Poly families are here to stay. "Societal Implications of Consensual Non-Monogamy." Has Feeld gone downhill? And more polyamory in the news

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First, announcements:

♥   A fundraiser is on for a warm, heartful queer poly short film titled "Coming Out Polyamorous for Thanksgiving." It's based on a true story, told in the most popular chapter of Alberto's recent memoir Entwined: Essays on Polyamory and Creating Home.

Work on the 15-minute film is well under way. The pitch: 

Alberto's skills, good heart, and proven ability to bring projects to completion persuaded the directors of The Polyamory Foundation (I'm its president) to provide a startup grant of $5,000. The campaign needs to raise another $10,000 to complete the film, promote it widely, enter it in at least five film fests, and make a big splash with it around Thanksgiving 2025.

The fundraiser needs help. It ends January 2nd. You can give here.

♥   With 2025 around the corner, browse the next 12 months of polyamory/ENM conferences, campouts, retreats, and other regional gatherings at Alan's List of Polyamory Events.  Any missing? Write me at alan7388 (at) gmail.com

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●  Public awareness of polyfamilies — as a permanent, for-real part of society — continues to grow.

For starters: Who Gets to Be A Parent? asks Maclean's, Canada's national news magazine since ever. It argues that polyfamily households are increasingly common, should be recognized, and will be.

With the rise of polyamory, families with three or more parents are an increasingly common reality. Canadian laws are struggling to catch up.

Maclean's / iStock

By Catherine Wong

...In 2018, along with three other lawyers, I started working on a case in which three members of a polyamorous triad wished to be registered as the parents of a baby named Clarke. In situations where a child is conceived via intercourse, as Clarke was, B.C.’s Family Law Act only recognizes a maximum of two parents, the biological mother and father, on a birth registration. If a child is conceived using assisted reproduction technology, like IVF, the law recognizes a maximum of three parents, provided they sign an agreement before conception. In the case of Clarke, his family—two biological parents and my client, a non-biological parent—all wished to be legally recognized.

In practice, my client was a parent: she was engaged in daily caretaking and decision-making. The family celebrated birthdays and holidays together. She even induced lactation so she could feed Clarke. She did all the things a loving parent would do—and more—and, still, her role wasn’t recognized under the law. ...She could not qualify for paid parental leave or childcare-related tax relief. She couldn’t put Clarke on her work’s family health plan. ... Perhaps most importantly, Clarke’s own experience of his three-parent family would be denied by the world at large.

The judge ruled that all three members of the triad should be registered as Clarke’s parents, which she found was in the child’s best interest. But even though the case set a provincial precedent that a child conceived through sexual intercourse can have more than two parents, the law still doesn’t say [any] children in B.C. can have three parents. ... Poly parents should not have to mount expensive, lengthy court processes just to be seen as equal to the nuclear families down the street.

...Right now, lawyers and advocates across Canada are revisiting the definition of parentage. In late 2020, the British Columbia Law Institute formed a committee to review who qualifies to be a parent under the province’s Family Law Act. It brought together fertility and family lawyers (including me), counsellors, doctors and representatives from B.C.’s Vital Statistics Agency (which registers births, marriages and deaths). Overall, the group recommended that parentage should be more intention-based—that the law should recognize people who are actively parenting children, even if they are not genetically related. Many family law cases involve parents who are trying to shirk their parental duties; the law should reward people who want to take on those responsibilities. ...

...Full judicial reform may take years, proceeding on a similar path as same-sex marriage (decades of successful individual cases, then provincial buy-in, then eventually, full legalization in 2005). In the meantime, more visibility around poly families will help to change hearts and minds. ...

Catherine Wong is a family law lawyer and mediator at Saltwater Law in Vancouver.

The story came nine days after one in the Toronto Sun: Throuples becoming more prevalent as family law plays catch-up (Nov. 17)

The Weekly Voice, Canada's "leader in South Asian News," presented  Polyamory in Canada: Redefining Love, Family, and Commitment  (Nov. 29, reprinted),

Notice the unspoken Canadian assumption behind these mainstream articles: Civil law adjusts to serve society's evolving needs, not to punish or suppress evolving social needs. That's because Canada is a free country. 

 

●  I missed this one at the time. CNBC, a U.S. business news channel, put up a segment on how a quad family of two couples manage their household finances (Aug. 25, 2022). 

