"People who like novelty tend to be better suited for nonmonogamy. People who have what they call a 'faster life history'..."

"— that’s a social science term — meaning they’ve probably moved around a lot, they’ve probably had a whole bunch of different kinds of jobs, they started dating younger and they’ve dated more people. They’re more likely to be interested in polyamory or nonmonogamy than the people who have never left their hometown, who like to have one job and really stick with it. Not that either of those are better than the other, but just what kind of wiring tends to mak [sic] you enjoy polyamory."

From "Is Polyamory Right for You?/Elisabeth Sheff spent 30 years studying polyamory. Here’s what she learned" (NYT gift link).

This is a long interview, so you might want to check it out. Or you might want to bemoan the NYT and its endless fascination with polyamory.

The proposed rule would impose "a narrow, culturally specific understanding of family" that "privileges a dominant cultural framework over the lived realities of communities of color and global Christians."

I'm reading "Presbyterian Church faces revolt after proposing clergy must be in monogamous relationships — and critics blame white privilege" (NY Post).

The headline is miswritten. The rule doesn't require a relationship. Clergy can still be single. They just can't have more than one partner. It seems that clergy can have sequential sexual relationships — with no commitment at all — as long as they follow a one-at-a-time approach. 

The Presbyterians on both sides of this controversy are relying on progressivism. Opponents tap into racial critique — that "lived realities" discourse. 

Proponents deploy feminist critique. They're "arguing that the practice of polyamory or polygamy can create 'power imbalances, emotional harm, and spiritual confusion,' particularly for women, children, and historically marginalized persons."

It seems that no one wants to get caught invoking tradition. History is that place where persons were marginalized. It's something to be undone. 

***

I love the stock photo the Post chose to illustrate this story. It's like an ad for fabric softener:

Which one is supposed to be the Presbyterian clergyperson?

"For almost everyone, writing books is a low-paying job! For most it pays literally nothing!"

Lindy West gives us a striking example of working very hard to get publicity for a new book and barely selling anything. Is this a specific example of female readers repelled by the author's finding a way to stand by her polyamorous husband or something much more general in book publishing these days:

"That's the precise point, 1 minute and 10 seconds in, where I clicked off the audiobook."

I wrote, 2 days ago, in what I called "a short, enigmatic blog post." I said, "I think anyone, using AI, can now easily discover what book is being talked about."

Shortly after posting, I tested AI and added the story of how it failed to identify the book. The problem was that the language I found so off-putting — "For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land" — wasn't written by the book's author. It was the book's epigraph, a quote from "Moby-Dick," a quote that at least 2 other authors have used. AI never found the book I'd been listening to. 

At that point, I became curious enough to go back to the audiobook and I listened to the whole thing. It was a book I'd blogged about last Tuesday after reading a NYT column about it. The column was called "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking." I have a long-running problem with the word "heartbreaking," and I blurted out "Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy."

West = Lindy West. The book is "Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane" (commission earned). And I'm going to stand by my blurted-out opinion: It is not heartbreaking. It's dangerous bullshit. 

Let me quote from page 123, where the author call herself a “people pleaser" and calls "people pleaser" "a hideous misnomer for a hideous behavior." Boldface added:

“People pleasing” is never about pleasing people—it’s about the pleaser avoiding discomfort, confrontation, accountability. It’s a manipulation, a rot that threatens all my relationships, not because it makes me “too nice” and vulnerable to exploitation, but because it makes me a liar who isn’t willing to do the hard work of love.

"In earlier writing, [Lindy] West presented her union with the musician Ahamefule Oluo... as a kind of feminist fairy-tale ending."

"'My Wedding Was Perfect — and I Was Fat as Hell the Whole Time,' said the headline of a 2015 column she wrote in The Guardian. But if the wedding was idyllic, West reveals in 'Adult Braces,' the marriage was not. Almost from the beginning, she writes, Aham conditioned their relationship on his being able to sleep with other women. She gave in because she was desperate to keep him, but his dalliances made her intolerably insecure. Because West lived in a left-wing milieu in which nonmonogamy is common, she felt an extra layer of shame over her inability to accept Aham’s extramarital sex life. ('At the time, being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles,' she writes.) Her anguish was exacerbated by an excruciating degree of bodily self-hatred, which, as she knows, contradicts the persona she’s built her career on. 'Do you think I have ever felt like I deserved to demand anything from men?' she asks.... [Aham] used her politics against her; West reports that Aham, who is half-Nigerian, 'believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership.'... [At the end of 'Adult Braces,' West writes] 'If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.'"

