The Lifestyle

by Terry Gould

  Founded in 1848 and lasting for thirty years, the Oneida commune’s Utopian premise was stated by its leader, the radical Christian preacher John Humphrey Noyes: “In the Kingdom of Heaven the institution of marriage which assigns the exclusive possession of one woman to one man does not exist, for in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are as the Angels of God in Heaven.” Noyes specifically applied that premise to the sexual relations of the three hundred men and women at Oneida, who all accepted his idiosyncratic religion, called “Bible Communism,” which held that since divine love was non-possessive, possessive love was the original sin. At Oneida, therefore, romantic love was viewed as a sinful emotion—entailing as it did a feeling of we-two-and-not-you—and monogamous marriage was an evil institution based on economic selfishness—we-four-and-no-more. In order to live in “universal love,” the communards practiced “complex marriage” in a huge brick mansion, where everyone had sex (though not group sex) with everyone else. In an odd reversal of sinful behavior, however, the proscription against feeling exclusive love for one’s sexual partner was constantly violated by the communards.

  For all its frailties and faults, Oneida was a financial success, and it lasted until the law took a dim view of what was going on in the mansion. In 1879 Noyes was declared a public enemy by the locals and fled to Canada under threats of prosecution. After this the complex marriage of the religious commune, already teetering, collapsed completely. But the secular dream of universal love and sexual sharing lived on among nonreligious anarchists, sex radicals, and communists, who carried it through the Depression and the war in their bohemian lairs. From this emerged a subculture in the late forties and early fifties whose cool adherants believed in beatitude, partner swapping, and social revolution: the beatniks.

  These were the modern archetypes of the poly people—the first of the New Agers who would discard Christianity almost entirely in favor of wistful interpretations of Buddhism, Taoism, and native traditions. Made famous by Jack Kerouac in novels like The Dharma Bums, the beats were hairy intellectual types, and they all viewed the North American supermarket world as needing a radical shake-up. Sex was satori, and the capitalist monolith that promoted monogamy was, to the beats, hard, aggressive, militaristic, and, in an odd way, atheistic. To make love in groups was to help bring down the system by undermining the conventions that controlled and regulated human sexuality.

  Being pleasure oriented, the swinging rebels occasionally visited the parties thrown by the MR. -inspired swinger magazines, but by the early sixties you could tell by the dress and talk of the couples in attendance that some just wanted to sexually share within their traditional marriage, and some wanted to show that sexual sharing was an act of revolutionary love. Heinlein had recently published Stranger in a Strange Land, and its proposition “Martians don’t own anything” struck a tremendous chord among the beats. No one knows for certain who formalized the Utopian faction of swinging by inventing the term “polyamorism,” but it seems to have entered the vernacular of some whole-earth hippies during the “love-in” era of the late sixties, and, by virtue of the “ism” suffix, it declared that multipartner sex was a distinctive doctrine, an ideal with a goal, as opposed to just a swinging sex practice. The goal of threesomes and foursomes became Peace on Earth. Make Love not War.

  Technically, “recreational swingers” practiced a bona fide form of polyamorism, but because playcouples were strictly bourgeois in their value structure, most polyamorists did not consider themselves swingers. Today polyamorists would group-gestalt you into a corner if you labeled them swingers without qualification. They are “in the lifestyle,” and use those words all the time, but polyamory is an ideology—“loving more than one”—with the emphasis on the word “loving.” They have departed from Noyes in their belief that you can sexually, spiritually, and romantically love more than one.

  Polyfidelity takes the polyamorist lifestyle one ideological step further, actually, back in the direction of Oneida but without the Christian predicate. The term polyfidelity was invented by the secular Kerista commune in the eighties to describe the most politically mature form of polyamorism, which Mitch described in Loving More magazine as including “group marriage, shared parenting, total economic sharing, a group growth process, and a Utopian plan for improving life around the world [by] community living.” In the case of Kerista, polyfidelity also involved a lot of group sex among the generally bohemian-looking communards, who formed group marriages, dissolved them, formed new ones with different partners, and then merged to “encompass all but two people in the community.” Yet because Mitch “genuinely loved” his lovers, “all [his] familial relationships were indeed primary and equal,” and, therefore, the “experience was in keeping with [the commune’s] strict polyfidelitous ideology.”