Rachel, Kyle, Ashley and Yair are two married couples in a non-monogamous relationship. They share a house, car, dog, cat, partners and finances. They also have plans to have children together. Obstacles they've faced having to do with rights and benefits as four partners have prompted them to meet with a lawyer to get divorced from one another and create a co-habitation agreement. Watch this video to learn how they manage finances in their non-traditional relationship.  

●  From the financial-services industry: Polyamory and planning: How to serve nonmonogamous clients  (Yahoo Finance, March 27, now paywalled).

I've got many more stories in the queue on how polyfamilies manage their finances. Stay tuned.

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●  Looking broadly: Robert N. Kraft, professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at Otterbein University, posts Societal Implications of Consensual Non-Monogamy (Dec. 12). It's an interview with poly therapist Sarah Stuteville, who produces the Seattle-based podcast Mistakes Were Made. The summary:

How polyamorous relationships influence family structures and the wider culture

• Discussions of non-monogamy clarify and define boundaries and behaviors for all types of relationships.

• Effective parenting in non-monogamous relationships is achieved through honesty and appropriate transparency.

• Reimagining conventional relationships can provide healthy alternatives for marginalized communities.

BTW, from Stuteville's advice for people starting this journey, 

Finding community and support is necessary for building a polyamorous life. Fortunately, there are more and more meetup groups, happy hours, and social organizations gathering poly people together....

Also, I believe dating apps can build this community, as long as your profile is clear that’s what you’re looking for. Other social media can also help people feel validated in their experiences. My husband is active on poly Reddit, and I’m on poly Instagram.

And I strongly encourage people to take well-motivated risks in sharing their decision to explore polyamory with trusted friends and family (if they feel safe). It’s important that loved ones know what you’re going through.

●  More poly in the pews: Churches face growing challenge as polyamory gains acceptance  (FaVS News,"a digital journalism start-up covering religion news and commentary" based in Spokane, Washington. Dec. 3)

By Tracy Simmons

Once considered a fringe relationship style among adults, consensual non-monogamy is gaining visibility across age groups. ... This, coupled with research showing over 20% of adults have engaged in consensual non-monogamous arrangements, raises a question for houses of worship: are they ready to address the growing acceptance of diverse relationship structures?

According to many within these communities, the answer is a resounding no.

“It’s so not ready,” said Kerlin Richter, a former Episcopal priest from Portland. “I think the church is still picturing freelove swingers from the 70s.”

Kerlin Richter

After serving her parish for seven years, she faced a year-long church investigation when she came out as polyamorous, ultimately leading to her renunciation of ordination.

...Though unaware of Richter’s open marriage, parishioners [had begun] confiding in her about their own non-traditional relationships. ... One congregant confessed that she feared rejection from the church if they discovered her polyamorous relationship.

“I was able to offer pastoral care and counseling, but it looked like a monogamous person trying to be slightly woke,” Richter recalled.

...Everything shifted when Richter, at 44, fell in love with her new partner and they decided to have a baby together, with her husband’s blessing. They opted for third parent adoption and decided to raise the baby together.

...But her private life was now visible.

Richter went to the bishop for guidance, but was told she needed to either renounce her order or return to monogamy. 

In 2023, she was fired from her position as rector.

She fought it at first, but after a year of legal battles she said she realized she couldn’t win.

“I thought I’d be able to explain why the shape of my family was not sinful, why it wasn’t a violation of my marriage or my ordination vows, but there was no space for any of that to actually happen,” Richter said. ...

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...Brian G. Murphy, one of the founders of queertheology.com, said for these reasons many polyamorous clergy remain closeted.

Brian G. Murphy

“There’s no Christian denomination that I know of that says it’s OK to be polyamorous,” he said. “They’ve got this handbook about what fidelity or commitment looks like and so to include polyamory, they’d have to reimagine all of that, then also rewrite it.”

...Murphy is a former Evangelical who recently converted to Judaism.

For many, like Richter, his website is one of the only resources for poly people of faith. It offers programs like “Polyamory & Christianity Course” designed to support individuals at the intersection of Christianity and polyamory or open relationships and initiatives like “Poly Possibilities” — an initiative that brings together religious non-monogamous people to explore how polyamory and spirituality enrich one another.

