by Meghan Daum
After Oberon’s lecture, he and Morning Glory felt that they were pulled toward each other by a magnetic force. She leapt from her chair and ran up to him. He immediately took her hand and they walked out of the room where they had what Morning Glory calls “a telepathic communion.” They stared at each other for five or ten minutes without speaking, yet they managed to silently convey to each other the sum total of their entire lives.
“We kissed and touched and just connected, and it was clear that we were going to be together,” Morning Glory says. She knew that she was in love with Oberon and that she wanted to be in his life. But she had a husband and a child. Moreover, she says, she had a commitment to non-monogamy and she felt she had to tell him that right away.
“I said to him ‘I know what we have is really unique and special and I really want to be with you for the rest of my life,’” says Morning Glory. “‘But there’s something really important about myself that I have to tell you. If what you want is a monogamous relationship I can’t give that to you. It’s not in my nature. I never planned to just meet someone and get divorced and dump all the rest of my lovers.’ And the look on his face! It was like ‘I finally found her!’”
Within twenty-four hours, Morning Glory and Oberon decided to get married at the next Gnostic Aquarian convention in six months. “We were so gaga,” Morning Glory says. “We couldn’t be separated long enough to go pee.”
For the next twenty-two years, Morning Glory and Oberon shared lovers and friends. From 1983 to 1994, they were in an open triad relationship with another woman who had a child, which they all raised together. In 1993, Morning Glory met Wolf at a Pagan Halloween gathering in Tennessee. He was living in Houston at the time and working at Kinko’s. For two years they had a long-distance relationship. “Wolf and I would have phone sex,” Morning Glory says.
“And after she’d hang up she and I would have wild sex!” Oberon says, interrupting her.
When Morning Glory visited Wolf in Houston for the first time, she walked into his house and knew he would form the perfect triad with her and Oberon. “I looked around and I started laughing internally,” she says. “There were the same books on the shelves [that Oberon had], the same comic books, astronomy books, old Star Trek episodes. He had the only other Klingon knife that I’d seen in my life other than Oberon’s. And Wolf came out and stayed and we found a really great unit.”
In 1995, Wolf moved to California to join Oberon and Morning Glory and the three of them were married in a triad hand-fasting ceremony. This was around the time that Oberon met Liza through a mutual lover. Liza was living on the East Coast at the time, but she fell in love with Oberon and a year later she moved to California. At that point, they were a group of four, but as blissful as life was, something was still missing. Though Morning Glory and Wolf were deeply in love, they knew they weren’t soul mates (Oberon is Morning Glory’s soul mate), and Morning Glory was always on the lookout for a soul mate for Wolf. She also happened to be in the market for another female partner for herself. Then a young woman named Wynter, who had been raised in the area by poly parents, showed up on Morning Glory’s doorstep seeking work at Mythic Images.
“She was the woman I’d been looking for my whole life,” says Morning Glory. “We realized we were each other’s missing female component.”
Morning Glory and Wynter developed a friendship that gradually turned into romantic love. “She was just seventeen at the time so we had to do a lot of sitting on our hands and working out things with her mom and dad and stuff like that,” says Morning Glory. “And she ended up coming to work for me as an employee, and it wasn’t until she was fully legal that we were able to act on anything.”
In the meantime, however, something even more amazing happened. Morning Glory introduced Wynter to Wolf at the pagan May Day celebration, a sexual erotic energy festival. They fell in love instantly and turned out to be soul mates. Wynter formally entered the family in 1997, on her eighteenth birthday, and became the lover of both Morning Glory and Wolf. “For me it was yet another romance come true,” says Morning Glory. “I was able to have the other man who I love most in my life and the woman I love most in my life be bonded in the same way that Oberon and I were bonded.”
* * *
Two days after her wedding to Wolf, which was performed by Morning Glory and Oberon, who are legally recognized clergy of the Church of All Worlds, Wynter is weary yet has the serene glow of the newly betrothed. With her red hair, pale, lightly freckled skin, and long loose dress, she has that Celtic goddess look you sometimes see in young women who work in head shops. When we meet in the family’s garden, where the wedding ceremony took place, she has just returned from the house of some of her outside lovers, a male/female couple that she sees regularly. She tries to get at least two nights a week with her husband. Every other Wednesday she sleeps with Morning Glory. Wynter has, in current rotation, approximately twenty lovers.
“I never know who I’m sleeping with on Wednesday night because every other Wednesday Wolfie goes gaming,” Wynter says. “I always forget what Wednesday it is, so I’m like ‘Hmm, who am I sleeping with?’ It’s amazing that I lead this life because I’m really into my solitary space. I need my time to be alone. Usually I take it in the morning. I take two hours and I go in the hot tub and I read Harry Potter and write in my journal. All my nights are filled so every morning I take time and do what I want to do.”
