The New York Times' star conservative takes us on... and not badly. Two more women's open-relationship stories on the way. And, psychedelic-assisted poly transformation.

Chacruna Institute

●  Ross Douthat is house conservative columnist at the New York Times. That can't be easy; he can't write dumb shit but has to be consistently worth reading for people who disagree with him. 

He discusses us polyfolk as his central focus in a pick-apart of society's current sexual transitions: The Quest for a New Vision of Sexual Morality (March 27). He starts with a recent New York magazine cover story about the pop-neuroscience men's influencer Andrew Huberman, who he agrees is an abusive pig:

...The portrait of a figure like Huberman would be interesting under any circumstances. But the special focus on his sex life, the detailed testimony from allegedly mistreated girlfriends, marks this as very much a post-#MeToo profile. Huberman is not accused of any sexual crime; he’s seemingly just a creep, cheat and control freak. But that kind of misbehavior is treated as essential to any judgment of his public career. Whatever the new rules of sex might be, it’s clear that we’re supposed to judge the cad’s lifestyle as regressive, deplorable and wicked. [Well yeah?]

So what kind of lifestyle might be preferable? Well, here we can turn back a few issues to a New York magazine January cover story on polyamory, featuring both a profile of a specific polycule and an extensive guide to “opening” your relationship or marriage.

When the Huberman profile appeared, some social-media voices suggested that there’s a tension in publishing a takedown of a man juggling six girlfriends after celebrating the juggle just a couple of months previously. But in reality the two cover stories are entirely of a piece. The implied critique of the neuroscience cad isn’t just that he has sex with lots of different women but that he does so deceptively and selfishly — instead of following the kind of open, complex process of negotiation that’s ethically required to be the kind of person who has sex with six different people at a time.

That idea of sex-as-process, with the sexual act itself embedded inside a kind of “best practices” of dialogue and interaction, seems to be where social liberalism has settled, for now, in its attempt to create a post-Hefnerian sexual culture. Thus the general fascination with polyamory, manifest in trend pieces, books and essays too numerous to count, isn’t just about envelope-pushing and shock value. It also reflects a desire to maintain the permissive sexual ethic that men like [Playboy founder Hugh] Hefner turned to their own exploitative ends, but to make it healthier and therapeutic, more female-friendly and egalitarian, safer and more structured.

Polyamory isn’t being offered as an alternative to conservative monogamy, in this sense, so much as an alternative to more dangerous, irresponsible, and deceptive forms of promiscuity — a responsible, spreadsheet-enabled, therapeutic version of the sexual revolution, in which transparency replaces cheating, and everything is permitted so long as you carefully negotiate permission.

Sounds pretty good! Especially because conservatives (of the old-fashioned type) are always talking about personal responsibility.

But I think he is committing a swap of cause and effect here, as people weak on history often do. In this case, our history.

For most of us old polyfolks who were there when today's movement settled on its current shape in the mid-1980s through 90s, polyamory (as opposed to broader forms of ethical non-monogamy) was not about tidier promiscuity. It was about actual heart-centered love — for people you truly want to treat well because you truly care about them. It was about the generalization of limerent, romantic love — that thing that has awed and obsessed and driven humans since humans existed — from the isolated couple, where society has carefully walled away its power, into wider, community-like fields that, we discovered, are not only imaginable but actually possible. Sometimes.

In the history of the poly movement, personal Road-to-Damascus revelations about such larger, agapé-style erotic-romantic love came first. Today's best poly practices developed not by an antiseptic therapeutic ideology, but by experiment and experience amid the early poly community's often bitter trials and errors. The wider world only later started to notice the emergent best practices — those found to improve the chance of success — as awareness of the movement finally began to spread mass-market.

Douthat continues:

A glance at some actual human relationships should raise some doubts about how well this model really works. Whatever Huberman’s failures of honesty and communication, for instance, he appears extremely well versed in the kind of therapy-speak that’s supposed to tame libidinous excess — suggesting that predators and cads can work through this system as well as any other.

Too true. 

...Or again, the new mom-with-an-open-marriage memoir by Molly Roden Winter, “More,” reads more like a testament to marital suffering than any kind of guide to the good life.

Also true. But as conservatives frequently say, getting to a good life often requires hard work and suffering. Ad astra per aspera. Roden Winter herself declares it was worth it.

●  Speaking of open-relationship memoirs by women, Rachel Krantz's Open comes out in paperback in June. Interviews and podcasts with her are already showing up. The book is sure to get more attention in the current environment than it did when it came out in hardback two years ago. From the publisher's description:

Krantz documents her dive into polyamory, from Brooklyn sex parties to swinging and beyond, in her extraordinary debut memoir. As she attempts to write a new plot for her love story with Adam, she runs up against miscommunications, gaslighting, and ancient power dynamics, and seeks solid ground in a relation-ship where the rules are ever-shifting. An award-winning journalist, she interviewed scientists, psychologists, and people living and loving outside the mainstream to understand what polyamory would do to her heart, mind, and life.

