Posted on 01/23/2005 8:03:29 PM PST by churchillbuff
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Misty slept with her husband. Vince climbed into her bed on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. And Sundays? Misty had Vince's wife all to herself.
The kids, meanwhile, stuck to their own mattresses.
Life was good in the "quad." Two couples, several kids, one house, five years and lots of scheduled sex - first in Boston, and then in Lakewood.
The quad broke up in 1999, when Vince Botinelly, 50, looked up an old flame, thereby straying outside of the de facto group marriage and having, in essence, an "affair."
Today, Botinelly, remains married to his wife, and lives in the house the quad bought together in Lakewood. Misty Stark, 44, got divorced about a year ago, and lives in Broomfield with her two teenage daughters, about a mile distant from her husband, whom she describes as a friend. She and Botinelly still consider themselves "partners" - they even wear matching "freedom" rings on their left hands that they exchanged - and have held two ceremonies to mark their commitment to each other.
Like hundreds of other Coloradans, and tens of thousands of people around the nation, Stark and Botinelly practice polyamory, meaning they pursue and enjoy multiple committed relationships simultaneously.
"None of my partners meets all of my needs," says Botinelly, a gaunt computer programmer with small oval glasses who looks like Woody Allen with long gray hair. In addition to his wife and Stark, he currently has relationships with women in Los Angeles, St. Louis and Colorado. "People think there is one person out there who meets all of their needs. Having all of my partners meets all of my needs."
Polyamory is a throwback to the 1970s fad for "open marriage," and it has something in common with good old-fashioned "swinging," but with a twist: Polyamorists don't just have sex with others - they fall in love with them.
They thrill to the touch of new flesh, to sex with fresh people, but they hunt for more than physical sparks. They want to daydream about the perfect freckle on her cheek while drawing hearts and inscribing her name on a notebook; to lie in bed for hours, eyes glued to the ceiling, whispering to him on the phone; to talk with a white-jacketed woman at a department-store perfume counter about alluring scents and gift wrapping.
Romance's strongest intoxicants come only with new relationships, polyamorists say, and they aren't willing to jettison the feeling for the sake of monogamy.
Romantic electricity "keeps you young and it keeps you going," says Botinelly. "Why would I want to experience this only once?"
The movement, unsurprisingly, has its biggest following on the West Coast, but Colorado supports one of the larger polyamorous communities in the nation, with at least 500 people along the Front Range. The state also is home to Loving More, polyamory's magazine, a roughly decade-old quarterly now published out of a Broomfield tract home by its new editor, Robyn Trask.
Advocates like Trask say polyamory is natural, and monogamy is not. With about half of all marriages ending in divorce, and an even larger percentage of marriages experiencing episodes of infidelity, isn't it about time, they ask, for people to embrace new ways of building lasting romantic unions? What's wrong, they wonder, with increasing the quantity of loving relationships in the world?
Critics, though, denounce the practice as immoral, and in opposition to the laws of nature. And if courts succeed in granting government imprimaturs to same-sex marriages - thereby dismantling the definition of marriage as single men and women joining in matrimony - group marriages won't be far behind, they say.
Polyamory "places adult desire above the best interests of children," says Bill Maier, a child and family psychologist with Focus on the Family, a Colorado Springs Christian organization that pushes for generally conservative approaches to public policy. Maier calls polyamory a "stealth issue," one that is dormant now but will explode across society if courts fiddle with marriage.
"They are saying 'What I need, what I want.' It's all about me, me me," he says. "It's a very self-centered, narcissistic attitude. If you really care about what is best for society and children, then you are not going to advocate a radical social experiment which would have devastating impacts on the next generation."
Trask, 40, describes herself as "spiritual." Pagan runes, half-moons, leaping dolphins, Hindu gods and other artifacts from spirituality's vast archipelago decorate her house and her body. She teaches "tantric" sex, a melding of spiritual and sexual practices that its practitioners say heightens and prolongs sexual encounters. She says she's under contract to write a book of historical fiction called "The Last High Priestess."
Trask says she's always been polyamorous, although she only discovered the term and the movement about six years ago. As a teenager in Colorado, Trask never practiced monogamy. When she and her husband married, they agreed the relationship would be "open."
About six years ago, they first heard about polyamory. They got involved with the local community - which has several thriving websites and holds all manner of potlucks, camping trips, support groups, and so on - and soon began nurturing more outside-of-the-marriage relationships.
Stark, for example, fell into a deep love affair with Trask's husband. Soon, however, all three of them - Trask, her husband, and Stark - formed a "triad," wherein Stark would typically come to the house with her own kids, the children would play together, and the adults together would retire to the same bed upstairs.
Did his parents' lifestyle bother David Trask, 17, who also grew up with a younger brother and sister?
"It did, maybe once or twice, but other than that my attitude has been, 'If it makes them happy, why not?"' he says.
David Trask, who sports long, floppy bangs, plays a lot of "role-playing" games, and competes as a figure skater, describes himself as polyamorous.
"I've gone back and forth on it a lot," says Trask, who plans to attend Front Range Community College soon. "I probably will end up being poly. I know myself, and I know I care a lot about a lot of different people - more than society says you should."
David Trask, his siblings and his mother all live together in the butterscotch-colored house deep in subdivision-land, a massive, dark Chevy SUV in the driveway exhibiting a bumper sticker that reads, "Got Intimacy?"
Trask's husband, however, has moved to Washington state. The couple is separated, but not divorced. Trask says their marital detachment has nothing to do with polyamory.
Trask and Stark remain committed partners, although sex for now has drifted away from the relationship.
Polyamory might involve a lot of romance and sex with different people, but it also churns up storms of Shakespeare's "green-ey'd monster," the force that drove the general Othello to murder his wife: jealousy.
