“I feel blessed that I’ve been exposed to more conscious relationship. Now that I’m in relationships it’s helping me now more than when I was a kid. I will say that something I’ve been realizing more is that the whole idea of a free and open relationship, when I was in high school, was totally cool and groovy, but at my maturity level then, I took that free, open relationship idea as more like a selfish, egocentric thing. I thought I could do more of what I wanted, if I hurt my girlfriend, then that’s her problem, she’s jealous. Since then, I’ve reflected more on it, and now with my girlfriend, I have more of an understanding for other people’s feelings, so I understand how other people feel about it. I can see a value in monogamy. I would have to work it out if I chose polyamory. To have an open relationship, there needs to be a greater level of maturity. Interior work that needs to happen before polyamory, and then you have to really work at it. I didn’t notice any of that before because my parents made it seem so easy and normal.” What parent wouldn’t be proud to have raised a young man like this one.
Nora and Jim are also proud of their two children: Adam, who is now twenty-four, and Carla, who is twenty-one. Adam is completing his doctorate in biochemistry and has been dating his current girlfriend for about a year, Carla recently finished college and is living with her girlfriend in a monogamous relationship. Nora describes the children as “happy campers” and is close to both. At first glance, they’re a conventional, normal-looking family. But Nora says their lesbian daughter is the most conservative of the lot.
Nora and Jim began dating thirty-five years ago and have been married for almost thirty years. Both were virgins when they got together in high school but agreed to explore sexually with others while they were away at different colleges, knowing that they would marry one day. He’s now a successful attorney, and she’s a psychotherapist in the New York suburbs. Fifteen years ago, after twenty years of monogamy, Nora and Jim embarked on an intimate relationship with the parents of Carla’s best friend. Carla was in kindergarten at the time. Nora recalls that they started to talk openly to the children about their polyamorous lifestyle a few years later because they felt it was important for them to know what was going on in the family. At the time, the children were too young to be asking questions about the sexual arrangements, but they wanted Adam and Carla to know that these extra adults who were spending so much time in their home were people their parents loved and cared about.
Nora says that the relationship with this first couple, which was initiated by the other woman who said that she “liked what you have” and wanted help bolstering her own floundering marriage, ended when the other couple got divorced. “We probably helped them stay together a little longer, but in the end we couldn’t rescue them,” Nora explains. But it was the beginning of a new chapter in her own marriage. For the next eight years, Nora lived with first one and then another lover in the family home while Jim had long-term relationships with two women sequentially who would spend most weekends at their house. Son Adam took it all in stride but now says, “I had no clue why you were hanging out with these baby-men, Mom.” Carla was a little less sanguine, especially as a teenager. She didn’t like having extra adults living in her house and once asked her mother, “Why can’t you be normal and get divorced like everyone else?” In retrospect, Nora regrets that their intense relationships with people who were single and sometimes “needy” took time and energy away from the children but feels that the children also benefited from relating to more adults. “They each have lots of friends, are very social and have excellent communication skills, way above average,” she says.
The biggest challenge came when Nora and Jim, along with their respective lovers, agreed to be profiled in a national magazine. Jim’s family got very upset about the publicity, and it created a lot of tension, especially with his sister who had been very close to the children and completely withdrew for a while. “It all blew over after a year or so,” Nora says. “It was kind of ridiculous, she knew our partners, they’d been at her wedding, but that’s how families are sometimes.”
Jacob also has two children in their early twenties. Jacob and his ex-wife Karen had an open marriage before their two girls were born, but he found that running his business along with providing the best possible environment for the children took too much time and energy to continue pursuing other relationships. Karen, who is a personal trainer, fell for one of her clients when the girls were in elementary school, and this led to a divorce. After this, Jacob had relationships with a series of women, often several at one time, and began to identify as polyamorous when a friend from his men’s group introduced him to my work. When Jacob’s older daughter was a senior in high school, he remarried, again choosing an open marriage. Jacob’s older daughter, Rachael, like Nora and Jim’s daughter, Carla, is a very monogamous lesbian who graduated from college with high honors. His younger daughter, Georgia, is currently applying to graduate schools in psychology and, for the first time since she started dating at fifteen, has managed to take a breather from coupling up and is without a steady boyfriend. “I’ve tried to stay single before,” she disclosed, “but it’s not easy. The guys kind of pressure you to be exclusive, and when you get really close, it’s just easier.”
Jacob says that he never discussed the women in his life with his children until the last couple of years but that he didn’t hide anything either. He says that Georgia had an issue with all those women taking away some of her precious time with Dad, but otherwise she hadn’t seen it as a problem. The main complaint from Georgia was this: “It was weird, Dad, because you always had these different smells on you, and some of them I really didn’t like!”