Here's a poly reviewer of the book for NPR two years ago: 'Open' explores polyamorous relationships through personal experience.

...I'll admit that I was trepidatious when I first approached this memoir. I've never really hidden the fact that I am polyamorous, nor that my partner of seven years and I have always had, to one extent or another, a non-monogamous relationship. Anyone who is poly (or polyam, the short form Krantz uses in the book) or non-monog knows when to share this information and when to silo it away in order to avoid the judging eyes and skeptical questions of the monogamous overculture. Knowing the memoir was about Krantz's introduction to non-monogamy — and not only that, but that she was introduced to it by a straight cis man, a demographic that is often assumed to abuse this relational preference — made me brace myself for a traditional happy ending about how it was a valid life choice but simply not for her.

Rachel Krantz

I couldn't have been more wrong. It's no spoiler to say that Krantz still identifies as polyam, at least according to social media, and... it's neither a manifesto of polyamorous ideals nor an argument against it. It's Krantz's sincere and curious reckoning with the cultural messaging we all receive about gendered expectations and power dynamics in romantic and sexual relationships in general. How do we untangle those from our own desires? How do we differentiate between those desires and the things we think we should want, or that our partners want us to want? The highs and lows of a first non-monogamous relationship prove the perfect canvas on which to explore these fundamental questions.

At first, things between Krantz and Adam seem rather rosy, although readers familiar with gaslighting and manipulation in relationships may recognize the red flags early on. ...

●  Holly Williams is another woman with a book coming out. She writes in the UK's Independent how she went back to monogamy brimming with good poly lessons: An open relationship taught me everything I needed to know about love (April 2). Her novel The Start of Something starts shipping next week. It's already a Cosmopolitan best book pick for 2024.

...The best lessons I’ve learned in how to be a good partner, and have a good relationship, came from exploring non-monogamy. ... I’m now in a happy, basically monogamous relationship. But starting out non-monogamous actually proved a pretty fantastic bedrock for long-term, committed love.

...My second novel, The Start of Something, tells the story of 10 characters via 10 interlocking sexual encounters. I wanted to explore the different shapes sex, love, and relationships can take in the modern world. ...

Running through The Start of Something is the belief that what makes love work is honesty – it doesn’t matter the structure, as long as you can communicate within it. This is hardly a new or radical take, I know. But – and it’s a big but! – it can still be alarmingly difficult. And while you might assume that opening a relationship would make it thornier, my own experience suggests the opposite – exploring non-monogamy made me a better partner.

...When I got into a serious relationship in my twenties, obviously it was monogamous, because I thought that was what being in a relationship meant. That was the point.

...[It] ended because of my unfaithfulness. Cue crushing, terrible guilt – and a new certainty that monogamy was Not For Me. ... I needed to be free: no one was ever going to tie me down again!

A pinball of pent-up horniness, I rebounded my way through Tinder, Feeld, and the nightclubs of east London. But I didn’t know how to communicate my need for freedom, and so often took a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. ... Still, there were clues that “just not mentioning it” was not working amazingly: the racing heart, the niggling guilt… And I did hurt people, by not being honest, and not really taking their feelings into account.

...It wasn’t until I started seeing people who were already in their own open relationships that I really understood what it took to make things work. What I learned was pretty simple: the more we properly talked about what we were looking for, without any moralising or persuading, the easier and safer it felt. If you’re gonna do ethical non-monogamy, my god you’re also gonna do a lot of talking. You can’t muddle through on vibes and hunches – there have got to be explicit boundaries, because there are a thousand ways to “do” non-monogamy. It meant planning before certain situations, and debriefing after: Are we all happy going out together? Will I stay over afterwards? So, how did it feel…?

...It all felt uncomfortable at first, and then it felt liberating. Have you ever been trapped in circular discussions with a partner, where you expect them to silently know what you need and if they don’t, you subtly punish them? There was way less of all that. Fewer games. Almost no sulks. Dating poly people made me more upfront, more realistic, less embarrassed about my true desires; it made me think harder about what’s behind feeling jealous, or insecure.

When I began dating my current partner Tommo, I was still seeing someone else. But then… as we fell in love, we also fell into monogamy. I believe that romantic love is not a finite resource: you can love more than one partner, like you can love more than one child, or friend. However, time is a finite resource. I soon found I wanted to spend more of it with Tommo than with anyone else. But I maintain that the open beginning was a great basis for the relationship. From the off, we learned to be calm, transparent, and clear in our communication. Our trust in each other is not predicated on exclusivity – but on honesty.

