On ABC's 20/20, a network of polyfamilies shows how it's done.

ABC-TV

They pulled it off. On ABC's "20/20" last night, a group of eight adults and three kids faced down an incredulous anchor and, for 7½ minutes, displayed to perhaps 5–7 million viewers what a happy poly network of families can look like. Watch it here:



Here's ABC's lovely text article paralleling the segment. It follows the video fairly closely.

I wonder, however, why the word "polyamory" never once appeared in the article or on air. It's not like ABC has been afraid of the word in the past.

The segment was part of a one-hour show titled “The New Sex: Strange Arrangements.” The other parts were an interview with 50 Shades of Grey author E. L. James, stuff about celebrity sex, and gigolos. (You can watch the whole thing.)

A leading spokesperson for the poly group was Sierra Black, who has recently written about her open marriage and raising her children in it for Salon and the parenting sites Strollerderby and Babble.com. Here's her blog Childwild, in which she's been talking about the 20/20 experience. Excerpt:

I did this because I wanted to give mainstream America a peek at a healthy, happy, thriving circle of poly families. It’s my hope that we’ve done just that, and that this is a step toward a future where news shows won’t want to do segments on how “kooky” polyamory is, because it’s just a thing some people do. I am fairly confident positive portrayals on TV can make a difference, and I’m grateful to ABC for their approach in this one.

My great thanks go out to ABC, 20/20 and in particular anchor Elizabeth Vargas and our producers Marc and Michael. I felt they gave a respectful, balanced portrayal of our family life and relationships.

I’m also grateful beyond words to the family, friends and loved ones who appeared in the segment: thank you for your courage and wisdom. To those who counseled me off-screen, practiced interviews, loaned me pretty things to wear (thanks mom!), hosted the viewing party, recorded the show and were there when I needed a hand to hold or a kind word: thank you from the bottom and the top and every in between part of my heart. This couldn’t have happened without each of you.

Another Strollerderby regular posts,

...Watching Sierra’s relationship profile on TV just now, I realized how incredibly stable her unusual family is.

The best part, I thought, was listening to Sierra’s elder daughter Rio describe her parents’ open marriage. From ABC News:

You might think Sierra and Martin’s daughters think their parents’ arrangement is unusual, but when “20/20″ anchor Elizabeth Vargas asked their daughter, Rio, if she thought her family was different from other families, she replied, “Not really.”

Rio’s definition of an open marriage was fairly precise, for a 7-year-old: “Your parent or one of your parents is dating a different person that’s not part of your family,” she said.

Vargas proved herself a bit conventional during the interview process, asking questions like, “Aren’t you just committing adultery?” The obvious answer is, of course not, though Sierra and her husband Martin gave an even better retort. “As Martin put it, ‘There’s no cheating.’ Sierra added, ‘We are committed to being an open book with each other, and it’s all based on a really high degree of love and trust.’”

Precisely.... There’s communication, dialogue, even bargaining amongst those involved about the types of behaviors that are acceptable to all parties and those that are off limits. I don’t doubt that more marriages could benefit from that kind of honesty.

In a tweet, anchor Elizabeth Vargas commented to a viewer right afterward, "i will admit, i really dont get it. But they all seem to really care about each other. Just cant imagine it myself..."

Update: Sierra writes us, "I'm trying to encourage positive feedback about the 20/20 piece to ABC. If you liked ABC's take on #polyamory, let them know @ABC2020 [twitter] or leave a supportive comment on this article: http://abcn.ws/IvnyTS .

"PS -- I saw you mentioned that the word polyamory wasn't used in the piece. The producers were confused about what polyamory means. They thought it was always and only households with three or more adults living together as equal partners; what you probably think of as polyfidelity or plural marriage. We tried to set them right about it and I think mostly succeeded, but they seem to have wound up thinking any term of art was confusing and just going with 'open marriage.' Meh."

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"Honey, I'm Home From My Date: Mass. Families Open Up About Open Marriage"

ABC News


Update: The show aired and yup, darn good. The host struck an incredulous tone (this is normal), but whole extended group got to explain their community of loving relationships and the benefits to the marriages within the group, to the group as a whole, and to their kids. Who had their say too. For 7½ minutes altogether. You can watch it here; click "Two Marriages, Many Lovers."

The article below includes a fair amount of what was said. Good job, people.

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

Just ahead of tonight's "20/20" segment on polyfamilies (as part of the show airing Friday April 20th), ABC News has put up a wonderful companion article on the web.

Honey, I'm Home From My Date: Mass. Families Open Up About Open Marriage

By MARC DORIAN and MICHAEL MENDELSOHN

To most people, the idea of their loved one dating and having passionate sex with other people is repellent. But for two married couples -- with children -- in Somerville, Mass., and thousands more across the country, this is the happy, stable norm.

Sierra Black, 33, is a writer for a popular parenting website. She's been married to Martin, 47, for almost nine years. Martin is a research scientist at a nearby university. (Martin and others in this article will be identified only by first names.)

Though most nights they're home together to put their two young daughters, ages 7 and 4, to bed, on other nights Sierra might be found canoodling with her lover, Aaron, and Martin might go on a sleepover date with his tall, blond girlfriend, whom we'll call J.

..."I make [dates with J] the least disruptive as possible," said Martin. "Sometimes, we just go out and have dinner ... and other times I have a sleepover. And I let [my kids] know that I'm having one, so if they wake up at night ... [and] need to go to bathroom, they know that I'm not there, but I'll be back in the morning."

You might think Sierra and Martin's daughters think their parents' arrangement is unusual, but when "20/20" anchor Elizabeth Vargas asked their daughter, Rio, if she thought her family was different from other families, she replied, "Not really."

Rio's definition of an open marriage was fairly precise, for a 7-year-old: "Your parent or one of your parents is dating a different person that's not part of your family," she said.

Sierra and Martin are very close friends with another local couple: Molly, 35, and David, 43. They have an open marriage, too, and are parents of a 6-year-old daughter. Those aren't the only things the two couples share.

Martin's girlfriend, J, is also David's girlfriend.

...Said Molly, "I get a lot back from this. I have a tremendous amount of love and support in my life, and that is because I have all these strong relationships."

These extracurricular relationships are not fleeting affairs and the couples aren't "swingers." Though Molly and David have been married for 12 years, Molly has been seeing Mark for five years, and David has been seeing J for three. Molly and Sierra have also been intimate for three years. And friendships were often cultivated years before things got intimate.

Honest, continuous communication is key, say many couples with open marriages.

As Martin put it, "There's no cheating."

Sierra added, "We are committed to being an open book with each other, and it's all based on a really high degree of love and trust."

"They have a very specialized ethical code," according to Dr. Elisabeth Sheff, a former sociology professor at Georgia State University who has studied people in open relationships for 15 years. "There's a real ethical basis by which they manage their relationships. In the end they may even be more egalitarian and kinder than those in monogamous relationships...which are often on auto-pilot."

...Molly and David have a daughter. But what kids of open marriages see, Molly said, "is lots of stable relationships with people who chose them consciously and happily."

Clinical psychologist Esther Perel, who wrote about open marriages in her book Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and Domestic, said "...You're giving the message to your children that this is an important dimension of life and that you take it seriously and that you negotiate it with care, with responsibility, and with respect."

Indeed, when "20/20" caught up one night with Sierra, Martin, David, Molly, Mark, Aaron, Romy and J, they were having a tame evening, with the three children joyfully playing around.

To those who might criticize such a family life, Molly said, "We all put so much love and effort into this life that we've created for our children, and saying, 'Oh, you're a bad parent' because you've chosen to structure your relationships in such and such a way -- I find that hurtful."

...Could open marriage join premarital sex, interracial marriage, gay rights and easy access to contraception on the list of former taboos now widely accepted in mainstream society?

"I don't think that open marriage will become a dominant model," said Esther Perel. "But it will become one of the many models for relationships. ... [T]here isn't one-size-fits-all."

Read the whole article (April 20, 2012). And add a comment.

The show's permanent online home should eventually be here.

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Atlanta Poly Weekend 2012: On the Way Up

I went to Atlanta Poly Weekend March 8-10, and here's a report. APW is a regional hotel con that's now in its second year, growing fast, and promising a big future.


"Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined two years ago that we would be able to do this," an emotional Billy Holder told the crowd at the conference-closing meeting on Sunday afternoon. He and his triad partners Pocket and Jeremy ("PB&J") first got the gleam in their eye about creating a Southern poly conference while lying in the sun one October afternoon in 2009. They proceeded to grow the Atlanta Polyamory Meetup group into a large and vibrant social happening. Then, drawing on experience working for science-fiction cons, they took the plunge, fronted a scary amount of money, and in March 2011 put on the South's first poly conference, aided by local volunteers. I was there; see my writeup.

Although that first Atlanta Poly Weekend was a success on many levels, drawing 113 people all told, it lost money. But not much, and only because of one hotel-contract glitch. PB&J were announcing the dates for APW 2012 even before the 2011 event was over.

Now — after a whirlwind three days of seminars, workshops, evening dancing and socializing among friends old and new — we were gathered for the goodbye meeting, suggestions and feedback. "We had 151 total attendance," announced Billy. "We had a 27% increase in paid attendance over last year. And we already have 41 pre-registered for 2013."