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking" (NYT).

Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy.

Well, what would you do with "a 'plain vanilla' box"?

After buying a “plain vanilla” box, a Chicago trio brought in an interior designer who blended their aesthetics and added elements like a moody den for socializing and a three-person bed.

🔗: https://t.co/b2Z4qO0bzg pic.twitter.com/2P6CpcN2xI

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 18, 2025

So a "moody den" is a solution to "a 'plain vanilla' box." Who knew?! The things you learn reading the Wall Street Journal. You can get a "three-person bed." How does that work?

"'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 was struck by conservative Instagrammer Arynne Wexler’s description of liberal women as 'androgynous pixie haircut unbathed Marxist freaks in polycules.'"

"Bravo on the clever turn of phrase, Miss Wexler. Impressive use of your Ivy League education to bash polycules.... Would Wexler prefer cheating as an alternative to polyamory? Wexler, per The Post, would delete her Instagram slurs about polyamorists, the WNBA ('welfare for tall lesbians') and other targets if only she could find a husband and kids.... Let’s stop othering and demonizing relationships that are based on consent, communication and affection. Fear, loathing and misinformation aren’t a route to happiness for anyone."

Natalie Davis, who runs the online publication Polyamory Today, writes in a letter to the Washington Post. 

Davis is responding to the article "MAGA and the single girl/What do the young women of the modern right want? It’s complicated." 

Wexler is just one person who's described in the article, which tells us: "She runs a popular Instagram account where she mocks Gen Z college degrees as 'pescatarian arts with a concentration on hating white people' and calls the WNBA 'welfare for tall lesbians' — but she’d delete her account tomorrow if she could trade it in for a husband and kids."

Don't get me started on my musings about what "pescatarian arts" is supposed to mean. Both Grok and Meade resisted the nonliteral interpretation.... 

"When my wife proposed that we stop being monogamous, she said it would make us stronger.... At the time, I was exiting a phase of my life perhaps best described as 'worship pastor bro.'"

"My Christian faith was undergoing a meticulous and scholarly deconstruction. I could begin to imagine a life without God, but with my new, expensive master’s degree in theology, I struggled to imagine a career without Him. By contrast, Corrie’s turn away from religion a year earlier had been quick, uncomplicated and annoyingly joyful.... Corrie started identifying as bisexual, then pansexual, then queer. It was hard to know how to feel about her transformation. On the one hand, it became harder to place myself and our heterosexual marriage on the new map of her sexual interests...."

Writes Jason Bilbrey, in "I Was Content With Monogamy. I Shouldn’t Have Been. Can exploring polyamory both break you and make you?" (NYT)(free access link).

The progress of polyamory in The New York Times.

March 11, 2023: "To Fix a Broken Marriage, an Experiment With Polyamory" ("The couple tried polyamory, which rekindled their passion, but it did not address their other issues...").

May 16, 2023: "Interested in Polyamory? Check Out These Places/Laws granting rights to people in polyamorous relationships are being recognized in more cities" ("We have a population that’s more open to these ideas, and many of these folks are either currently nonmonogamous or have tried nonmonogamy or at the very least know someone who’s polyamorous").

January 13, 2024: "How a Polyamorous Mom Had ‘a Big Sexual Adventure’ and Found Herself/In her memoir, 'More,' Molly Roden Winter recounts the highs and lows of juggling an open marriage with work and child care" ("I felt like there were no stories from the mainstream about it, and I felt very closeted.... It often feels like mothers are not supposed to be sexual beings").

January 19, 2024: "My Relationships Have No Clothes/I have no moral objection to infidelity. For me, sex is just sex" ("If I had to wait until he had no other partner, we would have missed out on this relationship, which is 90 percent TV jokes and 'Mad Men' quotes. We never would have the pride it brings each of us when we make the other laugh out loud").

April 15, 2024: "Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule/How they set boundaries, navigate jealousy, wingman their spouses and foster community" ("It’s not clear when the word ['polycule'] was coined, but it seems to have started catching on around 15 years ago to suggest an intricate structure formed of people with overlapping deep attachments: romantic, sexual, sensual, platonic").

