Savage Love: The Quad Squad

Yes, I know, TW, Dan Savage. Since we've been on the subject lately of the Poly 101s the public is seeing, here is his Savage Love Letter of the Day for yesterday.

Tell me if you see anything out of line with the advice he gives here. I don't.

As for tone, that's his shtick. You take it or leave it.

My S.O. and I recently started a polyamorous relationship with another couple, who have been our friends for some time. We see each other pretty regularly for non-sex encounters and sometimes we get together to just hang out. For the first time we were hanging out and I just wasn't feeling it. I attempted to text my S.O. to let him know ... that I just really wanted to go home, but his phone was off and things had already gotten started in the cuddling dept.

Do you have any suggestions for putting the brakes on a potential evening? I'm GGG in the sense that I am fine with him having fun without me, but he's not interested in a threesome with the other male partner, and I don't want to be the reason someone gets left out.

– Friendly Orgasms Usually Relaxing

Navigating interests and libidos is complicated enough for two people — half the mail most weeks is from couples who quite can't get their feeling-it/not-feeling-it dynamics into a rough semi-synch. So it would be highly unrealistic for four members of a poly quad to expect that all four will be in perfect sync all of the time.

And just as it’s perfectly acceptable to communicate that you’re not feeling it when you're in a relationship with one person, FOUR, it's perfectly acceptable to communicate that you're not feeling when you're in a relationship with multiple partners. So it frankly concerns me, FOUR, that you felt you had to send a secret smoke signal to your your S.O., your primary partner, in the form of a text — a text he didn't see, which presumably resulted in you playing along because things "had already gotten started." If you're in a relationship with this other couple, FOUR, and not just fucking around with them, you should be able to communicate with them too — using your words, not your smartphone. If you don't feel comfortable communicating with this other couple (about sex!), FOUR, you may have slapped the "polyamorous relationship" label on this foursome prematurely.

Anyway...

...If you always play as a group... then your S.O. should be used to being around the other male partner while he's in action. So if you took off or tapped out, FOUR, and the others wanted to mess around, the guys could take turns while one waited on the other bed or in another room. If you're already having the occasional MFF threesome, FOUR, then both guys should be familiar with getting left out taking a powder while the other three play. There are lots of workarounds here — including your S.O. getting over his fear of MMF threesomes.

The next time you all get together and you’re not feeling it, FOUR, you could text your S.O. an S.O.S. or make up a bullshit excuse — early work meeting, headache, bad clams — or, you could tell the truth. The truth is your best option — and it puts the onus on the others to figure out how to proceed without you but with your blessing.

I would urge you, however, to have a conversation with your S.O. and the other couple as soon as possible about the other night. ... Tell them you want to open up the lines of communication, so that the next time someone isn't feeling it (and it might not be you next time), that person feels free to say so, without fear of being shamed or pressured by the others.

If your S.O. and the other couple aren't assholes, FOUR, they'll be mortified to know that you didn't feel comfortable telling them how you were feeling in the moment.

Here's the original at his home paper (May 31, 2017). Possibly NSFW ads.

Update July 28: Another Savage Love Letter of the Day, in which he takes a very snarkable poly letter and treats it with delicacy, care and respect: Anxiety Attacks at the Trio Rodeo.

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"Meet the People In 'Quads' "

Connections.Mic

polyvic.org.au

Something I notice: the larger the relationship structure, the less often it occurs. In the poly world you see more vees than full triads (whether sexual all around or not), more triads than quads, more quads than quints. Extend the trend the other way, and this is why I think most people will always just form couples, even in the fully poly-aware and poly-accepting future that's coming.

This larger-is-rarer rule breaks down when relationships spread out to become a larger poly network: a tribe or community. Big "extended family" networks with indistinct edges are common, but they usually contains nodes of core couples or threes.

I haven't seen quads getting much attention lately. Usually formed by two couples, they have a reputation in some quarters as more stable than triads and in others as more trouble-prone, as in the snarky formula (dating to Deborah Anapol in the early 1990s) "2+2 —> 3+1."

