Polyamory Is For People Whose Parents Don’t Love Them——Why It’s The Family System Reimagined

The heat from the chai tea we’re drinking is warming me from the belly up. My boyfriend (of sorts) offers that our future polyamorous throuple will be bi-coastal. And no, that does not mean me in New York and his other partner in California, separated from each other with no object permanence of the other partner’s existence. He’s animated, offering that all three of us will travel and live together and make choices towards each other in tandem.

My imagination laps at the edges of my thoughts. I am just barely able to manage my own presence in this conversation that might be a test of exactly how shared our values are. Containing my budding fantasy of raising future children with two co-parents instead of one and never being alone in motherhood is getting tough. But I try to temper my enthusiasm—as a smart woman, I don’t want to seem overly amenable to a man’s desires. So externally I invite him to think through the logistics of ensuring this three-way love story maintains its balance. Internally, I water a small tendril of imagination; a dream of family dinners and holidays and birthdays with other partners (of our throuple?) and other triads and their children all present, all vibrant, all making choices towards each other in tandem.

My parents began as a married monogamous couple but birthed me into a dynamic where I spent no more than six weeks with my biological father between the ages of three and 18. I am now borderline no-contact with my mom and generally unaccepted as both a bisexual and non-practicing lawyer, but working as a stripper and artist in my highly traditional family. I cannot resist romanticizing the idea of being loved, openly and transparently, by two people at once. I’m so compelled by a queer family structure where no one needs to hide who they are. And I know I should be pushing this cis-gender boyfriend of mine to examine his own privilege and even, maybe, entitlement in asking for a throuple of his making. But I can’t help but wonder, if monogamous nuclear families are also patriarchal and often harmful to women and children, why can’t I find safety and family in something different?

On the first ring my friend Scott answered my call—only one chime to ready myself for his honest advice about how much risk versus reward practicing polyamory actually garners. Is polyamory that much riskier of a relationship model? “Well yes—I mean it’s riskier sexually and you can use barriers and frequent testing to protect your health. But perhaps more, or also—it’s very emotionally risky because you can be breaking up with multiple partners at once and that can really make you feel insecure.” My stomach churned at the physical memory of the week a girl ended things with me in the middle of a date, in the middle of the sidewalk to be precise, and shortly thereafter my boyfriend (of sorts?) expressed needing a readjustment to our dynamic. I sat down to dinner with him and asked if he planned to break up with me before drinks arrived. He was not! (Yay!) 

I was just making sure, I asserted. Maybe more true is the emotional dysregulation of two potential endings was too big for me to even clock my own feelings as insecure. Is there a reason to even try polyamory if it’s so uncertain? Yes, it is according to Scott. “I feel like I’m lying by being in a traditional monogamous relationship.” I wondered if emotional honesty is valuable enough for me to withstand definite emotional dysregulation. If monogamy is a lie, is lying such a sin if it creates the stability needed to form a real family system?

I dialed for Esther—practicing ethical non-monogamy since she was 19 had to mean she would tell me something less foreboding. “Polyamory is less risky than monogamy because my partner and I get to wake up and choose each other every day. There’s less risk of lying or being lied to, less risk of resenting your partner–and the freedom to feel big, weird feelings allows for a softer place to land.” My head nodded up and down, yes. 

Had my mother had a softer place to land when her monogamous relationship with my father disintegrated due to the biggest of his many affairs, she might have known she had permission to fight for her happiness, and she might have known that she was allowed to be angry and she might not have needed me to be the answer to her pain. As Esther discussed monogamy as a limit to community and friendships—and a path to isolation for most women—I felt more confident in my instincts. Non-monogamy is an insurance policy for happiness and fulfillment. And just like any insurance policy you need to pay for it, in this context with big emotions. Perhaps in a family system this kind of insurance is critical because this safety net protects children from needing to bear the weight of adult relationships. 

