For a growing number of sexual adventurers, commitment doesn’t equal exclusivity, and the possibility for meaningful connection is only as limited as your capacity to love
By Andy Isaacson
[Some names have been changed at sources’ requests]Hallmark doesn’t make Valentine’s Day cards for triads. Nor does it for quads, or vees, which may best describe the geometry of Jeffrey, Meredith and John’s relationship. Meredith is a 33-year-old teacher in Seattle; Jeffrey, a 35-year-old software engineer, is her husband. They’ve been married five years, have a baby son, and as Jeffrey puts it, imagine “holding hands and walking around parks together at eighty.”John is Meredith’s new boyfriend. The two go on dates to the movies. They also sometimes sleep together in the guest room. When they cook dinner at her house, they leave leftovers for Jeffrey, who returns home late from work. Sometimes John even babysits Jeffrey and Meredith’s son, when the couple goes out. It’s as if Tony Soprano, his goomah and his wife Carmela all had baked ziti together on Sunday nights. Early in their relationship, Meredith and Jeffrey cheated on each other, and the couple, acknowledging that this tendency might well continue — “being physical is just a natural extension of really liking someone,” says Meredith — decided to negotiate with what for so many monogamous couples is nonnegotiable. Rather than break the rules, they redefined them. “Ultimately, we just switched from a mode of communicating afterwards, guiltily, to communicating before and asking some questions about comfort,” says Jeffrey.The “desire for sexual variety” is a hard-wired temptation. For men, notes evolutionary psychologist David Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, the payoff is greater reproductive success, but nonmonogamy has also historically offered women access to more diverse genes and the additional resources that men tend to give the women they have sex with. It also allows them to scan the field for possible alternative mates. Monogamous relationships are precariously bound by a contract to resist this primal urge. We agree to sexual fidelity with our partners because the thought of them with someone else would break our hearts. But that fragile construct is routinely broken: Nearly half of respondents in an MSNBC.com poll last year admitted they had been unfaithful at some point in their lives. One in five adults in monogamous relationships have cheated on their current partner. One result of the poll, however — that 40 percent fooled around with a friend and 35 percent with a co-worker — gets to the philosophical heart of polyamory, which distinguishes itself from other forms of nonmonogamy by its emphasis on forming loving connections. “In swinging,” explains Dr. Deborah Taj Anapol, author of Polyamory: The New Love Without Limit, “they have sex first, and maybe they become friends later. In polyamory, people become friends first, and maybe they have sex later.” Such distinctions are simplistic, Anapol concedes — the spectrum of nonmonogamy is various shades of gray — but have served to legitimize the practice, to some extent, as a more principled way to be nonmonogamous. “Polyamory tends to present [itself] as the modern pragmatic grown-up version of free love,” notes the blog Freaksexual.Although relationships that look something like polyamory have long existed (the Kerista Commune in San Francisco for instance, practiced a form of group marriage it called “polyfidelity,” and the 1972 book Open Marriage, by George and Nena O’Neill, redefined monogamy for a generation), coinage of the term in the early 90s gave polyamory a new cultural voice. The online newsgroup alt.polyamory, in 1992, provided a virtual gathering place (today polyamory has a rich community life in cyberspace) and 1997’s The Ethical Slut, written by psychotherapist Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt, guided people through an uncharted realm of modern relationship that was without historical precedent. Having a language and a support network “makes the whole experience intelligible,” says Lara, a 34-year-old grad student in Chicago who has an open relationship with her partner of 10 years, Jon. “The emotional highs and lows, the anxieties, fear or jealousy — I can make sense of it all, because I know that other people have gone through it.”We don’t really know if there’s more polyamory, but “there certainly seems to be an increase in nonmonogamy,” observes Dr. Pepper Schwartz, an author and professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Both men and women travel more. We wait longer to get married, coursing in and out of relationships along the way — often living with different partners — which makes intimate connections seem more fungible. (Marriage, too, has been desacralized.) “You get habits that you learn, of taking sex when you feel like it and enjoying it, of getting in one relationship and out of another without much penalty,” she says. Women used to not be allowed the sexual freedom to explore — but that’s changed: Big Love is now an equal opportunity arrangement. Still, the popular notion of romantic love as a tango between two, deeply programmed in our modern psyche, complicates any biological urge to seek multiple partners. It also violates a central belief of those who favor polyamory: that we have the capacity to love intimately more than one person (and with solid communication and fewer nights free, we can even pull it off).