Many people do not have the required skill set to keep more than one partner happy. For some people, they simply have not learned to manage their time and energy well enough to be able to be a good relationship partner, and meet enough of their partners’ needs to sustain each relationship. For others, it does not come naturally to be as organized and detail-oriented as most poly relationships require. Juggling two or more partners requires really paying attention to each partner’s “bottom-line” needs to, at least, meet their minimum requirements consistently.
Alan calls himself a “veteran” of a 30-year poly marriage, and says, “Knowing your partners well enough to anticipate some of their needs and desires is really important.” Planning ahead, and planning your time carefully is a necessity to make sure you can reliably deliver on whatever you promise each partner.
Many people lack the skills to keep one relationships afloat and keep one lover happy, much less two or more. It takes a lot of time and energy to sustain multiple relationships, as relationships have a lot of moving parts that all need time and maintenance. And keeping your own life going smoothly, including career, family, friends, sleep, and other important activities requires good self-care. This is crucial not only to keep your sanity, but also to be able to be physically and emotionally present with each of your partners. Excellent interpersonal and communication skills are a must-have to solve the problems that will inevitably come up in any open relationship. Being able to consistently give your partners enough time and energy is vitally important to the survival of each of your relationships.
Jason explains it this way: “You meet all these great people and you jump into relationships with them, convincing yourself that you have enough time and energy for three or four relationships. But then you just can’t keep up that level of energy, and unfortunately, some relationships will fall through the cracks. Maybe you could handle four relationships when you were 23-years-old and didn’t have kids, or a demanding career, or maybe you could manage that many relationships when two of them were casual, but then one of them becomes more serious and you can’t fit everyone into your schedule anymore.”
Or maybe you were giving all three of your lovers enough to satisfy them, but then a family member has a health crisis and you have an added commitment to taking care of them. Or you have a baby, and suddenly have no time for anyone. Or you get a promotion and are working more hours. Or one relationship is in crisis and needs more of your time.
Mona has been in a relationship with Jasmine for 15 years, as well as one with Martin for 12 years. She is married to Jasmine, and spends two nights a week with Martin. She says, “I found out the hard way that two relationships is the maximum that I can handle. When you’re intoxicated with New Relationship Energy, you feel convinced that you have enough juice for everyone. Most poly people have found that at least one relationship will fail because they are neglecting that partner or cancelling dates on them or falling asleep in the middle of a date because they were up till 3 AM with another lover the night before. Or they carelessly schedule a date with the new partner on a day that is another partner’s birthday, even worse, a wedding anniversary. I have done it and you probably have, too.”
This trajectory is perfectly natural, because at the start of a new relationship, everything seems effortless in the rosy glow of newfound love. However, nine months or a year or two years later, the excitement calms down enough to notice all the problems and incompatibilities. Suddenly, the relationship becomes a lot more time-consuming and requires a lot of energy for processing and problem solving. At that point, managing multiple relationships can become quite a strain, and often one relationship (or more) will become a casualty.
Mona’s wife, Jasmine, also has another partner, Cristobal, who describes himself as “Jasmine’s fuck-buddy,” since they see each other a one or two Saturdays a month to play pick-up basketball games at the park, and then have an overnight for sex. Cristobal underscores the importance of time management in poly relationships. “I had a boyfriend for a year who was chronically two hours late for dates or just didn’t show up because he always scheduled too many things into his days, and just couldn’t make it work. I had another lover who was always so busy that something as minor as getting a cold for a few days made everything fall apart, and that would create a nightmare of rescheduling and processing with angry lovers feeling neglected. Excellent time management is a necessity for poly people, it’s right up there with good personal hygiene.”
Most poly people have made all these mistakes and more, especially when they are new at open relationships, because they have no training or experience in trying to sustain multiple relationships.
For example, Kate felt lonely and sad sometimes, because her husband, Russell, spent two nights a week with his girlfriend, Robin. Then Russell’s father died suddenly, and Russell became depressed and withdrawn. Robin called Russell frequently, asking for reassurance because he was not giving her any time or attention, and she eventually broke up with him. Kate felt unloved and rejected, and she finally threatened to file for divorce before Russell would agree to marriage counseling to try to get their relationship back on track.
