Pairs With Spares

That was love. Big Love.

So, for a while she lived with Jim, and they loved each other and they drove each other batty. ("He used to work for the NRA and I hate guns.") Then she met Tim, who was more on her wavelength, and now they live together, but she still sees Jim and also has a partner named Carla. Tim, Jim and Carla, of course, have other partners, and when Wagner maps out those connections as far as she can; the number reaches 18. Her relationships are "V's" -- the most common poly type -- which means that she is the connection point between multiple other people. She sees Tim and Jim, but Tim and Jim do not see each other.

"Many of us tried to make monogamy work," Wagner says. But monogamy, she says, often seemed to throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. Its practitioners would break off "perfectly good relationships" just because of intellectual incompatibility, for example, or because one partner liked ballet and the other liked bowling. Doesn't it make more sense, polys ask, to keep the good parts of a relationship, and find another boyfriend who likes "Swan Lake"?

The compartmentalization of affection: It's completely at odds with today's Disney Princess/Coldplay-lyric view of marriage, in which your spouse is your lover, best friend, therapist and Wii buddy, and you also have identical taste in movies.

But as people are increasingly expected to self-actualize clear to the grave, what are the chances that they'll pair up with someone who is on the exact same path of discovery?

Thought: Maybe you can have it all. You just can't get it all from the same person.

It's the thought that illustrates a paradox in polyamory: Its practitioners have astonishing optimism for humans' endless capacity to love, to share, to forgive, to grow, to explore. But that optimism seems rooted in a cynical belief that the monogamous are stuck in a myth, one that leads to cheating, unhappiness or divorce court. They believe, as do some evolutionary biologists, that most humans do not have endless capacity to be faithful to just one person.

There's a vague aura of entitlement to polyamory. The concept that one deserves complete romantic fulfillment seems a decidedly Me Generation concept.

More than one presenter at Poly Living's sessions utters a variation of this statement, which is either an explanation, an excuse or an untruth: We're just doing what everyone else is doing anyway. The difference is that we're not lying about it.

* * *

"Your turn!" Nicole says cheerfully to her partner Rebecca. The two women, both in their early 30s, are trying to eat lunch with their other partner, James, but the trio's toddler has chosen this moment to smear cake on his face and sprint toward the hotel restaurant's door. Rebecca hurtles out of her chair, cutting him off before he careens into a waitress. Nicole rolls her eyes toward the ceiling. "I have no idea," she says, "how people do this with just two parents."

Rebecca returns the boy to the table, handing him off to James as Nicole excuses herself to the bathroom. Morning sickness. Ugh.