“The mindset that only one person can be special,” says Dr. Anapol, “that your partner loving someone else means they love you less… leads very quickly to jealousy.”Ah, jealousy. A psychological emotion considered so primal, so inevitable, and thus so permissible that even crimes “of passion” are judged with a certain degree of sympathy. After all, “my one and only” means, by definition, there can be no one and other. Jealousy evolved with men, notes David Buss, as an adaptation to fend off “mate poachers,” keep a partner faithful and to ensure paternity certainty; for women it was designed to prevent the loss of her mate’s commitment and resources, which could be diverted to another. When our partner comes home with news of a promotion, we share in their celebration; but if they bear news of an exciting new connection with someone, we often sense a threat. Whatever the evolutionary forces that give rise to the emotion, we feel jealousy as “anger, territoriality, a sense of grief and loss, bad body image issues, and self-loathing,” says Dossie Easton. “But rather than owning it ourselves, we project it onto other people — which destroys all possibility of healing.”Candace, a 31-year-old in Seattle, is dating Michael and Eva. Michael is also dating Eva and Candace, and Eva is dating Candace and Michael. (“We call ourselves a ‘tripod,’” she says.) They each go on solo dates with the two during the week, and on weekends they all come together, as lovers. Candace has worked hard to “transcend jealousy,” a growth process she likens to a child learning that a parent’s love for her sibling doesn’t mean they love her less. But the bedroom, naturally, can be a formidable psychic battlefield. “That’s where most of our emotional problems have occurred,” she says. “I am again and again confronted with thoughts like, ‘She’s better at that than I am,’ or if he finishes in her, it’s like, ‘Oh, he wanted her more.’” Processing these emotions openly with Eva offers some comfort, but if “I can’t get past that,” she admits, the tripod might well have to fold.If polyamory were a poker game it would be a tense, high-stakes one, to be sure. “Polyamory was a seductive ideal,” says David, a 33-year-old therapist in Berkeley, who for a time explored multiple partners with his girlfriend Raina. “There’s a thrill-seeking edge. It’s evocative. It does break up the idea of ‘you belong to me,’ which is a suffocating model for a relationship, and exposes you to limitless possibilities. It’s also very dramatic, since you never know what’s going to happen. But there’s so much emotional material that gets activated, it can also be nonstop processing with your partner. Ultimately, I just didn’t want to be in that energy all the time; I wanted to play a different game.”Once couples rewrite the contract of sexual fidelity, any existing sense of security (however false) erodes — leaving, well, a lot of baggage. “When I unpack the fear, it’s really about being left, or leaving,” says Lara in Chicago. “‘Will this person make Jon leave me? Would my feelings for this person cause me to leave him?’ But at the end of the day, we want the best for the other person. And we both acknowledge that if the best thing for the other person is not being in a relationship with [the other], that we would have to let go.”Such high-stakes playing poses enormous risks for bluffers — that is, if a relationship doesn’t have a solid foundation, the outcome of opening it up to other partners can be disastrous. But on the other hand, it can yield great returns. Multiple relationships, says Dr. Anapol, offer “more opportunities to have both your strengths and weaknesses reflected. You can bring together the polarities of security and freedom, depth and variety,” she adds, as if to say that you can have your proverbial cake, and eat it too. Adding another sexual partner takes work, “But is that any different from adding a child, or for that matter, your ailing grandparent?” asks Dossie Easton. “Any relationship that added complexity to a family but wasn’t about sex we wouldn’t even bat an eyelash. If we put this in a nonsexual context we get some idea of our abilities and capacities.” Polyamory, she adds, can even be a way of building extended families in an era when couples tend to live away from their own. “We don’t tend to have the grandmothers and cousins and uncles available to help out with the work of child rearing these days. Many people have built their poly relationship to serve exactly those needs.” In Seattle, meanwhile, Meredith and Jeffrey haven’t yet needed to tell their five-month-old baby son who the other man is that very regularly visits the home and kisses mommy. “We have a fair amount of work to do in the realm of how we present this [to him],” says Jeffrey, figuring they’ll turn to other poly parents for guidance. “At the moment, he just makes some noises and smiles at you.” Andy Isaacson would like to thank the primaries, secondaries, triads, tripods, quads, vees and PhDs who shared perspectives and intimate details of their lives for this story.