Cecilia had a husband, a girlfriend, and a male lover she described as “a casual-sex date.” She says, “I was the happiest woman in the world with such an abundance of love and sex in my life! But after a year of total bliss, I started feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. I realized that, except for going to work 30 hours a week, I was spending every waking hour with my husband or lovers. I started getting a lot of complaints from everyone else in my life that I was neglecting them: my grown kids, my parents, not to mention my friends, who had stopped speaking to me by this time. I had stopped writing music and stopped going to the gym because I just didn’t have time. Both of those had been extremely important to me, so I knew my life was getting off track.” Around the same time, her girlfriend moved about an hour away to take a very demanding job, and was much less available for dates, which gave Cecilia a little more free time. She also decided to stop seeing her male lover. As she put it, “Polyamory was never meant to replace everything else in life, and somehow relationships were becoming my whole world. My life is much more balanced now.”
Some people have plenty of time and energy for their relationships, but have poor time management skills, or they refuse to plan their schedule in advance. This is particularly challenging for people who have learning disabilities or other neuro-diverse conditions like ADHD. These medical conditions can make processing information and organizing time and activities much more difficult. Many other people who do not have any type of learning disability also create chaos by being disorganized and inefficient in getting things done. As a result, they are always late, frequently cancel dates due to double-booking their schedules, or even get confused about who they have a date with that night.
Valerie broke up with Jason after they had been together about a year. She had been getting more and more fed up with receiving frantic texts a few minutes before he was due to arrive for a date, and the message was always similar: “I’m going to be a few hours late because I forgot I had to take the dog to the vet for an appointment,” or “I have to cancel because I underestimated how long it would take to finish this project for work,” or “Would you mind going shopping with me for a couple of hours of our date? I didn’t get around to buying a gift for my son’s birthday tomorrow.” Valerie finally ended the relationship because Jason was going away on a road trip with his other partner and canceled his date with Valerie the night before the trip. He had not bothered packing for the trip and forgot to go food shopping for it. Valerie was irate that this trip had been planned for six months, but he had waited until the night before to do all the necessary preparations and only then canceled their date.
Even more challenging than a disorganized partner is one who refuses to plan and schedule in advance and insists on being spontaneous. For some reason, men seem more likely than women to believe that they can succeed at polyamory without careful and consistent advance planning.
Forrest had three girlfriends, and he liked to make dates with each one of them on the spur of the moment. All three women were unhappy with this system, as it created chaos and uncertainty in their lives and made it difficult for them to make other plans. In order to be available for a date, they had to keep every evening and night open for him just in case he wanted a date. When they complained that this wasn’t fair, he told them they needed to “go with the flow,” and that making plans in advance was “too rigid” and “killed the experience,” and that he couldn’t predict a week in advance who he would “naturally feel like being with” on a given night. The unfortunate result was that each of them spent many nights alone, wishing they had made other plans. To make matters worse, some weeks he would spend three or four nights a week with one partner and ignore the other two, and the next week another partner might be “favored with his presence” for several nights in a row, then just as suddenly abandoned. Elaine broke up with him after three months, as she was sick of “being in suspended animation every day, wondering when I would ever see him.” Rosheda had another boyfriend who was a lot more reliable, who scheduled regular dates with her every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday nights. Rosheda told Forrest to call her only if he wanted a date on one of the remaining nights, and “don’t even think about calling me on the nights I have a date with Donnie.” Jillea tried to compromise by asking Forrest to call her at least two days before dates, so she could at least make plans a day or two in advance. However, Forrest couldn’t even seem to plan even a few hours in advance, so Jillea ended the relationship after about six months.
Antoine ran his own business managing hip-hop musicians, and told both of his lovers that he needed flexibility because his work required that he be very available to book shows and close deals. As a result, he never made dates, but instead would call either partner at 9 or 10 PM and say, “Hi honey! Can I come over?” That worked fine for Tanisha, as she had two kids, and she wasn’t really available until after getting the kids to bed, washing the dinner dishes, and doing a load of laundry. However, Eve said, “I feel like I’m just a booty call,” because Antoine only came over late at night instead of socializing and going out together. She “tried to be laid-back about it,” making plans with friends for dinner or a movie early in the evening, and being home by 10 PM, in case Antoine wanted to come over for a date. She was at a bar with her girlfriends one evening, and a handsome guy bought her a drink. They started dating, and he wanted a lot of her time and attention. Antoine got upset because whenever he called her for a date, she was already out with her new lover. She told Antoine, “He asks me out a week in advance. Do you expect me to say no, just on the off-chance you might call at the last minute?”