  Strict communitarianism is still pretty much what polyfidelity means to its adherents—which explains a lot of the millennial seriousness you encounter at poly conferences: Utopians consider their poly-swinging lifestyle as a beacon on the hill to the rest of humanity. They might be pleased that millions of bourgeois swingers have derived a system of rules that enable them to transcend societal norms and affectionately make love with others without jealousy—something their hero, Heinlein, would have approved of as a step in the right Utopian direction—but they are highly critical of swingers who feel there is no need to complicate things by falling in love with their lovers and sharing bank accounts. Look at us, they seem to say: we go the whole hog, romantically loving many spouses, pooling our resources, and moving in together on our inner-city communes and truck farms in the country.

  Given the sorts of difficulties you’d expect in living a polyfidelitous life, it is not surprising that there are only about one-tenth as many Utopian as recreational swingers. Drawn on a chart with circles and double-headed arrows criss-crossed and connected, group marriage resembles something like a complicated football play that must be executed every day—not just at parties. “A third person triples the number of relationships to be fulfilled and maintained compared with what a couple has,” Butler wrote, “and a fourth partner brings the number up to twelve. Love, trust, and communication are reciprocal behaviors that must thus be expended in a number of different relationships.” In California, the median life span of a traditional dyadic marriage is five years; only 7 percent of group marriages last that long.

  Yet the very heroic complexity of poly life makes it an alluring ideal. Today polys have as many centers of family intimacy in North America as swingers have clubs. On Gabriola Island in British Columbia, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Denver, and other centers of New Age awareness, polys gather around real or symbolic campfires, beat drums, meditate, and discuss shamanism, “the new sexuality,” goddesses and gods, matriarchy, ethnobotany, “reclaiming history,” pagan rituals, and white witchcraft. When recreational swingers attend their gatherings—as they are often invited to do in advertisements placed in swing publications—they find the language of polys to be eerily different from their own. Poly talk is ecstatic in metaphor, often Martian, part of the dialect established by Valentine Smith’s Church of All Worlds, to which a thousand polys belong. When poly people make love they “blend” and “quicken eggs” and “share water.” When they appreciate what you are saying they “resonate” your words and “grok” your soul. They refer to their families as “nests” and their parties as “intimate networking.”

  The fact is, polys are making some headway into that supposedly “other” lifestyle of playcouples. Polyfidelity lecturers regularly make the swing-convention circuit, proselytizing their views to couples whom they feel are already partway there, and whom they urge to sit down after a night at the club and discuss ways to extend their erotic play to true love. Stan Dale, head of California’s Human Awareness Institute and a founder of the Loving More conference, was the keynote speaker at the Lifestyles Organization’s 1993 convention. As mentioned, Dr. Deb
orah Anapol, one of the founders of Loving More magazine, often lectures at Lifestyles conventions. As does Dave Hutchison, head of the Liberated Christians, which embraces swinging as the first step straights might consider taking on the road to poly commitment. Bob Miller and Carol Roberts, who attended the convention at New Horizons, are board members of the polyfidelitist organization Family Synergy; they, too, lecture at Lifestyles conventions, trying to pull the two movements together. “Some of our members are ‘evolved swingers,’” states their brochure, “attracted to Family Synergy because of its focus on deeper relationships.” Indeed, on page one of every issue of Loving More its editors, Ryam Nearing and Brett Hill, espouse the poly “ecology of love” mission statement that you’ll find stacked in piles at the literature tables of Lifestyles conventions. “We affirm that loving more than one can be a natural expression of health, exuberance, joy and intimacy,” the poly leaders write. “We view the shift from enforced monogamy and nuclear families to polyamory and intentional families or tribes in the context of a larger shift toward a more balanced, peaceful and sustainable way of life.”