It helped us ditch any assumptions of what a relationship “should” look like…

Knowing this makes me feel both more free, and more secure. ... We talk about what’s working and what’s not. We ask the big questions. Including whether or not we should open up. I don’t want to just slot into a societally-approved, till-death-do-us-part model – I want to allow for movement, and growth.

Because for me, monogamy shouldn’t be the default: it should be a question. ... Right now, I’m happy spending all my romantic energy on just one person – but I think the reason that works is because there was never the assumption it had to be that way.

●  An example of some early best practices surviving, mostly intact, into today's mass market is this quickie little Open Marriage 101 in a women's mag: The 4 Do’s and 3 Don'ts of a Successful Open Marriage, According to a Non-Monogamist (PureWow, March 25; reprinted on aol.com and Yahoo).

"We chatted with Ally Iseman... a speaker, non-monogamy educator and practitioner and organizer in the sex-positive community in Los Angeles....'"

The subheads:

DO: Establish Your "Why"...

DON’T: Think This Will Fix Anything...

DO: Have Weekly Meetings Where You Discuss the Specifics of Your Agreement...

DON’T: Expect Your Partner to Be a Mind Reader...

DON’T: Go with the Flow...

DO: Connect with Fellow Non-Monogamy Enthusiasts...

DO: Decide How Much You Want—or Don’t Want—to Know...

●  Lastly: Old forgotten revelations, if they are correct rather than illusory, do not die but lie dormant, reawaiting their time. How Psychedelics Can Guide the Transformative Journey of Polyamory is a serious new paper by ketamine-assist therapist Justin Natoli, JD, LMFT, in Los Angeles (Chacruna Institute, April 2).

In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found few opinions that feel as personal or divisive as those around monogamy and polyamory. I hold a mindset that different arrangements work better for different people, and what works best may change over the course of one’s life. However, I also observe that institutions of power put monogamy on a pedestal in the postindustrial world. The result is a queering of other healthy forms of relationship that limits the love we share as a human family.

My intention with this paper is to help balance the scales. First, I will offer an expansive definition of polyamory and explore how it can be a journey of healing and transformation. I will then identify the three primary struggles I have observed along the polyamorous journey: shame, past trauma, and difficulty transcending labels. I will also illustrate how the spiritual and therapeutic use of psychedelics can help guide us through those struggles. To be clear, I make no claims for or against monogamy in this paper. I simply wish to highlight polyamory’s transformative potential and reclaim its validity.

The ideas in this paper come from my own psychedelic and polyamorous experiences, my clinical observations as a psychotherapist, and 25 transcribed interviews. All personal statements in this paper come from these interviews with the participants’ consent. I found interview participants by posting queries in Facebook groups related to psychedelic healing. The participants who responded were diverse in age, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, socioeconomic status, and preference for monogamy or polyamory. Each interview lasted approximately 30 minutes and followed a structured series of questions.

Chacruna Institute 

...Psychedelics help us transcend our labeling ego to see the full complexity and potential of our relationships. By removing limits and expectations, we are able to access what Hardy and Easton (2009) call “clean love”:

How many times have you rejected the possibility of love because it didn’t look the way you expected it to? Perhaps some characteristic was missing you were sure you must have, some other trait was present that you never dreamed of accepting. What happens when you throw away your expectations and open your eyes to the fabulous love that is shining right in front of you, holding out its hand? Clean love is love without expectations. (p. 59)

To illustrate how psychedelics help us access clean love, it is fitting to share my own story. ...

(Obligatory caution: These substances are not to be taken lightly. Read up.)

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Meanwhile, as the larger world stage darkens. . .

Call or write your representative.

(Look up their phone / email.)

    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can donate to Ukraine relief through this updated list of vetted organizations (Oct. 2023) or elsewhere. We're giving to a big one, Razom, and to a little informal one, Pizza for Ukraine in Kharkiv, the project of an old friend of my wife.

But that is only the start. 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 and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, see If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies. 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 also 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."

Now, writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

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

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

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Social attitudes in Ukraine are mostly traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But not bitterly so like often in the US; in the last generation the ideal of modern European civil society has become widely treasured, and social progressivism has room to thrive. The status of women has fast advanced, especially post-invasion (pre-invasion article). More than 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — including as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, snipers, and infantry. (Intimidating video: "Thus the Witch has Said".) Ukraine has more women volunteering in combat positions than any other armed force in the world.

  

Ukraine's LGBT military unicorn.
The thorns and barbed wire
represent old restrictions
now being cut away.
 

Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

And in December 2022, Russia made it a crime not just to speak for LGBT recognition in Russia or occupied Ukraine, but to speak for "non-traditional sexual relations." Pre-invasion, Russia had a visible polyamory education and awareness movement.