Tricia was involved with Dave, who always had other priorities that made him unwilling to plan dates with her in advance. Either he was involved in some political activism that was taking up most of his time, or he was going on trips to Hawaii to surf whenever he could get a cheap airfare. Or he would suddenly get involved with some other woman and Tricia wouldn’t hear from him for weeks. She says, “Sexism is the underbelly of this myth of spontaneity that Dave tried to sell me. It’s actually not spontaneous at all, because I have to be available any time and be at his beck and call. It gives the man all the power in the relationship, because I have to be available, but he doesn’t. I have to have food in the house in case he wants to come over for dinner. I’ve got to do laundry and have fresh sheets on the bed and keep the house cleaned up because he might come over any night. And I have to make sure I always have time and energy for last-minute sex dates whenever he’s in the mood to see me. And while he talks a good line about polyamory, his so-called spontaneity makes it impossible for me to have another lover, because how can I make plans with someone else when I don’t know when I’ll have a date with Dave? It really forces me to be monogamous, while he can do whatever he wants.” Tricia did get involved with someone else, but since she was no longer available on demand, Dave stopped calling her.
The best way to keep your relationships from succumbing to a time and energy crunch is to know your limits, and to avoid taking on more partners than you can handle. This is much easier said than done! For one thing, it is very hard to turn down a delightful love affair with a potential partner and say, “Sorry, my dance card is full.”
Most people have lived through times when they were lonely and experienced a scarcity of love, affection, companionship, and sex. As a result, poly people often jump at the chance to start a new relationship, perhaps rationalizing that it’s better to have too much love in their life rather than not enough. And when sexual and/or romantic chemistry with someone new is high, it is very tough to make an accurate assessment of whether you actually have room in your life for this new person. When you are just getting to know this potential lover, you don’t know whether this may be a one-weekend fling, an ongoing casual affair, or if it will become something more serious, which could be very difficult to fit into an already busy life. And it’s easy to conclude that if this new relationship is so wonderful, you can rearrange your schedule, or find the time somewhere because you really want it to work. That may be plausible in the short-run, but a few months down the road you may find yourself very invested in this new relationship and feeling intense pressure trying to fit it in with other responsibilities to a job, family, and other partners.
So whenever someone makes a romantic overture that you feel you just can’t turn down, you would be wise to stop and look carefully at your current responsibilities and time commitments. Can you actually offer this new person enough of yourself to sustain even a casual or secondary relationship? This is a lot easier if you are out of town on a trip and not likely to see them again, or if the new lover is moving away to go to grad school in three months. However, even these very compartmentalized relationships can sometimes turn into major love relationships.
Technology has made life both easier and harder at the same time. In the past, a hot love affair at a conference or with someone who was just passing through town would likely become a sweet memory, but modern devices have enabled long-distance relationships to become more feasible and sustainable. People who live in different states, or even on different continents, can text and sext day and night, talk every day by phone, have video chats, and even have video sex dates. So even a one-night fling on a road trip or at a music festival may continue and require a lot more from you than expected. Will other people and responsibilities in your life suffer as a result? Will you be a nervous wreck, rushing around trying to live up to your other commitments, and squeezing this new relationship in somehow?
Gerald found himself in a poly dilemma. He explains, “I spent my teens and 20s being lonely and couldn’t get a date to save my life. Now that I have gone to counseling and have better self-esteem and more confidence, I’m married and also have a long-term girlfriend. I still sometimes think I must be dreaming, because I can’t believe my good fortune in having two wonderful women who actually love me. When someone else makes a pass at me, I am very pleasantly surprised and certainly don’t want to say no to this fabulous opportunity to date a nice woman! Besides, I know how awful it is to be rejected and alone, so I certainly don’t want to hurt someone by turning down their overtures. However, I have made some terrible mistakes in saying yes to new lovers, and then completely screwing it up because I just didn’t have the bandwidth. In one case, I got involved with someone and they ended up hating me and never speaking to me again. Even though I was crazy about her, I was so unavailable that I could only manage a date with her once every two or three weeks, and she was always upset about that. And my wife and girlfriend were totally pissed at me for being distracted and exhausted all the time. My girlfriend would call my wife when I was out on a date with the new lover, and they would talk trash about me. Having too many people wanting you is a nice problem to have! But you’re not doing yourself or anyone else a favor by getting into a relationship that you just can’t sustain, and then being a big jerk to everyone.”