May 9, 2024: "What Kind of Husband Behaves Like Donald Trump?" ("And as Ms. Daniels explained how Mr. Trump would call her 'honeybunch' when he phoned her, and tell her he missed her, I found myself wondering: Is this a man who is capable of missing anyone?")

"My husband...’s a frat bro who loves sports, and I’m a radical alien witch academic nerd."

"In the beginning, we did all the typical stuff. Read the books on nonmonogamy, did the relationship check-ins. We’d sit down, take notes. We did every exercise in the books, listened to every podcast. We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called 'agile scrum,' which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing. That gave us great communication tactics."

Said a woman named Ann, quoted in "Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule/How they set boundaries, navigate jealousy, wingman their spouses and foster community" (NYT)(free access link).

My head spins. Who could listen to every podcast? Exhausting, and I'm barely picturing what "hard poly-processing" must mean!

Anyway, what does Ann's husband think? He seems quite a bit less jaunty and managerial about the whole thing. This is actually pretty sad, so I will put it after the jump, for your protection:

"Winter and her husband struggled with when and how to tell their sons about their arrangement..."

"... and wanted to wait until their children were mature enough to handle it. That plan failed when their oldest son, then 13, saw his dad’s online dating profile on his laptop, and texted his mother in a panic, asking if they were in an open marriage. Her youngest son found out in a similar way a few years ago, when he was 14, she said. By now, her sons, who are 19 and 21, are blasé about their parents’ sex lives. Her oldest has read her book, and told Winter he skipped some of the 'nitty-gritty' sex scenes, while her youngest chose not to read it, she said.... Her parents, Mary and Philip Roden, were a bit uncomfortable with the intimate details their daughter shares in her memoir, but... 'For the most part, I totally approved of what she was saying.'..."

From "How a Polyamorous Mom Had 'a Big Sexual Adventure’ and Found Herself/In her memoir, 'More,' Molly Roden Winter recounts the highs and lows of juggling an open marriage with work and child care" (NYT).

It's hard to write a memoir and publish it into the minds of everyone you know.

There must be moments when you think, this is just for me, or this ought to be rephrased as fiction, and then the great breakthrough, where you realize, no, this is memoir, and I will be heard.

And let's be fair. The sons didn't learn about their parents nonmonogamous relationship from their mother's memoir. They learned it from their father's online dating profile. The mother's memoir was just an inroad into mother's mind, and they didn't even want to go there.

"Ryan Malone, 37, a chemist who has lived on and off in Somerville for six years, said that he knows hundreds of people who identify as polyamorous..."

"... through his extended social circles. Mr. Malone, who has been nonmonogamous since he was in college, currently has a nesting partner, a long-term partner, two long-distance partners and a kink-based relationship with another person. Mr. Malone said he has never felt weird about going on dates with two or more people at the same time in Somerville. 'No one seems to bat an eye,' he said, so he sees the new protections as very subtle. Ashley Kirsner, 33, who has lived in Somerville for seven years, is the founder of Skip the Small Talk, an organization that offers speed-friending and speed-dating events.... Events like these, the support of the community and the city ordinances have helped Mx. Hall feel more seen. 'Every time a new book comes out, or a new protection comes into place, it feels like it’s validating your identity,' they said."

 
From "Interested in Polyamory? Check Out These Places/Laws granting rights to people in polyamorous relationships are being recognized in more cities" (NYT).

I googled "nesting partner." It's a standard term. I found this creepily illustrated Wikihow article on the subject. Creepily illustrated? I'm judging. The art.

How about "validating your identity"? Is that a standard term? Googling, I'm bombarded with material about ID cards, that kind of identity — are you really the person with the name, age, and address you're claiming? But what about the idea of validating your identity that is wanting your community to make outward gestures that approve of your cluster of personal relationships? 

Standard term or not, what do we make of this need to have the more complex aspects of your identity "validated"? It's funny that's going on at the same time that some people are getting invalidated — cancelled.

"When I first started my foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past... But tbh I’ve come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterized as..."

"... something like 'imperial Chinese harem'... None of this non-hierarchical bulls–t; everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the higher ranks.... I’m less hedonistic and more masochistic. I get a lot of pleasure from doing things that are hard, unpleasant, physically taxing, or emotionally painful..."

