. Set boundaries.
4. Respect your partner’s partners.
5. Keep your expectations realistic.
6. Maintain constant and open communication.
7. Make the most of your me-time.
8. Consider your motivations and your partner’s.

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"What life is like in a polyamorous family"

The Week

If you missed this excellent, 3,000-word article when it appeared in Vocative last Christmas Eve (under the title "A Poly Family Portrait: More Love to Give"), it has now been reprinted in a more influential venue: the website of the newsmagazine The Week ("All you need to know about everything that matters").

What life is like in a polyamorous family

David Ryder / Vocativ

Cliff greets me at the door of his family's apartment in Tacoma, Washington, trying to contain an excited golden Labrador mix that has managed to wriggle between his legs. Behind him stands his wife, Britt, who offers a cheery hello, while their 3-year-old son, Gareth, sizes things up from a safe distance.

..."It is very normal, except for the fact that we have one more adult living in our household," says Britt. "The only real difference is that we're buying food for one more person, and that person sleeps in our bed."

Britt, Cliff and Dave are polyamorists, which is to say they are interested in romantic relationships with more than one person. Specifically, they are a triad, meaning they are involved with one another both emotionally and sexually. V formations, which are also common to polyamory, involve one person who has a relationship with two others who don't connect; quads are usually couples that come together, though not all parties will engage. But these formations are just frameworks people use to describe their situations — there are no rules to, and seemingly endless permutations of, poly.

...Britt is quick to point out that no one situation, her own family unit included, is representative of polyamory as a whole. "Poly is a build-your-own relationship structure. Your mileage will vary depending on what the person involved is doing," she explains. "All that really matters is that everyone is ethically treated. As long as everyone is on the same page, it can be whatever you want it to be."...

Read on (March 18, 2015).

The Week online has published several polyamory articles in the last two years. Either someone there likes us, or their stats say these articles get them a lot of hits.

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"More Love to Give." A story spawned by Big Data?

Vocativ

Here's a long, sympathetic article about a delta triad raising a 3-year-old.

What I find especially interesting is where it appeared. Vocativ is a big, aggressive, well-funded but struggling outfit that calls itself “a new type of media company, bringing audiences hidden perspectives, unheard voices and original ideas from around the world via the Deep Web.” Its claim to uniqueness, as New York Capital reports, is the Deep Web part: “Its proprietary software, called OpenMind, scans sectors of the worldwide web not crawled by Google or other search engines, analyzing it and producing news leads and stories.”

Fast Company's Neil Ungerleider wrote, “Their search technology is similar to that used by law enforcement to detect terrorist chatter, hedge funds to find hidden financial information, and by intelligence agencies to gauge sentiment and collect intelligence.” In fact, those things are actually what the company's founders did before they decided they might have the Next Big Thing in news.

Which would make their attention to a polyfamily sound like big data validating that We Are The Future. However, former Vocativ employees say the technology hasn't panned out as well as hoped, and that a lot of Vocativ's stories come from writers looking for topics the old-fashioned way, by guess and by gosh.

The story itself is an especially good, professional example of its genre.

A Poly Family Portrait: More Love to Give

"Family is important to Britt, Cliff and Dave [left side], and Gareth has no shortage of grandparents." Photo by David Ryder

Putting aside the novelty and the otherness of polyamorous relationships, the experiences of one family—love, marriage, children—look a lot like any other

By Luke Malone

Cliff greets me at the door of his family’s apartment in Tacoma, Washington, trying to contain an excited golden Labrador mix that has managed to wriggle between his legs. Behind him stands his wife, Britt, who offers a cheery hello, while their 3-year-old son, Gareth, sizes things up from a safe distance.

I pass the test. The blond toddler grabs my hand and leads me down the hallway into his immaculate bedroom, where he immediately begins pulling toys down from a shelf.

...Britt, 24, offers me a drink as we sit chatting on their brown sectional sofa. Cliff, 29, occasionally interjects from the adjacent kitchen, where he, a former coastguardsman turned chef, is cooking a dinner of pulled pork. Gareth, a curious and tactile child, gives me an unsolicited hug, and his mother asks him to stop bothering me. We’re discussing the family’s recent move to the area from Sarasota, Florida. Out of the corner of my eye I notice Gareth sidle back up to me, a picture book in hand, which he slides into my lap.

“Gareth,” groans Britt. “Dadave will read that to you when he gets home.”

“Dadave” is Dave, Gareth’s other father. The four of them live together in a cozy two-bedroom apartment that overlooks a large reserve, 40 miles south of Seattle. In many ways they are a traditional family: Cliff and Dave both work, and Britt spends her days looking after Gareth. All three adults settle on the couch at night to watch TV once their son has gone to bed.

“It is very normal, except for the fact that we have one more adult living in our household,” says Britt. “The only real difference is that we’re buying food for one more person, and that person sleeps in our bed.”

...Without census information or other quantitative data, the exact number of polyamorous families is hard to pin down, though polyamory nonprofit Loving More estimates there are between 1 million and 1.5 million individuals in the U.S. who identify as poly. (A recent article by Scientific American states that between 4 percent and 5 percent of the U.S. population practices consensual non-monogamy, which includes polyamory.)

...Britt is quick to point out that no one situation, her own family unit included, is representative of polyamory as a whole. “Poly is a build-your-own relationship structure. Your mileage will vary depending on what the person involved is doing,” she explains. “All that really matters is that everyone is ethically treated. As long as everyone is on the same page, it can be whatever you want it to be.”

...Walking along the street in downtown Seattle, Britt and Cliff are holding hands, and Gareth is hanging onto his mom. He reaches out to grab my hand, and we end up four in a row during the lunchtime rush hour. A couple of passersby smile at us even though we are taking up the vast majority of the sidewalk.

“It’s easier to just be a person, frankly,” Britt says later, when I ask her about the difference between life in Washington versus what she experienced in Florida. “Florida is very draconian in many ways. I don’t feel like I have to be afraid out here, so that’s nice.”...

