Whole lotta love

When it comes to relationships, the polyamorist motto is "The more, the merrier." Considering the sorry state of traditional marriage, is multi-partnering due a closer look?

By Liz Langley

Read more: Sex, Marriage, Life

June 14, 2007 | You may have seen a bumper sticker around town that says "Marriage =" and then, as if it was an elementary equation, silhouettes of a man and a woman. Traipsing through the wooded parking lot of the Pines Retreat Center in Brooksville, Fla., I notice a car with a different version of this bumper sticker: Instead of one male and one female, this one has three of each.

This is the Florida Poly Retreat -- "poly" meaning polyamory, "the state or practice of having more than one open romantic relationship at a time," according to Merriam-Webster Online. That means there's no such thing as cheating or affairs, because everything's out in the open.

Certainly it isn't for everyone. But considering the state of traditional marriage -- according to a recent New York Times report, in 2005, married couples became a national minority for the first time in history -- multi-partnering might be due a closer look.

"As I'm fond of saying, polyamory ain't for sissies," says Anita Wagner, a 54-year-old legal secretary and poly activist in the Washington, D.C., area, whom I spoke to on the phone before the retreat. Anita has a primary partner with whom she's in a long-term committed relationship; she also has another boyfriend and a girlfriend; her partner has two other girlfriends. As far as being able to sort out the details of their relationships without acrimony, Anita tells me, "I'm very proud of us."

While there is some overlap between poly and swinging, Anita says that though both are valid, poly is about the whole person, about romantic love and intimacy as well as sex. If you're going to do this thing, she says, "Communicate, communicate, communicate." That, she says, is the poly mantra.

The four-day retreat includes workshops such as "Coming Out as Poly," "Poly and BDSM," "Poly and Christianity," "STD Update and Fun Safer Sex," and a round-table event that I moderated called "Meet the Press," set up by organizer and poly activist Cherie Ve Ard.

Cherie has been involved in two quads, the first in 1992 before she even knew the term "polyamory." It "wasn't something we went looking for," she says ("we" being she and her now ex-husband) of the intimacy that developed between them. The second quad, which started in 2000, bought a house together. "It turns out mortgage companies like having four people with incomes" to sign the paperwork, she says. That quad eventually split into pairs, but different pairs than it started with (it gets complex). Currently Cherie lives with her partner Chris Seeder and has two long-distance sweeties, Fritz Neumann and Franklin Veaux.

Cherie's quad experience, she says, "really caused me to think about what marriage is and why it didn't fit in my life."

"Relationships grow and change," and, she explains, "when you feel you're very secure in your relationship ... then having sides, swings, relationships and romances aren't threatening to that primary relationship."

Besides a disinclination toward monogamy by those who practice polyamory, it's difficult to characterize it in a simple way because of the various forms a relationship can take: no partners, one partner, five partners of varying sexes who may or may not live with you. "There is no poly lifestyle," Franklin says at the round table when I use the term. "That's like 'the monogamous lifestyle.'"

As for who practices poly, Robyn Trask of Loving More, a polyamorist association and magazine, offers me a survey her magazine did in 2002 of 1,000 poly practitioners (who, given their lifestyle, could conceivably be speaking for another 4,000). The survey found the following: 40 percent of the poly population have graduate degrees or higher (as opposed to 8 percent of the general population). Most were raised Christian (87 percent) but identified as pagan (30 percent). One-fifth had never married; one-fifth had been divorced. And only 49 percent were sexually involved with someone they described as a love interest.

That last figure would seem to undercut the easy assumption that polyamory is all about sex. It's safe to assume some poly relationships are more geared toward the sexual -- as some subset of all relationships are -- but where poly seems to veer away from simple "swinging" is in a greater willingness of participants to take on a new partner as a whole person, messy emotions and all. Though there are many ways to practice poly, the one that treads closest to the monogamous model seems to be "poly fidelity," or sexual faithfulness to a group of partners -- what one person at the Florida conference explained to me as "expanded monogamy."

Janet Kira Lessin and her husband, Dr. Sasha Lessin, of the World Polyamory Association in Maui, call their circle of seven partners a "pod" and its members ... "podners." Their poly practice includes a spiritual level: "We really emphasize the interpersonal synergy that occurs when you include other people in your personal definition," Sasha Lessin says, "and using the relationship to transcend the separate self sense."

Of course, the spiritual is also physical. New podners have to be tested for a multitude of STDs. You can stray from the pod but you have to be tested in three months again if you hope to get back in.

"They can still be with us in other ways," Sasha says, but until they clear, they're outside the condom-free circle. A recent St. Petersburg Times story featuring Cherie Ve Ard reported that when she finds a new romantic interest "she sends him a 'sexual history disclosure spreadsheet,' complete with names of partners, the types of sexual contact they had and the results of tests for sexually transmitted diseases. Ve Ard expects the same in return."

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