So wrote Caroline Ellison, quoted by the NY Post in "Sam Bankman-Fried ex Caroline Ellison made ‘foray’ into ‘Chinese harem’ polyamory."

Ellison has whatever legal/financial problems that motivated the press to go reading her now-deleted Tumblr account. I realize that I'm piling on by quoting what the NY Post chose to quote, but I want to say that we're not able to tell how speculative/humorous this statements might be if we had the context to know what kind of writer — what kind of person — Caroline Ellison is.

"One lesson of feminism, surely, is that being like other women, rather than a shining unfettered exception, isn’t such a terrible thing."

Writes Michelle Goldberg reacting to this line in a 1981 essay by Nona Willis Aronowitz: "I secretly wanted monogamy, that I was just like every other woman who wanted to tie her man down."

The Goldberg column is titled "When Sexual Liberation Is Oppressive" (NYT).

She's bringing up a 1981 essay by Nona Willis Aronowitz, because Willis Aronowitz quoted herself in her new book "Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution."

Willis Aronowitz is the daughter of Ellen Willis, who was — as Goldberg puts it — a "pro-sex feminist writer."

Don't you have to choose what to put first, sex or feminism? If you set out to put them on equal footing, what do you get? I must be a feminist and I must be pro-sex.

"All holidays are sins, according to Jehovah’s Witnesses’ strict doctrine. Each one is a different tactic of the devil attempting to distract and tempt..."

"... faithful servants of Jehovah. Thanksgiving, Witnesses explain, is rooted in a harvest festival to pagan gods, and those pagan gods corrupt even the contemporary celebration. The holiday revels in gluttony and excess.... ​ When I was 20, I was excommunicated and completely cut off from my family.... The part of me that was broken when my family of origin rejected me gets a little closer to being whole each time I celebrate holidays with my chosen family.... The value of our polyam family isn’t in its stability, but rather that we choose each other even when we change, relationships change, feelings change. The power is in the choosing. There’s no obligation. I can only offer invitation and acceptance.... My husband’s girlfriend may prioritize another partner or her family... For me, the beauty is in making space for us to gather and also making space for each person to make their own choices.... We open ourselves, share love, swim in pleasure, sometimes get hurt.... Now, my community reminds me that the scarcity mind-set that tells us we can only have one love, that we must compete for our lover’s attention, is a lie."

From "I wasn’t allowed to celebrate holidays growing up. Now, I revel in hosting my queer, polyamorous family/After a childhood spent learning to deny pleasure, I’m relishing life’s abundant pleasures with my chosen family" by Patricia Fancher (WaPo).

"Why had the polyamorous community rephrased the rush of falling in love as 'new relationship energy' (NRE for short)?"

"Why would anyone endeavor to rebrand love into something like a start-up, complete with its own energized, abbreviated lingo? And how could Juhana encourage me to pursue other relationships? Did I truly inspire so little emotion he wouldn’t care if I dated someone else? 'I am willing to endure the discomfort,' he would reply, 'because you are worth it.' But why couldn’t he be willing to endure the discomfort of depriving himself of someone else? Why, I wanted to know, was one pain fundamentally more acceptable than the other?"

From "My Boyfriend Has Two Girlfriends. Should I Be His Third?/My mind could rationalize polyamory, but my heart rebelled" by Silva Kuusniemi (NYT). 

Spoiler alert: She rejects him. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Barbara writes;

When I was in college back in the '60s in Florida, a couple I knew decided that it was fine for the guy to have a girlfriend on the side, what with free love and all. It was so fine that the three of them moved into a three bedroom house together. After about a month of this, the first girlfriend put the second girlfriend's clothes in an old bathtub in the back yard and set them on fire. Then she--the first gf--jumped in her car and drove to Las Vegas, never to be seen again. That's a polyamorous story.

That makes me think of this old David Crosby song (originally from the 60s):

 

He says that song was "not the reason they threw me out of The Byrds": "They threw me out of The Byrds because I was an asshole."

"A day before I sent Malcolm the email saying I wanted to break up, I came across a term online: solo polyamory."