Read the whole article (Dec. 24, 2014).

The article was reprinted by Yahoo Parenting on December 29th.

Update: And it was reprinted on the website of The Week, the national newsmagazine, on March 18, 2015. They gave it the title What life is like in a polyamorous family.

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"A many-splendored thing? The polyamorous family"

City Living Seattle

We may think of Seattle as the poly capital of the world (Elisabeth Sheff has said of one part of it, “You’ve heard of gayborhoods? This is the first poly-neighborhood I’ve heard of.”). But many people who live in the city have no idea. A few more of them now get the concept following this long, informative article in a smallish city magazine about Matt and V. Bullen and some of their network:

A many-splendored thing? The polyamorous family

By Alberto Lacao Jr.

“Edwin” drew a picture of his family’s
polyamorous dynamic when he was younger.
Image courtesy of Matt Bullen.

The afternoon lunch rush has been long finished at the Columbia City café. A family with a husband, wife, their 11-year-old son and the husband’s girlfriend walks in.

Yes, the husband, happily married for 17 years, has a girlfriend, and his wife has no issue with it. In fact, she has a boyfriend, too.

They are a polyamorous family. Polyamory is a relationship model in which a person has more than one intimate relationship with the knowledge of everyone involved....

Matt Bullen and his wife, Vee (not her real name), who live in Southeast Seattle, opened their relationship more than five years ago while they were living abroad.... Emma (not her real name), who has been dating Matt for the last 16 months, said she felt nothing odd with the arrangement. “I was actually pretty surprised with how everything was normal,” she said. “‘Normal’ is the only word you can use to describe it.”

She attends the Bullens’ son Edwin’s soccer games on the weekends, and Edwin (not his real name) sees her like an “auntie.”

Emma, who enjoys her independence, found this relationship fit perfectly and considers herself monogamous. “I date Matt and have no other interest in dating anyone else,” she said. “The dynamics work out well for me. I get my time and then relationship time.” There is no set template for the structure of a poly relationship. Like Matt, Vee and Emma’s arrangement, there are triads involving three people, or quads involving four people, group marriages…the list goes on.

...Polyamory is more centered on the actual relationships more than sexual contact. However, this can be a sticky subject, according to Allena Gabosch, executive director for the Center of Sex Positive Culture in Seattle. She acknowledged, “There’s a bit of controversy about what ‘polyamory’ means to those of us who are poly. We get to define it, and we all define it differently. For many, poly puts the emphasis on ‘loving, intimate relationships,’ where[as] ‘open’ may be more about casual sexual encounters. That said, I know many poly folk who practice both.”

As for her relationships, Vee makes it clear that her relationships “are not a casual thing. We truly love each other, and if something is to happen to the other one, we are there for each other. Our relationships are like friends with benefits but long-term.”

The new relationship wave?

Matt believes that the next wave of polyamory being more socially acceptable will be “those who are currently poly but who camouflage it, will finally stop it. They come out and say that, ‘You know what? This picture on my desk at work is not my sister or brother, but my other partner.’ Because they had found a second or third partner and are sick of disguising it.”

...Those in polyamorous relationships include former National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland, actress/comedian Mo’Nique, actress Tilda Swinton, magician Penn Jillette and financier Warren Buffett.

...“People are used to the monogamous paradigm — they don’t know there is another option,” Vee said. “Rather than thinking healthily of how to communicate the feelings that they have with partners…, you are either doing serial monogamy or you are cheating. If people knew they had another option that wasn’t unethical and it could work for them, a lot of relationships could be saved because a sharing could be accommodated.”

The long run?

According to Pepper Schwartz, professor of sociology at the University of Washington, not enough studies have been done on polyamory to know its actual viability. “Polyamory is a much more complicated form of living together for people who have not grown up with a village or [are] living in a group mentality,” she said. “Not impossible, just difficult. Even in those societies where multiple forms of marriage are legal and culturally familiar, the anthropological literature is replete with tales of competition, jealousy and favoritism. So I do not see it as a new trend but something that a small group people will want and an even smaller group of people will be able to do successfully.”

Vee agrees about the uncertainty, but she points out that it is “no different from a monogamous relationship, with a 50-percent chance of divorce. If you ask that about every mono relationship, people would be paralyzed.”

Matt added, “Monogamy is seen like the eldest child that is forgiven everything: No matter how many times it goes wrong, they still kind of favor it.… Then there’s the youngest son, polyamory, and everything he does is wrong. People tend to favor monogamy because that’s what’s always been around.”

Gabosch, of the Center of Sex Positive Culture, said that polyamory can be both “life-changing” and “important,” especially if one is going through a crisis. “I recently went through breast cancer, and having my poly family there was amazing. I never went to the doctor or chemo alone. In fact, many times, several of them were with me. I also think that the financial and emotional support that a poly family brings can be important.”

The Bullen’s son, Edwin, can definitely agree with this. He enjoys spending time with Emma, bantering about the Sounders or the latest James Bond movie, and with Vee’s boyfriend. A few of his friends know about his family dynamic, as does his schoolteacher (Emma is listed as an emergency contact), but he has not had any negative backlash from it....

Read the whole article (online April 19, 2013).

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Matt Bullen tells of his poly awakening, and so do others

Several remarkably good how-I-came-to-poly stories have been published in the last few days, while I was digging out from under the work that piled up when I was away at the Network for a New Culture's Summer Camp East. Kick back for a good read.


1. Matt Bullen in Seattle was the co-writer with his girlfriend Terisa Greenan (at far right) for her poly web-TV series "Family" (2009–10). Matt and Terisa are part of a tight poly cluster of five-plus, some of whom have have been very out to the news media as the prototypical successful Seattle poly bunch. For instance, they were the centerpiece of the important and influential Newsweek online article two years ago. Now Matt, a transplanted Brit and proud of it, has just published his story of how he and his wife Vee (at left) originally came to poly.