Tava had a slightly different approach to a similar problem. She was single for years and then was thrilled to find herself in a serious relationship with Jackson. She was elated to have love in her life after a long stretch of celibacy and loneliness, but struggled to find enough time for dates with Jackson because she was in grad school as well as working part-time. About six months into the new relationship, her close friend Fern confessed to having a crush on her. Tava was torn because she was very attracted to Fern, but she barely had enough time and energy to have one relationship, never mind two. She asked Fern if she would be willing to continue their platonic friendship for one more year, until she completed her master’s degree, and then become lovers if they both still had romantic feelings for each other. Fern also had a live-in girlfriend, so many of her relationship needs were already being met, and she agreed to try Tava’s plan. About six months later, Tava’s relationship with Jackson was more established and felt much more manageable. She was handling her school responsibilities much better as well, and was working fewer hours. As a result she felt she could offer Fern more time, and they happily began a romantic and sexual relationship. While waiting that six months wasn’t easy, they were both convinced that if they had jumped into a love affair right away, their relationship would have been doomed.
The reality is that open relationships generally require some advance planning, and sometimes very complicated planning. While spontaneous romance sounds great in theory, in real life it is usually incompatible with polyamory. Keeping two or more partners happy usually requires each partner knowing that they can count on regular dates, and that they can plan the other components of their lives, rather than waiting until the last minute to possibly get some time with a partner.
Some people compromise with a hybrid model that tries to have the best of both worlds, with some scheduled dates, as well as the flexibility for additional spur of the moment dates. For instance, Janine had trouble planning time with her lover, Shamine, because Janine’s teenage daughter’s schedule and plans were constantly changing, and her ex-wife, Brenda, often changed their childcare arrangements. So Janine made a commitment to spend every Friday night and part of every Saturday with Shamine, since Shamine always had Saturday off work, and Janine’s daughter was always with Brenda or with her grandmother on Friday nights. In addition to this standing date, Janine often calls Shamine on a weekday and says, “The kids are going to a movie with their friends tonight and won’t be home until 10, are you free for a date?” or “Brenda has the kids tonight and tomorrow night after all, because their cousins from New Orleans are visiting. Could we get together tonight or tomorrow night?” This works well for Shamine because she can count on seeing Janine every weekend, and often gets an extra date on a weeknight, which she says is “icing on the cake.”
Angela is a midwife who is on call to deliver babies three nights a week. She has what she calls a “for sure” date every Sunday night with her lover Joey, and a standing date with her lover Josh every Monday night, since she is generally not on call those nights. Two weekends a month, she is not on call, and she plans dates in advance with each partner on those weekends. On the nights she is on call, she can call either partner that day and suggest a date, with the caveat that there is a chance she may get called in the middle of the night (or in the middle of their date) to deliver a baby.
Even people who enjoy planning ahead often bemoan the complicated scheduling required by polyamory, and feel constrained by the seemingly rigid timing of dates. Tomas jokingly told his lover Jose, “You’re just here because it’s Thursday, and I’m your Thursday night boy! How do I know you even felt like seeing me tonight, or did you just show up because I happen to be in your Google calendar?” Jose explained that if he didn’t schedule dates with both of his lovers at least a week in advance, his life would be total chaos and he would never be able to make it work.
This is one of the seemingly paradoxical aspects of open relationships. While polyamory seems to promise wild romance and unbridled passion, it requires such a high level of organization and planning that it can seem bureaucratic and heartless.
Heather complained to Rich, “I’m just one of your harem of women, and you don’t really care whether you are seeing me or one of your two other girlfriends. You just happened to schedule me for tonight, so I guess that means I’ll do.”
