Stumbling into polyamory
There's an article at Elle about a couple discovering polyamory. On the one hand, it's nice to see a poly-positive piece in a mainstream magazine; on the other hand, I feel sorry for the couple for having to work all this out on their own. If only they'd tried the Internet, they would've found alt.polyamory, and more good advice than they could possibly use. (Also more ads for couples looking for hot bi babes, but never mind that.)
This couple did remarkably well at figuring things out for themselves; they came up with the idea of an open relationship, they experimented, they discovered that jealousy could be acknowledged and dealt with, they figured out that honesty is essential, they continue to love each other. But they haven't taken as many steps outside the bounds of Normal Monogamy as they seem to think they have; the author indicates several times that their relationship is a two-person marriage in which it's okay for each member of the couple to have "affairs" as long as they don't fall in love, as long as the affairs are strictly about sex and friendship.
And there's nothing at all wrong with that model; I'm delighted that it works for that couple, and I'm sure it works for plenty of other people too. (In fact, with a slight shift in nomenclature and emphasis, it's a pretty common poly model: a couple who are each other's primary partners, and each of them gets to have secondaries.) There's no One True Way to practice polyamory.
But by the same token, I'd be happier with the article if it acknowledged that multi-person marriages are also legitimate relationships, as are chains and vees and triangles and polyfidelitous relationships and line marriages and on and on and on—there are many other possibilities in addition to the flings-on-the-side approach, and loving more than one person doesn't necessarily have to mean the end of a two-partner relationship any more than sleeping with more than one person does.
(Um, and of course I should add that there's also nothing wrong with monogamous relationships; plenty of people are innately monogamous. It's easy for discussions of polyamory to slide over into a sort of evangelical mode that suggests that poly people are more Highly Evolved than monogamous people, which is just silly.)