It's in The Idler for 2011 — a well-regarded, annual British hardbound book-magazine "that campaigns against the work ethic and promotes liberty, autonomy and responsibility.... The title comes from a series of essays by Dr Johnson, published in 1758-59 in the Gentleman’s Magazine."

The More the Merrier

...In the centre of the fenced front garden of a cottage in New Zealand is a lemon tree. It yields big, contented lemons all year. My wife and I would chase our little boy around and around it, evening after evening, ducking down among the giggles to pick up a fallen fruit.... It was a welcome plateau of stability....

But geography was about to split me from Vera for several nights each week. She was set to spend a lot of time teaching at a university in Auckland, almost three hours to the north. She would be staying by herself, an attractive woman going through a time of excitement and stress, surrounded by thousands of bright, cute people. I would be alone in the countryside, looking after our boy.

She and I, it seemed to me, should talk. Any sensible couple would: even we, who had been married and utterly monogamous for well over a decade, could see that logistics might now open a sustained fracture into which sexual desire and the plain need for company might creep.

We had our talk, and then several other talks on the heels of it. Result: for the first time in our relationship, we gave each other permission to have casual sexual encounters with other people. As the odds for such sport were heavily in her favour, and I was doing little paid work, I had plenty of evenings alone after our lad went to sleep to think further about what our new arrangement might mean for our relationship. Two-thirds thrilled and one-third lonely, down among the dark paddocks of dairy country, I thought about how she might be spending the night in the city. Why were we okay with our agreement? How okay were we? Why was I mentally cheering her on, agog to hear any good war stories when she returned?...

Here’s what happened about our sex deal: neither of us did anything, at all....

----------

...Then we met Terisa, Scott and Larry. They came to one of the cheap and cheerful cocktail parties we threw each month at our North Seattle apartment. Terisa lives with the two men, who are both her partners of many years. She met Scott first. Later, he introduced her to Larry. The guys are not involved with each other.

...Once Terisa and I had established our shared professional interest in writing, we soon started dating and making love. We also found that we were able to get on well as pals. These strands interplayed, wove in and out, curveting off each other or muttering along famously.

Soon afterwards Vera started going out with Larry, Terisa’s husband. At first this led to a couple of classic quasi-farcical moments, such as Vera and I texting each other at daybreak from respective bedrooms at the triad’s house, asking politely who was going to pad downstairs to make the coffee.

This state of affairs was, in Terisa’s phrase, all very convenient....

But something else was starting to develop. As months passed, we found that the core romantic liaisons were sprouting other relationships and benefits: other kinds of love, if you like. Vera and Terisa became good pals, lunching and doing dance class together. Our seven-year-old learned editing skills sitting on Terisa’s knee at her computer suite; editing that was valuable not just in the filmic sense, but as a general ability critical to crafting all manner of creative work. Larry and Scott would also pitch in with our lad, helping with math homework or bantering. Vera and Larry toiled hard to develop produce patches at the triad’s home: as I write there is a huge bowl of their ripening cherry tomatoes a few feet from my desk. I baked bread and made soups for the group. And “Family” continued to act as a cementing force for all of us. I helped to write it, our son had an acting role in it, Vera catered and assisted. Larry was already executive producer, Scott a director of photography. Terisa directed and orchestrated the whole thing on a shoestring budget, with a cast and crew of up to 20 people per episode. It was a relentlessly creative time, an awful lot of fun, and cost little. We also began to attract the attention of media from Newsweek to Canal+ TV France. (Egoistical side note: can you imagine my satisfaction, as a skinny English boy, in talking to the French nation about how to love women?)

More recently, Terisa has started to collect our boy from school once or twice a week to take care of him for a few hours, giving Vera more freedom to earn part-time cash teaching ballet. This childcare arrangement was, in turn, made possible by our moving to an apartment three minutes from the triad’s house.... We can nip to each other’s home to drop off a loaf or to pick someone up on the way to the huge local charity shop where we buy most of our clothes....

----------

...People tend to want to know if there really is as much joy involved as I have begun to outline. The answer: yes. The context: polyamory also takes pretty much constant maintenance, and involves the occasional flashpoint scene that could strip the paint off the eyes of Mars. Living polyamorously is a bit like getting into the SAS: myths aside, and above all, you have to want to do it and to be able to focus way, way beyond initial illusions. To stretch this simile further, you have to be able to function well as your own person and as part of a group, sometimes parachuting into one of these two camps when you’d far rather be left in peace in the other.

Do we fight, do we get on each other’s nerves, do we get jealous? After all, Dr. Pepper Schwartz opined in a recent KOMO News piece that "it is not in most people's capacity to love multiple people at the same time, much less all live together as a happy family," The answer is: certainly there are tensions and jealousies. For example, as a family we all tend to be a little over-solicitous of each other’s feelings. This can lead to problems....

A good tip, if you are contemplating how you might deal with jealousy, is encapsulated in a section title of Dossie Easton and [Janet Hardy's] book The Ethical Slut. That is: ‘Go For The Ick’. In other words, cut to what is really making you feel anxious and queasy. Is it the thought of your partner looking into someone else’s eyes, or a fear of being dumped, or giggled about, or what? The nearer you can get to the core, the more clearly you can see yourself: and that is a good – though scary – place to be. Moreover, I advocate sharing your exploration with your partner....

...So, is polyamory enviable? Put it this way: when I go through our challenging times, I usually ask myself whether I would want to be living any other way or spending time doing anything else. No. Our son is happy and healthy. We all get on, even when the six of us descended on the UK for a hectic vacation....

...Polyamory is great, and it is tempting. But polyamory (or even swinging) is not something to be tried lightly. Ducks need to be corralled into a row, and anyone involved has to be searingly honest about what is likely to please or to disturb them. Otherwise, I almost guarantee shock and/or sadness. Indeed, I would advise not trying just in order to try, but to try with the full intention of succeeding. And that takes preparation and compassion. And courage.

