# data[].attributes.body
Youtube video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
3 3 Poly MOOC 2014 Long Term Poly Relationships

# data[].attributes.body
Find it on facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

# data[].attributes.body
A place to discuss polyamory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Polyamory (from Greek πολύ [poly], meaning "many" or "several", and Latin amor, "love") is the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. It is distinct from both swinging (which emphasizes sex with others as merely recreational) and polysexuality (which is attraction towards multiple genders and/or sexes)

This community is public (including all posts and the members list).

See e.g. http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html for poly intro info.

The Rules:
#1: Please remember that it's ok to link things here, but that the expectation is that you will write a short paragraph of text introducing your link to your article, blog, link, pictures, discussion topic, etc. and that It must be topical to the Poly community.

#2: No advertisements for services or for partners, I.E. no things like dating sites and no "I'm looking for a unicorn in Hoboken, NJ" type posts. We as a group have decided that we don't want personals, sexy pictures, etc. That includes advertising for other poly groups. Note that blog posts are not considered ads, and links to your blog articles about polyamory are welcome, so long as they are not solicitations for services or partners.

#3: This is a discussion community devoted to helping one another, support, and outreach.

#4: No reshares. Please avoid resharing things that were shared elsewhere first. Make the same post an original post here please if you feel you must. The exception to this is something that you write a well thought out intro post to. Something that makes it's relevance clear, and poses a question for debate.

#5: Communication is key. Arguing with moderator decisions is not. Do not publicly argue with the staff once a decision about something has been made. Please contact the community owner directly in case of a dispute with a moderator.

#6: The staff reserve the right to summarily delete comments, and posts if they break the rules, as they don't really contribute here.

Thank you.

We are now on FetLife as well! Come on by. FetLife gives our members another option, one that allows private posting to a group. Things posted on FetLife cannot be read unless you are logged into FetLife, granting an additional measure of privacy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Polyamory (from Greek πολύ [poly], meaning "many" or "several", and Latin amor, "love") is the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Varieties of Intimate Relationship | Information Is Beautiful

# data[].attributes.subject
The Varieties of Intimate Relationship | Information Is Beautiful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Varieties of Intimate Relationship - Information is Beautiful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Distilling the world's data, information & knowledge into beautiful infographics & visualizations

# data[].attributes.headline
Dry As Toast: {He Says/She Says} On Polyamorous Relationships

# data[].attributes.subject
Dry As Toast: {He Says/She Says} On Polyamorous Relationships

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Before my current relationship I had no idea of all the different ways a partnership could take form. Sure, I'd heard about swinging and open relationships, about polygamy and how practically every guy yearns for threesomes, but those were all terms said in jest and without knowing what the differences were or all the variations that exist in between. Since dating A., I've not only learned and appreciated the different ways a loving relationship could exist, but also questioned my own traditional upbringing on what a relationship should look like.

A few friends of ours introduced me to the world of polyamory in which couples are free to fall in love with others and it's been interesting watching other's experiences with that lifestyle. Although A. and I have no interest in pursuing relationships with other people (one is quite enough for the both of us), we openly talk about our thoughts on the subject - and other varieties of intimate relationships - fairly frequently. And with news that the polygamous stars of TLC's reality show Sister Wives are filing a lawsuit Wednesday against Utah to make their lifestyle legal, we thought we'd chime in on the subject. Here's what we each have to say about polyamory.

{He says} Polyamory can mean a lot of things, depending on the situation. A couple may incorporate a third (unicorn) into their already-strong relationship, or one member of the couple may maintain extra-curricular "dating" relationships outside of their main one. Further, relationships could hypothetically span a wide range of people, each having their own bond with one another. The trend, though, is not toward stability.

Because polyamory is only starting to spread, I hesitate to make a general statement about it that might offend its staunch supporters, but alas, I must be honest. The only successful long-term polyamorous relationships I've seen have been triads that start out as a solid companionship between two people. Every other aspect of polyamory that I've seen has been fleeting and temporary. That isn't to say that it can't happen, but the lifestyle lends itself more to exploration than longevity.

Personally, the thought of kindling another relationship on top of the one I already have makes my palms sweat. Maybe I'd feel differently if Dorkys wasn't such a handful. Who knows? As it is, I wouldn't turn down the opportunity to flirt and play with others together with no strings, but franchising the relationship would stretch my resources too thin.

{She says} My first thoughts when I hear about polyamorous relationships deal with jealousy. How don't the people involved feel threatened? I'm sure it could work, but only if every link in the chain is safe, honest and checks their ego at the door otherwise girls will end up crying when he spends more time with one instead of the other. Or at least I know I would.

