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Notes -
I think some of it is how polyamory is crossing over to the mainstream. It's been written by/about the type of upper-middle to upper class people who in the past would have been having ménages-a-trois or discreet affairs or French-style "well of course you have a mistress and I have a lover" arrangements, or swinging, or acknowledged 'open' marriages, but all done within a specific framework of discretion, no bastards (or not acknowledged ones), and no divorces to go running off with the new model spouse. You might bring your mistress to certain events, but not in a style that could be seen as parading her about, and never humiliate publicly your spouse.
So, rather in the same spirit as the articles about "will gay marriage teach straight people new ways to handle relationships?" were written before it all became legal, with an air of "gays are not monogamous they're monogamish, will we finally get straight marriage that permits cheating?" about it, now we're getting the polyamory stories.
And for the upper-middle to upper class types, who have a rule book about discreet affairs, it works (until it doesn't). For the weird, the ones who set up all the definitions and sub-definitions and rules and diagrams around poly, it works (until it doesn't). These are the people who put the same effort into working out relationship statistics as other stattos put into sports.
The third set are the people who are fat, ugly, disabled, poor, queer, etc. and who can't get or have a traditional, stable, committed relationship so who put together some kind of support system for sex, love, domestic support and the likes that involves a group of people who can contribute bits and pieces of time, attention, money, space and energy but not a whole-time relationship (and again, that works until it doesn't).
The problem is trying to mainstream it, for the ordinary people who don't have the upper-class resources about managing an affair (or three), the people who aren't living in Park Slope and having glowing reviews of their memoirs in the NYT, who are going to run into the problems of jealousy, trying to juggle time and space between partners, and the fear of being replaced. Of being told that the cultural moment is ethical non-monogamy, and if they're not poly then they are missing out (on all this hot sex and fizzy new romance). You don't want to be boring, do you? Whitebread conventional cis het?
And those are the people who are going to blow up their lives, and who are maybe now starting the backlash about "this wasn't what I was promised and it didn't happen the way I expected".
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