"It described a person who is romantically involved with many people but is not seeking a committed relationship with anyone. What makes this different from casual dating is that they’re not looking for a partner, and the relationship isn’t expected to escalate to long-term commitments, like marriage or children. More important, the relationship isn’t seen as wasted time or lacking significance because it doesn’t lead to those things. I wasn’t comfortable identifying as polyamorous then. My desire for something nontraditional was a source of shame and questioning. But for once, in the vast literature on love, I felt seen. I liked how solo polyamory cherished and prioritized autonomy and the preservation of self, and I found its rejection of traditional models of romantic love freeing. When Malcolm and I first told friends and family about our open relationship, we were met with verbal lashings and gross generalizations, including that this was 'not something Black people did.'"

From "My Choice Isn’t Marriage or Loneliness/I thought I had a classic fear of commitment, but it’s more complicated than that" by Haili Blassingame (NYT). There's an excellent illustration by Brian Rea at the link.

"Ollie says one of the 'rules' of the experiment is that he and Zoe, both bisexual, will only hook up with same-sex partners."

"But whoops, Zoe replies, she already broke that rule by sleeping with a man. Later, Ollie is dating and sleeping with a woman. We don’t see them discussing their rules, why they exist, why they might change, how they talk about the ones they’ve broken. Ollie’s narration adds no clarity.... While Ollie and Zoe are just kind of irritating—we’re treated to long sequences of them frolicking naked in fields; Ollie waxes poetic about how he loves Zoe for being such an 'adult,' because she soaks her oats overnight—what’s hardest to watch is how they’re hurting each other because they don’t communicate with specificity or empathy, or even agree why they’re doing this in the first place.... Zoe, Tom, and the other non-Ollie characters are played by actors, and the film is a re-creation of Ollie’s experience with the real Zoe.... Ollie and Real Zoe did try an open relationship and were documenting it, and Real Zoe really did end their relationship to be with another man, but what we see on screen here is not a documentary of an experiment in real time so much as Ollie’s on-screen memoir, starring himself...."

From "What HBO’s New Documentary Gets Wrong About Open Relationships/I’ve been in a nonmonogamous relationship for six years, and I’m tired of movies like There’s No 'I' in Threesome" (Slate).

I'm almost tempted to watch this just to see how terrible it is. It  might be funny.... oh, no.... I just looked at the trailer, here. I was thinking of embedding it. But watching it, I had to force myself, and by 0:34, I had to turn it off. The visuals are very unappealing.

"Sheltering in place forces roommates together and raises the stakes on everyday squabbles... You’re only as safe as your least-careful roommate."

"One friend of mine repeatedly scolded a roommate who refused to stop going to parties or to wash his hands, until the guy moved out in a huff. Another friend became ill with what seemed like covid-19 while subletting in Brooklyn; whenever she went into the common area to eat soup, her roommate would slam the bedroom door and send a nasty text. 'To be inside of all this, like we all are, with not only zero love around me but actual hate, as I’m sick, is a loneliness that is a new deep for me,' my friend wrote me. (She has since recovered.)..."

From "The Bushwick House Share Was a Haven—Then COVID-19 Struck" in The New Yorker.

At about exactly the point when I saw that, I saw "How a 16-Person Poly Pod Is Isolating in Bushwick" in New York Magazine. Different cast of characters. "A polyamorous lifestyle is undoubtedly ill-suited to our germophobic moment. Yet, the Villa’s residents seem to have an edge when it comes to thorny conversations about health and risk. 'We’re all about responsible humanism, so we’re used to talking about how our behavior affects other people,' Kenneth Play, a sex educator and co-founder of Hacienda Villa, said.... Play... has had hundreds of lovers over the years (he usually has an assistant book his liaisons), but he always wears a condom unless he is with his fiancée. She, in turn, has unprotected sex with only one other person, her other fiancé, who wears a condom with everyone else. 'I think the sex-positive community has something to teach in a time like this, because we all know how to follow strict protocols to make sure everyone is safe,' Play said."

"... we all know how to follow strict protocols to make sure everyone is safe...." I hate to inform the seemingly savvy Play but "make sure" is so last year. Here's my post on the subject from July 2019: "I've been noticing the phrase 'We need to make sure' in political speech lately. [Bernie] Sanders says 'We need to make sure that kids go to community schools, which are integrated and that means we have to focus on fair housing legislation and enforcement.' I see 'We need to make sure' as a sort of lie. It really only means we ought to try to get to a place out there that would be really nice to get to...."