“There’s not a whole lot of places to go when wrestling with those questions,” Richter said. ...

“God is already dwelling amongst us and in us and in our relationships,” he said. “You are already holy and actually it’s the church that should be knocking on your door because polyamorous people have unique insights into the divine.”

He continues to write about faith and polyamory in his forthcoming book, Love Beyond Monogamy: How New and Ancient Insights on Polyamory Will Enrich Your Spirituality and Sexuality, which is expected to be published in 2025. ...

 

●  The UK's Telegraph is a Tory paper (it's where Boris Johnson got his start), but here it tries to steer its readers away from their simplistic unicorn fantasies toward healthy polyamory, or at least toward better, more respectful swinging/ENM fun: How threesomes and swinging went mainstream (and the rules to follow) (Dec. 3).

Although for an illustration, they used the Feet. In pink.

With almost three in four couples on one dating app looking for threeways, here’s how to be a good ‘unicorn’ and not end up a third wheel.

"Ethical non-monogamy involves all parties consenting
to have multiple romantic or sexual relationships."

By Alice Garnett

...Ethical non-monogamy is... entering the mainstream.

This includes couples looking for a “third” – a practice that is often referred to as “unicorn hunting”. As a bisexual woman, I’ve stumbled upon a fair few of these profiles on online dating sites and they’ve been – for better or worse – a core facet of the procedure. 

...Unfortunately, dating apps are littered with couples posing as only the female half of their pairing – luring bisexual women into a false sense of security. My trio of couples agree that there’s a better way to approach it: with transparency.

For example, all three of our couples use a shared profile, where both partners are clearly visible. They all used Feeld, a dating app designed for people in the kink, queer and polyamorous communities. ...

...Moving from WhatsApp chats to an in person [three-date] is different, and as Nia puts it, “I’m always more nervous before these dates than with a standard two-person one.” 

During the date, couples make sure to check in with each other. Both Nia and Finn and Mac and Sarah explain that they often wait until their date makes the inevitable trip to the bar or toilet and will then seize the opportunity to “have a quick chat with my partner to make sure that we’re both into whoever we’re on a date with”.

Once it’s been established that everyone is into everyone, couples must overcome the biggest hurdle of all; making the first move. “The awkward dynamics of who kisses who first just get multiplied when there’s more than two people,” says Finn. … 

...Mac explains: “If we all end up in bed together then, it’s more of the same – checking in, asking how each other is feeling. Sometimes we pick a safe word with the person we’re with, just in case anyone feels uncomfortable.”

For couples exploring connections with other couples, chemistry becomes an interplay of four different personalities. … “When it’s all four of us, it’s less about a couple inviting an outsider and more about exploring together as equals,” Lucy explains.

...“There are so many weird unicorn hunters out there that we were anxious to not come across as that,” says Finn. “We weren’t seeking out a threesome for a particular reason or purpose – for example, exploring our own sexuality, spicing up the bedroom, or as a birthday present, which we’ve seen as reasons on dating apps – we were just there because we thought it would be fun. We didn’t want to make the person feel like they had to act like a diplomat and show balanced and equal affection and interest between us.”

...Accepting and embracing the discomfort – and then communicating it sensitively – is crucial to the success of these encounters. In fact, even an “unsuccessful” night is likely to have yielded a helpful lesson on boundaries and expectations.

... As for connections between couples, these can often lead to long-term friendships. ...

...When done right, these triads, throuples, threesomes, foursomes (whatever you want to call them) can be a source of love and affection and adventure. ...

●  Also recently in The Telegraph: How I raise my kids in an open relationship (Nov. 13) "We’ve been together for 15 years and although most couples would find it horrifying, both of us sleep with other people." The photos present the family looking wholesome as can be.

Christopher Pledger

By Susanna Galton

Whether they’re dropping off their children at the school gates, helping with coding or walking their mini-golden doodle on the beach, Danielle and Rich are typical modern day parents. ...

●  On the flip side, I swear this is not the Onion: I’m married to a man double my age – now we’ve become a throuple & our third faces £4k fines over our strict sex rules (in the tabloid Sun, Oct. 19).

The wife rules this setup. They live in Brazil, where I have no idea if the contract is enforceable.