This piece about quads just appeared on Connections.Mic:

Meet the People In 'Quads,' or Foursome Relationships


By Sophie Saint Thomas

We've heard of throuples, or couples who invite a third party into their relationship. But is there such thing as a couple that dates another couple? In the poly community, there is, although it's relatively uncommon: When two couples are in a relationship, it's known as a "quad."

What is a quad? One fairly successful quad is Jill*, 42; her husband and primary (a term used to describe her primary relationship partner) Eric, 48; Amanda, 38; and Amanda's primary Mark, 39.

The four are the founders of the app The Poly Life, which they created as a way to organize details such as sleeping and dating schedules. They live under one roof with a combined total of seven children, whom they parent collectively.

"In layman's terms, [a quad] means we are four people and in our relationship, we happen to be two committed couples and some of us have outside lovers. [In our quad] the couples date each other, both women are bisexual and sleep with each other, and the men can play (like a threesome with two men, one woman) but are not sexual with each other. The men identify as straight," Jill explained in an email last week.

..."I've seen occasional instances where everyone is sexually involved with everyone else, but that's quite rare," [Franklin] Veaux said in a Skype interview last week....

To establish a successful quad, all parties must communicate to ensure they are on the same page.

...Jill and Eric worked through the jealousy issues, and they now have identified as polyamorous for seven years. They met their current partners, Amanda and Mark, at a church function, of all places. "We live in a Christian, conservative neighborhood. We started out as friends, and it was a great surprise when we both had feelings for them," Jill said.

They've been in a relationship with Amanda and Mark for 3 1/2 years. "We still have hard days, but they're far between," Jill said.

...The key to their success, as is the case in all relationships, has been communicating openly and honestly with each other about the challenges of being in a quad. "Listening and not reacting takes practice, and with such busy lives, we can get triggered and communication can break down," Jill said. "Communication, ego-checks and scheduling is crucial to making us work."

The four of them co-parent their collective seven children, being honest with them about their bedroom schedule, which they say has led to good-natured jokes from the children. "We have a schedule of who sleeps with [whom] in what bed," Eric said. "It's become something a few of our kids now joke about when we deviate from the schedule like, 'Oh, Jill's fighting with Eric because Mark is in the guest room,' (and Jill is sleeping with Amanda)."

..."What I tend to see happen many times [says Veaux] is that you'll have two couples that will start dating in a quad because they believe that's a way to avoid dealing with jealousy or insecurity [by having the same number of partners]. Like if I've got two partners, and my wife has two partners, then we both have two partners so nobody is going to feel jealous. When you try to deal with jealousy by creating structure instead of dealing with insecurity, it tends not to work."

Entering into a quad for the wrong reasons typically leads to chaos and hurt feelings. Often, the partners will just break up for each other. "What they'll end up doing is swapping couples and then breaking up," Veaux said. "That happens so often it's almost a trope."

Bottom line: "Don't look to being in a quad to solve problems where somebody is not getting what they want. It might work, it might not," Veaux warned.

But if two couples enter a quad because they have feelings for each other, rather than trying to fix a hole within their own relationship, the benefits can be enormous — for the entire family.

"We raise all the children as if they are our own," Jill said. "If one of us can't be at one of our kids' events, we cover each other. The other benefits, for us, are companionship, emotional and financial support. Sharing our finances with each other and working towards bigger goals has been extraordinary: Because the money pot is bigger when you have four people contributing, our goals are becoming real. We're one big-ass happy family!"...

Read the whole article (April 26, 2016).

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"The well-organized home life of a polyamorous Springfield family"

This week's cover story for the alternative newspaper of western Massachusetts (for which I once worked!) is a thoughtful profile of an area quad family with kids.

Stories like this, hundreds of them as the years go by, are steadily helping to get us to public awareness and acceptance. People like these sharing their lives make life a little easier for all of us. Thank you.

Dishes, Dinner, & Sex: The well-organized home life of a polyamorous Springfield family

By Hunter Styles

Glance at Michelle, Aimee, Micah and Ian on the street and you might assume they’re two straight couples — or two gay couples. But they’re all going home together.

Jerrey Roberts / Valley Advocate

That home is a large, sunny house in the Forest Park neighborhood of Springfield. It’s where this group of four polyamorous partners — a “quad’” — live, laugh, eat and sleep under one roof.

