In recent years, the reality of homosexual families has cast doubt on the traditional assumption that a marriage must consist of one man and one woman. Although homosexual marriage is the most prominent challenge to this assumption, there are other unconventional family structures currently being explored. In this article, I will discuss the concept of families and marriages consisting of more than two people. This article is also a "coming out" article, because this is the first time I have publicly stated my interest in forming a polyamorous family. In speaking openly about poly I feel a kind of discomfort that I have seen before in lesbian, bisexual and gay friends when they come out with their orientations.
The word generally used for these larger families is "polyamory", a term that literally means "many loves". I will discuss why I have come to support polyamory, what advantages this family structure has over the traditional two-person family, and how realistic it is to expect that these views may be implemented in American society.
The core of my viewpoint is that I think there are no compelling justifications for the conventional belief that a family should be based upon the bonding of a "magic number" of two people. I should clearly state that I see nothing wrong with a traditional family. My claim is that a family based on more than two adults is also acceptable, and for some people has advantages over the two-adult family.
There are two very different ways in which a family can be polyamorous. The better-known form is "open marriage", in which each of the partners may love people who intend to remain outside the nuclear family. The other form expands the nuclear family to three or more adults. Some poly families blend a combination of these basic ideas. This article will explore the concept of a nuclear family of more than two adults.
On those rare occasions when people think of polyamory, they often assume a two-parent nuclear family and contemplate open marriage in that context. The idea of a two-parent nuclear family is very firmly ingrained in our social consciousness. I want to challenge this assumption and present the possibility that a nuclear family might have more than two adults. There are no specific bounds for the number of adults that might collectively form a poly household, but the most common sizes are between three and six.
I can trace my support of polyamory back many years to when I was listening to "Why does it have to be", a song by Restless Heart with the lyrics
Why does it have to be wrong or right?
Why does it have to be one way or the other?
Why do we have to hurt one to love another?
Tell me, why does it have to be?
Until I heard this song, I had accepted the traditional paradigm of finding one "true love" and forming a two-person relationship. I knew that I had experienced strong love for a few people at the same time, but I had never before thought of questioning the paradigm. I found the song very powerful because it spoke about the elephant in the living room -- something obvious and ignored. If there are two people with whom one shares love and one is forced to choose between them, there will be incredible pain. I imagined myself in such a situation, and the song's questions led me to think about the possibility of avoiding the pain by somehow avoiding that kind of choice. At the time I had never heard of the possibility of an expanded nuclear family, and did not know how my thoughts might find expression in the world, but I felt that I would be giving up too soon if I didn't search for another path.
Shortly before coming to college, I was introduced to polyamory through Paula Johnson's science-fiction book "Fallway". In her society, the normal family was based on a group marriage of three men and three women. A friend introduced me to Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", the classic of poly literature, during my first semester at Amherst. In recent times I have found a newsgroup on the Internet devoted to the subject, "alt.polyamory". The presence of these books and discussion groups has provided moral support, because I know that other people also think that polyamorous marriages and families are a realistic and desirable possibility in our society.
After giving the topic serious thought, I have come to the conclusion that I would prefer to live in an expanded nuclear family. A traditional two-parent family would also be acceptable, but there are some interesting advantages to polyamory. My line of reasoning is related to "family values". I think that a poly family would be a better place for me to raise children, develop emotional bonds and stimulate intellectual thought. I wonder how shocked a conservative would be at the thought of "family values" being used to rationally defend the virtues of a poly family structure.
One major advantage of polyamory is that the adults would find a wider range of interests and personalities in their partners. People are complex creatures, and it is impossible for the facets of two people to overlap completely. The larger number of people, all closely and deeply bonded to each other, would create a much richer psychological and intellectual environment. A three-person family has three two-person dynamics, and a four-person family has six. Each of these dynamics would have a life of its own. It is part of human nature that we share different parts of ourselves with different friends; in a poly family, we could develop several of these friendships deeply without worrying about the possibility of drifting apart. Through these multiple soulmates, more aspects of our personalities could find expression within the framework of loving, committed relationships.
Some people might think that the greater number of two-person dynamics within an expanded nuclear family would make it harder to keep the nuclear family stable. It is true that there are more dynamics where problems can arise, and the partners would need to be conscious of this fact, but I think that the larger number of dynamics would actually provide stability. In a two-adult family, each person is the only soulmate for the other. If one has important interests that are irrelevant to the other, there is the potential for discord. With more soulmates, there would be fewer unmatched interests. In a poly family, no one would need to be the perfect match for another person.