Having just completed a scheduled relationship-update check in with my boy who is a friend of sorts I needed to shed a bit of my own big emotions before I could dig deep with Trae. Luckily, Trae is kind, so my immediate emotional dysregulation did not derail our inquisition of the risk-reward tug of war in polyamory. In fact, my heightened mind state highlighted a key stabilizing factor of polyamory: flexibility. 

“I don’t think non-monogamy is more risky than monogamy,” Trae explained, “because relationships shift or falter all the time, and I hate to use breaking up as the metric, but non-monogamy is less risky than monogamy because there’s no set way to do things. You take on more emotional risk with monogamy because there’s such a narrow path for success.” While Trae delineated all the ways a triad could own property and raise kids together or two polyamorous couples could choose living in adjoining condos and offered alternative configurations that just do not exist in monogamous marriages I felt the twinking frustration with the boy I sometimes date subside because Trae’s framing crystalized why ethical non-monogamy appeals to me beyond my relationship with (sometimes) bae. 

Maintaining my agency while accessing deeply committed relationships is something I’ve always struggled to attain while trying to partner the right way. Vacillating between cold-aloofness to maintain my agency over myself or deeply sublimating my needs to obtain a commitment from someone else summarizes the entirety of my romantic history to this day. The chance to design a relationship that honors both my agency and another person’s feels like the kind of partnership where I could truly thrive, even through major life choices like marriage and parenting. Besides, emotions so big they seem to have a glow on their own don’t seem like a risk unique to polyamory, when every overture we make towards closeness with another human requires taking a risk. Could it be that the only risk unique to polyamory is whether we can be emotionally honest and brave enough with ourselves to pursue a relationship model that other people may not understand? The advantages of polyamory—or at least ethical non-monogamy—for adults seem significant. Breaking convention in adult relationships when only consenting parties are involved is one thing, but what does the research say about the impact of polyamorous relationships on children?

I called Dr. Eli Sheff, the expert on polyamory and author of The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Families and Relationships to check my own biases against the data. 

Eli, as she asked me to call her, shared data that was surprisingly commonsensical: children who grow up in polyamorous families are more adaptable than children and monogamous households and have higher mental health scores than children of monogamous households in their late teens and early twenties. She explained that these children of polyamorous parents report believing that challenges are surmountable and shifts in society, the economy and their own friend groups are merely situations one adapts to and even thrives in. As she spoke I furiously jotted down notes: what would happen if every child was raised in a home where parents demonstrated how to do conflict safely and with support? What would our communities look like if all children believed that, in Eli’s words, “every conversation topic was up for grabs?”  As we face a country with increasingly fractured ideologies and economies, raising kids in an environment where questioning norms and working through conflicting priorities is normal might save the world—or at least give society a strong pathway forward. 

Alas, the path forward is paved with a very real present-moment challenge of stigma. Indeed, polyamorous families experience stigma from the world around them, the same way interfaith, interracial and queer families face stigma—which is taxing on the unit. As Eli spoke about her respondents’ experiences I was reminded of moments when my white mom would take me to the grocery store and strangers would stare, or if they were brave, ask her where she adopted me. When she informed them that she birthed me I would watch their faces contort while processing that she must have had intercourse with a Black man to create me. Such are the quotidian aggressions against families existing outside of societal norms. 

Perhaps the most compelling point Eli made was that in polyamorous families, if one adult falls in love with someone else, the family doesn’t have to break apart. Instead, the family can continue as a unit, and the children still have a stable home to count on—a unique advantage that polyamorous families have over monogamous ones. I understand it is very heavy to acknowledge the inevitability of some form of a relationship ending either through a breakup or through death, but endings are a fact of the human experience. And there is something really compelling about creating a family structure that immunizes children from the incidental toxins of any adult relationship ending. 

I ended the phone call with Eli feeling infinitely more settled after an hour of discussing the data, the impact and the long-term effects of polyamory on adults and children. Given the evidence of the positive advantages polyamorous families have over monogamous families, I can’t help but wonder, if adaptability is the greatest currency of our age, why wouldn’t we design relationships embodying that resource?