I was starting to get the picture that polyamory can be challenging for teens and young adults even when they’ve been raised in polyamorous families and even when they’re not opposed to it. If polyamory was challenging for Raymond, I was pretty sure it would be challenging for any young adult. I decided to ask my own twenty-one-year-old daughter who was born into an open relationship and is now studying psychology at Stanford University what she thought. Once again, I was amazed by how mature and articulate this generation of young adults can be. I certainly don’t remember being mature enough at twenty-one to know I was immature, and if I had known, I’m sure I wouldn’t have admitted it to my mother or any other adult.
Alana wasn’t sure when she first became aware of polyamory. Her father and I were appearing on national television talking about our open marriage by the time she was three, but she was apparently oblivious to our open relationship if not to our absence. We were grateful that my mother was living with us, so we could easily leave her at home with Grandma while we flew to New York, say our sound bites, and fly home. It was a pretty big deal to us because we always got shredded by the host, who would sometimes apologize afterward and say it was a job requirement. But to a three-year-old, the details were irrelevant. It was simply a matter of “I didn’t like it when you went out without me. Otherwise, I didn’t think anything about it. I didn’t pay much attention. I thought your friends were weird because they ate raw and vegan food and meditated and belly danced, stuff like that. I really didn’t see and wasn’t interested in their sex lives. I felt different when you got divorced because my best friends’ parents weren’t divorced, but that’s all.”
So what does she think about polyamory now? “I think polyamory is fine, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not a good idea for most people because the way our society teaches people to view relationships is not compatible with polyamory, and when they try it, they get jealous. Most people I know think polyamory would never work for them because they’d get jealous. Friends with benefits is popular, but that’s viewed differently, it’s just hooking up in a pretty shallow way. It’s accepted by people, but when they get involved, they want commitment.”
Alana reminds me that when she went away to college, she tried to have an open relationship with the boyfriend she’d had the last two years of high
school, but it didn’t work. When I asked her why, she replied, “Because we were eighteen, immature, insecure, and had poor communication skills. We should have just broken up and been friends, but we were too codependent to separate. He’s a particularly jealous person, and it just didn’t work.” What about the next boyfriend, who left for law school last fall? I asked. “Oh, we talked about it, but he’s a serial monogamist. He said, ‘That’s just how I do it.’ End of conversation.” And the current boyfriend, whom she met just before leaving the country for a study abroad program? “He’s definitely more open. His aunt and uncle run a summer camp for nonmonogamous people, and his parents met at a hippie commune in the seventies. But his dad couldn’t deal with jealousy, so they moved to the suburbs and had a normal family life. He now lives at a Buddhist retreat center and has other girlfriends which I’m not really thrilled about, but I’m out of the country, and we agreed not to be exclusive, so I can’t really complain.”
Alana goes on to tell me that many of the students in her study-abroad program are in a similar situation and miserable. “Either they’ve broken up because they knew they were going to be apart but they’re not really over each other, or they’re trying to be open since they’re so far away, but they’re jealous.”
What’s interesting to me is that most of the young adults I know who were raised in child-centered polyamorous families seem to end up giving a higher priority to bonding and sustained intimacy than to freedom, whether they are male or female. While they often attempt both, they seem willing to go for serial monogamy because its continued cultural dominance provides greater ease in intimate connections with partners raised to believe in monogamy. Those who are more determined to pursue radical multipartner lifestyles whatever the cost or who are hungry for sexual variety to make up for a sexually repressed adolescence seem to have a greater need to rebel against the culture norms than the children of the last generation of polyamorous pioneers. This pattern also seems to hold true for the children of more mainstream families who are open with their children about their polyamorous relationships.
SETTING A CONTEXT FOR CHILDREN
Kelly is a corporate executive with a multinational company based in Vancouver, Canada. He’s a youthful forty-seven-year-old who has been happily married to Eileen, his high school sweetheart for twenty-five years. They have an eleven-year-old daughter and two sons who are eighteen and nineteen. This family looks like the most traditional, child-centered family anyone could imagine. Eileen is a stay-at-home mom who has spent years chauffeuring the children to various activities, helping them with their homework, and preparing special holiday treats. Despite the demands of his work, Kelly puts a high priority on family life, and when he’s not traveling between corporate offices, he always joins in family dinners, where the art of meaningful conversation is carefully taught. Like Nora and Jim, Kelly and Eileen were virgins when they got together and wanted to expand their sexual experience without breaking up their marriage. Nine years ago, when Kelly and Eileen decided to open their marriage, they realized they needed to prepare the children for a new way of life.
Kelly recalls that “the whole issue about kids was a big one for us. The kids were two, nine, and ten at the time and never exposed to anything other than normal family life. We were very proactive in preparing a context for them to be comfortable with what we were doing so they wouldn’t have any surprises. We were aware that the picture of extramarital relationships they would get from films or TV was a negative one, all about secret affairs, drama, and unhappiness. It’s always a bad thing, it’s ugly, that’s the dominant picture kids get. So while we never sat the kids down and directly talked about what we were doing, we made sure they knew there were no secrets going on between Mom and Dad and no hiding.
