You can read the whole article here.History is replete with people who, like Ve Ard, participated in relationships with more than one love, each lover aware of the others. Financier Warren Buffett, beatnik Jack Kerouac and William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman, come to mind.
Now the practice has a name: polyamory. Researchers believe the phenomenon is growing, and certainly it has become more visible, thanks largely to the Internet.
The word polyamory only last year joined the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries. But already it is seeping into the popular culture; it was mentioned recently on the NBC show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
The term is used to define an entire range of relationships. Some polyamorists are married people with multiple love interests, and others practice informal group "marriage." Some have group sex, and others have a series of one-on-one relationships.
Polyamorists around the country gather in support groups formed on the Internet; Meetup.com has about 6,000 polyamorous members nationally. A half-dozen groups meet in Florida, including Gator Poly at the University of Florida and PolyTampa in the Tampa Bay area (178 members).
If you'd like to know a lot more about polyamory, from an integral point of view, my fellow blogger Joe Perez has written on this topic in the past, attempting to see a moral framework for the decision to have multiple lovers. If you ask real nice, he might send you the piece which is no longer up on his former blog (Rising Up).
Personally, having one healthy relationship is enough challenge.
4 comments:
I've posted a response to this entry at my site. Thanks for sharing this.
not too crazy about it either. i guess it's because of my cultural upbringing.
"Personally, having one healthy relationship is enough challenge."
exactly.
btw, there's a thread on Zaadz regarding this topic. check it out :)
~C
Just now I posted this reply in a friend's LiveJournal, after thanking him for the pointer to your blog:
"You know, the polyamory thing ... and I /never/ talk about my Vajrayana / tantra stuff (except to once in a while say I'm still looking for a consort. My X spent some time in the monastery and met someone else there ... what I consider very poor judgment.) ... there's something about monogamy that really empowers stuff. From my Zen training I'm very suspicious of my ability to weasel out of tight situations ... "the builder of the house of ego" and all that. To /need/ to work through things is, I think, a very substantial support."
Monogamy is an ideology. It is not necessarily "natural." It fosters an infrastructure (wedding magazines, sit-coms, advertisements, couples counseling, on and on) that norms the MIND into assumptions about how people relate, and should relate. One assumption is that those who do not engage in monogamy are necessarily promiscuous, or somehow ethically unskillful, or more prone to delusion and clinging than those who are monogamous. This is incorrect. Commitment and a strong sense of ethics is just as important - perhaps even more so - in polyamorous relationships, as it is in mono. Anyone who is polyamorous knows that there is no "weaseling" out of anything, just because there's more people involved. Dharma and karma apply just the same.
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