Rich struggled to convince Heather that she was special to him, and that he looked forward to seeing her all week. She was skeptical, and replied, “You’re just a player! You’re a smooth talker, and I’m not sure I believe you.” Being on such a rigid schedule of dates with Rich every Monday and Thursday nights made Heather feel insecure and unloved. She was constantly questioning whether he really cared about her and says she felt “easily replaced” by his two other partners. When Heather wanted time with him on the weekend to go to a party or concert, or when she wanted to plan an out of town vacation with him, it was always “too complicated” for him to reschedule his other partners, and Heather gave up even trying. She says, “Eventually I started to wonder why on Earth I had a boyfriend at all, when I spent every weekend alone watching TV and ordering takeout food, all the while knowing he was out having fun partying with one of the other girlfriends.” Over time, these feelings of chronic insecurity, and resentment undermined the relationship, and she eventually broke up with Rich.
Many people claim that all the planning and negotiating about schedules takes some of the romance out of a relationship. So they try to be creative and build in possibilities for being able to call and say, “Hey, I miss you and I would love to see you, if you happen to be free tonight.” That can create some awkward situations, such as your lover saying, “Sorry, I am already on a date with my other partner and can’t change my plans.” But as Shamine says, “Sometimes the stars just align, and we both happen to be free and available, and it’s really great to know that my lover is so eager to see me and spend more time with me.”
Interestingly, there are two groups who appear to be better able to avoid taking on more relationships than they can realistically handle, and who seem to manage open relationships with far fewer time management problems. These two groups are mothers of school-age children, and people over 55, who sometimes call themselves “poly geezers.”
Mothers of school-age children seem to manage so well because they have had years of practice juggling kids, career, spouses, and more. Florenzia told me, “We’re already used to being insanely busy, having huge demands on our time and energy, and never getting enough sleep.” And as Rosa, a mother of three says, “Poly was easy compared to what I was handling before! I was working the night shift in a nursing home, coming home in the morning and taking my kids to day care and pre-school, sleeping for four hours and then picking up the kids, getting dinner for my husband and kids, taking a nap for an hour and then going back to work all night. My husband and I spent every weekend taking care of three small kids, cleaning house, shopping, and cooking for the whole week. Once all three kids were in elementary school, life became so much easier and I was actually getting eight hours sleep! After that, having a husband and two lovers was a piece of cake compared to managing kids, a job, and a house all that time, and it was a whole lot more fun!”
Some women have explained that trying to be “superwoman”—being the perfect wife, mother, and career woman—was so impossible that they were forced to accept their limits. Laura says, “I just had to lower my expectations of myself! I realized I was never going to have a perfectly clean house or look sexy for my wife when I was running after an infant and a toddler 24 hours a day. We ordered pizza or went out for burritos a few times a week so we could have quality time together as a family. We paid the neighbor’s teenager to do yardwork, and occasionally got my parents to watch the kids so we could have a grown-up date night as a couple. We never wanted to be monogamous, but once we had babies we had to take a break from polyamory because we just didn’t have time, and we were too goddamned tired for sex or romance, anyway. Now that the kids are older, we’ve been able to resume our poly life. And when the schedule just gets too crunched, I prioritize having a date with my girlfriend or my wife over keeping the house clean, cooking, etc. Having kids has taught me that my relationships with my family and loved ones are the most important things in life. As long as I have quality time with my wife, my girlfriend, and my kids—and we can keep a roof over our heads and food on the table—nothing else really matters.”
Some fathers say that their wives have been great role models in helping them learn time management skills, increasing their success in balancing work, spouse, kids, and outside relationships. Jack says, “I was always amazed by how organized Madeline was about everything. She made a list of all the tasks she needed to do that week, how long each thing would take, and what day she would do each one. She would look it over and cross out a few things, saying, that’s not important or time-urgent, that one can be delegated, etc. She would cook a few casseroles on the weekend for later in the week, taught the kids to make a salad every night and wash the dishes, and assigned me to do laundry and gave me a shopping list to buy groceries. She would then schedule a weekly date with her boyfriend and negotiate with me about when I would see my girlfriend, Lorna. She often reminded me to text Lorna to make her feel special, reminded me to buy her flowers, and always remembered to put Lorna’s favorite wine on the shopping list. I really appreciated her being my ‘wingman’ because Lorna believed that I was the most thoughtful guy in the world. I finally had to confess that I was a clueless lummox, but luckily I had a great wife who was helping me out with managing this poly thing. I thought Lorna would be mad, but she just laughed and said I was a very lucky guy, and that she appreciated Madeline being on top of everything, because she was benefiting from it.”
