Confusion like this is exactly why the term polyamory was coined.
It’s kind of like the Flammable/Imflammable signs on gasoline trucks.
Slightly different, in that polyamorous people aren’t necessarily involved in multiple marriages. A person with one spouse, but who also engages in short term affairs outside of that marriage, would be polyamorous but not polygamous.
Unless they’re doing it behind their spouse’s back, in which case the technical term is “scumbag.”
Or “cheating.”
A marriage where one or both spouses also engage in short-term affairs with another partner – specifically sexual – is an “open marriage” or relationship if it’s long-term relationship but not considered a “marriage” by them.
Polyamory has the implication of the relationships being long-term, “marriage-like” since such multiple partners are not legal anywhere. After that, the way things are set up can vary widely.
All of the members might live in the same household or there might be more than one.
One member might have several partners, but all of them are exclusive to that member.
All of the members might share each other, either bisexually or monosexually, a free-for-all or some exclusivity within the group. This is pretty rare as it take a lot of negotiation and communication to keep feelings from being hurt.
I was in a polyamorous relationship – before the word had been coined – for six years from 1985 through 1992 until DesertWife died. Technically, to keep the wowsers happy (including her parents), she divorced her first husband and married me, and moved from his household to mine, but she kept a relationship with him with my knowledge and consent. Never had a three-way, though.
Since her death I’ve attended Burning Man ten times, each time at PolyParadise, a polyamorous-friendly camp, mainly because the long-time friend who convinced me to go was a member.
By “short term affairs,” I didn’t mean hook-ups. I should have used a clearer term. I just meant that polyamory isn’t a perfect replacement for polygamous, as polyamorous relationships often have “primary” and “secondary” relationships - such as a spouse, plus one or more boyfriends/girlfriends. I’ve been in two polyamorous relationships. Had the first one led to marriage, it would have been a single marriage, with additional relationships that were clearly understood by all parties to be subordinate to the primary relationship. The second poly relationship became monogamous when we decided to marry. Even if it had been a legal option, neither polyamorous relationship would have ever become a polygamous relationship.
I am well aware of that, the general person using polygamy tends to refer specifically m/f/f/f/f/f relationships.
I think the logic goes like this: “I hate Democrats. I’m against polygamy. Therefore, Democrats must be for polygamy.”
Only because that’s more common, due to the preponderance of patriarchal societies around the world (historically and even today).
But I would never assume legalized polygamy would exclude polyandry, and I don’t think most people would either.
I’ve never bought into the argument that a poly marriage would be too complicated as a reason to ban it. After all, we already have a pretty robust system for figuring out complex legal issues, and that is contract law, and specifically, how to manage businesses with more than one owner.
No one says that multiple-partner businesses should be banned, just because they’re more complicated than businesses with only two partners. If Alice, Bob, Cathy, Dave and Elizabeth want to form some kind of complex marriage arrangement, let them have it. Have a clear contract that details obligations to each other, to any kids produced, and that has clauses dealing with divorce, adding new partners, inheritance and the like. I expect that, within just a few years, lawyers who specialize in such marriages would have boilerplate contracts that cover probably 95+% of cases we’ll ever see, and the last 5% will just take a bit more work to tweak the details.
At some point, though, doesn’t the whole “marriage” part of it become diluted out of existence? I mean, right now there’s nothing stopping Alice, Bob, Cathy, Dave and Elizabeth from entering into a contractual agreement to pool their resources into shared living arrangements, child-raising and inheritances, whether they’re all sleeping with each other or not. Whether you call it a marriage or not seems like little more than semantics.
(And yes, I realize this is almost the same argument people once made against same-sex marriage. Call me an old fogey, but I guess I’m happy drawing the line at marriage = two and only two adults.)
Depends. What does “marriage” mean?
Historically in some minority of societies involving a minority of humanity it meant a joint venture of two people to bear & raise kids and share the fruits of their labors. Heavily managed by the prior generation of older adults. In other societies it meant bride-selling. Or whole-village-raises-the-shared-kids.
“Mariage” is a very elastic term over the time and space of human society. You (any you) of course are welcome to adopt a particularly narrow and rigid view of the term. But understand that fixedness is NOT reflected in the historical record.
So, I looked up the law in question, and this is nothing more than a bold faced lie:
“(a) In general.—No person acting under color of State law may deny—
“(1) full faith and credit to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State pertaining to a marriage between 2 individuals, on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals; or
“(2) a right or claim arising from such a marriage on the basis that such marriage would not be recognized under the law of that State on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals.
Very good point.
Here are all of the many forms of marriage that are mentioned in the Bible, with citations. So, I pretend I don’t know what evangelicals are talking about when they refer to “traditional” marriage.
I’m not sure if you were agreeing or disagreeing with the part where you quoted me, but I think we’re agreeing. Overall, it would take a while, and as in the current red state / blue state conflict over abortion as well as other legal issues, there’d probably be a metric ton of reciprocity issues, but yeah details can and would be worked out over time. And exactly as you said, the basics would be worked out fast, but the outliers would end up in litigation over many, many years to come.
Moving away from the debate about the practicality of multi-person-marriages, and going back to a more P&E POV, it does the Republican Party, which has multiple prominent Christian Dominion proponents, no good to actually argue the facts of what a poly marriage would look like or how it would work. It is just a continuation of the “Look at those Liberals, how evil!” that has become the norm for their political ‘debate’.
Frame it as good vs evil, and you don’t have to define WHY you should vote against your own interests, or for people who are by the normal definitions of your supposed moral compass, are objectively horrible.
Yeah, we’re agreeing, I was just expanding on the thought. It always annoys me when people try to dismiss something new because “What about the complexity!”, when we’ve had courts for literally thousands of years, that specialize in figuring out complex issues.
It’s like when people say we can’t have self-driving cars, because they can’t figure out who should get sued if there’s an accident. Sue everybody, and let the judge sort it out, just like any new kind of accident. After a few years, we’ll know who to blame, and so we can all relax.
Traditional=women are property.
I’m shocked, shocked to find lying in GOP propaganda.
[Quote from the Washington Examiner]
[looks at what the right wing media and moderates told us for decades about Roe vs Wade…]
Pull the other one Mr. Examiner opinionator, it has bells and whistles.