Poly Theory and Practice

This year APW had nicer hotel space on Atlanta's northern perimeter. Friday began with an introduction by PB&J and the volunteer staff from Atlanta Polyamory Inc. (created as a 501(c)7 nonprofit after last year's con). I arrived in the middle of Joreth Innkeeper's seminar on Gary Chapman's The Five Love Languages and took a seat. As Joreth explained, Chapman's concepts have taken hold in the poly community (despite his Christian perspective) as useful tools for uncovering the different relationship expectations and needs that you and your partners hold unconsciously. I've found Chapman's ideas to be unexpectedly revealing about myself.

Next I stepped into a room where Vrimj, polyactivist and legal eagle, was giving a rundown of the Kody Brown polygamy case in Utah — which promises, or threatens, to have a direct effect on us. The Kody Brown family are the stars of the "Sister Wives" reality show. The five of them are bringing a federal case to overturn state bigamy laws against multiple people living as if married. Legally speaking, the Brown family (originalist Mormons) are identical to a secular poly household. They assert only one legal marriage within the group; the other wives don't claim to be more than single girlfriends of Kody's under the law. But they're illegal anyway, by living together and also by "purporting to be married" spiritually. For better or worse, said Vrimj, "this case is the most exciting thing that's happened on a polyamory legal front in the U.S. in quite a long time." Living with partners and/or calling them spouses (spice) will either be legalized in the states that now outlaw it, or will be affirmed as criminal-izable. "Either way it's going to affect us."

Dinner that evening (in the reasonably priced dining room next to the conference area) brought a chance to join in with tables of strangers getting to know each other and hear each other's stories. After dinner, Maymay delivered the evening's keynote address — a theory-heavy brain-bender. He challenged the poly world's careless use of relationship terms based on role-positions ("metamour," for instance) and couple privilege ("dyadism") rather than framing things around the meta-relationships between relationships themselves. "Language is a superpower, and invisible, so it goes unexplored," Maymay said; "relationships are roles one acts, not positions." From there he went into metaphors from fractal geometry that were beyond my abilities. One challenging bit stood out: He asked for shows of hands for various positions that people consider themselves in. "Within the polyamorous world," he said, "the most marginalized people are those who consider themselves only- or mostly-secondaries. That is why [after no hands went up for that category] none are here. The non-privileged do not show up at conferences organized by the systems that oppress them."

Here's his whole talk, not a light read. Is he deep or just scattered, or both?

After that, Billy's down-home welcome to the crowd and introduction to the evening dance floor (with excellent professional DJ-ing) was a needed decompression. People kicked loose till late.

Much to Choose

For most of the weekend, three simultaneous tracks of talks and panels gave a range of choices that meant you had to miss 2/3 of them. I gravitated toward the sessions around activism and theory more than the relationship-help workshops and hands-on exercises. Barry Smiler spoke on his theme that poly is just the latest aspect of the centuries-long trend toward personal self-determination — the long, gradual shift away from your life decisions being mostly made for you by your culture, to the modern paradigm of building your life yourself. He predicted that poly and other forms of relationship choice will be normalized a lot faster than we think, in maybe just 10 or 15 years.

Terisa Greenan of Seattle, renowned in the poly world for her media presence and her 2008–09 web-TV series "Family," led a lively discussion on coming out: why people do it or don't, for reasons good or bad. She revealed that she herself still struggles with people viewing her as slutty or weird; "I find it hard to swim upstream" against constant social currents "saying I'm wrong." Despite being a public poly spokesperson, in personal life "I struggle with coming out to new people," she said. "People's reactions are highly unpredictable." She recommended practicing delivering The Talk for friends and family facing a mirror; "it really works." Professional actress that she is, she suggested that projecting ease, spontaneity, and lightness about yourself takes studied work and rehearsal beforehand.

Some members of the audience recommended a different approach: letting information about your poly relationships slip informally in bits and steps, "and let people pick up as much as they're comfortable with." The less of a big thing you make it, someone pointed out, the less your listeners will. Especially your kids. Whatever else, project pride and confidence, not unease or embarrassment; people take their cues from you. And consider carefully who really needs to know, and why.

Elsewhere, Barry and Cathy Smiler discussed how they grew the meetup announcement group BmorePoly in the Baltimore region, creating cross-fertilizations between poly, kink, swing, and related alt-cultures that were isolated from each other in the same areas, "silo-ized."

Joreth gave a presentation on the volunteer Polyamory Media Association. It offers out-and-proud polys training in how to represent themselves well in public and to the media. There are tricks to this. Joreth explained how the PMA can help you pick your agenda, craft your media persona “using your best aspects to get your message across,” develop your message goal, and create the necessary sound bites to have on tap for this goal. She emphasized the need to decide the boundaries between your public and private spheres and enforce them. You need to choose to keep focus on communicating what you intend to (“you must look and seem like your target audience”) and not what you don’t (“de-emphasize those aspects [of yourself] that will distract your audience”).

The PMA also helps members of the poly community examine media inquiries for their agendas and possible warning flags. It can provides advice in negotiating with writers and TV producers. Joreth focused mainly on TV, since that's the medium where your details matter the most.

This is fairly standard stuff, but it usually comes in high-priced professional training and seminars. Amazingly, the PMA's training and resources are free. It runs by volunteers, Joreth primarily. The media demand for poly spokespeople exceeds the supply, so if you get on the PMA’s list of available people, your phone may start to ring. Want to be a public poly explainer? The way is open.

A Coming Flood of Poly Swingers?

Lawyer Stephen Cobb owns a swing club in Florida and represents swingers — or "lifestylers" as they prefer to be called — and their businesses in court. He told a roomful of people that the swing/lifestyle community is both huge (my guesstimate is it's at least 20 to 50 times larger than the self-identified poly world; some say 100 times) and changing rapidly. With many lifestylers moving toward poly living in all but name.

Traditionally, the swing world has had unwritten rules that swing sex is strictly no-strings-attached, couples remain sacrosanct, emotional monogamy is jealously guarded, and falling in love is bad news. But, said Cobb, today's swingers are the first generation with the internet, and it has exposed them to wider ranges of possibilities for different kinds of connections.

Last year Cobb came to APW and was blown away to see the relationship insights and practices that the poly community has to offer. "The Lifestyle has had a real fear of dealing with the emotional component," he told the crowd. But now "your next wave of people coming into polyamory is going to be from the Lifestyle. It's going to seem like they're coming in overnight. And they're going to flood it.

"The tipping point is going to happen quickly, and this community needs to be ready," he continued. "...We need your insights and level of authority on these subjects." He made a public pledge to work his connections to double APW's attendance to at least 310 people in 2013. All this echoed a theme that I've been hearing from various other directions: silos are breaking down; poly soon won't be just for polys anymore.

Dare to Examine, Dare to Challenge

As her Sunday keynote, Joreth gave a provocative PowerPoint on poly and skepticism.

A little background here. I've always noticed that spiritually speaking, the poly community tends to divide into two opposing camps: New Age/ pagan/ all-purpose-"spiritual" people on one side, and atheists/ rationalists/ skeptics on the other. Both sides are way over-represented compared to their numbers in society at large. (In a similar vein, the great poly political axis seems to be leftists/progressives/greens versus libertarians, with Democrats and Republicans being incidental third and fourth parties. I wish the rest of the country was like that.)

Joreth, an outspoken atheist/skeptic, gave a bang-up presentation on how this way of thought applies to choosing and negotiating successful relationships. She described some known bugs in human nature, in particular confirmation bias and especially the "entrenchment effect" — whereby a false belief or assumption becomes more entrenched, not less, when its holder is confronted with strong evidence against it.

The scientific/skeptic approach to life offers "excellent tools for evaluating poly situations and fears and assumptions," Joreth said. "Using the scientific method for relationships is not intended to remove emotions from a decision, but to test the factual basis of the emotions." What this means is, submit your "emotional theories" about a situation that you're getting into "to testing, and try to poke holes in those theories." As opposed to what most people do: look only for evidence that confirms what they believe.

(My example: "Suzie likes fried eggs! I like fried eggs! Suzie really is the greatest! The people telling me to be cautious are just full of negativity.") Instead, as an experimental scientist would do, seek evidence that challenges your emotional theories, to test how well they stand up. ("Are the people telling me rumors that Suzie has two restraining orders against her just full of negativity? I can test that theory, by doing a records check.")

One of the great things about poly intimate networking, Joreth pointed out, is that you may have several intimates and metamours who know you deeply and can provide informed second and third opinions — the equivalent of scientific "peer review."

People who approach life this way, said Joreth, fare better as they move through the world than people who blunder from error to error via confirmation bias and the entrenchment effect.

If these workshops and topics sound pretty intellectualized, it's because those were the ones I mostly went to. Happening on the other sides of the walls from the rooms I was in (and sometimes slightly audible through the walls) were "Clear and Confident Kissing," a learning-by-doing workshop from which I saw people emerge rather dazzled; poly household management from chores and schedules to finances; "How Not To Read Your Partner's Mind"; "Casual Intimacy" by Spicey Spice; and "Maintaining Identity in a Sea of Awesome" as you move out into the wide poly world. Anita Wagner Illig gave the Saturday keynote talk on her ever-popular Making Peace with Jealousy workshop, and also gave workshops on living in a poly/mono relationship and "Defining Your Relationships and Living Your Dream." And there were more. Here are the panel descriptions.

And as if these three days weren't exhausting enough, I stayed over for the all-day regional meeting of the Polyamory Leadership Network on Monday in the same hotel.

