"Threesome Marriages"

The Daily Beast

A few days ago, writer Abby Ellin went asking around for triads to interview. It didn't take her long. See the piece below. Despite a few false notes it gets the picture overall.

Ellin regularly writes the "Vows" column for the New York Times. The Daily Beast (the news site published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker) is moderately prestigious in its own right, and maybe Ellin will find a way to mention the poly option somewhere in the Times' marriage coverage.

First came traditional marriage. Then, gay marriage. Now, there's a movement combining both — simultaneously. Abby Ellin visits the next frontier of nuptials: the "triad."

Less than 18 months ago, Sasha Lessin and Janet Kira Lessin gathered before their friends near their home in Maui, and proclaimed their love for one another. Nothing unusual about that — Sasha, 68, and Janet, 55 — were legally married in 2000. Rather, this public commitment ceremony was designed to also bind them to Shivaya, their new 60-something "husband." Says Sasha: “I want to walk down the street hand in hand in hand in hand and live together openly and proclaim our relationship. But also to have all those survivor and visitation rights and tax breaks and everything like that.”

...Unlike open marriages and the swinger days of the 1960s and 1970s, these unions are not about sex with multiple outside partners. Nor are they relationships where one person is involved with two others, who are not involved with each other, a la actress Tilda Swinton. That's closer to bigamy. Instead, triads — "triangular triads," to use precise polyamorous jargon — demand that all three parties have full relationships, including sexual, with each other. In the Lessins case, that can be varying pairs but, as Sasha, a psychologist, puts it, "Janet loves it when she gets a double decker." In a triad, there would be no doubt in Elizabeth Edwards’ mind whether her husband fathered a baby out of wedlock; she likely would have participated in it....

There are no statistics or studies out there, but according to Robyn Trask, the executive director of Loving More, a nonprofit organization in Loveland (yes, really), Colorado, dedicated to poly-education and support, about 25 percent of the estimated 50,000 self-identified polyamorists in the U.S. live together in semi-wedded bliss. A disproportionate number of them are baby boomers. (Paging Timothy Leary: Janet Lessin claims on her Web site that she's able to travel astrally.)...

...Valerie White, executive director of the Sexual Freedom Legal Defense and Education Fund, a legal-defense fund for people with alternative sexual expression in Sharon, Massachusetts, says she believes that triads are actually a great way to raise a family. "Years ago, children didn’t get raised in dyads, they got raised with grandparents and aunts and uncles — it was much looser and more village-like," says White. "I think a lot more people are finding that polyamory is a way to recapture that kind of support.”

...Doug Carr, Robert Hill, and Paul Wilson have been a happy threesome for 29 years. The three men, who live outside Austin, Texas, share a bed, a checking account, and joint real-estate properties in each of their names — “a left-handed form of cementing the relationship in a legal context,” says Hill, 69, a retired financier (because of their arrangement, they, too, requested I use pseudonyms).... They held a commitment ceremony in 1984 for 20 friends, and then a reception for 200 in their house, where we “introduced ourselves to the world as a triad,” says Carr....

Read the whole article (May 7, 2009). I've always had a problem with the Lessins calling themselves the "World" Polyamory Association (and pushing ridiculous woo woo), and Ellin could have done a little more reading up in other regards, but these are nitpicks.

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