The full, 3,000-word piece is not available online; you have to buy or subscribe to The Idler. It claims a circulation of 33,000. "The magazine is known for attracting opinion-forming contributors such as Toby Young, Louis Theroux and David Hockney," writes Matt. "So the readership, though small, probably reflects that."

P.S.: Matt has just started a polyamory blog about his life.

He and Terisa are working on a new web-TV series, "VNN Nicely News", that's supposed to be out later this summer.

Here's a two-part audio interview they did on poly parenting: Part 1; Part 2. These are episodes #249 and #250 of Cunning Minx's Polyamory Weekly podcast (which I haven't been promoting nearly as much as it deserves).

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


2. Mystic Life is the author of the small book Spiritual Polyamory (2004) and other works.

My First Exposure to Polyamory: The Witches of Eastwick

By Mystic Life

Back in college I went to a party with some friends who were visiting from out of town, and apparently one of the women at the party had noticed me. She called and asked if I’d like to go to a movie with her... The Witches of Eastwick.

...“Julie” wasn’t very attractive to me. However, she was nice, she liked me, and I had low self-esteem… so we ended up dating for over two years. She was only my second sex partner, and the first partner I ended up cheating upon. At the time, I truly believed “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” though of course it was very disrespectful and created distance between us.

...Instead of recognizing that monogamy wasn’t working for me, I thought I could get by on flings. Besides, since I was living in mid-Michigan, I didn’t see myself as having any alternative to monogamy. Also, I had some karma around the issue of infidelity since my father was a cheater as well. I didn’t see the connection at the time, but I’ve come to believe that if we’re not conscious of our stuff, we can “act out” the issues that hold an emotional charge from our family of origin.

So… back to our first date. I LOVED The Witches of Eastwick, though I didn’t know why at the time.... Jack Nicholson’s character, Daryl Van Horne, appealed because he spoke to a part of me that had yet to emerge. When asked early on in the film if he is married, he replies:

“The answer is no, I don’t believe in it. Good for the man, lousy for the woman. She dies, she suffocates. I’ve see it! And then the husband runs around complaining that he’s fucking a dead person, and he’s the one who killed her!”

From where I stand now, I feel this deadening effect is not correlated with gender.... I would later realize how marriage (or any traditional relationship) can deaden the participants’ sexuality. Later on I would read Sonia Johnson’s The Ship That Sailed into the Living Room in which she suggests that the best way to enliven a sexual relationship is to begin telling the truth. Reading Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton would further enhance my understanding of the importance of living transparently....

Read on (July 29, 2011).

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3. At The Frisky:

Girl Talk: My Adventures In An Open Marriage

By Rachel Rabbit White

...So far, I’ve found a way to make my relationship with my husband, Edmund, keep its charm, passion, intimacy and commitment. And it has happened by opening the gates.

...The night of our [first] date there was a storm. The lights were out and we found an Ecuadorian restaurant lit by candles, where we drank tequila with mango and hot sauce. When we got back to his apartment, a tree cracked with lightning and fell in the street. I felt equally intense. When Edmund asked me to marry him a year later, it just made sense. Like our first date, our relationship was emotional and passionate but more than anything, it was a meeting of minds.

We had talked about non-monogamy once, when we first started dating. It was during the “getting you know you sexually” phase, where weekends are spent entirely in bed, save for meals out. We learned that we were both bisexual and enjoyed porn. “Who knows what the future holds for us. Polyamory?” he half-joked. The thing we agreed on about monogamy and marriage is that it should be open to change, fluidity. How can you make such a serious a decision once in your life, and never go back and evaluate it? Monogamy or divorce was just so black and white.

----------

...While marriage had taken its toll, making us feel at times a little like brother and sister, we feared non-monogamy might break the beautiful relationship we had. But soon, Edmund stopped seeing it as sharing me, and started to view it as us exploring together....

I couldn’t guess how I would feel about my partner’s sexual conquests — until it happened. It was my birthday and a female friend came home with us. I poured some white wine, but it wasn’t long until her honey-blonde hair whipped to the side, and she writhed her body onto my lap, as our mouths touched. Soon, the three of us fell into bed together. As I pulled back watching the two of them, I could feel myself beaming. I felt excited for him, happy with a surge of “Yeah my husband is hot!” I also learned that having sex with people outside your marriage makes you want more sex with your husband. For weeks, Edmund and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other....

I still don’t know where we are headed or what our future will look like. But I trust the flow of it. I get it now, it is just me and him. You make the rules in your own relationship.

Read the whole article (July 28, 2011).

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4. By a bi-guy columnist for AfterElton:

Snails & Oysters: Kelly, a Bipolyamorous Love Story

By Chris O'Guinn

In 1993, just after the death of my mom, I got a best friend — which was a big deal because I hadn’t had one of those since I was five....

At the time I was basically feral. I had long hair and a leather jacket, loads of anger and more issues than a magazine rack. I was timesharing groups of friends — that is, I had two distinct groups of people I spent time with, none of whom was I very close with.

Kelly picked her way through the briar patch of my defenses with an ease that I found alarming. She knew what it was like to put up a wall of hostility to keep the world out because she had done the same thing....

We started to really connect through our writing. She was always a better writer than me — such a consummate perfectionist. I was awed by her stories....

Then, in the course of a conversation with Kelly’s BFF I learned that Kelly was, in fact, bisexual. I absorbed that knowledge without much drama, so I was a little surprised when Kelly freaked out and begged me to meet her for a talk.

She tried to downplay what her BFF had said, panicking that I would reject her because I now knew this secret about her. The only response I could think to give her to calm her down was that I was bisexual too.

I had never told anyone that before.

...Yes, of course I developed a crush on her. There was a small hitch, though — she was dating one of those guys I nominally called "friend." I think this might have been the first time the words “F**k my life” had ever been spoken.

Well, their dating became their getting married and I just learned to deal. I still had a best friend in Kelly and that was all sorts of awesome. We wrote together, we laughed together. I even got invited to her parents’ house for special dinners. It was there that I learned that families could be about something other than tearing you down. Who knew?...

