In the US today, if you have 15 kids, your health insurance will cover all of them (possibly with some additional cost to you, I dunno), and nobody says that that’s weird or unusual or that insurance should only cover the first kid.

Actually I do know and said so in 62, but I know nobody reads my comments (pouts).

In my experience if you have health insurance and want 15 kids covered you are going to pay for each kid. The corporation I work for covers the basic coverage for the employee only and anything above that (including upgrading to the good coverage for the employee) is paid for by the employee. Essentially the company kicks in a lump sum and beyond that is up to the worker. There may still be a few companies that offer “bring the whole family” but I don’t know of them.

I’m in a triad marriage. I consider myself married: we don’t get legal benefits, but we had a wedding in front of our (Pagan) religious authorities and the people in our community, and that’s frankly got a longer tradition attached to it than filing paperwork fees at the courthouse. It helps that we are in Portland, OR — where honestly more eyebrows get raised at our age differences than at our triad status.

In my marriage we deal with things as full equals. It’s true that there’s an “alpha” and “beta” dynamic at times, but the thing is, “beta” does not have any less power than “alpha” — I came across this article awhile back restating power dynamics as “cat” and “dog”, cat as person who brings in new suggestions and dog as person with the final veto power, and it really resonated. My female partner and I are both alphas; my male partner has the veto vote. He actually sort of plays the traditional “wife” role as the backbone of the household. The way she and I negotiate is fairly intense and, I guess, sort of political in tone, both forwardly establishing our domains; the way we negotiate with him is by all establishing the bottom line of what we’ll each cope with, and going from there.

There are alternatives to a two-party system in politics — certainly it can work on a smaller scale. The two-party system certainly requires less thought and effort from the participants to remain stable, but in my happy experience, it’s not the only way.

We technically have an open marriage. In practice, this means occasional flings. We really don’t find the time and energy for steady girlfriends/boyfriends outside the household, and we all work part-time and live more frugally than we might, mostly because we value leisure time with each other. I don’t believe this is necessary for poly marriages in general, just for ours. I know others who work full-time and are doing fine; it’s just a mutual lifestyle choice with us, and one of the basic assumptions about life that made us compatible with each other in the first place.

Re: Kit @ 37, I am in China at the moment, and I have something fairly hopeful to report: most of my college students here are young women. Of the boys in the class, about a quarter actually care to do their work. Of the girls… nearly all. They’re going to graduate with high marks and force their way into the workplace against sexism; there’s already been some breakdown of traditional gender roles, as evidenced by a strong “tomboy” culture, and I think in ten years’ time we’ll see a very strong emergence of gender equality — God willin’ and the powderkeg don’t blow.

I’ve known several poly “marriages.” A few have done quite well long-term. A few, not so well. Track record overall maybe about like monogamous marriages. None involved minor children at home. What’s that mean? Got me.

…Unrelatedly: I had some not-very-serious thoughts about the Mafia/poly connection, but I didn’t want to completely hijack the discussion here, so I posted ‘em in my blog; if anyone’s interested, follow the link.

Exactly.

My husband and I have been together for fourteen years. In that time I’ve had several other serious relationships, some of which lasted about a year, one of which lasted five and a half, the last of which is, well, my fiance. He’s had a few casual things, and now has a relationship of I think seven years duration with his long-distance partner and three years with his local one.

None of this was ever One Big Relationship, though it has had family units consisting of networks of relationships that happen to work out sensibly as family units. But I consistently run into stuff that basically trivialises and dismisses the fourteen years I’ve been with my husband because completely different relationships in which he was not a participant ended. I, uh, what?

I don’t have “poly relationships”. I have multiple relationships, which makes me poly, or the system of relationships I’m in poly, but all my relationships are dyads.

Of course, there’s also a question in some cases as to what it means for “a poly relationship” to last a given period of time, because a lot of poly relationships don’t consist of exactly n people. In fact, most of my experience involves having what I would call multiple two-person relationships at once, rather than one multi-person relationship per se. For example, in one of my current relationships, we just reached our tenth anniversary, but we’ve both had a variety of other partners during that time. That partner has been together with one of their other partners for, what, 13 years now? Something like that. But I wouldn’t say that the three of us have a poly relationship; in our particular case, I would consider that two different relationships.

But yeah, as a couple of people have noted, there are a lot of different ways to do polyamory, so it can be hard to generalize about this stuff.

Thanks for the post!

I certainly agree that we’re not going to have poly marriage anytime *soon*, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happens eventually. In 1965, I can imagine people saying, “We’ll never have same-sex marriage in my lifetime, ’cause after all in 16 US states people of different races still can’t get married.” My guess is that within 25 years, same-sex marriage will be fairly widespread (but not universal) in the US, and that by then people will have started seriously pushing for multiple-adult marriage. But of course I’m talking through my hat here; my future predictions are often more optimistic than is warranted.

…On a side note, I see polygamy equated with bestiality remarkably often, and it always surprises me; a lot of US law around who can have sex with who has to do with consent, and it seems obvious that it’s possible to get explicit verbal consent from multiple adult humans in a way that just isn’t possible with animals. But yeah, given how many people use polygamy and bestiality as the main examples of obviously evil things that will inevitably result from legalizing same-sex marriage, there’s clearly a long way to go in getting widespread social acceptance of polyamory, much less poly marriage.

I’m surprised not to see more people here mention that in sf, poly marriage is usually described as falling under the general rubric of contract law. But yeah, as several people have noted, a lot of US laws would need to be tweaked/adjusted to make that work.

But yes, Mel@43 made a great point: a lot of the things that monogamous people have a hard time figuring out about polyamory (like the common “but … how can you love more than one person? that’s not possible!”) are pretty similar to, or at least analogous to, things that come up all the time regarding multiple people who aren’t lovers in the monogamous world (nobody would say “but … how can you have more than one friend? that’s not possible!” or “but .. how can you have more than one family member? that’s not possible!”).

I agree that the expense of health insurance for multiple partners would be a big stumbling point for a lot of businesses. But a lot depends on what’s socially acceptable. In the US today, if you have 15 kids, your health insurance will cover all of them (possibly with some additional cost to you, I dunno), and nobody says that that’s weird or unusual or that insurance should only cover the first kid.

I think generalizations don’t work. People are different.