I also wonder how deeply they can all love one another in the initial stages. Where do they find the time and energy it takes to build something meaningful in multiple relationships? I know some poly people feel restricted by idea that once you fall in love with someone, you're forbidden to feel the same for another person. I understand that, but at the end of the day, I like having my one go-to person and learning how to compromise and figure out the puzzle that is this sole relationship. Because I've no other choice (other than breaking up and finding someone else, of course), I'm forced to learn what makes him tick, what ticks me off and how we can become a better fit for each other. This isn't to say other things are off limits, just that at the end of it all, we'd rather just come home to each other.

Still, it's beautiful to see people pursuing and giving love with no qualms about what society deems appropriate or not and I admire their ability to put aside any insecurities to do so. The first time I attended one of their events, I smiled at the thought that everyone's just trying to find what suits them and makes them happy whether it'd be for the moment or something long-lasting. It's obviously not for everyone, but just because it's not doesn't mean it's wrong.

What do you think about polyamory? What would it take for a consensual non-monogamous relationship to truly work?

Images: informationisbeautiful.net and tacit.livejournal.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
{He Says/She Says} On Polyamorous Relationships

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Before my current relationship I had no idea of all the different ways a partnership could take form. Sure, I'd heard about swinging and open relationships, about polygamy and how practically every guy yearns for threesomes, but those were all terms said in jest and without knowing what the differences were or all the variations that exist in between.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Polyamorist Self Improvement Program

# data[].attributes.subject
The Polyamorist Self Improvement Program

# data[].attributes.headline
5 Myths About Polyamory | Relationships, Sex & Love

# data[].attributes.subject
5 Myths About Polyamory | Relationships, Sex & Love

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A polyamorous arrangement.

Credit: Chris Curtis, Shutterstock

Researchers estimate that as many as 5 percent of Americans are currently in relationships involving consensual nonmonogamy - that is, permission to go outside the couple looking for love or sex.

The boundaries in these relationships are remarkably varied, with some couples negotiating one-off "swinging" or partner-swapping experiences. and others forming stable bonds among three, four or five partners simultaneously. The latter is a version of polyamory, relationships in which people have multiple partnerships at once with the full knowledge of all involved.

Polyamorous people have largely flown under the radar, but that's beginning to change as psychologists become intrigued by this unusual group. The first annual International Academic Polyamory Conference takes place Feb. 15 in Berkeley, Calif., and ongoing studies are examining everything from how jealousy works in polyamorous relationships to how kids in polyamorous familes fare. Though there's a lot left to learn, initial findings are busting some myths about how love among many works.

Myth #1: Poly people are unsatisfied

When someone goes outside a relationship looking for companionship or sex, it's natural to assume there's something missing from their romance. But that doesn't appear to be the case for polyamorous individuals.

Melissa Mitchell, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Georgia, conducted research while at Simon Frasier University in Canada on 1,093 polyamorous individuals. The participants were asked to list a primary partner and a secondary partner (more on that later), and they averaged nine years together with their primary and about two-and-a-half years with their secondary.

Mitchell and her colleagues surveyed their participants about how satisfied and fulfilled they felt in their relationships. They found that people were more satisfied with, felt more close to and more supported by their primary partner, suggesting that their desire for a secondary partner had little to do with dissatisfaction in the relationship. And satisfaction with an outside partner didn't hurt the primary relationship. [ 6 Scientific Tips for a Successful Marriage]

"Polyamorous relationships are relatively independent of one another," Mitchell said in January at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in New Orleans. "We tend to assume in our culture that if you have your needs met outside your relationship, some kind of detrimental effect is going to result, and that's not what we find here."

Myth #2: Polyamorous people are still paired up

Many polyamorous people do form relationships that orbit around a committed couple, with each person having relationships on the side. But the primary partner/secondary partner model is an oversimplification for many poly relationships, said Bjarne Holmes, a psychologist at Champlain College in Vermont.

"I'd say about 30 percent or so of the polyamorous population would say they think of one partner as being primary," Holmes told LiveScience. "A large part of the population would say, 'No, I don't buy into that idea of primary or secondary.'"

Many polyamorous people resist that hierarchy and say they get different things out of different relationships, Holmes said. There are also many people who live in triads or quads, in which three or four people have relationships with each other or with just one or a few members of the group.

"What I've come across most is actually configurations of two males and a female living together," Holmes said.

