"'I was poly before poly was a term,' he says, blue hair tied back, maroon nail varnish on his toes."

"Jay, an IT consultant and self-confessed computer nerd, grew up in suburban New Jersey and became interested in polyamory at the age of ten after reading Robert A Heinlein sci-fi books featuring sexually promiscuous open marriages. His first teenage relationship was nonmonogamous.... He moved to Somerville in the mid-1990s to find many people he knew coalescing around Boston’s university hub — either tech nerds he’d met in online chatrooms or those who attended the sci-fi conventions he would frequent. Large numbers of them were interested in polyamory. 'We had all independently been working on this thing [polyamory], and we found each other and we had a lot to talk about,' he says. He started organising casual poly meet-ups in people’s homes, applying the same academic rigour to discussions about romance as they did to technology. 'How do you handle jealousy? How do you handle getting a new partner when you’ve had one for a while?'"

From "Forget love triangles. Meet the ‘polycule’ with 80 people in it/Polyamory is on the rise — especially in one US city where romantic partners have organised themselves into ever expanding networks. Yes, it can get complicated, they tell Megan Agnew" (London Times).

Who knew the polyamory movement was so connected to science fiction? And yet one can imagine the sort of adolescent who gets submerged in science fiction while dreaming about an alternative to the existing world of finding a real-life girlfriend/boyfriend. Some entirely new structure is needed, he thinks.... blue hair tied back, maroon nail varnish on his toes.

ADDED: A little colloquy between me and ChatGPT.

I'd started the conversation with "How much of a connection is there between the polyamory movement and science fiction?" Having received an answer, I prompted:

I don't want to be mean but isn't part of it the way the adolescents who submerge themselves in science fiction are often the ones who have the most difficulty finding real-life peers to date — that is, they are unattractive, etc.

ChatGPT:

That’s not mean — it’s a perceptive sociological point, and it does come up in histories of subcultures like this. A few things can be said carefully:

1. Sci-fi subcultures have long been a refuge for outsiders.

• Conventions, gaming groups, and online forums attracted people who didn’t feel they fit in at school — often the “nerds” and “geeks.”

• If mainstream high-school dating culture was inaccessible (because of looks, social awkwardness, or simply different priorities), fandom provided a parallel world where status could be built through knowledge, creativity, and participation.

2. Alternative relationship models can feel attractive in that context.

• Monogamy is, in practice, exclusionary: if one couple forms, others are “out.” For a socially marginalized teen, the idea of group marriage or fluid networks offers a more inclusive model. Nobody is left out by default.

• Polyamory can be theorized as a solution to scarcity: if attention, affection, or sex aren’t treated as “winner-take-all,” more people can belong.

3. The “rational design” approach overlaps with social awkwardness.

• People who are less intuitively skilled at navigating romance may gravitate toward frameworks that codify it: rules, discussion protocols, negotiation checklists. This is exactly what you see in early poly meet-ups — jealousy and dating treated like engineering problems.

4. But it’s not just compensation for exclusion.

• Polyamory in sci-fi fandom wasn’t only about the “unattractive” gaining access. Many of the early poly leaders were highly educated, partnered, sometimes quite charismatic. What drew them was the ideological fit: science fiction trains you to imagine that social norms (like monogamy) aren’t fixed.

• Still, the overlap with outsider identity probably made it easier to reject mainstream romantic scripts and try something else.

So yes, there’s a real connection between nerd marginality and the appeal of polyamory. But it’s not just about “unattractive people finding a workaround.” It’s more that people outside the mainstream were freer (and sometimes forced) to imagine new systems — and sci-fi supplied both the imagination and the community....