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

Your congressperson's email and phone. Putin-aligned Republicans right now are blocking some $60 billion in aid, especially ammunition, that the Ukrainians desperately need in order not to be overwhelmed by Russian advances. Just a handful of other Republicans getting some courage to do what they know is right would be enough.                         

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

Women defenders in a trench in the Donetsk region

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

Update April 14, 2024: More than a year later Vidma is still alive, still in the Bakhmut area, and posting TikToks. Her unit is at the front in or around the battle for Chasiv Yar, a town just walking distance west of Bakhmut that will soon, unfortunately, be in world news. A young girl who looks high-school age has showed up to join their fight. Another. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us. 

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

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

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Polyamory is all over the news. Two reasons why so much of it is about polyfamilies.

Lots to catch up on. 

Many readers here have noticed a trend: The type of polyamory that most fascinates the media, presumably because it most fascinates the public, is the structurally tightest form: multi-partner polyfamilies. Especially with kids.

I think it's because polyfamilies are two opposite things at once. They are the most radically different form of ENM compared to what people usually think is possible (compared to, say, parallel poly or just an open relationship). And polyfamilies are also the most like the culturally-standard household, just with a twist: three or more adults instead of two.

●  NBC's Today Show, or at least its website, publicized a new word invented by a quad with kids: polyfamory. The group didn't appear on TV, but this article was a hit on Today's website: Mom + dad + mom + dad = One big, happy family. "Meet the parents practicing ‘polyfamory.’ In polyfamory, the possibilities are endless. And poly parents say the challenges are worth it." (Jan. 23).

The piece features two households. The first:

By Danielle Campoamor

As society's idea of what constitutes a family continues to expand, some parents are living in 'polyfamory' households, where multiple partners birth and care for all of their children under one roof.

Alysia Rodgers, 34, says her and her husband, Tyler, were not looking for polyamory — the term for when a person has one or more romantic partners at the same time, with the enthusiastic consent of everyone involved — when they met Sean Hartless, 46, and his wife, Taya.

"We didn't even know what polyamory was, until we started getting feelings for each other," Alysia tells TODAY.com.

Soon, Sean and Taya, 28, were driving nearly two hours to see Alysia and Tyler, 35, in their home in Oregon. Exhausted by the commute and fueled by a desire to see everyone more frequently, the couples moved into a new house together in February, 2020.

And that's how polyamory became polyfamory.

Tyler and Alysia were already parents to two children, now 7 and 8. Tyler says explaining their new living situation to the kids was "really easy."

"Our kids already knew we were dating Sean and Taya," Tyler tells TODAY.com. "We told them: 'You know mom has a boyfriend and dad had a girlfriend and we're going to move in together, and we're all going to be a big family and they're going to help parent you, so we're going to need you to treat them like you treat us — like parents.'"

Since living together under one roof, the family has added two children.

"I birthed one and Taya birthed the other," Alysia says. "We did not regulate the biology" — meaning Alysia, Taya, Tyler and Sean do not know who their 22-month-old's and 15-month-old's biological fathers are.

"We're all equal parents to all of the children and it's not up for debate or discussion," Alysia says. "It's not something that we're trying to hide from the children either. If they want to know where their DNA comes from, we will absolutely go down that path with them. But at this point in their lives, it doesn't matter."

"We wanted to do everything we could to make sure that everybody feels like an equal parent," Taya adds. "At this point, finding out their genetics would change nothing."

A rise in polyamorous relationships

Polyamorous relationships have gained popularity in recent years. One 2021 study of 3,438 single adults in the United States found that one in six respondents "wanted to be polyamorous;" one in nine have been at some point, and one in 15 said they "knew someone who was or is polyamorous."

Still, shows like "Sister Wives" — which depict polygamy, in which one person is married to multiple partners — have caused confusion and even created negative stereotypes about polyamorous families, Sean says.

"'Sister Wives' references always make us laugh, because that's practicing polygamy versus polyamory," he explains. "I think people hear the 'poly' lead in and think that it's the same thing — that's not us. We don't have a hierarchal situation here — we're all trying to be equals and not have the 'patriarch' lead the family."

People magazine soon had their own story about the family: Poly Quad Parents Open Up About Raising Kids, Having Babies Together (Jan. 31).

Business Insider published a piece about them from a different angle: Meet a 4-parent, polyamorous family using 3 incomes and zero daycare costs to beat the US childcare crisis (Feb. 4). The setup "provides the family a unique financial edge: three steady incomes and zero childcare costs."

Then many other media began featuring them.

Back to the Today.com piece: Its second family includes Jennifer Martin, who you may remember for her other media outreach since last summer. She also appeared later as the guest for 90 minutes on the podcast 'Thereafter', "a place where we explore life on the other side of faith change" (Feb. 14). She's an ex-Evangelical who still identifies as Christian.