We are soon joined by Jon, a tall blue-eyed blond with a long ponytail. Of all the Ravenhearts, he’s the “straightest” looking. His clothes suggest no particular cultural affiliation. As a computer specialist, he’s also the only Ravenheart who has a job outside the home. Jon fell in love with Liza in 1998 and became an official Ravenheart just this past January. Today he’s hanging out with a young woman named Jezebel, who isn’t a member of the family but who is living in one of the apartments next to the house. Jon and Jezebel are currently lovers. In the past, Jezebel has been involved in threesomes with Wolf and Wynter. These days she’s taking some time for herself, happy to be Jon’s “secondary” (his primary being Liza) and learning to be her “own primary.”
“When I moved onto this property I had to assure Jon that I wasn’t moving in for him,” says Jezebel, who, unlike just about everyone else in this story, actually tells me her legal name—Jennifer. “It was just because I wanted to live here.”
“Right now I’m being pretty particular about who I sleep with,” says Jon. “I don’t have a lot of lovers.”
Morning Glory, who has ambled into the garden, nods approvingly to Jon and gives him a supportive little thumbs-up. You can’t help but wonder if the discernment he’s just articulated is the unconscious wish of every Ravenheart.
* * *
Jon had heard of the Ravenhearts well before he ever got involved with them. He met Liza through an “erotic community,” which she describes as an organized retreat wherein groups of thirty or so people get together and are “openly sexual with each other.” Jon was a bit intimidated when he learned that her primary lover was Oberon Ravenheart, not for reasons having to do with sexual prowess, but because Jon feared his knowledge of paganism wasn’t sufficiently developed. But the family embraced him wholeheartedly. It also helped that, like Wolf, he was a gamer.
“The first step to becoming a Ravenheart is you have to fall madly in love with someone who already is a Ravenheart and they have to fall madly in love with you,” says Liza, who calls Jon “a very special person” for being able to enter such a large, established group. “Then comes the difficult part. Just being madly in love and having some kind of partnership with one of us doesn’t make you a Ravenheart. You have to have a relationship with every Ravenheart. In other words, every Ravenheart has to be in harmony with your presence.”
It would seem that to become a Ravenheart you’d also have to meet a need that no one else is meeting. The idea that different people fulfill different needs, sexually and otherwise, is an almost constant refr
ain in the household. In some cases, it’s abundantly clear what one person can bring to the table that another can’t. “Oberon and Jon are over thirty years apart,” says Liza. “Obviously they’re totally different. Oberon has a lot of wisdom and experience. Jon is very loving and playful.”
“The way I make love to Morning Glory is different than the way I make love to Wynter,” says Wolf. “Having to accommodate the needs of different women makes me a better lover. You don’t have to be in a poly relationship to understand that people have different needs sexually or whatever. If I were to go down the line and think of how I was sexually with the different women I’ve dated, being the same with each of them would just not be appropriate.”
Wynter, as Wolf describes her, is “catch as catch can.” She likes to dress up in sexy clothes and seduce him while he’s paying bills. If she’s in the garden, she wants to have sex in the garden. She also likes to do it in the hot tub. “If she says ‘Let’s take a hot tub’ it means ‘Let’s have sex’,” Wolf says.
The issue of privacy is twofold in the Ravenheart household. On one hand, there are plenty of places to be alone. On the other, walking in on someone having sex is not exactly scandal-worthy. “If someone comes up to the hot tub they’ll always say ‘May I join you?’” explains Wolf. “If you want to be alone you just say so. But there’s also no embarrassing social taboo about sex. That dims the voyeuristic thrill.”
The same goes for nudity. Wolf points out that, during my visit, the Ravenhearts have gone out of their way to keep themselves clothed. “When it’s hot, Oberon hardly ever wears clothes,” he says. “We think nothing of walking around in the yard naked. That’s why we have the privacy fence.”
With both sex and nudity stripped of their taboos, the Ravenhearts seem to fall back on role-playing.
“Often Morning Glory and I will dress up and play pirate games,” Wolf says. “We also play a lot of nurse games.”
The fact that Wolf can have spontaneous, hot tub sex with Wynter and preplanned, full-costumed sex with Morning Glory plays right into their central argument for polyamory, which is, essentially, that it takes a village to fill the libido’s every need. “In my monogamous marriage, which was very short-lived, the thing that nearly crushed me was that if I didn’t meet every single emotional, physical, sexual, psychological, and mental need that person had, that need went unmet,” says Wolf. “Here you don’t have that. For example, I don’t like horses. But Wynter and Morning Glory love horses. Well, they can go horseback riding together and I don’t have to.”
This is the kind of argument that can elude those of us who aren’t poly. It seems to me that anyone with any kind of relationship experience at all knows that their beloved can’t be expected to fill every emotional, physical, psychological, mental, and even sexual need. To most of us, that’s what friends, colleagues, psychiatrists, and Internet news groups are for.
“Why do I have to live with someone in order to go horseback riding with them?” says Morning Glory. “Because then my wife and I can go home and have great sex!”
Could it be that great sex is what some polys do rather than going out for coffee? When Morning Glory counts the number of lovers she expects to have this year (“People who if I find myself in any kind of proximity to them there’s a high probability that sex will occur”), she arrives at a number around twenty. This includes people she might run into occasionally or see when she travels out of town. She thinks about this in a manner that I might apply to how many people I’d expect to have lunch with in a given year.