Read the whole article (July 28, 2011). It becomes very moving; no spoilers here.

Update Sept. 6, 2011: At The Experience Project, there are currently 141 experience stories in the section "I Am Polyamorous."

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Polycamp Northwest: "Heather Has Two Mommies, One Daddy, and Several Matriarchal Women in the Community Who She Thinks of as Moms"

The Stranger (Seattle)

For six of the last seven years, Polycamp Northwest has been held on a summer weekend in Washington state. This year's camp starts in three weeks. Dan Savage has just written an article about the Polycamp community for the weekly alternative newspaper in Seattle that he edits.

Notice the article's title. Savage surely chose it himself. It harks to anthropological findings that humans evolved to live and love communally during almost all of the last million years or so — before the invention of agriculture, a mere 10,000 years ago, threw us into unnatural societies for which we literally are not born and bred. The case for this view is presented, with overwhelming force, in the new book Sex at Dawn. Savage loves the book. So do I. More on this later.

Heather Has Two Mommies, One Daddy, and Several Matriarchal Women in the Community Who She Thinks of as Moms

Polycamp — the Summer Camp for Kids Growing Up in Poly Families — Is All Grown Up Now

By Dan Savage

"When I was little, my mother had a talk with me about having a 'public face,' because not everyone would understand our family," says Koe Sozuteki, a 20-year-old woman who grew up in a large poly household in Seattle. "That was a hard conversation to have in elementary school."

Sozuteki has a bio mom, a bio dad, a stepmom, three other poly moms, "several other matriarchal women in the community who I think of as moms," and an uncle. She also has a brother and half a dozen poly siblings — children she grew up with but is not related to by blood.

Sozuteki was teased in school about her family, she says, and she didn't get much support from teachers.

"Back in the mid-'90s," she says, "people just didn't know how to approach it."

..."People in poly relationships — particularly if they have kids — fear judgment and rejection," says Quintus, an electrician who lives in Kitsap County with his wife and two daughters. "They fear being rejected by their friends, by their families. It's why so many poly families are still closeted."

Quintus and his wife Francisca, who have been poly for a dozen years, are the new heads of Polycamp, an annual summer retreat for local poly families. Polycamp began as a one-day picnic in Redmond and now takes place over four days at Millersylvania State Park outside Olympia.

Sozuteki attended her first Polycamp when she was 13. "We got to run around," she says, "a passel of kids and teenagers, with a sense of freedom because we could be open as poly kids. It was great."

While families with children were Polycamp's original focus, Quintus and Francisca explain that Polycamp now strives to appeal to all poly people — "poly people with kids, poly people who can't stand kids, and people who are single but identify as poly."

...What Polycamp may not have now, however, is a clear-eyed mission. "We try to appeal to all the different niches in the community," Quintus tells me. "There's a lot of overlap: There's the kink community, the sci-fi community, the nature/granola/hippie community, the pagan community. We want to be a resource for everyone."...

Quintus and Francisca's daughters are about the same age that Koe Sozuteki was when she first started to attend Polycamp — and they face some of the same pressures that Sozuteki did.

"At school, they keep it private," says Quintus. "We've told them it's their choice whether they talk to their friends about it. They may receive some judgment or be teased, so it's their choice. We're involved in the poly community, so they have peers that they can talk to. They know there are other families like theirs."...

"Children want to love and be loved," says Quintus. "Children grasp the concept easily. As they've gotten older, we've explained that ours is not the traditional form that most relationships take. We're not ashamed of our lifestyle. We're open with family and friends. But they had a right to know that their family is unique."

Sozuteki says she's happy and that she's grateful to have been "born into a tribe of intimate friends."...

Polycamp 2010 takes place August 26–29 at Millersylvania State Park. For more information, go to www.polycamp.org.

Read the whole article.

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A polyamory researcher tells what she's learned

The Seattle Met

Despite the attention that polyamory is getting these days, there's little solid, real-world sociological research into it yet.

One of the few researchers working in this area is Elisabeth Sheff at Georgia State University. Here's her synopsis (as of 2007) of her research since 1996 on polyamorists and other sexual minorities (see left side of document).

Currently Sheff is conducting, among other things, a long-term study of poly families with children, tracking how both the families and the kids develop over time. Sociologists work under strict ethics rules regarding their subjects, children especially. Only recently did she gain clearance to interview children as young as six. She is looking for additional polyfamiles with kids to include in this long-term study; if interested, contact her at the address in the links above.

Meanwhile, Sheff offers some frank observations about the poly world in an interview in the Seattle Met, a glossy city magazine (June 2010 issue). She paints an unvarnished picture, but everything here strikes me as true. Excerpts:

More to Love

And much more time spent on communication.

By Kathryn Robinson

...Q: What have you learned?

Sheff: That polyamory works great for some people and is disastrous for others. Some find it an extremely fulfilling, liberating lifestyle based on really authentic, deep, emotionally intimate interactions, and are willing to put a lot of effort into that, because it is extremely time-consuming. It’s a lot of work. For others, it produces a lot of insecurity, jealousy, fighting. Some relationships break up. I would say overall, it doesn’t often turn out to be the idyllic, utopian love fest that many people want it to be. It takes a lot of effort to make it work well. It’s not just constant sex all the time; it requires a lot of communication. In fact, sometimes there’s alarmingly little sex.

So it looks like real life?

Yes! A lot!

What are the reasons people give for pursuing it?

The idea of emotional plentitude; that you don’t run out of love by just loving one person. That there’s lots of love to go around. With that comes a rejection of ownership. The idea that one can lay claim to someone else and what they can do with their body and their emotions is repugnant to these folks. So often there’s kind of a libertarian streak, a kind of ‘We’re gonna do what we want, so leave us alone!’ Some are consciously rebellious, so their polyamory is a kind of label of non-conformity to the regular, vanilla crowd. It often goes with ideas of multiplicity on other levels, so many enjoy paganism.