By Andy Isaacson
[Some names have been changed at sources’ requests]Hallmark doesn’t make Valentine’s Day cards for triads. Nor does it for quads, or vees, which may best describe the geometry of Jeffrey, Meredith and John’s relationship. Meredith is a 33-year-old teacher in Seattle; Jeffrey, a 35-year-old software engineer, is her husband. They’ve been married five years, have a baby son, and as Jeffrey puts it, imagine “holding hands and walking around parks together at eighty.”John is Meredith’s new boyfriend. The two go on dates to the movies. They also sometimes sleep together in the guest room. When they cook dinner at her house, they leave leftovers for Jeffrey, who returns home late from work. Sometimes John even babysits Jeffrey and Meredith’s son, when the couple goes out. It’s as if Tony Soprano, his goomah and his wife Carmela all had baked ziti together on Sunday nights. Early in their relationship, Meredith and Jeffrey cheated on each other, and the couple, acknowledging that this tendency might well continue — “being physical is just a natural extension of really liking someone,” says Meredith — decided to negotiate with what for so many monogamous couples is nonnegotiable. Rather than break the rules, they redefined them. “Ultimately, we just switched from a mode of communicating afterwards, guiltily, to communicating before and asking some questions about comfort,” says Jeffrey.The “desire for sexual variety” is a hard-wired temptation. For men, notes evolutionary psychologist David Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, the payoff is greater reproductive success, but nonmonogamy has also historically offered women access to more diverse genes and the additional resources that men tend to give the women they have sex with. It also allows them to scan the field for possible alternative mates. Monogamous relationships are precariously bound by a contract to resist this primal urge. We agree to sexual fidelity with our partners because the thought of them with someone else would break our hearts. But that fragile construct is routinely broken: Nearly half of respondents in an MSNBC.com poll last year admitted they had been unfaithful at some point in their lives. One in five adults in monogamous relationships have cheated on their current partner. One result of the poll, however — that 40 percent fooled around with a friend and 35 percent with a co-worker — gets to the philosophical heart of polyamory, which distinguishes itself from other forms of nonmonogamy by its emphasis on forming loving connections. “In swinging,” explains Dr. Deborah Taj Anapol, author of Polyamory: The New Love Without Limit, “they have sex first, and maybe they become friends later. In polyamory, people become friends first, and maybe they have sex later.” Such distinctions are simplistic, Anapol concedes — the spectrum of nonmonogamy is various shades of gray — but have served to legitimize the practice, to some extent, as a more principled way to be nonmonogamous. “Polyamory tends to present [itself] as the modern pragmatic grown-up version of free love,” notes the blog Freaksexual.Although relationships that look something like polyamory have long existed (the Kerista Commune in San Francisco for instance, practiced a form of group marriage it called “polyfidelity,” and the 1972 book Open Marriage, by George and Nena O’Neill, redefined monogamy for a generation), coinage of the term in the early 90s gave polyamory a new cultural voice. The online newsgroup alt.polyamory, in 1992, provided a virtual gathering place (today polyamory has a rich community life in cyberspace) and 1997’s The Ethical Slut, written by psychotherapist Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt, guided people through an uncharted realm of modern relationship that was without historical precedent. Having a language and a support network “makes the whole experience intelligible,” says Lara, a 34-year-old grad student in Chicago who has an open relationship with her partner of 10 years, Jon. “The emotional highs and lows, the anxieties, fear or jealousy — I can make sense of it all, because I know that other people have gone through it.”We don’t really know if there’s more polyamory, but “there certainly seems to be an increase in nonmonogamy,” observes Dr. Pepper Schwartz, an author and professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Both men and women travel more. We wait longer to get married, coursing in and out of relationships along the way — often living with different partners — which makes intimate connections seem more fungible. (Marriage, too, has been desacralized.) “You get habits that you learn, of taking sex when you feel like it and enjoying it, of getting in one relationship and out of another without much penalty,” she says. Women used to not be allowed the sexual freedom to explore — but that’s changed: Big Love is now an equal opportunity arrangement. Still, the popular notion of romantic love as a tango between two, deeply programmed in our modern psyche, complicates any biological urge to seek multiple partners. It also violates a central belief of those who favor polyamory: that we have the capacity to love intimately more than one person (and with solid communication and fewer nights free, we can even pull it off).