“By becoming sexually involved with someone I feel like I can make a difference in their life,” says Morning Glory. “For years I’ve found people and it’s like I have some kind of calling to help them. It’s like the goddess taps me on the shoulder and says ‘That one over there.’ I’ve never been a prostitute. I’ve never charged for my sexual favors. But I have bestowed them generously all over the planet and tried to do so from a place of energizing people and turning them on and getting them involved with being happy in their own lives.”
Asking a poly whether or not they get jealous is sort of like asking a tall person how the weather is up there. The question got old a long time ago and to the Ravenhearts it seems irrelevant. According to Oberon, the answer again goes back to Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land concept, which is, as Heinlein wrote, that “love is that condition where another person’s happiness is essential to your own.” In other words, if you love someone, set them up with someone else. The Ravenhearts often introduce each other to new potential sex partners. It’s a kind of mitzvah Liza calls “a conspiracy of heart’s desire.”
“Whenever we start to talk about poly lifestyles the issue of jealousy comes up,” says Liza, who seems somehow less earnest than the other members of the family and has an appealing, self-deprecating laugh. “And that really limits the conversation. Because really jealousy is a response to wanting to get your needs met and clumsily going about doing it. When people have their needs met they don’t give a damn about what other people are doing.”
Unlike Morning Glory and Oberon, who rejected monogamy as early as elementary school, or Wynter, who was raised by poly parents, Liza grew up idolizing her parents’ monogamous marriage. Like many of us, the first time she fell in love she hoped it would last forever. Like just about all of us, it didn’t. And although she says she didn’t enter polyamory because it seemed like a more realistic choice, she admits that romantic notions of monogamy can set nearly impossible standards for relationships.
“Monogamy in the way that we all fantasize it could be is very rare,” Liza says. “Any statistic would bear this out, this is not my perception.”
Like Oberon, who laments “conventional society’s idea that there’s only one way to live and everyone has to be shoehorned into it,” Liza wishes that people could be more aware of their choices.
“What I would like to see is a world where people are able to look at their alternatives,” she says. “They could view their relationships like a work of art over which they have some measure of creative control rather than be plugged into a few options that are unlikely realistically to fit their real temperament and character.”
It would be difficult for anyone with an even moderately progressive sensibility to argue that point. If polyamory was solely concerned with shedding light on relationship options that the mainstream, Judeo-Christian world tends to dismiss as impractical or immoral, I would applaud the Ravenhearts for their magnanimousness and their organizational skills and leave it at that. But for many of the Ravenhearts, especially those who appear to have the most partners, I suspect there is another set of values at work. It has to do with the degree to which they hang their polyamory on their religion and the degree to which that religion is dependent upon the science fiction and fantasy subculture.
When Morning Glory talks about the polyamorous ideas conveyed in Heinlein’s novel, her summary goes like this: “He spun a really fascinating possibility. What if you didn’t have to stop dating? You could continue including your lovers as your best friends and their lovers as their best friends. You could build a whole social structure of a family that was bonded on this profound spiritual and sexual level.”
As nice as this sounds, it seems like a much taller order than even monogamy. For those of us who spend the majority of our time and mental energy wrestling with the conventions and demands of mainstream, heterogeneous society, the notion of becoming best friends with your lovers and their lovers and everyone else who comes down the pike would require suppressing our personal tastes to an almost impossible degree. In other words, most of us aren’t capable of liking that many people, let alone bonding with them on a profound spiritual and sexual level.
But here is where I am reminded of the sci-fi kids in high school and the medieval jousters in college and can finally begin to understand exactly why they irked so many of us “normal” people. We didn’t like the way it was so easy for the
m to like each other. We were bothered by the fact that their requirements for being turned on seemed to have less to do with things like culturally sanctioned ideas of attractiveness than with their mutual involvement in the subculture. The Ravenhearts are given to statements like “we connected deeply” and “the human capacity for love is infinite.” It’s also pretty clear that most of them don’t often sleep with anyone who doesn’t share their interest in paganism or science fiction, and I can’t help but wonder if, in their minds, a deep connection is as close at hand as the next meeting of the Eleusinian Mysteries. By being polyamorous, they are, in effect, giving themselves permission to sleep with other members of the science fiction club. That would seem to call into question just what “infinite capacity for love” really means.
The Ravenhearts’s relentless references to things like witchcraft and “the goddess” don’t mar the fact that they are fundamentally nice people. Nor does it keep them from being, by all appearances, relatively smart people. Oberon was a leader in the 1960s movement to bring together the various Earth-based religions and unite them under the term “neo-pagan.” He is credited with formulating and publishing the theology of deep ecology, best known as the Gaia thesis. All of the Ravenhearts bring some kind of intellectual component to their conversation. They debate various topics. They rationalize their desires. With their deliberate, rather circuitous speech patterns, they sound a lot like philosophy majors at a college with no course requirements.