“As our relationships with others evolved, we never hid our warmth for other people in our lives. We talked to the children about how much we were looking forward to seeing certain people and how much we loved them. So they were not surprised to see us hugging or being affectionate with each other in the kitchen while waiting for the water to boil for the potatoes. We had no problem expressing warmth and love in front of the kids. Of course we didn’t feel each other up; we didn’t do that as a couple either. We didn’t talk about our sex lives and who was sleeping where, but we didn’t hide it either. We talked openly about our lovers to the kids. We told them how much we enjoy spending time together or that so and so had called. We went to a lot of effort to set a context so that the kids never needed to feel uncomfortable about what was evolving in our relationships with others. We found that the kids tended to be warm and accepting with whomever we were warm and accepting with ourselves. There were times when we felt self-conscious, but mostly we just normalized the whole thing.”
About two years after opening their marriage, they met Erica. After dating for three years, Erica moved into the family home. “Erica was more like a favorite aunt than a parent,” Kelly explains. “She was just remarkable with the children, and they adore her. Even now, sometimes she stays with them when we go away.” The threesome ended after six months of living together, and each of the three has a slightly different take on why it ended, but they’re still close friends who talk every week and occasionally visit with Erica and her new partner.
Kelly emphasizes, “We felt it was very important never to lie to the kids, not even a white lie, so if they asked, where did we meet this person, we’d say, on the Internet, which was the truth, not at work or some other cover-up. We rarely get questions from the kids because we give them all the information they need. But if they ask, we answer truthfully. If I spent the weekend away with Erica and they asked, where did she sleep, I’d say, she slept with me.”
Kelly has known Selena for about eight years, and they’ve been lovers for five, but she’s only recently met the kids when she came to visit the family for a week. Eileen is slowly warming up to Selena, Kelly says, but prefers to stay with just friendship for now. Kelly explains that his relationship with Selena began while the family was living in England, and he would see Selena when he was in Vancouver on business. Selena has three children of her own who spend most weekends with their father, and they’re not at all ready to tackle the complexities of bringing the two families together, although I get the feeling that Kelly would like to if he could figure out the right context.
I asked Kelly if he’d discussed polyamory with his oldest son Trent, who is now nineteen and has a girlfriend. Kelly replied that Trent is aware that some of their friends are also lovers, but it just hasn’t come up with the younger ones. “Mike has never been very communicative, he’s more of a geek, and while Sally is nosier than the boys were, she’s really more concerned with her own life so far.” Kelly continued, “I’ve always had a close relationship with Trent, and he’s brought me questions about sex since he was eight or nine. When he was younger we would shower together, and that’s when we would talk. So if he wanted to talk to me, he’d say, ‘Dad, can we take a shower?’ He’d ask me about things he’d heard on the playground that he wanted to know more about. Once some kids called him a fag, so he wanted to know what that meant, and then he wanted to know how gay men had sex.”
For the past two years, Trent has had a long-distance relationship with a girl who’s away at boarding school. Kelly describes Trent as “a very good looking, outgoing, talented kid who plays in a band, and he always has a string of girls following him around. When we saw him starting to spend time with another girl, we did have a talk with him about whether he was about to create some drama with the two girls and advised him to communicate openly with both of them. We told him he’d have to decide how to handle it, but he should be honorable and not lie or withhold information and practice safe sex. We did mention polyamory, or sexual friendship, as possibilities and pointed out the advantages and responsibilities that go with different choices. I’m not sure exactly what he decided, but he slept over at the other girl’s house, and that was followed by a series of
lengthy phone calls with the girlfriend who’s away at school. We were concerned that all the time processing was cutting into his time for homework and were relieved when they broke up.”
I loved the practical, down-to-earth way that Kelly and Eileen managed what could have been a rocky transition for their children from a traditional monogamous marriage to a polyamorous lifestyle. It was an added bonus that their life experience then allowed them to support their teenage son in making ethical and responsible choices for himself. For families with small children, the polyamorous context is often set from birth, so it doesn’t seem alien to the children unless it clashes with the larger culture. Living in a socially liberal area is one way to avoid this clash, but crossing national boundaries is another way to circumvent rigid cultural norms, as illustrated in the following histories.
BRINGING UP BABY
Juliette, Roland, Laurel, and their one-year-old daughter, Maya, make polyamory look about as normal—and easy—as anyone could imagine. But then none of them are teenagers. All three adults are in their early forties and are self-employed freelancers. Juliette and Roland met and fell in love while both were working in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1990s. At the time, Juliette was married to another man, and it was Roland who first suggested they try a polyamorous relationship, but Juliette’s husband didn’t like the idea. Eventually, they divorced, and she and Roland were married. Juliette says that the first ten years of their marriage were spent learning how to have an open relationship, moving to Spain, and trying to conceive—without success.
Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners Page 18