The Polyamorist Next Door

I suppose, given Americans’ fondness for postmodern taboo-breaking, it was inevitable that polyamory would go mainstream. Recently, it’s been the subject of lifestyle articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, The New Yorker, and More, a buzzy memoir by Park Slope wife and mother, Molly Roden Winter. Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline, came out of the closet in Vanity Fair, raving about polyamory as a “creative and expansive way of loving … about deep connection, committed partnerships, reliable family, and supportive community,” and Tik Tok is crowded with posts by young poly folk. In fact, according to a 2023 Pew Research study, the majority of Gen Z-ers have given the practice a Good Housekeeping seal of approval: 51% of adults younger than 30 agree that open marriage is cool. The dating apps Feeld and Ok Cupid have introduced non-monogamy into their filtering systems; can other dating sites be far behind?

Plenty of skeptics have piled on since the media has taken up polyamory. They point out the undeniable truth that our species has shown a marked talent for jealousy, distractibility, egotism, STD’s, and unplanned pregnancies. How could a creed that endorses multiple concurrent sexual partners not aggravate all of those problems, leading to more divorce, separation, single-parent households, damaged children, and heartbreak?  Well, it can’t, but the normalization of polyamory probably won’t affect everyone equally. It will likely conform to the old saying, “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”

In fact, the polyamory craze is a textbook example of what Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs.” Henderson has particular insight into this polyamory moment, not because he claims direct experience of the practice but because of his miserably chaotic childhood. Now a popular writer, he is the author of the forthcoming memoir Troubled.  In it, he chronicles how his father disappeared before he was born and how child welfare authorities took him from his drug-addicted mother when he was three. Over the next years, he cycled through multiple foster homes until he was finally adopted by a couple in a down-and-out rural California community called Red Bluff. A year later, Henderson’s adoptive parents split up. He had a few years of stability with his adopted mother and her female partner, but then their relationship fell apart too. Some of his friends in Red Bluff lived in similarly tumultuous circumstances. They landed in jail, dead, or chronically stoned, but for a variety of reasons—luck, impressive but underdeveloped cognitive gifts—he escaped that fate. Rob enlisted in the Air Force, and from there, went on to get a BA from Yale and a Ph. D. from Cambridge. 

It was at Yale that he encountered cosseted students from places like Greenwich, proudly proclaiming opinions that could gain the approval of their progressive friends but showing total ignorance of the struggles of people in places like Red Bluff. A prime example: “defund the police.” By supporting the idea, well-to do college graduates living in low crime, prosperous areas display their enlightened open-mindedness to their peers at no cost to themselves, without considering the catastrophic impact on residents in high crime neighborhoods if those beliefs were to be put into practice. Henderson sees such beliefs as the ideological parallel of luxury goods. Through those beliefs, people who live in upper middle class Maryland suburbs or Park Slope raise their status by signaling that they are not really the bourgeois trads their normie lifestyle seems to suggest. Some of the same dynamic is at work in the polyamory craze.

Like just about every sexual practice, polyamory has a long history. In the 19th century, utopian religious communities like Oneida in upstate New York practiced “complex marriage.” The Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s also introduced experiments in communal living and sexual partner sharing. These efforts were short-lived; the communes generally succumbed to the very same desire for novelty that polyamory itself was supposed to satisfy. The more philosophical-minded polyamorists of today know all that, but they view themselves as coming from a different place. They practice what they call “ethical non-monogamy.”  

How could polyamory be ethical? First, partners are supposed to be completely honest with each other. They are not hiding their other relationships; therefore, they argue, they are not cheating. Second, they have frank conversations about emotions like jealousy and fear of abandonment designed to anticipate and respect a partner’s emotions. Justin Mogiliski, associate Professor of Psychology at the University of South Carolina State, describes it this way: 

if each person exerts enough autonomy to know, communicate, and stand by their relationship expectations, partners can anticipate and resolve conflict together. Rather than forbid relationships with other people, they try to plan around the risks that other relationships can introduce.