Jennifer Martin, 34, agrees [about the religious "patriarch" comment by the other family above]. "It's missing autonomy," Jennifer says, who lives Virginia with her husband Daniel, 35, partner Ty Simpson, 32, and their two children.

Jennifer and Daniel both grew up in conservative, evangelical households, where, Jennifer says, "if you fall in love with somebody, you get married." The couple were engaged at 19, married at 20 and had two kids by the time Jennifer was 25.

"I don't even think I ever heard the word 'polyamory,'" Jennifer says. "I didn't know anybody who was non-monogamous. I didn't think that existed."

At 27, after reconsidering what she believed, Jennifer told Daniel she was feeling sexually attracted to and even in love with other people, but was not falling out of love with him, either.

"We took things really slow — we saw a counselor, read books and we went to a polyamory group," she says. "He started dating somebody before I did."

In 2018, Jennifer met Ty. In 2020, he moved in with Jennifer and Daniel and their family grew.

"One of the things that was hard for me in the beginning, was kind of shaking off the mentality that I was taking something away from Daniel and his experiences with the kids," Ty tells TODAY.com. "But it's a community. ... We all have our own roles to play, and at the end of the day, the main goal is to ensure that the kids are being raised to be kind and loving."

Both families say there are both pros and cons to a polyfamory household.

"We have four sets of adult hands to work on things," Tyler says. "It's very rare, I think, for people to have that kind of help."

Alysia, Tyler and Sean all work full time, while Taya is a stay-at-home mom. Sean says knowing the children are always being cared for by at least one parent "is a big sigh of relief" because everyone knows "your kids are for sure taken care of by the right people."

They say their children also learn valuable lessons as a result of their family dynamic — lessons like, "relationships don't have to look a certain way," Sean says, and that however they choose to live is "100% their choice" and that their parents will "love them and support them no matter what," Alysia adds.

Jennifer says she's glad her sons are learning about "autonomy," to question traditional gender roles and how to tap into the power of community.

"We make everything in the house a communal effort," she explains. "They realize that everybody puts their weight in and has a role to play. I hope that that will form a mindset of mutual aid and community when they grow up."

Of course, polyfamory comes with some challenges: scheduling, for one.

"We have to meet weekly and our Google calendars are so chaotic," Daniel tells TODAY.com. "We have to make sure that not only can we coordinate schedules, but that people's needs are met." ...

...Despite the challenges — including moments of jealousy, strangers sexualizing their polyamorous relationships and not being completely accepted by family members — both families say the pros outweigh the cons because their children benefit from having so many trusting, loving adults in their lives.

"At the end of the day, we're just like any other monogamous family — there's just four of us," Tyler says. "Being a parent is so much more than just biology, and that's what we're about."

One of the Polyfamory quad posted on the group's Instagram: "I cannot thank [Today Show author] @daniellecampoamor enough for being an absolute joy to work with. The positivity and education in this article is everything we could’ve asked for."

●  New York Times, Style section: A Handfasting Ceremony For Two … or Three (or More) (Feb. 18 online; Feb. 19 print edition).

"The Celtic ritual has become a popular commitment ceremony for some polyamorous couples" [sic]

By Jenny Block [who presumably didn't write that tagline].

...Handfasting is an ancient practice that “has become more popular across the board,” said Scarlett Mullikin, an officiant based in Kankakee County, Ill., and the founder of Natural Element Ceremonies. And because it involves binding partners’ hands together — symbolizing the binding of two, three, four (or more) lives — it’s “the easiest way to connect multi-partners” or those who are polyamorous, she said.

...The benefits of a committed relationship are the same whether monogamous, polyamorous, legally recognized or not. “There’s a safety and a security to crossing this threshold of marriage,” [Houston counselor Ty David] Lerman said. “Polyam relationships are still just relationships.”

And with a handfasting ceremony, Ms. Mullikin said, partners can “experience the joy and the energy and the bliss that goes into a wedding day.”

●  On TV: CBS Minnesota WCCO-TV broadcast What is polyamory? What does it mean in relationships? (Feb. 8). "There is a broad spectrum of relationship types that address romantic or sexual needs, Dr. Shonda Craft explains." Watch the 5-minute interview. Craft is positive and excellently informative.

● Throuples, ménages and the power of three: Can ‘triad’ relationships really work? (The Independent, UK; Jan. 20). "Throuples, or ‘triad’ relationships, are having a moment."

iStock

“Call us a throuple,” Selena Gomez recently captioned an Instagram photo showing her embracing Brooklyn Beckham and his wife Nicola Peltz. She was apparently joking, but that’s perhaps part of the problem. While various celebrities seem to be vaguely alluding to polyamory lately, everyone’s being decidedly coy about coming right out and talking about it.