These four adults are intimately connected to each other, but they’re also open to new flings and encounters. And so they face an unusual challenge: running a communal household while tending to the myriad romantic relationships that hold the four of them — and their lovers — together.

“It’s structured chaos,” says Michelle. “But we’ve maintained it for years now because we come together and talk about how things are playing out.”

For years, the four of them slept together on a queen-size and a king-size bed pushed together. But it’s not the hedonistic free-for-all some might imagine.

Having kids, for example, changed everything....

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...The poly groups in the Amherst area tend to skew young, Micah says, because of the university population. A poly group that met for a while in Hartford skewed older. A sizable Boston group called Poly Boston has members who range widely in age and experience.

In the Valley, a close-knit poly population means lots of dating within the group.

“I have no interest anymore in being someone else’s training wheels,” says Micah. “I don’t want to spend all of the time and effort it takes to meet someone, get involved with them, then find out that poly isn’t really for them. I don’t want to go through that anymore.”

But there are other advantages to dating within the group. You may not be well-acquainted with a potential partner, but “you probably know the people they’ve dated,” Micah said. “So you can ask them about them.”

It can be challenging to make such thorough commitments to others. But the tendency runs deep with this clan.

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...Connor is now three, and he has a one-year-old sister named Katie (also conceived by Aimee and Micah). Childcare comes in part from Ian’s mother, who lives on the ground floor of the house. Throw in four cats, and the place feels awfully busy sometimes.

“It’s really hard to get alone time in this house,” says Micah. “Especially with children. Right now, none of the bedroom doors lock. We’re changing that. We need to be able to keep the kids out.”

Before most decisions can be made, he adds, everyone needs to be consulted. It can be time-consuming.

Establishing a home life took time, and it wasn’t without its bumpy patches. Ian moved in later than the other three — along with his former wife. The original idea was to create a cooperative home of at least five people.

“But it didn’t work out as envisioned,” Micah said, referring to Ian’s wife. “She was a willing participant. But it just wasn’t working, so she left the house.”

As with any relationship, there are fights and bruised feelings. But in a polyamorous relationship, jealousy requires an extra dose of introspection.

In a monogamous relationship, “there are certain things that you just get to be angry about,” Aimee suggests. “Whereas for us, when I feel jealous about something, I need to really look at what’s making me feel that.”

“It’s uneasy,” says Ian. “It’s so much easier just to blame the other person when you’re upset.”

When a duo within the quad quarrels or needs more time together, the group will band together to work out a schedule giving the couple less “kid duty” or budget some extra money for a date night.

“Most problems that you could identify as poly problems are just relationship problems, honestly,” says Micah.

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...“Coming out as poly was a hell of a lot harder for me than coming out as bisexual,” Michelle says. “You need to educate people more about what it means. When you say you’re bisexual, at least people kind of get it.”

Michelle is open about being polyamorous. Not having to hide her relationships was an important consideration when selecting a job, she says. “My boss and my co-workers have been over to the house for parties. They’ve seen my life.”

Ian’s open, but fairly quiet about it. “I don’t wave a banner at work. But it comes up in conversation sometimes, and it’s no big deal. I have photos of everyone up at my desk.”...

But that’s work. They have a lot of fun, too. Often, Friday and Saturday night are for getting together with other partners outside of the quad, or with extended friend groups Still, the four of them spend a lot of time together. They go to museums and festivals. They take trips together to visit family — and they do have a lot of family. And they all try to sit down together for dinner at least a couple of times a week.

“Here are four adults — five, counting Ian’s mom — that are actively involved in the betterment and well-being of these small things,” says Michelle.

“It takes a village, right?” says Micah. “We’re a village.” •

The whole article (print issue of Nov. 20–26, 2014).

The same writer has two companion pieces in the same issue. Trans, Queer, Poly… and Married profiles a different person. I’m Poly — Now What? is about finding the local Meetup group.

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A poly home, just without the sex

The Atlantic

Not the street with the home described,
but a similar one nearby. (NCinDC / Flickr)

My post yesterday about the big poly article at The Atlantic led me to an Atlantic piece published ten days earlier. It's an example of how groups of friends are building tight-knit households that are the next thing to polyamorous, in order to beat the isolation and resource overstretch that increasingly bedevil harried nuclear families.