I'll be back in 2013. I'd better be. Billy has recruited me to be a keynote speaker!

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A lesbian triad comes out in print

Cherrie (Australia)
Lesbians are much less likely to be in open relationships than gay men, according to any number of surveys, possibly even less so than straights. But among those who are, it's my unscientific impression that lesbians are more likely to embrace the family-formation model of polyamory than polys in general. Does somebody have any data?

Cherrie, a glossy lesbian magazine in Australia, profiles one such group — and their opinions about why it works — in an article on varieties of lesbian relationships.

Modern Love

By Francesca Sciacca

...Tathra, 39, a sustainability consultant and Emma, 29, a teacher, have been together six and a half years. From the beginning Tathra was very clear with Emma that polyamory, the practice of being in ethical, open relationships, was part of who she is. However, it wasn’t until almost five years into their relationship that Jac, 32, a secondary teacher, came on the scene as Emma’s lover. [In the picture, from left: Tathra, Emma. Jac.]

...Having an ethical polyamorous relationship that works is based on agreements. For these women, it’s clear and simple. Don’t bitch about each other. If any of them have a disagreement it must get resolved before they sleep with someone else. Keep in open communication and even talk about it as a group. Schedule date nights. Don’t take each other for granted. Be present with whomever you’re with in the moment.

This is made all the more challenging when you all live under the one roof....

Jac adds: “Tathra is really great for me because she’s got so much experience in relationships, but also in her relationship with Emma… Tathra totally gets it because she knows my partner the way that I do! There’s that bond between Tathra and I that works really well.”

The bond between the three of them is palpable. [The author says she's] moved by their maturity and the depth to examine who they are in relationships. Jac says, “Even jealousy is not forbidden or taboo.”

Tathra explains, “There’s a term in the polyamorous community — compersion. It means finding pleasure in your lover having pleasure with another. In a Buddhist sense it’s more like, enjoying the joy of others. It’s basically the opposite to jealousy. Jealousy is completely natural, and in fact it’s important to acknowledge when you feel it, which allows it to pass much easier.”...

...Tathra says, “It’s not even that monogamy is unfulfilling. I just believe that one person can’t meet all the needs of another. Sometimes platonic relationships can fulfil those other needs when you’re in a relationship with someone. And sometimes they don’t.”

...Emma says, “Some people operate in, ‘I want what I can’t have.’ We don’t have things you can’t have. Because there is nothing forbidden, that’s not a driving factor for anything. We’ve had difficulties in our relationship, but it’s not so much the polyamory. It’s relationship stuff, trivial stuff like the housework.”

Emma continues: “Ours is a lot more about choosing to be with the person rather than feeling obliged to because of your commitment to someone. We’re together because we want to be together, not for any other reason.”

The article concludes:

...Maybe monogamy isn’t outdated, but rather what is outdated are the types of questions we’re asking in relationships. What if the question was, does this relationship serve me? Does this relationship serve them and ultimately does it serve the world?....

Read the whole article by flipping to page 18. (April 2012 issue; after this month look for it here). The text is also reprinted on Australian's Gay News Network.

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"Love Without Boundaries: A Revolutionary Relationship"

The Indypendent (New York)

The Indypendent is an award-winning radical newspaper in New York "exploring how systems of power — economic, political and social — affect the lives of people locally and globally.... part of the global Indymedia movement." Its current issue has a long, happy article on the writer's amazing poly life, how she came to it, and what she thinks it means.

Love Without Boundaries: A Revolutionary Relationship

By Ichi Vasquez

...A dozen faces sped toward me screaming “SURPRISE!” I stood in disbelief, staring at my friends and loved ones, and I could feel a wide grin take over my face. I spotted my boyfriend coming toward me with open arms, sweeping me up into a fierce hug.

“You have no idea how long I’ve been planning this,” he said, laughing with relief and happiness. I pulled him into a deep, sweet kiss of gratitude. Through the frenzy of hugs and happy chatter, I saw my secondary partner, who had driven hours up to the city to stay the weekend and be a part of the surprise. Thrilled that he was there, I kissed him lovingly.

I turned my head and rested it on his chest as my eyes found my boyfriend’s gaze near the front of the room. He stared at me adoringly as I was being held by my other partner, and my eyes silently sent him waves of joy and love. I felt so immensely cared for — the combination of being held by one man I adored and receiving space to enjoy myself from the man I loved. This was pure happiness….

...I certainly didn’t know other choices existed until I came to New York City. It was here in this bubbling melting-pot city of various cultures, lifestyles and artistic innovations that I stumbled across the world of polyamory almost five years ago — and it has forever altered the way I see myself as well as my connection with others....

...I learned that certain freedoms my partner and I gave each other actually brought us closer. I learned of numerous ways to connect romantically with someone that don’t involve sex. I rediscovered the value and intimacy of a single kiss. I learned that my heart feels genuine love in numerous degrees and variations for all the special people who have been in my life.

I exposed myself to situations that provoked my deepest fears of abandonment, betrayal and jealousy. I lived through them, and came out the other side with a deeper understanding of my heart and myself....

...Discussing which rules I wanted to follow in my relationships gave me a greater sense of freedom, empathy and empowerment — not just in my connections with others, but also within myself. I was an equal on a team, a life adventurer — not a subordinate or a passive participant. For the first time, I truly felt like I was living out subconscious curiosities that were coming from the deepest recesses of my heart.

Exploring polyamory encouraged me to seek wholeness on my own, as opposed to feeling whole thanks to my relationships or other external factors. People screw up. They let you down, they change their minds and they break promises — so even if you are receiving genuine love from various relationships, your priority should always be to love yourself no matter what happens. It’s also okay that partners can’t meet every need you have — they aren’t supposed to. Taking responsibility for one’s own happiness is a lesson that spans a lifetime.

This responsibility actively forced me to pay closer attention to the choices I made on a daily basis. My emotions became deeper, more alive — I began to have a conscious awareness of myself that I never had before....

A Double-Edged Sword

...One of the biggest challenges I tackled within myself was learning to communicate with partners more than I ever had before, and standing my ground....

Polyamory isn’t for everyone, and this article certainly isn’t a call for everyone to embrace it as the main model for relationships.... The importance here lies not in having multiple partners, but in the freedom to mold and create how we connect to each other from the most platonic to the most intimate of ways.

...By taking control of our hearts and sexuality and seeking others who are like-minded, we can take control of the most precious gifts of self-expression and sharing we have. And perhaps this will lead to other personal revolutions that inspire rebuilding the kind of world where love truly has no boundaries, we no longer feel the pull of popular repressive ideals — and we answer to no one but our highest selves.

Read the whole article (March 21 – April 17, 2012).

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"Group Marriage and the Future of the Family"

Psychology Today Blogs

As the idea of responsible non-monogamy — meaning full communication, consent, goodwill, and care among all stakeholders — spreads, it's taking different forms among different people and subcultures.

For instance, although the swinging subculture goes back almost to World War II, it's changing. A lot of swingers are broadening away from the Lifestyle's traditional rules of no-strings-attached sex, emotional monogamy, and no falling in love. These days more swingers are specifying that they want a "friends first" relationship with another couple before getting into play. Falling in love is becoming more acceptable. This "progressive swinging" is polyamory in all but name, and it's becoming huge — because swinging is huge (maybe 20 to 50 times larger than the self-identified poly community; does somebody have real data?) More about this in a future post.

At the other end of the commitment spectrum are long-term poly households sharing a home, finances, and lifelong goals and plans. Often they're raising children together. These are true group marriages in everything but legal recognition.

Deborah Anapol sees a bright future for this model, writing on her Psychology Today blogsite:

Group Marriage and the Future of the Family

Group marriage offers children more role models and more attention.

By Deborah Anapol, Ph.D.

This post is a response to The Monogamish Marriage: What If It's Not Cheating to Cheat? by Pamela Madsen

With the traditional nuclear family well on its way to extinction, we are faced with a question of critical importance: who will mind the children? Neither two-career nor single-parent families offer children full-time, loving caretakers, and quality day care is both scarce and expensive.... Even at its best, full-time institutional care (including public schooling) cannot provide the individual attention, intimacy, flexibility, and opportunity for solitude that children need to realize their potential. Serial monogamy presents children as well as parents with a stressfully discontinuous family life. Meanwhile, an entire generation is at risk, as divorce is an increasingly common fact of life.

While we don't yet know how polyamory impacts the rate of divorce, the little data we have suggest that it doesn't....

...Group marriages can mean a higher standard of living while consuming fewer resources. Intimate partners are more likely than friends or neighbors to feel comfortable sharing housing, transportation, appliances, and other resources. Even if partners don't live communally, they frequently share meals, help each other with household repairs and projects, and vacation together. This kind of cooperation helps provide a higher quality of life while reducing individual consumption as well as keeping people too busy to over-consume. Multiple partners also help in the renewal of our devastated human ecology by creating a sense of bonded community....

...One of the most common concerns about polyamory is that it's harmful to children, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Multiple-adult families and committed intimate networks have the potential of providing dependent children with additional nurturing adults who can meet their material, intellectual, and emotional needs. While parents may end up focusing less attention on their children, children may gain new aunts, uncles, and adopted parents.