...There are countless ways a triad can look. Grace, a 41-year-old civil servant from Bristol, recalls her first throuple experience being a bit of an accident. “We had some really good times and there was genuine desire and intent between both my partners to be together as well as with me, but they were both quite shy with each other and their relationship went slowly,” she explains.

...Many of the hierarchical problems that arise in throuples, though, are down to the way they’re formed: often an established couple who then meet a “third”, with all the problems that arise from that kind of language.

“If two people out of three had a pre-existing relationship that was already well established, those two people have couple’s privilege,” Grace explains, adding that it can impact everything – from “big decisions [that] always prioritise the stability of one of the relationships in the triad, to small things like language that minimises or separates the most recent partner.” Saying to the newest partner “Wanna come with us to the gig Friday night?”, or even “We love you, we’re so happy we met you” reinforces an unequal “us” and “you” dynamic that can lead to pain in the long term. ...

Winter, a 28-year-old from Bristol, says it’s not an uncommon set-up: all her throuple experiences were with herself, the same established partner, and a third. “My aim was always to create distinct and separate relationships between each of us, thinking of it as three pairs rather than one throuple,” she says. ... “I felt the frame-of-mind was important to how things were viewed.”

While it’s great to see more conversations being had around ethical non-monogamy, there’s also a keen awareness among everyone I spoke to that media representation is usually a massive let-down. Anne Hodder-Smith, a sex expert based in the US, says that the well-worn cliché of one man and two women enjoying a string of threesomes is a cis-normative trope that very rarely reflects reality.

...“Stop using the word ‘third’. Nothing says you want to devalue a human being by adding them onto your relationship like that word.”

Winter also recommends taking time and allowing space for it to work. “Go slowly, and make sure everybody has figured each other out and the dynamic has reached stability before really committing to any labels,” she says. “This involves the general relationship advice of strong, open and honest communication from all parties, and turned up to 10. ...”

●  Also in the The Independent, a book author in a same-sex marriage speaks up for poly relationships. Throuples aren’t immoral – and neither is my own ‘scandalous’ marriage (Jan. 26; registration walled)

Why should we think it shocking for someone to love multiple others? We don’t restrict any other relationship to a binary.

"Among polyamorists, erotic pleasure and commitment
are shared rather than narrowed." (iStock)

By Andrew Solomon

...I have spent several years interviewing people in polygamous and polyamorous relationships, and while I started my research feeling suspicious of these arrangements, I ended by thinking they may make perfect sense to the people living them – and that their ideas of affective commitment were ultimately all that mattered.

Why should we think it shocking for someone to love multiple others? We don’t restrict any other relationship to a binary; most people have multiple friends. If some people want to be in multiple sexual relationships, or to make a commitment to one another that is sustaining and defining even in the absence of eros, then why should those arrangements be denied legal status? In fact, there is a social and political interest in sustaining these models, because people who marry one another – in any arrangement – usually take care of one another. This can relieve the state of enormous costs and burdens. ...

...I write as someone whose own marriage would have seemed scandalous when I was growing up, and was illegal until I was in my 40s. ... In his excellent new novel The New Life, the London Review of Books' Tom Crewe describes the struggle that set the stage for my marriage, and I could not read his words without feeling anew how vulnerable we remain to the shifting tides of chauvinism. My finest book has been banned in three American states lest the story of my joyful marriage infect young readers. ...

●  Quebec LGBTQ2S+ minister 'open' to recognizing multi-parent families (Canadian Press, Feb. 3)

Quebec's minister responsible for LGBTQ2S+ issues, Martine Biron, says she's open to developing some form of recognition for families with more than two parents.

...Groups like the Coalition des familles LGBT+ have called upon the Legault government to provide legal recognition for multi-parent families. ...

●  More from Cosmopolitan: 7 Things People *Always* Get Wrong About What It’s Really Like to Be in a Throuple (Jan. 25)

By Abby Moss

My partners and I are at IKEA, in the middle of the kitchen section, arguing about Kilner jars. I’m saying we’ve got enough jars and that everything in our kitchen doesn’t need to be stored in jars anyway. Andrea*, on the other hand, thinks we need jars for everything—rice, pasta, lentils, and so on. Paul* doesn’t care about the jars but is getting hungry and wants to go get meatballs. We’re attracting a few odd glances from the couples passing by. They’re trying to figure out our dynamic. There are three of us, but we’re arguing like a couple. We clearly live together, but we don’t seem like roommates—that’s for sure. ...

●  Conservatives continue to go after the shrinks: American Psychological Association distances itself from panel studying 'marginalized' polyamory community says Fox News, Feb. 16, citing The Christian Post.

The APA "does not have a policy with respect to consensual non-monogamous relationships," a spokesperson said. ...