In fact, the "normal" household of Mom and Dad with no other adults is a recent historical aberration. Humans have lived in larger extended families and tribes for almost always. We're born to it. This is why a nuclear family can instinctively feel so diminished, lonely, and incomplete without you knowing why.

Setups like the one below qualify, to me, as the generalization of polyfamilies: they're based on friendship rather than romantic interconnections, but otherwise quite similar. Think "intentional community."

Two Couples, One Mortgage

Why my partner and I decided to buy a house with our friends, share our space and our lives, and all make a family together.

By Ari Weisbard

Last December, my partner Rebecca and I bought a rowhouse with another couple. Our wedding was this May. Next month, we’re expecting a baby — the other couple’s baby.

For most of our adult lives, Rebecca and I lived in houses full of roommates and loved it. Before our most recent move, we rented a rambling five-bedroom house with four friends. When we started talking about getting married, we realized our biggest fear was that we’d leave these important kinds of friendships behind and end up living in what she jokingly called a “love/torture cave of nuclear family loneliness.” Neither of us wanted that.

It turned out two of our closest friends... felt similarly, and we decided to do something different and move in all together....

Yes, all four of us are on the deed and, yes, we share the 30-year mortgage and food and maintenance expenses. No, there’s no division of the house into separate sections. And no, all four of us are not all having sex with each other. (Why do many people assume that if adults are willing to share a kitchen, they probably also want to share a bed?) We are just two couples who plan to live together and raise children in one household, hopefully for decades....

Many nights, when one of us stumbles home from work exhausted from a hard day, someone else has already done the shopping and cooked a great homemade dinner. When a pipe burst this February, we all took turns bailing out the basement. Once the baby arrives, we look forward to being crucial reinforcements for each other during those first several nearly sleepless months and trading off so each couple can have date nights. Living together with another couple also has made it easier to identify and counteract some of the sexist patterns that emerge in many households. Because we discuss chores as a group and work consciously together to establish our household norms and individual responsibilities, there’s less opportunity for traditional gender roles to establish themselves surreptitiously.

Living together seems to be a great financial move so far. With four adults splitting the mortgage and other costs, it is easier for each of us to save more of our income, which will give us the financial freedom to pay for childcare or reduce our work hours later, when we need more time and money for our families....

For many people, their romantic partner is the one person with whom they feel comfortable showing their struggles or weaknesses. While Rebecca and I certainly support each other in that way, it has actually been great for our relationship that we don’t try to be each other’s only source of support and amateur therapy....

Sounds poly to me. Read the whole article (July 11, 2014).

Here's a similar story about another platonic-quad household. Here's one about six adults, several of them divorced from one another and remarried to others, who all moved in together along with their kids and find it great.

I'll be posting more here about such all-but-poly households. The media are spotting a trend toward them "not seen since the 1970s," driven in part by the changing economy.

As I've written before, we can expect this way of life to increase in the coming century as resources become scarcer and more poorly distributed. People with good poly housemate skills will have an early advantage.

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"Why I'd Love a Four-Person Marriage"

Elephant Journal

So many people these days yearn for structures of family and community beyond the isolated nuclear couple.

Especially desperate are parents trying to raise emotionally healthy children by themselves — children with competence, good values and few crises — and feeling helpless against onslaughts of marketers and consumerism, damagingly stressed-out school environments, the narrowing, steepening pathway to the middle-class life that their own parents took for granted, all in an environment of little-boxes isolation from even the neighbors.

Humans are not designed to live like this. Especially children. We were shaped by evolution to thrive in rich community of extended family and tribe. Including 24-hour adult-infant contact, ample time later for free play and exploration, and extended webs of adult-child bondings.

"These traditional practices are important to understand," writes Time magazine online this week, "because many indices of poor health in children — such as obesity, depression, ADHD and teen suicide — have increased dramatically in the United States over the last 50 years."