  Straights coming across such sentiments in poly literature beside the cash register at their local New Age bookstore might suspect that the poly movement has a distinctly “feminine,” if not feminist, feel to it. That’s the case across the board. Of the seventeen contributing writers in Loving Mores summer issue, eleven were women. The emphasis in all the articles was on love and relationships, personal growth and relating, self-awareness, and intimacy through “family expansion.” Loving More’s logo features three hearts in a row running perpendicular to the tagline “New Models for Relationships” (in contrast to the bitten apple of the North American Swing Club Association).

  And that brings us to one other important feature of the poly people. If there are questions as to whether women “drive” the swinging lifestyle, there should be fewer questions about who runs the poly movement. Women seem to. It was women, Butler wrote, who “tended to put talk into action… developing a real, multifaceted relationship that evolved into a group marriage.”

  When you attend their rites you find that many poly women reach back beyond their “science fiction fandom,” their beat and love-commune heritages, and see themselves as descended from prehistoric “copartnership societies,” in which women may either have ruled or lived as full equals to men. There was certainly one thing you couldn’t help noticing at the Loving More seminars, from the opening talk to the closing ceremonies. Many of the poly leaders were high-level female professionals in the straight world, and many of their expanded families were polyandrous—that is, the husbands outnumbered the wives. In most of these group marriages, the women had activated the expansion.

  Take Ryam, for instance. She literally wrote the book on polyfidelity: Loving More: The Polyfidelity Primer. The day before the lecture by Audrey, Lewis, and Mitch, I’d sat with Ryam and six-month-old Zeke by the hot-spring pool, just after she had conducted her ninety-minute “Women’s Circle.”

  Ryam is a conservative lady. It was a hundred degrees in the eucalyptus shade, but she was covered neck to sandaled feet in a bib dress. She had plain brown hair, a bright, healthy face that never sees makeup, and the strong, sure hands of a new mother. In that summer’s issue of Loving More she’d printed a proud family picture of Barry, Allan, Brett, herself, and Ruth sitting demurely at a picnic. They were all around age forty and the men looked as straight as preachers. Brett had his hands on Ryam’s shoulders, Barry had his hands on Ruth’s, Ryam and Ruth were holding hands, and Allan—in the middle—had his hands on his thighs. “For many people, their first area of interest in polyfidelity is the ‘sex part,’” Ryam had stated in her Primer. “Can it be a healthy desire and ecstatic experience to be physically and emotionally intimate with more than one person at a time? Can you experience the feelings of specialness, passion, and in-loveness with more than one? Based upon the direct experiences of many people, the answer is ‘Yes, of course!’”

  “A lot of people in this movement—especially women—say, ‘Okay, well, I’ve always been this open, loving person,’” Ryam explained to me, hoisting the squirming Zeke to her shoulder. “They know that about themselves from early on. But, as with me, I didn’t really have the words for it, I didn’t know there were other people doing it. There’s something about being more open in the way you view relationships that’s almost never talked about in polite society. Like I say in my book, it’s usually portrayed as illicit, insane, or illegal, and always temporary. But cheating is okay so long as no one finds out.”

  I asked her if she’d found herself drawn to having more than one husband from childhood, as a sort of sexual orientation.

  “I think there are a lot of people,” she replied, “not so much that they are ‘drawn’ to it, but that they have a tendency that way, and suddenly they meet a couple who give them words for it, introduce them to other people doing it. For me it was in the late seventies with my husband Barry; it was sort of like, ‘Oh, I’ve discovered I’m poly!’ I finally came to that realization. So we had an open marriage for a few years, but we found it wasn’t quite what we were looking for. We wanted something more stable and with bigger roots for a family. So at the time I was in love with Allan, and we brought him in and we were in a polyfidelity triad for thirteen years. Three years ago, Brett entered the picture. I got into a loving relationship with him and we went from being a polyfidelity triad to being a family of four.”