But many practitioners are just regular people, who feel they either have plenty of love to go around, or needs they don’t want to put all on one person. It’s a way to have more attention or different kinds of attention, or more companionship. It’s the idea that it’s too much to ask one person to be everything, so you either have to deny your needs or find a different way to get them met. Finally, [polyamory] offers a model that allows women complete access to multiplicity rather than the traditional [polygamous] model of just men having access to multiplicity.

Who does it not work for?

The ones I’ve seen as doomed are the couples who come in with a very staunch idea of what they’re looking for. Like the female-male couple, maybe married or maybe just partnered, looking for a bisexual woman to add to their relationship. They’re looking to create a triad of one man with two women. Often they have set ideas about who she’ll be and act, come looking for her, and frankly they have a hard time finding her.

So it’s a couple that wants a wife!

Yes. And it’s hard to find. Not that many women want to do that. It often leaves the bisexual woman feeling like ‘Hey! I’m not your sex toy!’ And it often leaves the couples dissatisfied....

But what about the heterosexual couple where the guy just wants freedom for both of them to pursue other love relationships outside the primary relationship?

Yes, there are folks like that. Pretty regularly it is the dude who says, ‘Let’s check this out.’ The woman is often more hesitant at first, sometimes will enter the poly community, if not kicking and screaming, at least lagging behind. Then she’ll realize, ‘Wow this is great! It’s not as scary as I thought.’ And he’ll realize, ‘Wait, this isn’t as much fun as I expected. It’s not living up to my fantasy. There’s not as much sex. Not as many partners as I thought.’

Is that common?

Enough that it’s cliché that they each do a 180....

What else changes when couples become polyamorous?

Introducing other people into the relationship almost always changes relationship dynamics. Add something else in, and everything shifts. Sometimes it’s large, sometimes minor. But sometimes it shifts in directions that change power relationships or the status quo....

How often does polyamory work?

Depends on what you mean by work. If you mean, takes some form and stays that way ‘til death do us part — extremely infrequently. But if you mean, meets the needs of the people involved for that point in time, then quite a bit. The larger the polyamorous groups get the less stable and cohesive they are. The more enduring form tends to be the open couple: The male-female couple who cohabitate, and often see additional partners. It’s the most common and appears to be the most enduring. But their cast of characters tends to shift.

And do couples of that description stay together?

Their chances of staying together depends wholly on who they are....

Sheff goes on to describe her own decidedly mixed poly history, which seems to inform the above:

I was the classic woman who came in kicking and screaming. My partner really wanted to try it, and was looking for The Unicorn but couldn’t find her. For the vast majority of the time, we just talked about polyamory and had various agreements that gradually opened our relationship, but we didn't act on it for ten years. Eventually he found a girlfriend. And I found another man, and basically he couldn’t deal with that. So ten years into it for the two of us, and at great trauma to us both, we came back to monogamy. We tried that for the next five years — and it wasn’t problematic sexually, because in reality neither of us had really been that actively polyamorous. But I felt so betrayed by his sudden turn of intention once I found another man — I couldn’t get over that. Because he had pushed it for so long, finally overcoming my resistance, and then once I began to like it he said, ‘No, let’s not do this.’ I was like, ‘No! You don’t get to make that rule!’ Finally I left him. We’ve remained good friends, but I’m really gun-shy of polyamory for myself. I’m not sure I could maintain a long-term poly relationship. I could date multiple people, yes. But the idealized poly image of having this expanded family — it is just so much work.

Read the whole article (be sure to look for the second page; the navigation isn't obvious).

The interviewer also presents a sidebar article about a conflicted poly-mono couple, friends of hers, who face some serious choices:

Big Love

For Seattle polyamorists, love is a many-partnered thing. And managing the jealousy is a full-time job.

By Kathryn Robinson

MY OLD FRIEND, whose name isn’t really Amy, had never even heard the word “polyamory” until her husband of 15 years brought it up one night, between dessert and indigestion.

...As she sat piecing together Greek and Latin roots — many? loves? — he elaborated, with all the enthusiasm of a toddler clutching a shiny trinket. Not superficial swinging, nor Big Love–style polygyny, he explained, polyamory is the umbrella term for the practice of loving more than one person at a time. He wanted her to consider the kind that would free each of them to openly pursue romantic interests in addition to the primary one at home.

“So…cheating,” Amy summarized crisply, her strawberry pound cake thudding to the bottom of her gut.

“No!” Josh corrected. “That’s just it! It’s openly loving more than one person, within a context of honest disclosure and loving agreement. It’s actually the opposite of cheating.”

...Over coffee with her the next morning... she smiled weakly and I took her hand. “Josh is a good man, Ames,” [I said]. “The only guy in the world who would ask his wife’s permission to play around. He loves you to the point of adoration, you know he does.”

Gratitude shone from her weary eyes. “I know he does. The irony is, this ‘open love’ thing appeals to him precisely because of the qualities I love best about him.”

I knew what she meant. I’ve known Amy through the long chain of cads we all dated before we were surprised by fine men, and Josh is among the finest. Kind, smart, and grounded, he is made of a nonjudgmental spirit, a large heart for people, and an integrity so genuine he would never submit blindly to any convention for its own sake. Josh is a flower child, born 10 years too late.

So it makes sense that when he heard about polyamory — from a friend who turned out to be a practitioner — it stirred something deep in him....

...“It’s all so high-minded,” she sighed, swigging her coffee. “So dripping with integrity.... I just don’t think I’m wired for it,” she murmured. “And the thing is — I’d like to be. I know Josh loves me. I love him. Because this means something to him I’d like to be able to at least try it. But I think the jealousy could destroy us.”

...And suddenly I was back in high school humanities class, learning for the first time about the philosophical underpinnings of the political theory called Communism. I’ll never forget running in the door from school that night and telling Mom and Dad all about this life-changing philosophy I’d learned. Pure classlessness, the foundation of the good society. It made so much sense!