This richer environment would also be valuable for raising children. Because children tend to adopt aspects of their parents' personalities, a poly family would give children a wider range of personality traits to use as building blocks. More parents would provide a wider range of knowledge and interests, and this would be invaluable for providing a quality home environment.
Multiple parents would simplify the logistics of raising children. One of the biggest problems in modern families is that parents can't get time to themselves without the expense of a babysitter. In a poly family, any two or three people could leave the children in the care of another parent. This would give the parents a chance to refresh their emotional connections and experience aspects of life that would be inaccessible to those with children in tow or a babysitter to pay. Family values activists note that raising children is far easier in a two-parent family than a single-parent family, and I claim that a three-parent family is a quantum leap better in this respect. If two parents are better than one, why not three or four?
I see this line of argument as a modern solution to the fragmentation of community and extended family. In the past, you could depend on relatives to occasionally help take care of the children, and on friends to remain in the same community. In modern society, our kin rarely live nearby and we can't count on friends staying in town. The expanded nuclear family builds a small dependable community in the midst of modern mobility.
In the long term, a poly family would be better able to sustain the inevitable trauma of life. Consider what happens when someone is injured, or has a serious illness. In a two-adult family, the other partner must take care of the family and household while bearing the emotional trauma alone. In a poly family, the presence of at least two other adults would make it unlikely that anyone would be put in this difficult situation.
Although polyamory makes sense to me now, the idea didn't occur to me when I first thought about the problems of sharing love with two people. I think there were two reasons I failed to make the leap. First, the concept of poly has a bad reputation from male-dominated polygamy, so I didn't even consider the possibility that a multi-partner marriage could be based on equality. Second, one can't have more than two heterosexual partners without some pair being platonic, so I never even thought beyond one male and one female.
I suspect that these two objections would occur to others, so they deserve a response. To the first point, polyamory can be as equitable, or as biased, as any kind of marriage. There are two responses to the second objection. First, there is no reason why platonic pairs would be a problem. It would require some thought since we can't draw a parallel to traditional marriage, but people have dealt with this issue without running into any insurmountable problems. Second, my initial analysis reflected my bias towards heterosexuality. If the family includes homosexuals or bisexuals, you could have a fully non-platonic group that contains more than two people. For example, one common poly structure is a straight person of one gender with two bisexual people of the opposite gender.
Forming a poly family is complicated in our society. We are surrounded by models of the traditional family, but poly is uncharted territory. A poly family is likely to form by the joining of two couples, or a couple with a single person. In either case, the new two-person bonds need to be allowed to develop without being overshadowed by the existing bonds. The worst thing that can happen is for a single person to feel like the "third person" in a triad -- there should be no "third" person, but this takes some special effort. People forming a poly family need to develop some special sensitivity to make it work. One possible solution is for the new pairs to spend time together, and for the old pairs to spend less time together until the poly relationship has become more equitable.
Even getting to that stage is difficult in this society. We live in a world where people think in terms of couples, and poly dating is just about impossible. People have a natural tendency to think that couples (or the people in them) cannot be dated, but that's a necessary step somewhere along the path to an expanded nuclear family. When two people are together, it is assumed that a third person could join only by breaking up the existing relationship. Since this is taboo, it is almost impossible to engage in the social dynamics necessary for forming a poly family (such as flirting with and dating people in other relationships, or indicating a serious interest in someone if you are in a relationship yourself).
When a poly family forms, the next problem is social recognition. People are starting to accept homosexual families, but very few people have even thought about the idea of poly families. As legally unrecognized families, poly families face many of the same problems as homosexual families. Zoning laws often restrict single-family residences to people related by blood or marriage, tax returns give special benefits to married couples and insurance forms allow for an employee to extend coverage to his/her spouse.
I think that marriage, distilled to its essential qualities, is a situation where people live together, are connected by deep emotional bonds, and are committed to staying together and supporting each other. Poly families can meet these criteria. Since our laws make the formal recognition of marriage important, I believe that poly marriage should be legal. Poly is still too rare to have appeared in the cultural debate over the meaning of family and marriage, but it presents an interesting question that may help illuminate the necessary and sufficient conditions for the word "family".
The author is currently part of a M/F couple, and they are looking for a woman to form a triad or vee M/F/F household. See www.polymatchmaker.com user 'yamanote'. (August 2011)