Fusion
by Molly Osberg
They were high school sweethearts, sort of: Britt and John met in middle school right outside of Houston, the kind of place where the person you end up marrying is someone you’ve known your whole life. They flirted later in the halls of one of those big Southern high schools that boasts pro-football players as alumni. When John moved to Mississippi for a while they stayed in touch, writing letters; Britt was bonkers for him the whole time. When he returned and they got together in earnest, she didn’t have eyes for anyone else. They got hitched at 18.
“I thought it was happily ever after,” she says. “I wanted to go with him anywhere he went.”
Fast-forward three years: their marriage is no longer and Britt’s OkCupid profile acts as a one-two punch of invitation and warning. If you’re into hiking, Little Miss Sunshine, or The Bible, message her. If you’re into one-night stands or want to be monogamous, please don’t. Britt, an aspiring comedian, doesn’t fit stereotypes of countercultural swingers, opting instead for a modern Texan bombshell look (high heels, sundresses, red lipstick). But she’s patently uninterested in spending her life dating a lone dude. Not that she doesn’t want a relationship; believe her, she’s trying. She’s just learned a couple of lessons in the last few years.
Non-monogamy—the consensual, upfront kind—is a dizzyingly diffuse practice. The terms of these relationships vary wildly in scope and level of detail. Its practitioners come in configurations of one or three or 16, living as families together or keeping separate houses even after going steady for years. There is, to date, no overarching survey of how many people practice consensual non-monogamy in the States; academics told me the number could range from one to nine million, depending on one’s definition of “polyamorous.” But nearly everyone for whom the arrangement works secretly believes their way of being non-monogamous is superior—much like two people in the early stages of romance might believe they have made fools out of the rest of the world.
Despite decades of cyclical media attention, these so-called “poly” arrangements, open relationships, and monogamish marriages are conflated, side-eyed, and gawked at along predictable lines. In the early ‘70s swinging was decried in Time Magazine as a “troublesome addiction” among people who were “incapable of intimate relationships”; as recently as 2009, social scientists in the New York Times speculated that people in open relationships simply “haven’t found the right person yet.” Readers still ogle these easy objects of attention: the throuples, quads, group marriages that redefine the two-parent household. Either that or they feature breathless 30-something couples spilling about “our experiment,” as if non-monogamy were a weird appendage to tack onto a nice, normal relationship instead of a practical, individual choice.
In her wide-ranging Marriage, A History, Stephanie Coontz points out that it’s only through the 20th century that sexual satisfaction, the consolidation of resources, domestic bliss, and romantic love were rolled together into the imagined ideal of a Western partnership. In some tangible ways, that ideal has been slowly unraveling. Polyamory is making a cameo even in the conversations of otherwise straitlaced young people like Britt. We live in a world where platonic college students play at BDSM and “pretend to be a couple just to spice things up”; where OkCupid reported such an uptick in users interested in non-monogamy that they added features allowing partners to link their profiles together or set up a profile as a couple.
When I spoke to Elizabeth Sheff, who has been studying polyamory for more than a decade, she told me that older generations are learning to practice above-ground non-monogamy from the internet. People coming of age now, however, are hearing about it from friends. “Look,” she told me, “if monogamy were natural we probably wouldn’t need to have so many rules about it.” …