“So great in theory,” Dad said. “And so seriously incompatible with the human heart.”

I smiled at Amy, and felt tired for her. Because I’m sure some small percentage of humans genuinely is polyamorist; women and men who, unlike Amy, really are wired that way. All she needs to do now, God help her, is figure out if Josh is one of them.

Or if he’s just, well, a guy.

Never mind the crack about guys. But the crack about communism? After 40 years of observation I'll say, at the risk of sounding like John Reed¹: "I have seen the future, and it sometimes works."

Read the whole article (June 2010).

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¹ John Reed, colleague of Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, and Max Eastman, was the American radical journalist mixed up in the Bolshevik revolution who wrote Ten Days that Shook the World (1919) and was portrayed in the 1981 movie Reds.

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Newsweek: Polyamory is "America's Next Romantic Revolution"

Newsweek online

There's been gossip for more than a month that Newsweek magazine was interviewing people for a big article on polyamory. This morning the magazine published the article on its website, with an accompanying two-part video.

The title on Newsweek's homepage is "America's Next Romantic Revolution," and the title in the rotating feature spot is "The Next Sexual Revolution?" The article centers on Terisa Greenan's household in Seattle (on which she bases her webcast video series "Family") and works outward from there.

It's dead on-target and absolutely wonderful.

It is not in the paper magazine, however, at least not yet. Word is the writer hopes she can get it into the print edition sometime in the coming weeks. [UPDATE LATER: This never happened.]

Only You. And You. And You.

Polyamory — relationships with multiple, mutually consenting partners — has a coming-out party.

By Jessica Bennett | Newsweek Web Exclusive

July 29, 2009

Terisa Greenan and her boyfriend, Matt, are enjoying a rare day of Seattle sun, sharing a beet carpaccio on the patio of a local restaurant. Matt holds Terisa's hand, as his 6-year-old son squeezes in between the couple to give Terisa a kiss. His mother, Vera, looks over and smiles; she's there with her boyfriend, Larry. Suddenly it starts to rain, and the group must move inside. In the process, they rearrange themselves: Matt's hand touches Vera's leg. Terisa gives Larry a kiss. The child, seemingly unconcerned, puts his arms around his mother and digs into his meal.

Terisa and Matt and Vera and Larry — along with Scott, who's also at this dinner — are not swingers, per se; they aren't pursuing casual sex. Nor are they polygamists of the sort portrayed on HBO's Big Love; they aren't religious, and they don't have multiple wives. But they do believe in "ethical nonmonogamy," or engaging in loving, intimate relationships with more than one person — based upon the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. They are polyamorous, to use the term of art applied to multiple-partner families like theirs, and they wouldn't want to live any other way.

...It's enough to make any monogamist's head spin. But the traditionalists had better get used to it.

Researchers are just beginning to study the phenomenon, but the few who do estimate that openly polyamorous families in the United States number more than half a million, with thriving contingents in nearly every major city. Over the past year, books like Open, by journalist Jenny Block; Opening Up, by sex columnist Tristan Taormino; and an updated version of The Ethical Slut — widely considered the modern "poly" Bible — have helped publicize the concept. Today there are poly blogs and podcasts, local get-togethers, and an online polyamory magazine called Loving More with 15,000 regular readers....

With polyamorists' higher profile has come some growing pains. The majority of them don't seem particularly interested in pressing a political agenda; the joke in the community is that the complexities of their relationships leave little time for activism. But they are beginning to show up on the radar screen of the religious right, some of whose leaders have publicly condemned polyamory as one of a host of deviant behaviors sure to become normalized if gay marriage wins federal sanction. "This group is really rising up from the underground, emboldened by the success of the gay-marriage movement," says Glenn Stanton, the director of family studies for Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian group. "And while there's part of me that says, 'Oh, my goodness, I don't think I could see them make grounds,' there's another part of me that says, 'Well, just watch them.' "

...Polyamory might sound like heaven to some: a variety of partners, adding spice and a respite from the familiarity and boredom that's doomed many a traditional couple. But humans are hard-wired to be jealous, and though it may be possible to overcome it, polyamorous couples are "fighting Mother Nature" when they try, says biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, a professor at Rutgers University who has long studied the chemistry of love. Polys say they aren't so much denying their biological instincts as insisting they can work around them — through open communication, patience, and honesty. Polys call this process "compersion" — or learning to find personal fulfillment in the emotional and sexual satisfaction of your partner, even if you're not the one doing the satisfying. "It's about making sure that everybody's needs are met, including your own," says Terisa. "And that's not always easy, but it's part of the fun."

It's complicated, to say the least: tending to the needs of multiple partners, figuring out what to tell the kids, making sure that nobody's feelings are hurt. "I like to call it polyagony," jokes [Ken] Haslam, the Kinsey researcher, who is himself polyamorous. "It works for some perfectly, and for others it's a f--king disaster."

...It's easy to dismiss polyamory as a kind of frat-house fantasy gone wild. But in truth, the community has a decidedly feminist bent: women have been central to its creation, and "gender equality" is a publicly recognized tenet of the practice....

...It's a new paradigm, certainly—and it does break some rules. "Polyamory scares people — it shakes up their world view," says Allena Gabosh, the director of the Seattle-based Center for Sex Positive Culture. But perhaps the practice is more natural than we think: a response to the challenges of monogamous relationships, whose shortcomings — in a culture where divorce has become a commonplace — are clear. Everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: can one person really satisfy every need? Polyamorists think the answer is obvious — and that it's only a matter of time before the monogamous world sees there's more than one way to live and love....

Read the whole article (July 29, 2009).

Newsweek also put up an absolutely first-rate two-part video on the Seattle household, mixing real-life interviews with scenes from "Family":

Part 1: Love — Poly Style

Part 2: Making Poly Love Work

Newsweek also put up a slide show on the history of polygamy and multiple partnering, titled "More Ways Than Two" (starting with Rameses II in ancient Egypt). It struck me as mediocre by seeming to conflate separate topics.