Will calls his partner, Roxanne, “the MVP of exquisite time management.” He explains, “I learned how it’s done by watching her! She hired an administrative assistant, and at first I thought she was crazy to pay this woman top dollar to do what I stupidly thought was secretarial work. Her assistant, Donna, runs her business and her entire life, and does a great job of it! She plans Roxanne’s schedule seven days a week down to the minute, squeezing in hair appointments, time to work out at the gym, and schedules her dates with her girlfriend, as well as setting up carpools to get the kids to school and all their after-school activities.” Donna recruited a friend of hers to be Will’s personal assistant. He says it is worth every penny because he has become twice as productive at work and received a major bonus from his boss. He is also much better at keeping dates with his girlfriend and is much more relaxed and able to enjoy his time with her because he is so much more organized and less stressed. He has also been able to spend more time with the kids on weekends because he is not bringing work home with him, since his assistant keeps him on track to complete tasks.
Poly people over age 55 seem to do pretty well at sustaining multiple relationships. This is probably due to two factors: They have more years of relationship experience, and they simply have more free time for relationships because any kids are grown and they are more likely to be retired or working part-time.
Most people who are past mid-life have been through a number of relationships. They may be older and wiser than they were in their misspent youth, as they have probably developed a useful relationship skill set. They have likely learned from painful experience that relationships need care and feeding, and they have probably been through some brutal breakups. Through trial and error, they probably know much more now about what they need and want in relationships, as well as what they are actually capable of delivering. Many have learned life lessons that they can apply to creating satisfying and healthy poly relationships. And for many “poly geezers,” their success in open relationships is at least partially down to having more free time due to retirement and/or to being what one poly woman called “post-kids.”
A few older poly people have told me that they are much better at time management now than they were in their younger years. John says, “I lost so many boyfriends in the past because I would forget about dates or call at the last minute because I had double-booked my time with appointments. Even though I am still working full-time, I’m much more organized and better at prioritizing and follow-through than I was in the past.” An older woman said, “Once the kids left home, I sold the house in the suburbs and bought a condo in the city that’s very close to my job. Going from a four-bedroom house with a big yard to a studio apartment gave me back at least 20 hours a week I used to spend on housework and yardwork, and I have a 10-minute walk to work instead of a 90-minute drive in heaving traffic twice a day. My life is streamlined now, so I have a lot more time to focus on my relationships.”
In fact, poly people over 55 are one of the fastest-growing demographics in the world of open relationships, usually mortifying their grown children and shocking their friends and families with their unconventional lifestyles. Some are long-term married or cohabiting couples, whether queer or straight, who have decided to open up their relationship after decades of monogamy. Others have been married and divorced a few times, and have discovered that polyamory meets their needs more fully than serial monogamy. Some have been widowed after long-term relationships, and are venturing back out into the dating world and exploring non-monogamous relationships for the first time.
In addition to these older poly “newbies,” a small subset of older poly people have been living in ongoing open relationships for 30, 40, or even 50 years or more. Some are “aging hippies and free-love zealots,” as Nancy calls herself and her two partners, Emma and Carrie. She explains, “In the 1970s, many radical lesbians believed that monogamous marriage was invented by the patriarchy to enslave women and control women’s sexuality. Marriage and monogamy certainly hadn’t worked out well for the straight women we knew, so lots of lesbians rejected monogamy and were trying to invent more liberated forms of love. And we thought lesbians were so highly evolved that we wouldn’t be jealous, but it turned out we are just as insanely jealous as everybody else.”
Nancy and Emma have been life partners for over 40 years. They were close friends with Carrie and her partner, Ginny, but Ginny died from cancer 25 years ago. The three women remained very close friends, and a few years later, Emma and Carrie fell in love. It was very difficult for Nancy at first and she struggled with anger and hurt over this new development. However, after a year of gradually working through her feelings about Emma’s relationship with Carrie, she invited Carrie to “join the family.” Carrie’s grown daughter was distraught when she first heard about what she called “My mother’s lesbian ménage a trois.” She explains, “I grew up in the 1970s with two lesbian mothers, and from earliest childhood, my moms were always those freaks that everyone looked down on and snickered about. By the time I was grown up, gay people were much more accepted and I no longer felt I had to be ashamed of my family. Now, suddenly my mother has joined some crazy lesbian group marriage and I now have to explain that to my husband and our friends.”