  “You and three men.”

  “That’s right. And a year and a half ago, my legal husband Barry met Ruth and she joined—so that’s all of us who live together now. I think it’s not people becoming poly, it’s sort of like a blossoming; everything was already there, but now they know. It’s a realization kind of a thing.”

  “So then it’s not just another orientation?” I asked.

  “Well, I think all humans are poly. I don’t think humans are biologically monogamous. I suppose, if you’re talking about orientation, it’s the orientation to go against the grain and be natural about it. It’s the orientation to be who you are naturally. Why not? It’s natural to love many brothers and sisters and cousins. It’s natural to love lovers.”

  “Jealousy’s natural too,” I said.

  “Oh yes, of course, but there’s a word we use, ‘compersion,’ it’s the opposite of sexual jealousy—it’s where you have positive feelings when you see your loved ones enjoying their relationship with each other. Poly people had to invent that word because they invented the relationship in which it came to be.”

  I pondered the significance of that for a moment. There really was no word in English, or in any other language for that matter, to describe that “warm emotion” Ryam experienced watching Barry happily in love with Ruth. Could it be because no one in the history of humanity had ever felt such an emotion, and so it had remained unnamed? Would it ever enter the language as a “natural” feeling that was experienced often enough to need a word to describe it? Throughout her book, Ryam had stressed that “polyfidelity is a new marriage form.” It was biologically normal, she said, but it was not based on economics or religion or the dominance of one sex over the other, as other forms of monogamous or polygamous marriage had been in the past. “Instead,” she wrote, “polyfidelity is based on individual choice…an egalitarian family that comes together voluntarily…. A new form for a new millennium, polyfidelity is in its infancy at this very moment. It encompasses the highest evolution of the sound ideals of individual choice, voluntary co-operation, a healthy family life, and positive romantic love. It embraces sexual equality, a nonpossession orientation towards relationships, and a widening circle of spousal intimacy and true love.”

  “What did you talk about at the Women’s Circle?” I asked.

  “Well, a lot of people said they were intellectually and emotionally poly for a long time, but the direct experience of it brought up all kinds of negative feelings they’d never been raised as children to dea
l with—not with the fairy tales we read. And we talked about how the only way through it is to live it, to work with it. There are ways to make it easier, and we shared techniques and ways of looking at the world from this fresh perspective with each other. And we gave each other support that we’re not crazy because we live this way. These are our natural instincts; the natural instinct is to love more than one person. We as women know this about ourselves. So what we’ve found in this lifestyle is a very attractive arrangement to feel close and warm. When it’s working it’s a very high, loving way to live.”

  “So you have to invent new fairy tales to tell little girls?”

  “That’s right—nonmonogamous fairy tales,” she said, smiling, kissing Zeke.

  I pictured one of those fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Prince Charming, Tarzan, and Aladdin all in one poly house.

  The poly world would probably say that without compersion you couldn’t get them to live happily ever after.

  While waiting for the start of a Human Awareness Institute seminar called “Opening to Intimacy: Authentic Connecting,” I thought about a basic poly belief that employed a metaphor from Stranger in a Strange Land to encapsulate their lifestyle: unless the world learned to “share water,” we were doomed. Sharing water is the central allegorical rite of the Church of All Worlds, derived from the brotherly ritual of Heinlein’s Martians, brought to earth by Valentine Michael Smith from a desert planet where water was in such scarce supply that, rather than fighting over it, the aliens made apportioning it a daily act of loving communion among all beings. Literary snobs scoff at the sci-fi symbolism of Heinlein, but nobody can deny that, writing in 1961, he was decades ahead of evolutionary psychologists in his central theme that men have fought wars since the beginning of time because they couldn’t share women.