Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners (25 page)

“I had close relationships with other girls at the time because of how it was with those girls. A group of us surfed together, went on camping trips together, but while we touched and hugged a lot, it wasn’t really sexual.

We enjoyed hanging around each other. My two closest female friends were attractive to me, but we had a deeper friendship. Now at college, girls will act like they’re hitting on you, but they’re just being loving with you.

Sometimes it’s confusing.

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“Living in the
Venus and Her Lover
household did contribute to the maturing of my sexual identity. I was more mature than most kids without going through that interior shit. So first I learned this framework on how to go about my relationships . . . a higher vision. It was a positive thing in my life. It gave me something to look towards. Then I started having a girlfriend, and there was my own interior personal stuff working that out in relationships. Okay, Mom and JG act this way, but what does it really mean? Cool ideas, now let me internalize that. Then, I’ve had to work through it all on my own.

“I had the same girlfriend my junior and senior years in high school.

We studied together, we were on the swim team together, we had fun together. But she was very jealous, I would get jealous, and we would argue

. . . drama. Yes, I was horny and wanting to have sex, but even more, I thought: I’ve learned a lot about a healthy functional relationship, but I’ve never experienced a dysfunctional relationship. I did have a love for her, and I thought: even though I’m unhappy with how things are, I’m learning so much. I just need to go through it. It taught me a lot of what I didn’t want, on a deeper level, not just in my head from what I learned from my parents. Being able to talk to your parents about your relationships and sexuality is a big advantage! It cuts out a whole ton of shit. It provides more clarity on those very personal questions. If you can only seek answers from society and friends, they can give you a skewed view of life.

“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.

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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 doctor-ate 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 camp-ers” 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 initi-ated 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
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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
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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 Stan-ford 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,
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‘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.

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
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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.