Bertha calls herself, Tommy, and Janet “elderly, poly weirdos, living happily ever after.” Tommy and Janet are both professional musicians who met at a rock concert in 1970. They got married in what Janet describes as “the most embarrassing hippie wedding ever. It was in the woods, barefoot, I wore a homemade macramé wedding dress, and we were all on drugs.” Five years later, and with two-year-old twin boys, Tommy broke their monogamous agreement by getting involved with a beautiful blues singer named Bertha. This nearly led to divorce. However, it soon had an unexpected happy ending when Janet and Bertha agreed to meet to discuss the situation. It was love at first sight! The two women bonded by sharing photos of their kids, since Bertha also had a two-year-old boy. The three of them and their kids have lived together ever since. There is one problem, however. Tommy complains that Bertha and Janet are so tight that they sometimes ignore him, and they often just make decisions without consulting him. He explains, “If they agree on something, the fix is in, and there is no point even talking about it.” Otherwise, he’s a very happy man.
Similarly, Jerry and Peter were already living together in 1980, when they met another cohabiting gay couple, Wayne and Tyrone. The two couples courted and lived together for 20 years as a foursome. However, Jerry was HIV positive, struggled with depression, and developed an addiction to crystal meth. All three partners asked him to move out because he would not seek treatment and stop using drugs. However, Peter continued to see Jerry and financially support him (and his drug habit). The ensuing tensions led Wayne and Tyrone to insist that Peter stop seeing Jerry, and they continued as a threesome.
Many very long-term open relationships are somewhat invisible, as most poly families have kept a low profile. For instance, Linda has two male partners, Bruce and Cliff, and they have been quietly living together for over 40 years. Bruce explains, “All our friends, extended family members, and coworkers know about our relationship, so we are obviously not keeping it secret. However, when our relationship first started, society was much less accepting of alternative types of relationships, and we did not particularly want to go on TV and talk about it like some poly people are doing now. I’m thrilled that the world has changed enough that people can feel safe being so public about their relationships now.”
This statement is typical of many “poly geezers,” particularly those who were in an open relationship while raising children. Many of these parents feared losing custody of their children if they were too open about their unconventional families. Danielle and her husband became lovers with another heterosexual couple in 1979. They lived together as a family for 30 years and raised two children together. Sadly, the other couple split up with them eight years ago, saying they had grown apart. Danielle says, “We saw so many lesbian mothers lose custody of their children during the 70s and 80s due to their sexual orientation. And we saw several poly families lose custody of their children during the 1980s and 90s due to vindictive ex-husbands or born-again Christian grandparents going to court and getting custody of the kids. So while we never hid the fact that all four of us were lovers, we didn’t advertise it either. And when our kids were teenagers, they were totally embarrassed that we had such a goofball family, as my son called us. My daughter kept asking us how she had gotten stuck with such lame-ass parents. The kids pleaded with us to be discreet around their friends and teachers. And our son was being bullied at school because his classmates somehow thought our family was one gay male couple and one lesbian couple, when we are actually two straight married couples. I guess the kids at school just couldn’t quite imagine a poly situation, but they had seen gay couples so they jumped to that conclusion.”
Whether to be open or closeted is a major issue in many long-term poly families, whether or not children are involved. In some families, disagreement over this thorny issue has created such conflict that one or more partners have left the relationship. Frank and Lisa had been in an open marriage for 20 years when they met Crystal. Each of them had had several discreet outside relationships throughout their marriage. When Frank became lovers with Crystal, she was an organizer of a poly Meetup group and wrote a blog about open relationships. Their very different approaches to their relationship became a frequent source of friction during their 10-year relationship. She felt they were “too timid” for “playing it safe” by keeping their open marriage private. Frank and Lisa accused her of writing her poly blog “just to brag about how transgressive and cool you are,” and that it was none of anyone else’s business who they were sleeping with. Because Lisa was the director of a local women’s health clinic, she was concerned that if her poly life were made public, it could be used against the clinic and their funding would be cut. Finally, Lisa started pressuring Frank to end the relationship with Crystal, but he refused. Then, Crystal accidentally outed Frank as her lover on Facebook, not realizing that she had the wrong privacy settings and that everyone could see it. Reluctantly, Frank finally ended the relationship.