“The mindset that only one person can be special,” says Dr. Anapol, “that your partner loving someone else means they love you less… leads very quickly to jealousy.”Ah, jealousy. A psychological emotion considered so primal, so inevitable, and thus so permissible that even crimes “of passion” are judged with a certain degree of sympathy. After all, “my one and only” means, by definition, there can be no one and other. Jealousy evolved with men, notes David Buss, as an adaptation to fend off “mate poachers,” keep a partner faithful and to ensure paternity certainty; for women it was designed to prevent the loss of her mate’s commitment and resources, which could be diverted to another. When our partner comes home with news of a promotion, we share in their celebration; but if they bear news of an exciting new connection with someone, we often sense a threat. Whatever the evolutionary forces that give rise to the emotion, we feel jealousy as “anger, territoriality, a sense of grief and loss, bad body image issues, and self-loathing,” says Dossie Easton. “But rather than owning it ourselves, we project it onto other people — which destroys all possibility of healing.”Candace, a 31-year-old in Seattle, is dating Michael and Eva. Michael is also dating Eva and Candace, and Eva is dating Candace and Michael. (“We call ourselves a ‘tripod,’” she says.) They each go on solo dates with the two during the week, and on weekends they all come together, as lovers. Candace has worked hard to “transcend jealousy,” a growth process she likens to a child learning that a parent’s love for her sibling doesn’t mean they love her less. But the bedroom, naturally, can be a formidable psychic battlefield. “That’s where most of our emotional problems have occurred,” she says. “I am again and again confronted with thoughts like, ‘She’s better at that than I am,’ or if he finishes in her, it’s like, ‘Oh, he wanted her more.’” Processing these emotions openly with Eva offers some comfort, but if “I can’t get past that,” she admits, the tripod might well have to fold.If polyamory were a poker game it would be a tense, high-stakes one, to be sure. “Polyamory was a seductive ideal,” says David, a 33-year-old therapist in Berkeley, who for a time explored multiple partners with his girlfriend Raina. “There’s a thrill-seeking edge. It’s evocative. It does break up the idea of ‘you belong to me,’ which is a suffocating model for a relationship, and exposes you to limitless possibilities. It’s also very dramatic, since you never know what’s going to happen. But there’s so much emotional material that gets activated, it can also be nonstop processing with your partner. Ultimately, I just didn’t want to be in that energy all the time; I wanted to play a different game.”Once couples rewrite the contract of sexual fidelity, any existing sense of security (however false) erodes — leaving, well, a lot of baggage. “When I unpack the fear, it’s really about being left, or leaving,” says Lara in Chicago. “‘Will this person make Jon leave me? Would my feelings for this person cause me to leave him?’ But at the end of the day, we want the best for the other person. And we both acknowledge that if the best thing for the other person is not being in a relationship with [the other], that we would have to let go.”Such high-stakes playing poses enormous risks for bluffers — that is, if a relationship doesn’t have a solid foundation, the outcome of opening it up to other partners can be disastrous. But on the other hand, it can yield great returns. Multiple relationships, says Dr. Anapol, offer “more opportunities to have both your strengths and weaknesses reflected. You can bring together the polarities of security and freedom, depth and variety,” she adds, as if to say that you can have your proverbial cake, and eat it too. Adding another sexual partner takes work, “But is that any different from adding a child, or for that matter, your ailing grandparent?” asks Dossie Easton. “Any relationship that added complexity to a family but wasn’t about sex we wouldn’t even bat an eyelash. If we put this in a nonsexual context we get some idea of our abilities and capacities.” Polyamory, she adds, can even be a way of building extended families in an era when couples tend to live away from their own. “We don’t tend to have the grandmothers and cousins and uncles available to help out with the work of child rearing these days. Many people have built their poly relationship to serve exactly those needs.” In Seattle, meanwhile, Meredith and Jeffrey haven’t yet needed to tell their five-month-old baby son who the other man is that very regularly visits the home and kisses mommy. “We have a fair amount of work to do in the realm of how we present this [to him],” says Jeffrey, figuring they’ll turn to other poly parents for guidance. “At the moment, he just makes some noises and smiles at you.” Andy Isaacson would like to thank the primaries, secondaries, triads, tripods, quads, vees and PhDs who shared perspectives and intimate details of their lives for this story.