Anderson, Débora, Luiza. (Jam Press/Disclosure)

...“The contract includes clauses such as equal attention, where Anderson must offer the same level of affection and dedication to both of us” [says Débora, the wife, at center in pic].  “Another important point is the travel decision clause, in which I, as the primary partner, have the final say on travel destinations.

“Additionally, the contract states that he must have at least 10 sexual relations with each of us every month.

...If the contract is not followed, [Débora] claims a fine of £4,000 [about $5,040] for each broken rule....

Yes I know about 24/7 total power exchange kink relationships. Maybe this is that. But even there, the sub(s) must be able to break role to negotiate terms, including financial terms and what they will sign. Else they're cult victims — not role playing as cult victims.

●  Has Feeld gone downhill as the muggles pour in? GQ takes up this much-discussed topic: How “vanilla tourists” and threesome-hunters ironed out Feeld’s kinks (Dec. 9)

As polyamory goes mainstream, longtime users of the alternative dating app are divided about its sudden success.

By Josiah Gogarty

In the beginning, Amsterdam’s Feeld community was small, and felt like a secret, exclusive part of the city’s queer scene. Béa would often bump into matches at parties. Now things have changed. As well as vanilla people joining the app, and horny men posing as doms, who are really “just assholes”, Béa says, there’s been a surge in users that they feel are only engaging in ENM in a superficial way. ...

Lulu Lin

Béa says that the “cultural shift towards more people becoming aware of these lifestyle choices” is a great thing. But they also think that a lot of ENM-curious Feeld newbies are just using it “to try and fix something in [a] relationship that is already broken.” ... This [says Béa] gives the whole ENM world a bad name: “It means that your relationship is falling apart if you’re nonmonogamous.”

Then there’s those simply trawling for threesomes. “I don’t want to ever put any shade on anyone for exploring,” Béa says, “but the [number] of straight couples I see who come on to Feeld with ‘looking for a girl for an unforgettable night’ [in their profile] ... that’s just this hetero, straight male fantasy.”

...The debate around Feeld is hard to imagine happening with one of the mainstream dating apps, which function less as communities than vast school discos, with pools of people eyeing each other up and picking who to pair off with. But Feeld is different. ...

...Bumble, Hinge and Tinder have all added options to specify nonmonogamy on profiles in the last couple of years, while new kink and ENM dating apps, like Pure, BeeDee, Joyce, WAX and Nymph, are coming for Feeld’s users. ...

Sixteen years later, bandwagons do roll downhill.

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And as changes seem imminent. . .

    

I've ended with Ukraine for more than two years now. At first some readers said it was off topic and didn't see the tie-in. Now more get it. This is serious, people.

Especially with the current appointment picks in Washington, which resemble nothing so much as a decapitation strike.

I've seen too many progressive movements die out, or get wiped out, because they failed to scan the wider world accurately and understand their position in it strategically. We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Increasingly powerful people call us a threat to society, religion, and nation. Because by living successfully outside their worldview, we expose its incompleteness.

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

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

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

Such rulers and would-be rulers seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, repressive laws, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, stacked courts and agencies, and sometimes, eventually, artillery.

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

For those of us born since World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, linking up at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it. And now, about ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, ‘A Big Step Back’: In Ukraine, Concerns Mount Over Narrowing Press Freedoms. And it has quite the history of being run by corrupt oligarchs — leading to the Maidan Uprising of 2013, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Zelensky's overwhelming election in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate. So they're working on that. And they're stamping hard on the old culture of everyday, petty corruption.  More on that.  More; "Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies."

Wrote US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic early in the war, 

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

They have a word there, with a deep history, for the horizontal, self-organized, mutual get-it-done that grows from community social trust: hromada. We polyfolks often dream of creating something like that community spirit in miniature, in our polycules and networks. Occasionally we succeed.

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Social attitudes in Ukraine are mostly traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But in the last generation the ideal of modern European civil society has become widely treasured. The status of women has fast advanced, especially post-invasion. More than 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — including as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, snipers, and infantry. Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

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

                                     

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

Women defenders on our world's eastern front

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

Update Nov. 1, 2024: Two years later Vidma is still alive, still with her mortar unit, still at the front, and posting TikToks.  A young girl who looks high-school age showed up to join them. Another vid with her. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us. 

And maybe our own? Says Maine's independent Senator Angus King,

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

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