More adults sharing parenting can mean less stress and less burnout without losing any of the rewards. In a larger group of men and women, it's more likely that one or two adults will be willing and able to stay home and care for the family or that each could be available one or two days a week.... It's possible for children to have more role models, more playmates, and more love in a group environment. Of course, these advantages can be found in any community setting, but people sometimes avoid intimacy with other adults in a conscious or unconscious effort to safeguard a monogamous commitment....

Read the whole article (March 22, 2012). It's adapted from Anapol's book Polyamory in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, 2012).

Also: Here's a roundup of research that has been done on children of polyamorous families.

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"The surprisingly woman-friendly roots of modern polyamory"

Slate

You remember the Slate article a few weeks ago about why male-dominated polygamy is bad for the societies that host it? Now the same writer is back with the flip side.

Her article gets it right but seems a little breathless, as if she's discovered something new. It may be new to many Slate readers, but the fact that women have supplied most of the modern polyamory movement's leaders, writers, organizers, public spokespeople, and movers-and-shakers since the late 1980s is well known and widely remarked.

I'm struck by how this continues to be true year after year as new leaders, spokespeople, and organizers emerge. I'd say the female-to-male ratio in the movement's key roles may be as high as 3 to 1. (Somebody ought to do a proper study.) And, the men are feminist or feminist-friendly.

This is the biggest difference between polyamory's current "third wave," as sociologist Elisabeth Sheff calls it, and the more male-dominated second wave of the 1960s and 70s, when quite a few women came to feel they were getting the short end of the free-love stick. The women's rebellion against this inside the counterculture came on suddenly around 1969. That in turn had a lot to do with starting the explosive spread of feminism into mainstream society in the early 1970s. But that's another story....

Making Love and Trouble: The surprisingly woman-friendly roots of modern polyamory.

By Libby Copeland

Polyamory does not have the same male-centric history as polygamy.


Recently I wrote about the many problems polygamy tends to cause across the world, including high crime rates resulting from young men confined to singledom because older men are hoarding wives, and the subjugation of teenage girls forced to marry because there simply aren’t enough women to go around....

Historically, though, there’s been an exception to the rule about plural marriage being bad for women. Polyamory, in which people openly take on multiple relationships, sometimes in the context of group marriage, has a radically different history. Nearly as marginal on the left wing of our culture as polygamy is on the right, modern-day polyamory is intertwined with the rise of feminism, and its roots go back to the ’40s — the 1840s....

In the 1970s, during what sociologist Elisabeth Sheff calls the second wave of polyamory, fringe groups around the country experimented with non-monogamy. A San Francisco-based commune called Kerista, founded by a man who called himself Jud the Prophet, consisted of three large group marriages, in which sleeping schedules were rotated regularly to keep intimacy evenly distributed.... Its 1979 handbook mandated egalitarianism and required that members care for the commune’s children in “non-sexist parental roles.”

During the ’90s, the Internet sparked a third wave of polyamory, after AIDS had driven it underground during the ’80s. A Usenet newsgroup called alt.polyamory helped build a community, and a woman calling herself Morning Glory Zell, member of a “neo-Pagan” organization called the Church of All Worlds, helped popularize the term in an article called “A Bouquet of Lovers.” In more recent years, polyamory has mainstreamed somewhat, becoming fodder for features in Newsweek and on ABC’s Nightline. MTV did a True Life documentary on polyamorous young people, books like The Ethical Slut explored the topic, and Dan Savage continues to champion non-monogamy. Polyamory is no longer primarily identified with pagans and prophets.

In the most crunchy, West Coast communities, group marriages and open marriages are common enough that people can talk about being “poly” without having to explain what that is, says Sheff, a Georgia State University professor who is working on a book about polyamory. In her research, Sheff has even come across an area in Seattle populated by large polyamorous families: “You’ve heard of gayborhoods? This is the first poly-neighborhood I’ve heard of.”

Women are in many ways the driving force behind polyamory as a movement these days...

Read on (March 12, 2012).

P.S.: I'm glad to hear that Elisabeth Sheff is writing a book. Though not poly herself, she has been one of the prime academics studying the movement's sociology.

P.P.S.: Here's a history resource from the time between what Sheff calls polyamory's first and second wave: Yonina writes, "I just did a project on polyamorous / non-monogamous discourse and practice in the literary modern period (~1900s to 1930s)." Here's her annotated bibliography with much useful detail.

Update, March 20: An audio interview with the Slate author just went up on New Hampshire's Public Radio's "Word of Mouth" program. Listen here (8:40).

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When triad life comes easy

Huffington Post: Gay Voices

Poly discussion sites can make this life look damn hard. There's jealousy to analyze and master, insecurities to dredge up and dissect on a brightly lit table, agreements to negotiate, NRE craziness to manage, Non-Violent Communication to learn, Google Calendar to install.... It can sound like pursuing a PhD in self-improvement. For many people it is.

Showing up less often on poly-community sites are the naturals: people who just take to group relationships like fish to water. They seem born to it, and/or have lucked into the right partners. They don't seek much community support, often barely know a poly community exists, or perhaps even (until recently) know the word.

John Shore, a prolific gay religious book author ("America's preeminent non-douchey Christian" says Dan Savage), today interviews such a woman on his popular Huffington Post site. She is living in a polyfi triad home with a passel of their combined kids, where they hide out pretty comfortably in a deeply conservative Christian backwater of the South.

Sometimes It Takes Three to Tango

Could you give us a quick definition of what "polyamorous" is/means?

...Honestly, the term "polyamorous" wasn't on our radar when we fell in love. It was later that we discovered there was a term for what we were. If we need a term, we consider ourselves "polyfidelitous," which is what polys call those who love more than one person in a long-term, faithful kind of way.

Some people consider themselves polyamorous because they believe they need and/or want to be in multiple relationships at any given time. This is not a good description of us. We all feel we could be satisfied with just one person. It's just that we fell in love with two, pretty much all at the same time... and we discovered (through lots of open and honest communication!) that we were all not just OK with it, but that it was something we wanted.

Truthfully, we don't think of ourselves as polyamorous. We just think of ourselves as us.

...How long have you guys been together?

We have been dear friends for a very long time, with children who grew up as babies together.... I was a (divorced) single mother, and they were a happily married couple.... She had been my best friend for years, and we've always been closer than sisters. People used to always comment on how close we were, but we never realized that could be sexual, too. Both of us were raised to not even be aware that was a possibility.

Long story short, the three of us began doing more and more things together and it just... worked really well. We got along incredibly, the three of us, and at some point, my best friend realized she had feelings for me. She was the one who began the conversation about, "What if?"...

We all felt very excited when we realized that we were in love and that we all wanted the same thing (a long-term, committed relationship as a three). And then there was a lot of open and honest communication, of course. There has to be with any successful couple, and so with three people, even more so....

Every step forward just felt so right on so many different levels, and doors kept opening up right and left. There were numerous points where we would look at each other and say, "It's so weird, but if I was still a fundamentalist Christian, I would say that God is blessing us..."

We took very small and careful steps forward, hesitantly, every inch of the way being shocked at how nice, how perfect, how healthy, how "just right" it always felt. Our fears about each next step were always replaced by fearfully taking it and then finding it delightful....

Do you all live together?

Yep. Wouldn't have it any other way.... Two years this spring.

What's the sexual deal? Are each of you bisexual? Do you all sleep in the same bed?

He is not bisexual. I suppose that both of the women are. Well, honestly, I don't even know if we are. I just know that I love her. And she loves me. And being intimate feels like it makes sense, given the depth of our feelings for each other. We had been incredibly close friends for years, prior, and it never seemed close enough. Now, it feels just right.

We all sleep together every night. The person in the middle gets seriously snuggled on. It's fun.

Sexually, we have learned a lot about how three people can have an amazingly wonderful experience that feels like making love for everyone. We occasionally joke about the bestselling book we will write about how to have amazing threesomes one day. It was delightful to learn that you can have that feeling of being "one" with three. You totally can. That was one of the things we worried about at first -- what would we do about sex? Now, my mind automatically assumes that making love takes three.... We are sexual as couples, too, just not as often....

...I love my two partners. I love our life together. I love our big, happy home. But I do not love the fact that I live in a community that would rather me live as a struggling single mom to four children than to have the support of two adults who love me dearly as a life partner. The fact that my community would believe wholeheartedly that my sexual relationship with my abusive ex-husband was righteous but that my sexual relationship with two committed life partners (if they knew about it) is unrighteous, just seems so hypocritical....

Do you know any other polyamorous, or polyfidelitous, relationship units? (I guess "couples" isn't the right word, is it?) But do you know any others like yourselves?

No. I'm sure they are out there, but we don't know of any personally. That's OK. Honestly, I don't think this would work for very many people. The reason it does for us is that we are just the right three people for each other. It's hard enough to find just the right one person for yourself, much less two! When I think about my relationship as a three, I mostly just feel incredibly lucky, like God is smiling at us. I get to be loved by two best friends and lovers. I get to love two amazing people back (and they really are amazing). I get to love a whole house-full of children. It just feels like so much goodness. When I come home from work and pull into our drive, I smile. I love us!...

What do you want people to know about people like you, and relationships like yours?

That we are normal, solid citizens. That we are professionals that you work with at the office. That we are the teacher in your child's classroom, the person who delivers your mail, the doctor who looks at your injury. That we are the mom at the soccer games. That we are the dad at the geography bee. That we are the people with the really huge cart of groceries ahead of you in the supermarket line. That we grew up in conservative Christian America and certainly never imagined that we would do something like this. That we certainly weren't looking for something outside of the norm, but that love found us, and we were willing to step outside of the norm to meet it....