Though few in the polyamory lobby admit it, this means successful non monogamy requires a particular kind of high functioning person. They must be exceptionally high in conscientiousness and executive functioning, and exceptionally low in impulsivity. They have to be self-aware to an extent unknown to many-or maybe most- earthlings. When Molly Winter and her husband made up a list of rules they planned to follow—don’t date an ex or anyone in the neighborhood, or someone you work with, and no falling in love—they were anticipating, with mixed success as it turned out, the situations that might prompt emotions they would find hard to manage. It goes without saying that the skillful polyamorist also has to be gifted at time management. Last spring, The New York Times interviewed a 37-year-old who “currently has a nesting partner, a long-term partner, two long-distance partners, and a kink-based relationship with another person.” Geoffrey Miller, a married, non-monogamous professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico, wasn’t joking when he said that polyamory benefits from modern inventions like contraception, STI testing, cities with a wide selection of educated partners—and Google calendar.  

A strong credit score helps, too. Winter and her husband have purchased and renovated a Park Slope brownstone that, by definition, makes her a wealthy woman. She doesn’t appear to think twice about paying for babysitters, Ubers, hotels, seductive foreplay dinners, therapists, and medical care (her athletic sex life has led to a series of urinary tract infections). Polyamory is also fairly widespread among tech workers in the affluent Silicon Valley and other places where the rationalist community hangs out, including the Bahamian luxury condo where crypto-scammer Sam Bankman-Fried set up shop with his infamous polycule.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that consensual nonmonogamy is a feasible new kind of safe sex for the educated and hyper-socialized. That still leaves a large population of people who come from turbulent backgrounds that are not conducive to teaching children executive functioning. They may not have people in their lives who can model how to follow rules, stick to plans and agreements, or examine their own unruly feelings. Growing up, Rob Henderson didn’t know any adults who had graduated from college. Yet the label “consensual nonmonogamy” sounds like it comes from a Critical Studies classroom. It’s a safe bet that you won’t hear it at a Tennessee truck stop or an Akron Dollar Store. What you will hear is talk of nasty break-ups, missing fathers, restraining orders, unplanned pregnancies, and what family scholars call multi-partner fertility. Multi-partner fertility is widespread in working class and poor communities and can be every bit as damaging to kids as poverty itself. As for the young polyamorists of Tik Tok, some of whom look like they’re in their teens, they are also a different breed than the rationalists of Mountain View or the owners of Brooklyn brownstones. They giggle and preen for their viewers like children exploring a new toy at Christmas. None of them seem like they’ve given much thought to the philosophy of ethics.

Not that diplomas are any guarantee of smooth sailing. Molly Winter and her husband are reasonably successful at following ethical non monogamy best practices in their adventures, and by the end of the book—at least as she tells it— their marriage seems intact. But along the way, she did encounter a number of system failures. There’s a German lover whose fiancée is bi-sexual—bisexuality is common in polyamory communities as are homosexuals and transexuals—but she says she is attracted to straight women rather than lesbian partners. Winter is having great sex with her German, until she gradually comes to realize that he is grooming her—and other women as it happens—for threesomes with his fiancée. Later, she falls for Scott, a younger man married to a woman with her own extra-marital partner, who eventually leaves Scott and moves to California to be with her lover, taking their son with her. Molly is left with a dejected lover who breaks up with her when he finds someone who will give him the exclusive relationship he ultimately decides he wants. As for what happens to Scott’s relationship with his son, now 3,000 miles away and living with a stranger who will act as his stepfather, well, polyamorists don't have much to say about problems like that.

What these incidents suggest is that as educated and conscientious as many polyamorists may be, they cannot solve the problem of self-delusion. People don’t just lie to their partners; they lie to themselves. They often aren’t sure what they really want today, not to mention what they’ll want next month. “If each person exerts enough autonomy to know, communicate, and stand by their relationship expectations,” as the professor posits, turns out to be a very big ask.

At any rate, even if a select few are able to navigate the choppy waters of polyamory to their satisfaction, where does that leave the giggling teens of TikTok, the working-class folks of Red Bluff, and Scott’s forsaken son?

Kay S. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She writes extensively on childhood, family issues, poverty, and cultural change in America.