Myth #3: Polyamory is a way to avoid commitment

Research by Amy Moors, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, finds that people whose relationship style involves little emotional entanglement often say they'd love a polyamorous relationship, thinking that they could have the benefits of coupledom without too much attachment.

Wrong. Joining a polyamorous relationship and thinking it's going to be a commitment-free breeze would likely be a huge mistake. For one thing, plenty of polyamorous relationships are very serious and stable - Holmes says he's interviewed people who've been legally married for 40 years and in a relationship with a second partner for 20.

Secondly, successful polyamorous partners communicate relentlessly, Holmes said: "They communicate to death." It's the only way to ensure that everyone's needs are met and no one is feeling jealous or left out in a relationship that involves many people.

Myth #4: Polyamory is exhausting

The monogamists in the crowd may be shaking their heads. Isn't all that communication and negotiation exhausting? It's true that polyamorous relationships take lots of time, said Elizabeth Sheff, a legal consultant and former Georgia State University professor who is writing a book on polyamorous families.

"Even if you're able to hang out together, giving four relationships the amount of care and feeding and maintenance they need can be a full-time job," Sheff told LiveScience. [ Life's Extremes: Polyamory vs. Monogamy]

But people who thrive in polyamory seem to love that job, Holmes said. Polyamorous people report feeling energized by their multiple relationships and say that good feelings in one translate to good feelings in others.

"I had someone describe to me that love breeds more feelings of love," Holmes said.

Myth #5: Polyamory is bad for the kids

One big question about polyamory is how it affects families with children. The answer to that is not entirely clear - there have been no large-scale, long-term studies on the outcomes of kids growing up with polyamorous parents.

But some early research is suggesting that polyamory doesn't have to have a bad impact on the kids. Sheff has interviewed more than 100 members of polyamorous families, including about two dozen children of polyamorous parents ranging in age from 5 to 17 years old.

Parents list some disadvantages of the polyamorous lifestyle for their kids, namely stigma from the outside world and the danger of a child becoming attached to a partner who might later leave the arrangement, a risk most tried to ameliorate by being extremely cautious about introducing partners to their children.

For their part, kids in the 5- to 8-year-old range were rarely aware that their families were different from the norm, Sheff found. They thought about their parents' boyfriends and girlfriends as they related to themselves, not as they related to mom or dad.

"A 6-year-old may not think of someone as mommy's girlfriend, but think of that person as 'the one who brings Legos' or 'the one who takes me out to ice cream,'" Sheff said.

From ages 9 to 12, kids became more aware of their families as different, but mostly said it was easy to stay " closeted," because people tend to mistake polyamorous arrangements as blended families or other relics of modern relationship complexity. The teens in the 13- to 17-year-old crowd tended to take a more in-your-face approach, Sheff said, "an approach of, 'If you think this is wrong you're going to have to prove it to me. My family is fine.'"

Some teens indicated that they'd consider polyamory for themselves; others weren't interested at all.

Both parents and kids saw advantages to the polyamorous lifestyle as well. For parents, having more than two adults on hand to help with child-rearing could be a lifesaver. Kids also reported liking having multiple adults whom they trusted - though they complained that with so much supervision, they couldn't get away with anything. Children also spoke of the advantages of growing up knowing they could make their own decisions about how to build their families.

The results are likely somewhat optimistic, Sheff said, as dysfunctional families are usually less likely to volunteer for studies. But the lack of widespread trauma among the children of polyamorous families suggests that polyamory is not, by definition, terrible for kids.

"One of the main things this does indicate to me is that these families can be really good places to raise children," Sheff said. "Not necessarily that all of them, definitionally, are, but that they may be, depending on how families work it out."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Researchers estimate that as many as 5 percent of Americans are currently in relationships involving consensual nonmonogamy - that is, permission to go outside the couple looking for love or sex. The boundaries in these relationships are remarkably varied, with some couples negotiating one-off "swinging" or partner-swapping experiences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Communication. One woman noted that the level of honesty and communication required to be polyamorous is one that all couples should practice, but it is required for polyamory to work. Communication and honesty were mentioned repeatedly as vital to maintaining poly relationships.

# data[].attributes.headline
Polyamorous Relationships Are About More Than Just Couples | Angi Becker Stevens

# data[].attributes.subject
Polyamorous Relationships Are About More Than Just Couples | Angi Becker Stevens

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Over the past few years, polyamory has become a more widely known term and practice. And perhaps inevitably, certain misconceptions and misunderstandings about what "polyamory" means have become widespread as well. It would be unfortunately difficult to say which among these misunderstandings is the most common, or the most hurtful to polyamorous folks. But there's one in particular that I'd like to discuss: the idea that "polyamory" means "committed couple who have casual partners on the side."