The APA Division 44 Committee on Consensual Non-Monogamy "focuses on research, practice, and education about consensually non-monogamous relationships," according to its website.

The committee said that it "seeks to address the needs of people who practice consensual non-monogamy, including needs that may arise from the intersection of [consensually non-monogamous relationships] with their other marginalized identities."

The "five primary purposes" of APA 44 include research, psychological practice, education and training, social justice and public awareness.

A Feb. 10 article by Dr. Melissa Martin in The Published Reporter that noted the committee is "circulating a survey and a petition seeking to secure legally protected class status for individuals with multiple sex partners," and the former child therapist also speculated that APA 44 shows the APA "wants bigamy and polygamy to be legalized as group marriage."

APA Public Affairs Director Kim I. Mills pushed back against any claims that the organization supports polyamory, according to The Christian Post.

"APA divisions are quasi-independent organizations that are free to establish committees to represent and promote their specialties within psychology, using the best empirical evidence," Mills told the outlet.

"As such, they do not speak for the American Psychological Association, which does not have a policy with respect to consensual non-monogamous relationships," Mills continued. "The only official APA policies are those that are adopted by the APA Council of Representatives, the APA's governing body of nearly 200 of the nation's leading psychologists, which meets twice a year. ...

●  Easy as one, two, three: Are throuples becoming more mainstream? (Sydney Morning Herald and other Australian papers in its chain, Feb. 3)

Dianne Gain

By Samantha Selinger-Morris

...“Students are much more likely now, than 10 years ago, to say they’re open to polyamory, or that they are in fact polyamorous,” says Dr Samuel Shpall, a senior lecturer at The University of Sydney who teaches The Philosophy Of Sex. ...

QT Hotels and Resorts ... is launching its upcoming ‘You, Plus Two’ Valentine’s Day deal, aimed at celebrating “love that comes in three”. QT’s Australian hotels and resorts will offer free martinis and oysters for bookings of three this February 14. ...

“I find, clinically, often couples come in saying, ‘We want to explore non-monogamy as a way of spicing up our [sex] life’,” says Sydney sex therapist Jacqueline Hellyer.... “It’s often seen as a bit of a quick fix to a bored or jaded relationship.” ...

But her clients often don’t go forward and pursue being part of a throuple, or another consensual non-monogamous arrangement, after she walks them through what they really want from their relationship, and how having multiple partners can play out. ...

Trio in ‘Y tu mamá también’ (Shutterstock)

●  Throuples on film: 9 times movies and TV shows depicted ‘triad’ relationships (UK Independent, Feb. 15). "Sometimes three’s company... sometimes it can be so much more. Louis Chilton picks nine of the best films and TV shows centring on three-person polyamorous relationships."

●  In the Georgia Voice, an LGBTQ semi-monthly: Dating While Queer in The Modern Age: On Ethical Nonmonogamy and Polyamory (Feb. 2)

By Divine Ikpe

...I spoke to two different polyamorous queer people: Opal, who is just starting to consider polyamory as a viable option for herself, and Fay, who is in a long-term polyamorous throuple. ...

●  I tried the hook-up app for Generation Threesome. Here’s what happened next (The UK's Times, Feb. 9, paywalled.) "Wooed by social media, Gen Z is embracing lifestyle choices that were once considered taboo."

●  Have non-monogamy labels on dating apps caused more harm than good? (Mashable, Feb. 14)

Ashley Vargas

In the last months of 2022, the ethically non-monogamous (ENM) community celebrated a huge win. Dating app Hinge launched their 'Relationship Types' feature, allowing their users to mark if they identified as ethically non-monogamous (ENM) or monogamous. Undoubtedly a landmark event, this marked the first mainstream ‘traditional’ dating app to make conscious strides towards inclusivity for the ENM community since OkCupid allowed polyamorous couples to link their profiles in 2016. Speaking to Mashable, a Hinge spokesperson commented: "We believe that everyone looking for love should be able to find it which is why we’re constantly looking at new ways to support daters' needs."

However, the move sparked an increase in anti-ENM discourse on social media and brought up new questions asked about the virtual future and place for ENM people. ...

●  Away from the mainstream apps, a bi guy's take on 9 Polyamorous Dating Apps [that] Will Help You Meet Awesome Partners (Men's Health, Feb. 13, by Zachary Zane). "For poly folks looking for those special someones."

●  Zane also has been given a new column in Cosmopolitan: Mistake #1: Diving Into Polyamory for All the Wrong Reasons (Feb. 8). "Introducing Navigating Non-Monogamy, a new column in which Zachary Zane walks you through all the fumbles he’s made on his polyamory journey so that you, dear reader, don’t have to."