The Time article is titled What the Pygmies Can Teach Us About Childrearing (Jan. 30, 2013). It draws upon Jared Diamond's new book The World Until Yesterday, which, says Time, "describes some of the lessons we can learn from today’s hunter-gatherer societies that most closely approximate the way people lived in our ancestral past." Diamond doesn't romanticize prehistoric lifestyles. He lived for long periods among the ancient hunter-gatherer tribes that remain isolated in the mountains of New Guinea, and he paints much of their life as fear-driven, ugly, and sometimes just plain dumb even by the standards of the next tribe over. But they do some things consistently better than we do, and one is raising emotionally healthy children. This happens in part because the job is spread around.

The modern polyamory movement has emerged at humanity's opposite pole: among the most educated, intellectual/geeky, cosmopolitan people in the most developed Western societies. The kind of people who read Jared Diamond, for instance.

And often, sex and love prove not to be their main draws to polyamory. It's often a new vision of family: extended chosen family, modernly tribal.

At the poly conferences I go to, attendees have often been asked to describe the poly situation of their dreams. Consistently coming out on top is the extended group-marriage model, often with kids. Even though this model is the rarest in real poly life. It's damn hard to put together. For now.

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So where's this leading? Elephant Journal is an online magazine (formerly the print magazine elephant) that calls itself "your guide to what we like to call ‘the mindful life’: yoga, organics, sustainability, genuine spirituality, conscious consumerism, fair fashion, the contemplative arts…anything that helps us to live a good life that also happens to be good for others, and our planet."

Its February issue features a heartrending article by a woman with kids yearning for the quad relationship that she and her husband once had with another couple. Here's the thing. There was no sex involved. They were a tight poly quad in every other respect, despite being just-friends who wouldn't raise Rick Santorum's eyebrow. There is so much yearning out there.

Why I’d Love a Four-Person Marriage

Lyla Cicero

Two Couples in Bathing Outfits, circa 1934.

A few years after finding and marrying each other, Seth and I found our couple-friend soulmates.

Over the few years that followed, in an entirely platonic way, we became more than just friends. When there was something going on in one of our lives, there were four people, instead of just two, who put their heads together and figured out what to do.

Instead of Seth and I planning our social schedules together, all four of us would coordinate. When one of us was being bullheaded, there were three other folks there to gently but persistently provide an “intervention.”

Let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to get your partner to hear feedback on his behavior when there are two other people there backing you up!

However, the biggest thing I took away from that experience was that the business of life felt a lot less like work during that time. Life felt less burdensome and more fun. With four adults facing the world together things just felt a bit less daunting—spending time with friends stopped feeling like it required elaborate planning or impossible scheduling feats. There just seemed to be…time.

When our couple-friend soulmates divorced, Seth and I were devastated. We all joked that Seth and I were more upset than they were, but I think in some ways we really were.

We were losing this family unit we’d created — except we didn’t have any of the motivation for wanting to move on that they had. We were perfectly happy in our sexless, four-person marriage; we hadn’t signed on for divorce.

Fast-forward two years and our couple-friends are out there dating, finding new communities, moving on with their lives and Seth and I are slogging through marriage with twin two-year-olds. Seth and I have had our ups and downs over the past couple years since our twins were born, and there were times I wondered if we would make it.

But I want us to. I want Seth as my life partner; I never really question that. What I question is why it feels so hard.... I question why the business of life seems so hard in ways that sometimes overwhelm our relationship and leaves us with too few resources for each other and our family.

...The sheer impossibility of completing all the tasks necessary to financially, logistically and emotionally manage a household, attempt to meet each other’s and our kids’ needs, maintain our careers, and oh, have some time to nurture ourselves, feels back-breaking. It is simply too much for two people!

I often think back to our foursome and fantasize about having another couple as an intimate part of our lives or even our household.

Ok, sure, sometimes these fantasies involve me exploring my attraction to women with a hot, redhead who just happens to be a member of that new couple. And I think that would be great, I really do! I think if you can have the right mindset and great communication, having two new folks to explore with sexually can be really good for a marriage.

But this post is not about that; it’s about the soul-crushing workload of a two-parent household. Whoever thought up this craziness? What culture in the history of the world isolated two people, threw toddlers at them, demanded they both find satisfying, lucrative employment, and then, as some kind of cruel joke, expected them to meet all of each other’s emotional and sexual needs?