There has been much talk about "open marriage" and "open relationships" in recent years, with some even paradoxically dubbing non-monogamy "the new monogamy." In this open-marriage conception of non-monogamous relationships, there is still a central, committed (often legally married) couple, who allow one another to engage in purely sexual (or at least quite casual) outside relationships. Generally, any discussion about the benefits of such practice revolves around how it strengthens and/or reinvigorates the central couple in question. I want to be perfectly clear that I don't see anything wrong with strictly sexual non-monogamy so long as it's genuinely fulfilling and consensual for all involved, including the outside partners. But for those of us living in polyamorous families, it can be incredibly frustrating when people use those concepts of open marriage to make assumptions about the structure of our relationships.

Because we live in such a monogamy-centered society, it makes sense that many people can only conceive of non-monogamy in what ultimately still amounts to monogamous terms. There is a common misconception that a polyamorous relationship is really no different from an open-relationship agreement: one committed couple, with some lighthearted fun on the side. But the word "polyamory," by definition, means loving more than one. Many of us have deeply committed relationships with more than one partner, with no hierarchy among them and no core "couple" at the heart of it all. To me, this notion that there must be one more important relationship, one true love, feels a lot like people looking at same-sex couples and thinking that one person must be the "man" in the relationship and the other must be the "woman." After all, both of these misunderstandings result from people trying to graft their normative conceptions of love and relationships onto people who are partnering in non-normative ways. It seems that it is somewhat easy for many people to acknowledge that humans are capable of loving one person and still enjoying sex with others (assuming, of course, that the terms of their relationship make such behavior acceptable). But it is much harder for people to think outside the fairy-tale notion of "the one" and imagine that it might be possible to actually romantically love more than one person simultaneously.

The unfortunate result of this is that, for those of us in more than one serious and meaningful relationship, the world around us insists on viewing one of those relationships as less valid than the other, especially when one relationship happens to predate others. I have been with my husband for 17 years, legally married for 11. But I am also deeply in love with and committed to my boyfriend of two and a half years, and it hurts that people make assumptions about that relationship simply being something frivolous and recreational outside my marriage.

Another side effect of this misunderstanding is that people often wonder why we poly people need to talk openly about "what happens behind closed doors." I have heard many times that there should be no reason to disclose one's polyamorous relationships with parents, children, or the neighbors. That might seem logical if what we're talking about is strictly extramarital sexual partners. But my life with my partners isn't reducible to "what happens behind closed doors" any more than any serious, long-term relationship is. We share a home and a life; we are a family. Openly, publicly acknowledging my boyfriend as my partner is not just saying that we have sex. It's saying that, like my husband, he is my partner in every sense of the word. He loves me and supports me and respects me. He sees me at my worst and still wants to spend his life with me anyway. It would be unimaginable to me to hide the nature of our relationship, to pretend that he is merely a friend or roommate, to not have him by my side at weddings and funerals and family holiday gatherings. But this is exactly what people are expecting of me when they ask why I feel the need to be so "open" about my "private business."

Not all polyamorous people have multiple equally committed relationships, and many do designate a more central (typically live-in) relationship as "primary." But my partners and I are hardly unusual among polyamorous folks. Many share homes in configurations like ours, or as committed triads or quads or complex networks of five or more. Many have deep and lasting relationships with no cohabitation at all. To project traditional conceptions of love and commitment onto these relationships, to view them only as a slight variation on monogamy, is to deny all of the many varied ways that polyamorous people form relationships and families.

If you have polyamorous friends, relatives, or acquaintances, please don't make assumptions about their lives based on what you think all non-monogamous configurations look like. Let them tell you how they define their relationships. And if they identify multiple people as their partners, don't try to read into who is more important than whom, imagining hierarchies even if you're told there are none. Though it might not fit with how you conceptualize love, offer polyamorous relationships the same validation that you would offer any other. And remember what a common human thing it is to want to be able to tell the world -- and not be told by the world -- whom we love.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Polyamorous Relationships Are About More Than Just Couples

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Over the past few years, polyamory has become a more widely known term and practice. And perhaps inevitably, certain misconceptions and misunderstandings about what "polyamory" means have become widespread as well. It would be unfortunately difficult to say which among these misunderstandings is the most common, or the most hurtful to polyamorous folks.