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Updates: 7 a.m. next morning: I see the article is now #1 on Newsweek's site in all four categories: most read, emailed, recommended, and commented. Also, it's made the front page of Digg.

-- The Fox TV network has put out a news item referencing the Newsweek article. It's remarkably objective considering it's Fox.

-- A New York Press blogger says "Newsweek Loves Group Sex". (Never mind that the folks in the article say they never sleep with more than one person.)

-- Anita Wagner discusses some of the... umm... least complimentary comments that are piling in to the Newsweek site, on her Practical Polyamory blog. The contrast in character is remarkable between the ugly negatives and the often polite, thoughtful, well-presented positives. That's also been true in the comments to past poly news articles generally. We're winning the comment wars in terms of the impressions we make on normal people; keep it up. As Emerson said, "Character is everything." As Goddess of Java says, "Be a credit to your kink."

More on this: Okay, I went googling and found where a lot of those ugly comments are coming from. Turns out the right-wing blogosphere is having conniption fits over the Newsweek article and is sending its readers there — FreeRepublic, FoxNation, TownHall, the works. I kinda suspected. (A typical Freeper: "Yes and Bestiality and Pedophilia if the Obamunists have their way. Oh I almost forgot Necrophelia.") NewsBusters did a relatively decent article.

-- A columnist in The Frisky discusses the Newsweek article:

...ever since Anya James wrote about being in a polyamorous relationship back in November, I’ve noticed that three-way relationships have been everywhere. According to a study cited in Newsweek, “openly polyamorous families in the United States number more than half a million, with thriving contingents in nearly every major city.”...

-- The Newsweek article prompted momlogic.com to reprint its interview from last year with Loving More's Robyn Trask about her life, partners, and children.

-- Thoughtful criticism and commentary from a basically pro-poly columnist at GetReligion.org, a site about treatment of religious issues in the media.

-- Here's a Spanish translation of the article, which appeared on the site of the weekly newsmagazine El Argentino in Buenos Aires (Aug. 26, 2009).

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"Local family's lifestyle gets national attention"

KOMO-TV 4 News (Seattle)

Terisa Greenan and her webcast sitcom "Family" — the fictional adventures of Gemma, Ben and Ernie living in a vee triad — have drawn the attention of the ABC-TV affiliate in her hometown. And, says the station's report, an Oprah Winfrey producer has expressed interest in taking Greenan and her own two partners national.

Watch the broadcast (about 4 minutes). Here are excerpts from the accompanying article on the station's website, basically a transcript of the broadcast:

By Michelle Esteban

SEATTLE -- A controversial local family's story is a huge hit on YouTube and has everyone, from Oprah to the Kinsey Institute, asking just how they do what they do.

The childless family of three is polyamorous, meaning its members can have more than one romantic relationship at once.

Terisa Greenan is in love with two men, Scott and Larry, and they're both crazy about her.

..."We're all heterosexuals. I have a romantic relationship with both of them separately," said Terisa.

Terisa recently started dating a third man, and her two current partners are OK with that.

"I don't feel sexual jealousy in that way," said Scott.

And why should he? Larry and Scott date and sleep with other women, too. And of course, Terisa has no complaints.

"When I see Larry and his new girlfriend kissing or hugging and lying in bed together, and he has a smile on his face and he beams with joy, I think, 'I love him. I want him to experience that joy,'" she said.

Expert: "Most people want monogamy"

"It is not in most people's capacity to love multiple people at the same time, much less all live together as a happy family," said Dr. Pepper Schwartz, relationship specialist and sociology professor at the University of Washington.

Schwartz thinks the trio loves the security of their relationship, but aren't madly in love. She says most polyamorous relationships don't last because too many emotions get in the way.

"Most people want monogamy," she said.

Not Scott.

"We like the charge of a new relationship," he said.

To each his own, says Larry....

Web series catches attention of Oprah, Kinsey Institute

...The Web series started as a lark while Terisa was between jobs. There's no budget, and the actors and crew work solely for experience and exposure. Terisa says "Family" is about the art of filmmaking; the insight into an alternative lifestyle is just the bonus.

The seven-minute sitcoms get thousands of hits on YouTube. And it may soon be the topic of discussion on America's most popular talk show.

"Oprah Winfrey called. It was amazing, I was like, 'How on Earth did you find me?'" Terisa said.

National exposure would complicate an already-complicated lifestyle. With three people, everything, from decision making to scheduling and arguing, takes longer.

What do their parents think? Terisa and Scott's parents have accepted their lifestyle, but Larry has kept his father in the dark.

"At some point really soon, we're going have that conversation. It won't be fun," said Larry.

But Larry can tell his father that he's making history. The Web series recently grabbed the attention of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex at Indiana University.

...The institute says Terisa's work is one of a kind. The school intends to add a DVD collection of the Web series to its library as a resource.

The curator says the soap-opera format of "Family" is the first of its kind in the history of polyamorous relationships. He believes the DVD will serve as a valuable form of reference for future social historians.

As for the future of the trio, Terisa, Scott and Larry intend to grow old together.

Here's the whole article (July 22, 2009).

The KOMO-TV broadcast is also getting promoted nationally on ABC News.com (in the Health section), as the lead paragraphs of this article; the rest of the article is mostly a reprint of ABC News.com's story last month about calls for legalized polyamorous marriage.

Only a few years ago, some people were saying never, ever talk to the media because they will just trash you and trash poly. What a change.

Of course, you still have to know how to present yourself well (which does not mean "just being yourself"!), and you have to figure out the agenda of the outfit you're dealing with — and if it's a bad agenda, say no. Especially when it comes to TV, which has an eye that never blinks. Robyn Trask of Loving More has had good success coaching people to deal with TV producers on a level footing. Call her if you're ever in this position.

And also study the wise tips on appearing in the media posted by Susan Wright of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF). She has also posted some suggested sound bites to memorize.

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