Read the whole interview (Feb. 25, 2012).

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"Modern lovers: The ‘sexual body warriors’ and pioneers transforming 21st-century relationships"

The Sunday Independent (UK)

The Independent is the closest thing Great Britain has to a national newspaper of record, after the venerable, two-centuries-old Times of London was bought and wrecked by Rupert Murdoch. Or so says my wife Sparkle Moose, who lived there for eight years.

Last week the Sunday Independent published a major article on the changing forms of relationships in 21st-century society. Polyamory gets lengthy treatment.

Modern lovers: The ‘sexual body warriors’ and pioneers transforming 21st-century relationships

By Sarah Morrison

You probably should not ask psychotherapists to divulge what they believe is meant by the term "modern love". The response you get may be enough to set you pining for a Mills & Boon.... "Modern love has become more complicated," argues the psycho-therapist and bestselling author Susie Orbach, "but it has also become much more interesting."

A quick glimpse at the statistics tells us why.... Marriages are at the lowest rate since 1895.... But our thirst for desire, romance and life-changing relationships is more prominent than ever before, the experts say.

...As Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim wrote in The Normal Chaos of Love: "Love is becoming a blank that lovers must fill in themselves."...

...Orbach wants to dispel the myth that traditional love has been replaced with a lust-fuelled array of casual relationships.... "Attachment is important. My experience still tells me that people, most people, want somebody who is there for them."

...In psychology lecturer Dr Meg Barker's new book, Rewriting the Rules, due out this year, she cites research showing that up to 60 per cent of married people have affairs.... As Barker asserts, "some of the radical ways people challenge love doesn't necessarily involve swinging from chandeliers". [Barker has long been a leading researcher of the poly community.]

...In fact, the "new monogamy" as it is called, involves fewer labels and definitions and largely avoids categories at all. There is "friendship with benefits", a "hook-up culture", and "polyamory", the notion that people can have multiple relationships that may be emotionally close and sexual in nature. This term first entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. Dr Christine Campbell, senior lecturer in psychology at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, who is carrying out studies on jealousy in polyamorous relationships, says: "The worst label you can call a polyamorist is a 'swinger'; they are very clear that it is not just about sex, but also emotional connections."

There may be an absence of quantitative research into the number of people who define themselves as "poly", but few will deny that the growth of the internet has enabled the community to become more vocal. Sites such as Facebook and OkCupid.com, one of the largest American dating websites, now allow users the chance to define themselves as in an "open relationship". OkCupid estimates that around 6 per cent of all its members fall into this group....

The article goes on to profile four people and groups representing interesting types: A gay " ’appy singleton" relying on his iPhone's find-a-hookup app, a "sexual body warrior" couple ("sexual healers, using intimate bodywork and therapy to empower people sexually"), a genderqueer longterm polyamorous family (photo above), and a "cyber couple" who met on SingleMuslim.com.

Here is the polyfamily profile. A different photo of them leads the original article.

DK Green, 45, and his wives, Rachel Green, 49, and Luisa Green, 47 – affectionately dubbed the "tripod" – have lived together for more than a decade in a committed polyamorous relationship. They have raised three children and, like most other married couples, they share one bed – albeit 7ft in size – in their home in Chesterfield.

Only, they are not married – and will never be allowed to be under British law. DK Green, self-defined "daddy of the house", is biologically a woman and the mother to all three children – Kirsty, 25, Tony, 22, and Lina, 14 – as well as five step-grandchildren. His two wives were married to him and each other via a pagan ceremony known as handfasting. They have brought other partners into their home, on the condition of mutual consent, but say they view their marriage as "sacrosanct".

DK, who has been in a heterosexual marriage before, says: "We all met online in 1999, within two weeks of each other. The three of us are loyal to each other; nobody does anything without the others' consent. If it's honest, open and hurts no one, it is not cheating. We respect each other as wives, although I am head of the household. The response has been varied. Lina, our youngest, has had the hardest time, but that's as much to do with the fact that her parents are gay as that she has three mums.

"Some of the children's fathers are still very much part of their lives. There is a tribal kind of feel to our family and our children always have someone to go to. If they want advice or a cuddle, they come to me. If they want a laugh, they go to Luisa, the American, and if they want to know something, they go to Rachel, because she's a genius. We all have things to offer them. Then there are the practical things: three of us were able to buy a house together; one of us [alone] couldn't. We are traditional in a non-traditional sense. We have children, grandchildren, mortgages and bills; there just happens to be three of us.

"For all the benefits, there is three times as much to deal with. We are talking about six relationships between us, but we probably work at it harder than the average couple. People absolutely believe that you fall head over heels with someone and can't possibly see someone else, but my love for Luisa doesn't change the fact that my love for Rachel is deep and abiding. Just like a parent can love more than one child, so too can you love more than one partner. Your heart doesn't split in half, it doubles; there is an endless supply of love."

Read the whole article (Feb. 12, 2012).

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On the subject of redefining relationships in the 21st century, writer and activist Angi Becker Stevens recently published a notable article, "Polyamory: Rebooting our Definitions of Love and Family," at the online magazine Role/Reboot ("providing the best writing on culture and gender roles"):

...It says a great deal about our society’s rigid definition of romantic love that people are able to somewhat easily accept the concept of sexually open relationships — and even dishonest infidelity — while insisting that it cannot be possible to actually love multiple partners simultaneously. Frustratingly, I have been told on more than one occasion that what I share with my partners cannot, by definition, be love, as if anyone can define for others what love is and what it is not. These attitudes strike me as incredibly reminiscent of a society that — 30 years ago — viewed same-sex relationships only as a deviant sexual behavior. And yet dismissal and disapproval of my relationships often comes from those who support LGBTQ equality, who claim to be open-minded and progressive.

Currently, I am in two relationships, both of which I consider myself committed to for life. My husband and I will be celebrating 10 years of marriage — 15 total years as a couple — this year, and we have an 8-year-old daughter together. My boyfriend doesn’t live with us yet, but we have plans to all live together in the not-so-distant future, and there’s been much talk of adding more children to our family as well. My daughter is well aware of the nature of my relationships, which I do not keep hidden from anyone.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many people raise concerns about the well-being of children in polyamorous families. Some seem concerned that the kids in these situations are growing up with inappropriate ethics, which is a lot like warning same-sex couples that their children will grown up thinking it’s OK to be gay....

From my perspective, being in a polyamorous family has a lot to offer both children and parents. Children benefit from having additional trusted adults who care for them, parents benefit from sharing the burdens of parenting among more than just two people. And while I would make no claims that polyamory is inherently and necessarily revolutionary with regard to gender roles, there is something to be said for the possibilities it opens up in that respect. When we shift away from families with one mother and one father, it can become easier to also shake up the roles and expectations associated with those labels. I believe in the sentiment that it takes a village to raise a child, particularly if women are to function as equals in society while also caring for young children. Multi-parent households are certainly not the only way of more equitably dividing parental tasks, but they do offer one model for doing so....

Read the whole article. (Feb. 8, 2012).

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My keynote speech at Poly Living 2012

I'm still winding down from the exciting, almost overwhelming whirl of people (130 of them) and workshops and ideas and conversations and affection at last weekend's Poly Living Conference in Philadelphia, run by the Loving More nonprofit. I gave the keynote speech.

People asked me to put the text of it online. So here it is. Regular readers will recognize chunks of it and some of my hobbyhorses. No apologies for self-plagiarism.

For much of the time I was talking I had a slide show running on the wall behind me, presenting screen shots of the last 90 or so posts on this site. Some people said this was an effective enhancement; others said it was a distraction. If you were there, what did you think?

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

Busting Loose: Polyamory in the Next Five Years

(Keynote speech, Poly Living Conference; Feb. 10, 2012)

Hi! I'm Alan. And now, if this is supposed to be the keynote talk for the weekend, I am going to take the assignment seriously:

(Blows pitch pipe.)

A key note is sounded for a chorus, so that they can start together on the same key. I hope that what I say here will set the tone, for everybody to have an exciting and productive weekend.

(Holds up pitch pipe.) I will be back to this.

Okay, here is what I am going to do:

-- I'm going to talk first about how and why polyamory right now is busting out all over, and what I think we can expect to see in the next five years or so.

-- And then, looking much farther out, I'll be a bit daring and describe how I think the things we are doing, and the culture we are haltingly building, just might shape the direction and survival of Western civilization in ages to come.

-- And then, we can get up out of our seats and do a couple of fun little exercises to maybe start getting to know each other better and kick off the social part of the evening.

So:

What kind of "busting loose" is polyamory going to have in the next five years?

Just a couple months ago when I wrote the description of this talk in the program, I worded it kind of tentatively. "We may be in for quite a ride." "The pace of public awareness may be accelerating." Well since then, things have been going nuts. We're having a sudden breakout of greater public recognition, which clearly must have been just waiting to happen.

For instance: Unlike in previous cheating-politician scandals... (audience laughter) ...the Newt Gingrich open-marriage episode two weeks ago became a vehicle for major media attention to good open and poly relationships, contrasting with how Gingrich did it. There have been big profiles of people doing multiple relationships, and articles on how to make them work with honesty and close communication and compassion and respect, in the New York Times (twice), the BBC, USA Today, many others. Representatives for poly done well are suddenly in demand to I think an unprecedented degree.