The answer is none!...

Read the whole long article (Jan. 31, 2013).

P.S.: If this post speaks to you, if you dream of how to live in community in a new and better culture, check out the Network for a New Culture. Some of my dear friends are very active in it, and I've been going to the annual West Virginia summer camp of its East Coast branch for several years now. Which I wrote about here.

P.P.S.: Hope to see you at Poly Living in Philadelphia in a day or two! (You can just show up for walk-in registration. Day passes available.)

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"A polyamorous quad welcomes their first child"

Offbeat Mama

      Connor and family. Left to right: Ian, Micah (the author), Aimee, Michelle.

For its "birth week," the online magazine Offbeat Mama ("Parenting against the grain") presents an article by a friend of mine who co-organizes the Transcending Boundaries conference, held in Massachusetts every fall to bridge across queer, alt-gender, and alt-relationship identities.

A polyamorous quad welcomes their first child

This is not a "normal" birth story. Which makes sense, since my family is not a normal family. Please note the lack of quotes that second time — it's with good reason....

On April 2, 2011 our little Munchkin came into this world, caught in the loving hands of two of his parents while a third held his mother. We were surrounded by a top-quality, professional staff made up of midwives, nurses, and our doula. His entry into this world went exactly as we wanted, with minimal intervention, surrounded by love and full of hope for the future.

...Aimee's due date was Friday, March 30. We'd all been anxiously waiting for the big day seemingly forever. For most of the previous three weeks, every little exclamation from Aimee was met with the same question, "Are you OK?" from one or all of her partners. How she didn't kill any of us is testimony to her prodigious patience.

Friday began like any other day in our household.... At the midwife appointment Aimee was [dilated] between one and two centimeters, so all of the practice her uterus had been up to was doing something. The nurse cautioned that things could stay like this for a few more days, or she could suddenly open up and give birth in a few hours. With that in mind we went home. Around 8:25 pm, Aimee gave out an exclamation that was not as little as before. Then another. She was painfully cramping along with the Braxton-Hicks contractions. This was something new.

...Like a good geek girl, Aimee got a little app for her iPhone that created a log of her contractions. Push a button to start the timer, push it again to stop, and it created a handy dandy log of your use. She fired it up and started using it to get good data.

...If this was early labor, we knew it could be a long process, or even stop. Ian and Mich went to bed, determined to rest in case it was the last good night's sleep they'd have in awhile. Aimee was too uncomfortable to really sleep, so she and I bunked down on our sectional, watched movies, and settled in for a long night.

Friday night was a very long night.

...At this point (around 7am Saturday morning), Aimee had been awake for almost twenty-four hours, and in labor for eleven of them. I point this out because my admiration for her just went up, which is saying something, as the rest of the story will show....

By the time we made it to our [hospital] room, we were all hungry, since breakfast had been four hours before and none of us had eaten much. Excitement does that to the appetite. I had just tweeted to the world that we were safely ensconced....

...Here is where Barbara really demonstrated why every pregnant woman should have a doula. She gave expert advice on positioning, encouraging Aimee to shift positions frequently to prevent fatigue. She had, of all things, a piece of shelf liner (the rubbery mesh kind that keeps things from sliding around), that she used to hold up Aimee's belly. Taking the weight off of her, for even a few minutes at a time, was an invaluable relief. And I cannot underestimate how important her presence was for Ian, Michy and I....

Read on! (Sept. 10, 2012).

That was 17 months ago. Last I saw Connor he was thriving, vigorous and adorable.

Micah says they're planning more.

He also writes,

I've been very pleased with the reception on Offbeat Mama. I've been encouraged to write more about our family for them, and I am planning to do so.

Now that Connor is 17 months, the one thing I can say is that he is a pretty normal toddler. He has his own little personality quirks, like all kids do. He loves motorized vehicles, the bigger and louder the better. He's starting to show strong preferences regarding food and clothing. And he absolutely loves sports. And Yo GabaGaba. But overall, he's growing and developing exactly as he should be. Which would come as no surprise to anyone reading your blog. Poly families aren't that different from mono ones. We just have a couple extra sets of hands.

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