●  Feeld is probably the leading dating app for poly, ENM, kink, and other alternative folx. Document Journal, a classy fashion magazine "of independent thought and culture," runs a photo-heavy feature on the company and its founder: Feeld is the dating app for the next sexual revolution (Feb. 7). "Document catches up with Ana Kirova, the radical platform’s founder, examining the roots, rules, and labels of the modern sexual landscape."

Claire Seka

●  Quite a different take from the student Fordham Observer at Fordham University: We Can All Learn From Polyamory (Feb. 8), by Jessica Wu. "The nine pillars of relationship anarchy provide lessons for people in any type of relationship."

● 'It's a liberation': Belgians increasingly open to polyamorous relationships (The Brussels Times, Feb. 3)

●  Whole Lotta Love: Polyamory Takes Off (in the Pacific Sun of Marin County, California, " the longest running alternative newsweekly on the planet," Feb. 7)

...“I have seen many straight couples open their relationship at the woman’s initiative,” said Diane Gleim, a certified sex therapist (CST) based in Sonoma County. “[The common] assumption is that it’s mostly men who seek polyamory because they want multiple sexual partners. There is research that shows that monogamous, heterosexual women actually desire novel sex and novel sexual partners more than heterosexual, monogamous men.” Several other counselors interviewed agreed.

Even when women are not the instigators, they often become champions of the way of life. ...

UPCOMING POLYCONS.  The annual round of polyamory conventions, retreats, campouts, and other gatherings is opening up again, tentatively, as the pandemic seems to be receding. At least three are set for April and May:

–  Poly Big Fun retreat, April 9–12, in Bastrop State Park near Austin, TX

–  Southwest Love Fest, April 14–16, Tucson, AZ

–  The ever poly-friendly New Culture Spring Camp, May 5–10, Abrams Creek Retreat Center, Mt. Storm, WV.

This summer has a lot of them. See Alan's List of Polyamory Events for all such gatherings on the calendar for the next 12 months. All that I know about, anyway! Tell me about any I'm missing: alan7388 (at) gmail.com .

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

Meanwhile...

Why have I been ending posts to this polyamory news site with Ukraine?

Because I've seen many progressive movements die out because they failed to scan the wider world correctly and understand their position in it strategically.

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

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

The Russian family-cartoon series Masyanya
turned dissident. Watch. The cartoonist got out.
Update: a brilliant sequel of turnabout, with a
coda of empathy in wartime. 
 

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

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

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

For what it's worth, this site has received more pagereads from Ukraine over the years (56,400) than from any other country in eastern Europe.

For now, you can donate to Ukraine relief through this list of vetted organizations or many others. We're giving to a big one, Razom, and to a little one, Pizza for Ukraine in Kharkiv, a project of an old friend of my wife (story).

But that is only the start. For those of us born since World War II, we are witnessing the most consequential war of our lifetimes. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine.

The coming times are going to require hard things of us. We don't get to choose the time and place in history we find ourselves born into, but we do get to choose how we respond to it. Buck up and be ready.

Need a little help bucking up? Play this. Another version, on the streets of Kherson the night after its liberation November 11. More? Just some guys in Kharkiv (our Pizza for Ukraine town) helping to hold onto a free and open society, a shrinking thing in the world. The tossed grenade seems to have saved them. Maybe your granddad did this across a trench from Hitler's troops — for you, and us, because a world fascist movement was successfully defeated that time, opening the way for the rest of the 2oth century. Although the outcome didn't look good for a couple of years there.

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

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

PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, see If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies. 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. (More.)

Now, writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

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

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

Social attitudes in Ukraine tend traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church, but not bitterly so like often in the US; the ideal of modern European civil society is widely treasured, and social progressivism has room to thrive. The status of women is rocketing, especially since the start of the war (pre-war article). A reported 57,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions, including as combat officers, platoon leaders, artillery gunners, tankers, and snipers. Some LGBT folx in the armed forces wear symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay."

And in November, Russia made it a crime not just to speak for LGBT recognition, but to speak for "non-traditional sexual relations." Until recently Russia had an active polyamory education and awareness movement.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our continued material support for as long as it takes. Speak up for it, loudly.

"Defenders of Bakhmut," where soldiers at the front line gave Zelensky the signed battle flag he presented to Nancy Pelosi. Art by Natasha Le in Mikolaiv; she reinterprets traditional guardian angels as riot grrls for an upcoming generation.

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

PS: A real-life version of that icon in Bakhmut; the artwork isn't just fantasy.  Vedma ("Witch") commands a mortar platoon there; watch vid from Jan. 3. In February they were rotated out of Bakhmut after many months, and she recorded this (Feb. 21):

🇺🇦Witch tells the story of the Bakhmut Asphalt Plant❤️ pic.twitter.com/UC3y0NsDjQ

— Sofia Ukraini (@SlavaUk30722777) February 22, 2023

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