And here I have to show some slides from less than 24 hours ago. (Click other powerpoint.) Our own presenters Anita and Tim Illig and Michael Rios and Sarah Taub here this weekend were riding this wave last night on the Channel Seven news in DC, representing us and our values just beautifully.... And a bit farther south in Virginia, members of that area’s poly community are about to be on TV too. It’s happening all over.

Now: Contrast this experience with the Governor Mark Sanford cheating-politician scandal 2½ years ago, which also captivated the nation for a few days. Sanford was Mr. Hiking the Appalachian Trial. During that one, Loving More sent out a press release to media high and low trying to drum up attention for multiple relationships that are done with kindness and consent and good ethics all around — and couldn't get a peep of interest. Something really changed in those intervening 2½ years.

Moreover: On January 30th I think we crossed a certain milestone in poly history. For the first time that I know of, we became a political football in a national political arena in a way that was good for us. For years, we’ve been railed against as an example of the Something Awful waiting at the bottom of the slippery slope of gay marriage. But the day before the Florida Republican primary, the largest newspaper in Florida's largest Republican belt published a long feature article on the people in the local poly community and their high ethical standards, explicitly drawing a pointed contrast between us and Newt Gingrich right in the lead paragraphs. The newspaper was profiling us very positively to drive home Gingrich's scuzziness by comparison — the day before Florida's crucial vote (which Gingrich lost, though I'm sure this was only a tiny part of it).

If we're going to be used as a political football, that was a pretty good football to be! I didn't expect to see this happening this soon.

Other milestones in the last month or so: In the space of one week, we saw poly triad families, each with a kid, profiled positively on ABC's Morning Edition, Nightline, and the National Geographic Channel. More and more of the public is getting acquainted with what multi-partner families actually look like. We are becoming more familiar; on the way to being normalized.

That same week, we also saw a broadcast-TV drama, ABC's "Private Practice," present a fictional polyamorous triad family — explicitly called that by name, so viewers would be sure to get it — treated so well, and at such length, that it reminded me of the first breakthrough shows treating gay characters with understanding and respect.

Reid Mihalko, who works in and around the TV industry, has said for a few years that Hollywood is quite aware of modern polyamory and its potential to seize viewers' interest. He says TV people have been nosing around the edges of it. But they've been nervous about letting it get any closer to home than the polygamists in "Big Love" and "Sister Wives," who are pretty removed from American mainstream life. Because, Reid says, the networks still aren't sure how advertisers will react, and in TV, advertisers rule everything. Now it looks like maybe the networks have decided it's time to test the waters a little more boldly.

Demand for publicly out polys who want to appear in the media exceeds the supply. People like Robyn Trask in Loving More, and Anita Wagner active in the Poly Leadership Network, keep getting calls. Truly — if you want to try your hand at representing open relationships and poly life to the public, the way is open. Robyn would love to have more good people to send media inquiries to. She is experienced in dealing with the media herself, and she's an invaluable resource for newbies about how to negotiate with them on a more even basis so you get treated right. And how to know when to walk away, and how to present your message effectively like a pro.

Also: We now have a Polyamory Media Association, which is run by Joreth. It's set up to train out-and-proud polyfolks to become skilled, effective public spokespeople for themselves. There are necessary tricks to this, especially for TV, and they’re easy to learn. The Poly Media Association is also a resource for reporters and program directors seeking poly people. Its services are free and depend on volunteers.

As for the next five years? We're going to be busting loose more all over, though of course there will be plateau periods too. The things we are saying and doing truly grab attention. We turn heads. With relationship roles and rules and ideals in flux throughout society, society is increasingly ready to hear us, and see us, and consider our examples.

And, as we become more widely seen and talked about and thought about, is there going to be a backlash in the next few years? A big moral-panic persecution, as the things we’re saying become less avoidable, less dismissable, and therefore maybe more threatening?

No. That is my prediction. I used to think there would be a great backlash at some point, but now I don't.

There will continue to be a lot of pain and discrimination. There will continue to be trouble from your birth families, and in court from hostile judges in child-custody divorce cases, and from bosses who may fire you. But gradually less with time.

One reason I say this, is that an organized backlash has already been tried. From about 2003 to 2006, some top-level conservative think tanks and journals tried to whip up a campaign against us as the next great threat to civilization that they could defend everyone from. It was all over the serious conservative journals like the National Review and the Weekly Standard.

This campaign gained very little traction beyond the conservative movement's immediate followers. It didn't take. So, they pretty much just abandoned it and went on to try other things that might do better in the panic market.

Meanwhile, therefore, we have had years now in which we've been defining ourselves to the public on our own terms. This is crucial. Politicians spend millions of dollars trying to define themselves to the public before their opponents can do it. We've done it on a shoestring.

Thanks in part to Loving More and a whole lot of brave individual volunteers, we've by and large successfully represented the modern polyamory movement to the public as what we know ourselves to be: ethical people who care deeply about good relationships — smart, verbal, interesting, friendly people — nonthreatening and respectful of all well-considered relationship choices, monogamy included — and by and large just kind of adorable. Every year we are better entrenching this public image, firming up our defense against future moral panics.

It is going to get easier. It's gradually going to get easier to be out. And when that happens, the dam will really burst.

Remember, the dam broke on gay issues when a flood of gay people finally got sick of the closet and came out all over the place in just a few years. We're not quite there yet. But it's going to happen.


(Pause.)

And now, before closing, I want to look ahead much farther.

Barry Smiler has said, quote:

> I'm more than half convinced that in the future when
> historians look back on the poly movement, we'll be
> remembered not so much for multiple partners, but
> rather as the cauldron in which was developed some
> powerful tools and frameworks for discussing and
> negotiating win-win in relationship situations.

In other words, we're among the people developing powerful tools and frameworks for getting along intimately in close, complex social structures.

You see where this is going.

I have a rather bleak view of what may happen to the world in the coming century or two. Some of you have heard this from me, but I'm going to lay it out again.

Maybe 150 or 200 years from now, following climate-change and resource-overshoot catastrophes, I see surviving cultures spreading out and recolonizing the wreckage of the 21st and 22nd centuries.

Getting to a sustainable world on the other side of this, or maybe with any luck before it gets that bad — "sustainable" meaning a world that is both good and able to last — will not happen, without the emergence of genuinely attractive life alternatives to high material consumption.

A sustainable world will surely require more people sharing homes, kitchens, child-rearing, goods and resources of all kinds. Life in more crowded quarters, in a low-consumption economy of resource-sharing, is generally a worse way to live in the present culture. People strive hard all their lives to move in the opposite direction: to buy bigger, emptier homes farther apart. Closer living, using less material goods, will truly attract people only in a new culture of unusually high interpersonal and group-living skills by today's standards.

Never mind about sex and romance for a moment. I see today's polyamory community gardening up sprouts of these next-level interpersonal and group-interaction skills — the practices and ideology and interpersonal value system of a new culture. I really want these ideas and practices to take root well enough to survive through ugly times, if that's what's coming, and be there to seed the ground on the other side.

Second point: Back to sex and romance. A sustainable world is going to require attractive ways to pursue and acquire richness and purpose and meaning in life that do not depend on Getting More Stuff. The ways that people find richness and value and meaning will need to have low resource costs. Which means, finding these things in each other. As the bumpersticker says: "The best things in life aren't things."

A culture offering wide possibilities for romance and sexual intimacy, or just deeply intimate socialization throughout life, can offer abundant richness and purpose. A materially simple life need not be simple in any other way.

Don't get me wrong; I have no use for fairyland woo-woo about these things. But I do think that the polyamory paradigm might help to humanize the world. I think that it might even someday generalize the magic of romantic love into something larger and more powerful in the world than the isolated couple-love where society has safely walled it away. Thus helping to provide ways to lead rich, rewarding, meaning-filled lives without the Earth-killing pursuit of Ever More Stuff.

And thirdly: Sexual repression in a culture is an accurate predictor (as the CIA is said to be quite aware) of that culture's tendency toward war hysterias, religious fanaticism, violence, submission to authoritarian rule, and pathologies of denialism toward reality-based ways of thought. So, a safer world will have to be freer of it. And we're on the intellectual cutting edge against sexual repression.

So: Is this really going to be the great future that this movement has ahead for us?

Well as computer pioneer Alan Kay said: "The best way to predict the future, is to invent it."

Thank you.


(Break.)

Okay! Now, here is the Key Note!

(Blow pitch pipe.)

My challenge to you guys here this weekend, is to imagine what YOU would like to create. What ways of being would you like to develop here at this conference? How do we empower each other to do this? Go for it — go ahead and push your limits. Risk it.

We've kept you in your seats long enough. I'd like to suggest we try a little something to get up and get the juices flowing for the reception and the next part of the evening.

First let's everybody stand up and stretch.

Now — start moving around a bit. Just moving.

Okay, as you are milling, look at someone near you that you may not know. Get their eye.

And the two of you, face off with each other. Now if you're okay with this tell the other person your deepest hopes and dreams about what you hope to get out of this weekend. First one of you, then the other.

What brought you here? What are your dearest hopes in your heart for this event? And then trade, and the other person can say theirs.

And when you're done, go back to join the milling, and do it with someone else, someone you don't know....

(By that point I was completely drowned out by a rising roar of excited chatter, and my job was done. It worked!)

