Whole lotta love

This is the part where some people start to think: "This sounds like a lot of work." All relationships require maintenance and also practical considerations, like health insurance. Cherie goes as far as to advise poly groups to form limited liability corporations in order to be covered as a business. And then, of course, there's the inevitable jealousy. People in open marriages aren't impervious to it; they just learn to handle it differently.

"In the monogamous world," Cherie tells me, "jealousy is usually handled at the trigger point. It's assumed that your partner isn't going to flirt with other people." Poly people don't get the luxury of being on romantic autopilot -- if a partner's flirtations upset them they have to think about why. It means a lot of self-assessment.

Nan Wise, a New Jersey sex therapist and relationship counselor who identifies as polyamorous, sees the jealousy and new relationship energy -- that twittery feeling of finding someone new, which your primary partner might not have if they're not also in a new relationship -- as one of the biggest banana peels poly relationships can slip on. Our bodies release a chemical when we're in that initial love stage -- PEA or phenylethylalanine -- that Nan calls "a chemical speedball." "Do not operate machinery in this state," she says.

And the idea, I'm told at the round table, is definitely not to just add more people when a relationship is rocky. One person says you have to be "very aware of what your poly-saturation point is."

When I first meet Carli she is in the throes of a breakup. Married to a man for 14 years, she became involved with Susan 10 years ago and the couple became a trio. Then Susan decided she wanted out. "I know that I am and have been grieving," says Carli. "But I love these two people, with all their warts and wrinkles." Her sadness doesn't dull her wits. Lean, tan, warm and extroverted, Carli is one of those women who can carry on a perfectly sensible conversation while all the time the eyes in the back of her head are always on her kids.

In Carli's case there are about six of them. Two are hers, the others are members of the co-op school where she works three days a week. It's the women at the co-op she considers her community. At one point she tried a local poly support group in the Central Florida area, but, she says, Susan kept getting hit on.

Two months after we talk on the playground at her school, Susan is back in the picture -- and though Carli's clearly happier, the vibe is different. "I don't think I'd be sexual because I'm very conscious of the whole STD thing," she says, aware that Susan might be getting involved with someone else. Having done volunteer HIV education, she's skittish of trusting anyone's word on their sexual history. Susan still comes and stays overnight once a week, so for the kids, things are kind of back to normal. They missed Mommy Susan, as they call her (Carli and her husband are just Mommy and Daddy), but always knew she had her own house.

If the prospect of multiple partners seems troublesome, the subject of multiple partners with kids around can be even stickier. Robyn Trask, who has three children, says that she has known people who have lost custody of their children as a result of their poly life. The ideal, she says, would be to get more social workers and therapists to see that "[polyamory] is like any kind of family, but it has more people in it."

At the Florida retreat round table, Trask points out that the nuclear family is a relatively new invention. In bygone days it wasn't unusual to have several generations or extensions of family under one roof. In that way, polyamory can also be seen as a throwback to a time when big households were the norm.

Take the Tell family. Miriam and Rebecca became involved 10 years ago, but expanded their relationship in 2005 when they "married" a third partner, Robin, and took the new last name Tell. When I call their Albany, N.Y., home, I interrupt them in the practice of singing arpeggios with their 1-year-old daughter, Nadia. "She can't actually sing the notes but she imitates the emphasis," says Miriam, Nadia's birth mother. When Robin, her dad, tries to get her to sing for me, 900 miles away, she just looks at the phone.

"We've joked that people are going to say, 'How do people do this without three [parents]?'" says Miriam. As a freelance writer she was able to work at home, staying with Nadia until she was 8 months old. But by January her business was picking up. At that point, Robin had a job he wasn't crazy about, so he quit to watch Nadia. Now Robin has found a dream job, so Rebecca is stepping away from her position as a case manager at a homeless shelter to stay with the baby -- which will be good practice, as it turns out, since the current plan is for Rebecca to carry the next child.

The Tells are aware that their lifestyle is exotic to outsiders and Miriam is bemused when I ask what the sleeping arrangements are like. "We have a massive king-size bed in one room and a twin in the other and we just kind of shuffled around," she says. Sometimes one person wants more attention; sometimes another wants more space. "I think people are always concerned about it because they think there has to be some underlying angst and competition -- and that's just not there. Sure we've had our fits of angst but not particularly around that issue."

They have given plenty of thought, though, to how their unusual arrangement will affect Nadia. "Our social circle has a lot of parents and one triad so ... we're glad she's going to have people she can talk to about having three parents," Miriam says. As for how Nadia herself might react later on, Miriam says she'll handle any potential rebellion the same way she handles a lack of understanding from anyone.

"We always start off acknowledging that we know this is weird, we know this is unusual ... but when you come and see our family it's not that different from yours. We have chores, we have a mortgage, we cook dinner. We try to get our daughter to bed and sometimes she doesn't go to bed when we want her to," she says, with an occasional chirp from Nadia in the background. "Really, our day-to-day lives are pretty unremarkable."

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)