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Poly Parenting: A Day in the Life

Babble.com

At the high-traffic parenting site Babble.com, on the occasion of Valentine's Day, Sierra posts a new blog article reflecting on her brimming life as a poly parent:

What It’s Like To Be A Parent In An Open Marriage

By Sierra

It’s movie night at my house. Six kids are piled up on the couch downstairs watching "How To Train Your Dragon' and devouring pizza. My girlfriend and I steal a private moment together while our husbands settle the kids in.

We say a sleepy hello, she gets a work call, and I comfort a sad toddler. End of moment. It’s chaos, but happy chaos. There’s a lot of laughter and smiles amid the juggling act of feeding everyone dinner and making sure no one’s view of the dragons is blocked by an elbow.

When the movie ends, my girlfriend and her husband bundle their kid up and head home. My husband, Martin, and I tuck our girls into bed. He tidies up the living room, getting ready for his sweetie to arrive for their date night. I pack up my laptop and head out to a lover’s house. Not for a hot date. We’re getting together to work for a few hours. I’m behind on a deadline.

This is a snapshot of life in an open marriage: busy, happy, full.

At least the way we do it....

...Monogamy was never on the table for us. I’d been practicing polyamory since high school and was dating two other people when I met my husband. Martin had never tried non-monogamy, but he thought I was pretty special and wanted to give it a go. It’s certainly not what our parents wanted for us — I think my mom hoped it might be a phase I’d outgrow — but they’re supportive.

While there are infinite ways to structure an open marriage, my husband and I have one with a few lovers who are closely entwined with our lives. We celebrate birthdays together, and go on family trips. In the decade we’ve been together, I’ve had a handful of lovers, all of whom were close friends before they shared my bed. My partners are like extended family — we don’t live together, but we see each other often and our families have close relationships. People take all kinds of approaches to this. Some never introduce their lovers to their kids. Some live together in households where three or more adults are parenting together.

And apparently we’re not that unusual. Around 7 percent of straight couples have arranged some kind of consensual non-monogamy, according to a recent Slate article. Numbers are much higher for gay men and a little lower for lesbians. Still, there’s been little enough research done that these numbers remain fuzzy. What is clear in the research is that practicing polyamory doesn’t make or break most relationships....

Read the whole long, thoughtful article (Feb. 14, 2012). Save it to pass to family and friends if they need something reassuring.

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Western poly ideas spread to South Asia, and thoughts on the far future

Two hundred years from now, when surviving cultures are spreading out and recolonizing the climate-changed, resource-overshot wreckage of the 21st and 22nd centuries (I sometimes think), perhaps parts of India will be providing some of those outspreading survivors.

I'd put lower odds on America in its current form. A better world in coming ages will mean embracing sustainability ― and here in the U.S., the topmost elites who dominate business, policy-making, and the limits of acceptable discussion have mostly become so denialist and brittle that they would rather crash American civilization, and much of the world with it, than get behind, say, a carbon tax.

Long views like that are part of what keep me in this polyamory-awareness business.

Okay, what's the connection?

Getting to a sustainable world — one that is both good and able to last ― will not happen without the emergence of genuinely attractive life alternatives to high material consumption. It will also require economic structures that do not depend on ever-increasing material consumption year by year to stay ahead of economic failure.

Bear with me.

A sustainable world, on the far side of whatever is coming first, will surely require more people sharing homes, kitchens, child-rearing, goods and resources of all kinds.¹ Life in more crowded quarters, in a low-consumption economy of resource-sharing, is generally a worse way to live under present circumstances. People strive hard all their lives to move in the opposite direction: to get bigger homes farther apart with more empty rooms. Closer living will be attractive to people only in a new culture with unusually high interpersonal and group-living skills by today's standards.

Never mind about sex and romance for a moment. I see today's polyamory community gardening up sprouts of these next-level interpersonal and group-interaction skills, and the ideology of this new culture. I really want these ideas and practices to take root well enough to survive through ugly times, if that's what's coming, and be there to seed the ground on the other side.

Second point: back to sex and romance. A sustainable world is going to require attractive ways to pursue and acquire richness and purpose and meaning in life that do not depend on Getting More Stuff. The ways that people find richness and value and meaning will need to have low resource costs. Which means finding these things in each other. As the bumpersticker says, "The best things in life aren't things." A culture offering wide possibilities for romance and sexual intimacy, or just deeply intimate socialization throughout life, can offer richness and purpose in abundance. A materially simple life need not be simple in any other way.

Don't get me wrong; I have no use for New Age woo-woo about these things. But I do think that the polyamory paradigm might help to humanize the world. I think that it might even someday generalize the magic of romantic love into something that's larger and more powerful in the world than the isolated couple-love where society has safely walled it away ― thus helping to provide ways to lead rich, rewarding, meaning-filled lives without the Earth-killing pursuit of Ever More Stuff.

Thirdly: Sexual repression in a culture is an accurate predictor (as the CIA is said to be quite aware) of that culture's war hysterias, religious fanaticism, submission to authoritarian rule, and pathologies of denialism toward reality-based ways of thought. So, a safer world will have to be freer of it.

Hmmm... some of this may get into the keynote speech I'm giving at the opening of Loving More's Poly Living conference in Philadelphia this Friday evening (February 10). You can still sign up for the weekend, and maybe tell me in person I'm full of shit about this, though I like hugs too. Hope to see you there.

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Okay, back to India.

The ideas about relationships that we polys are seeding into the Western world are starting to get attention in other places too ― places that might someday be in a better position to develop them and carry them forward. Here is a roundup of such attention in South Asia.

● In southern India's leading English newspaper, The Hindu:

Is our society ready for multiple partner relationships?

By Vijay Nagaswami

...The general theme of what most of my interlocutors had to say centred around the belief that since multiple-partner relationships are successful in many parts of the world, they should, therefore, be acceptable in our country as well. Although my research hasn't provided me any convincing data that such relationships actually work in the short or long-term, I thought it may be politic to examine some of the dynamics in some clearly delineable prototypes of multiple-partner relationships.

Open relationships

The first of these are what are usually referred to as ‘open relationships', wherein both partners are free to get emotionally and sexually involved with other people without needing the partner's consent every time.... In other words, the element of exclusivity gets taken out of your open relationship, although commitment is still inherent.

This is different from ‘swinging' and ‘spouse-swapping' in which the focus is more on sexual rather than emotional intimacy....

And in recent times, there is the new phenomenon called polyamory or simply, poly, sometimes described as ‘responsible non-monogamy'. While the definition of polyamory is not always absolutely clear, and can include open relationships as well in its ambit, it is distinguished from swinging because it's seen as encompassing sexual, emotional, romantic and spiritual dimensions. The basic understanding here is that anyone is capable of having simultaneous, multiple, deep, intimate relationships, and that the ‘distracting' elements of marriage, like jealousy, exclusivity, power imbalances etc., are squarely removed from the equation, thereby creating opportunities to grow as human beings.

However, jealousy does appear every now and again, and the successful poly is one who has been able to conquer this emotion and replace it with what is referred to as compersion (the opposite of jealousy, where you experience genuine happiness that your partner finds fulfillment or joy from somebody or something other than yourself). Fidelity, loyalty, honesty, equality, respect and transparency are big virtues among polys, for, no relationship takes place in the absence of consent and consensus. If ever consent is withheld, the reasons have to be substantial.

Polyamorists may engage in long-term relationships in triads, quads or networks. They would still tend to have a ‘primary' relationship and one or several ‘secondary relationships'. They are a growing movement in the United States (apparently there're about half a million polyamorists there) and also participate in Pride parades to highlight the legitimacy of their cause. Polyfidelity is a more controlled method of engaging in multiple relationships. The partners that one can choose from are limited to members of a group, network or commune. And fidelity to this group is demanded at all costs. Otherwise, the dynamics are similar to polyamorous relationships....

...Some research into multiple marriages is under way in the West, but it's too early to tell whether it is a viable and sustainable alternative to monogamy....

Read the whole article (Jan. 7, 2012). More about Vijay Nagaswami and his book 3's a Crowd: Understanding and Surviving Infidelity.

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● In Outlook India, one of India's four top-selling English weekly newsmagazines:

Indian couples are exploring a few ‘open’ ways out of desultory middle life

By Ira Trivedi

...Just down the road from Renu’s South Delhi home, I meet Sangeeta. For a soft woman of benign, even nondescript appearance, short and pudgy — clad in a simple salwar-kameez — she is surprisingly loquacious. An eager Sangeeta talks freely, almost in a manner of showing off, about her open marriage.

“An open marriage is not what people think. Some of my friends do think that I am promiscuous, or that my kids see me with other men. Many of my so-called friends ended their friendships with me, they thought I was immoral, and that the only way to live was in an orthodox marriage, caged in with the in-laws. But my husband and I know that our marriage looks like most people’s marriages, except that we are honest with each other, and that we are happier than we have ever been before.”

...At 35, Sangeeta has pretty much overhauled her views. A three-year overseas stint in the UK with her engineer husband, exposure to glossy magazines, television and liberal faceless friends made on the internet have encouraged her to enter new forms of relationships — something she would never have imagined she would do when she was 18.

“My husband and I know that our marriage looks like most people’s marriages...except we’re honest with each other.”

...The relationship paradigm is slowly changing in pockets of India where a subculture is brewing which is dancing an unconventional dance to the conventional song of marriage.

When I was a kid, my girlfriends and I teased each other chanting the popular jingle, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Smriti with a baby carriage.” In the Indian context, the order of love and marriage was understood by all of us to be the other way around. At this time, such truisms were uncontroversial and as empirically accurate as they were morally prescriptive.

Those were the days when any sort of love other than arranged monogamous relationships dared not raise its head.... Just a decade ago, Indians could not imagine procreation and marriage as separate, or even procreation and sex as separate. We never imagined tolerance for premarital sex, live-in relationships, or open marriages, yet as I interviewed urban, and largely middle-class couples and individuals for this article, I found them speaking eagerly about their unconventional relationships and desires.

...A prime reason for this shift, continues [Sanjay] Srivastava [professor of sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth], is the increasing distance from wider kinship networks. Couples marry, move away to other cities, and are less likely to be under surveillance from kinsfolk than before. So, urban mobility, changing nature of work and, very significantly, the lessening of stigma (at least in some circles) on women having unconventional relationships, is also an important context in this regard.

...Unconventional forms of relationships such as live-in partnerships and open marriages are certainly not the norm or the mainstream in India, but through these new paradigms we get a sense of where marriage and sexuality may be headed, not according to statistics that tend to capture the most tectonic shifts, but according to pioneers, such as the people who I have spoken to, who stand on the frontlines.

...It is surprising to see the large number of low-conflict, melancholic marriages, mostly in the cohort of people in their late ’30s, 40s and early 50s. My interactions and studies indicated a beguiling paradox: many of the people who I spoke with either felt more comfortable existing within the rules of melancholy marriages/relationships or with breaking them completely through affairs and divorce, than by revising their mindset towards relationships.

It seemed that even though there existed an incentive to bring about change, couples seemed disinclined to figure out how marriage and sex might evolve substantively, and not merely superficially into something better and more satisfying within the existing relationship. This is probably linked to the shortage of marriage counselors, sex therapists and family psychologists who can speak freely to couples and guide and counsel them. As the uncomplicated (though not necessarily happier) age of the baby carriage comes to end, we are presented with a brand new frontier, one in which the future is uncertain as old standards, traditions and priorities are gently blown away.

Read the whole article (issue dated Dec. 26, 2011).

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● Commentary by a female writer in República, a newspaper in Nepal:

Romantic inclusivity

By BHUSHITA VASISTHA

Polyamory (pronounced Pou-lee-aa-moukh-ry) wasn’t the word I was prepared to encounter on one of those lousy days at my office, when the sun hung low in wisps of mist and warm air from the heater burnt my nostrils to fatigue.

When I first stumbled upon the word, amid a jumble of other adjectives dedicated to describe French existentialist writer Simone De Beauvoir, well, it was merely the Frenchness of the word that invoked my curiosity....

...On close follow-up, the idea came as a full-fledged concept, which was adopted by a noticeable chunk as a lifestyle. And there are, actually, psychiatrists specializing on the issue, even though American health insurance doesn’t recognize their charge as medical expense yet.

And wait, they aren’t swingers (one who swap their partners for pleasure). Uh, uh, not even polygamist (those who, as if not suffering enough, go for multiple marriages).

Polyamory is defined as, “a lifestyle in which a person may pursue simultaneous romantic relationships, with the blessing and consent of each of their partners. This is in contrast to monogamy, where relationship partners agree to romantic exclusivity. This is also in contrast to infidelity, where someone takes on additional lovers without their partner’s consent.

Polyamorous people commit to honesty, negotiation, and clear communication about each of the relationships in their life (Hymer and Rubin, 1982).”

While the concept as a whole was intriguing enough, what really got me was this term “romantic exclusivity”. Of late, I’ve pondered a lot on this particular aspect of relationship, yet the neatness of the summarization — romantic exclusivity — came as some sort of revelation....

...[The polyamory school of thought] claims that love always multiplies on sharing. Or in more plain terms, it suggests if you share a loving relationship with 10 people, it's more extensive than loving one person. Simple mathematical axiom!

And when you experience more freedom in a relationship ― not just freedom to pursue multiple relationships, but freedom to be yourself, whoever that is ― the dynamics of relationship expands from mere attraction to mutual respect. From my own experience, whenever my boyfriend trustingly lets me be with other friends, even male friends, I feel more loving towards him; I feel this great joy for being trusted. And funnily, the more I’m convinced that he trusts me with other men, the lesser I’m motivated to cheat (ya, that’s a huge word) on him. I can be friends with men, be myself, and joke around, without any murky desires lurking on the backyard of my mind. And that is so beautiful, so meaningful, so relaxing....

Torn amidst this desire to break free and allow freedom, I’m extremely fascinated to polyamory as an intellectual theory, but I wonder, if pursuing 10 relationships at a time, per se, wouldn’t be ten times more problematic, if not as hectic.

Read the whole article (Dec. 3, 2011).

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● In Chauthi Duniya, a national Hindi weekly newspaper (English edition):

Have you always wanted to have more than one partner and be honest with them about it? Check out the life of a polyamorist.

Polyamory is the term consisting of the Greek word for more – ‘poli’ and the Latin word for love – ‘amor’, and it therefore refers to “love for more than one partner”. This love can be sexual, emotional, spiritual or their combination....

...Polyamory is based on honesty and openness and the key values of polyamorists, as they call themselves, are fidelity, loyalty, respect, trust, dignity, mutual support, communication, negotiations and unpossessiveness. For that reason, polyamorists are also familiar with the term ‘coming-out’.

They imagine fidelity and loyalty in a slightly different way than most, monogamous people. Jealousy isn’t considered a sign of love or moral weakness, which is sometimes used as criticism by people who don’t understand polyamory (they therefore don’t take respect and mutual communication into account) and want to drag their partner into a relationship he or she isn’t ready to establish. Jealousy is just an emotion that requires our attention, similar to depression, and has to be explored.

What’s love like with several partners?

Some relationships are bisexual, while others are monosexual (that is, solely heterosexual or homosexual). Polyamory may have a hierarchical structure. The hierarchical version distinguishes between primary, secondary etc. partners. The status of the primary partner may be equal to the status of a marital partner.... There are different variations in terms of number and gender structure and in terms of partners’ residence and division of work. Some relationships last for a long time and people also have children.

Polyamorists say that in fact people aren’t polygamous or monogamous beings. There are only polygamous and monogamous relationships. Everything therefore depends on the arrangement between all the people involved....

The whole article (2010). It also appeared in the magazine ZeeNews (Aug. 28, 2010).

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● Deborah Anapol, who has lived in India, wrote a long article "Polyamory in India: Then and Now," with "then" being ancient times:

Like China, India presents some strange paradoxes when it comes to sexuality and intimate relating. The famous erotic temple sculptures of Khajuraho and the present-day practices of existing indigenous tribal peoples in central India, the well-known writings of Kama Sutra, and the popular worship of Krishna with his thousands of wives, and legendary queens and goddesses with more than one husband, all point to a culture where sexuality was celebrated and multiple partner relating was sanctioned.

...Uma, a psychotherapist in Mumbai, feels that the British are primarily responsible for the sexual repression that has prevailed in Indian society for the past century and that most Indians "have not managed to shake off yet."...

Read on. (July 12, 2010).

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Update, March 26, 2012: Thanks to Pieter Schultz for spotting this:

3 on a bed: India’s first polyamoric film


In a fully packed auditorium... I saw the première of Rajdeep Paul and Sarmistha Maiti’s 32-minutes short film ‘3 on a bed’, on Saturday, March 24, 2012. Produced by Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute (SRFTI) and inspired by Girish Karnad’s Kannada play ‘Hayavadana’, this is said to be India’s first polyamoric film about a ménage-à-trois or a threesome of two men and a woman.

As the name suggests, the story revolves around three friends, Kapil, Debdutta and Padmini, all art college pass-outs, sharing their bodies, soul, food and a bed....

...While watching ‘3 on a bed’, I recalled an article published in popular Bengali news daily about the life-story of a business person; living at Garia in Kolkata; who is married to two women, who are sisters. He also has had children from his wives and they all are living together happily, under one roof. Perhaps, people may term this as an exceptional incidence of our society, but the truth is, it exists and relationship is successful.

The concept of this film raises the same issue; can this kind of love and sexual relationship exists in our society? If so, what shall be their terms? What should be the model of our social system?...

...As the film ends, it leaves the audience with a feel good feeling. When we see the three characters to unite again, it’s a strong message given by the director duo; yes, a new world is possible, what we all need to do is to love others selflessly.

As Debdutta, replied in his interview, “it might be your dream; but you need a team to realize your dream”, I wish, the team of Rajdeep and Sarmistha will continue making films and keep sharing their dreams with us.

Read the whole article (March 26, 2012).

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1. For instance: Why do eight houses on one cul-de-sac require eight riding lawnmowers? Two reasons. First, unless more lawnmowers are made, marketed, and sold than are needed, businesses suffer, workers become unemployed, stockholders lose value, and any downward economic spiral is accelerated. Second: From the individual homeowner's standpoint, a private lawnmower spares you from having to interact with the neighbors ― to negotiate and maintain agreements about sharing its use, costs, and upkeep. This matters, because by new-culture standards, most people today interact rather poorly.

I believe these two seemingly separate reasons actually depend on each other, and reinforce each other, and perpetuate each other. Multiply that by practically all the other material things that surround us.

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