It's one thing to declare oneself polyamorous, and then commence the kissing. It's another thing entirely, though, to watch your partner do the same thing.
"I've seen a lot of people come into the polyamory community and say they're totally poly, they're committed, but as soon as their partner starts to date, then they're not polyamorous anymore," says Trask.
Polyamory champions say they learn from jealousy; that they wrestle with it, harness it, and get beyond the volatile energy.
Hogwash, says Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University anthropologist who published last year's "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love."
"The problem, of course (with polyamory), is jealousy, and it's a huge problem," she says. "They try to say it's not a huge problem, but when you get to talking to them, you find out it is a big problem. ... It's nowhere near as easy as they try to represent."
"When you see your partner copulating with someone else, that's different than an argument about the toothpaste-tube cap."
Leanna Wolfe, an anthropolgy professor at Los Angeles Valley College who titled her sexology doctoral dissertation at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, "Jealousy and Transformation in Polyamorous Relationships," says the emotion is inescapable.
"I don't know that people actually reduce their jealousy," she says. The polyamorists "have mantras and potions," but what really makes jealousy less keen and painful is practice, she says. You let your partner have a date, fearing the man will be her "Prince Charming" and you'll lose her; that does not happen, and jealousy's intensity ratchets down a notch.
Still, she says, "At some level, when you're having sex with anyone who is not your spouse, you're playing with fire, and you don't know where it will go."
Nevertheless, Wolfe calls polyamory an "intelligent" approach to relationships.
"It's possible for (polyamorous relationships) to be a lot longer-term than monogamous relationships, because they are not expecting intensity from each other all the time," she says. "They presume they can't be everyone for every person, and they understand there will be other people for other places."
The United States has remained stuck on monogamy for too long, says Deborah Anapol, a northern California author and relationship expert who helped found Loving More magazine in 1994. Thanks in part to the growing popularity of movements like polyamory, she says, "People realize there are more options than monogamy. People have more awareness, and more of a sense of hope. They have a sense of hope that I'm in love with two people, and I don't have to choose one of them - I could maybe have both."
Sex, she says, grows more vibrant among those who practice polyamory. Beyond the potential for an upped volume of sex, the introduction of new partners to relationships also excites sexual chemistry. Some studies, she says, show that testosterone levels in men spike when their wives have sex with other men.
About two years ago, Jim Boegman, 40, an Aurora software designer, presented the idea of polyamory to his wife by having her read a story by the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who explored aspects of polyamory in some of his work. His novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" serves as a lodestone for polyamorists, many of whom are science fiction fans.
Boegman's wife's response was, "It makes sense," he says.
Since then Boegman, who stands 6 feet 8 inches, has a sharp salt-and-pepper beard and long gray-and-black hair that sweeps back from his forehead - the fan of Medieval re-enactments and sword fighting looks like one of the Three Musketeers - has had several relationships. In addition to his wife, he now has two girlfriends.
With so many commitments, it's a burden to organize and schedule everything. "It's very complicated," he says.
But worth the effort, Boegman says: "It's hard for me to imagine going back to a situation where I can only see one person."
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Polyamorists draw from a sprawling vocabulary of words revolving around sex and relationships. What's a quad? Four people in a committed relationship. A triad? Three people. Here's more, culled from an online polyamory glossary at www.polyamorysociety.org/glossary.html:
Bright-eyed Novice (BeN): a person who has just discovered polyamory
Polyamorist Braided Commitment Band: a band that is braided annually on a day set aside to celebrate the poly union
Compersion: the feeling of taking joy in your partner's excitement about a new love relationship.
Cowboy (or Cowgirl): a person who believes that alternative relationships are unstable, and tries to pull a partner into a monogamous relationship. Refers to "cutting a filly out of the herd."
New Relationship Energy: energy that flows between partners in a new relationship
Polyactivist: a person interested in taking action to counteract the political, social and religious enforcement of monogamy
Polyfidelity: a group in which all partners are primary to all other partners and sexual fidelity is to the group
Poly Mantra: communicate, communicate, communicate and then communicate some more
Primary Partner: a person of polyamorous orientation who is intimately involved in your life on a day-to-day basis
Swinging: recreational sexual activity, also called "sport sex," where partners or participants agree to have casual sex with one another
- Douglas Brown
In fact, it wasn't David's 7 wives that ticked JHVH off. That was fine and dandy. It wasn't until David covetted another mans wife that it was considered a "sin".
Moses had more than one wife. Solomon. Ezra. Esau. The list goes on.
True, but in just about every instance it caused trouble later.
They keep talking about "commitment." Commitment to what exactly? "You keep using that word. I do no' think it means what you think it means." -- Inigo Montoya
Gee, he sounds like a looker.
I'm not a man, but I would wager that's because they are getting ready to kick that guys ass.
Sometimes even one wife is trouble...I have a friend who is waiting for a comet to hit him..
Some tribal cultures do practice polyamory, but it's rarer than polygamy. Polygamy goes back to the time of the Old Testament patriarchs.
It's outlawed explicitly in the New Testament (every man should have his own wife and vice versa or something like that). I don't think it's outlawed in the Old Testament since a lot of thos patriarchs had more than one wife. Does anyone know if Judaism specifically prohibits polygamy?
A Rabbi Gershom issued a thousand year ban around the tenth century.
You should lead an effort to get everyone one of the 1,000 attendees to call and write the paper. There are finally chinks appearing in the MSM's armor. Attack. Fight the bias. Given the CBS fiasco, the timing is perfect, and issues like this are perfect because the bias is so blatant, so undeniable and indefensible.
MM
'Open marriage' by another name. The situations I am familiar with wound up with really messed up kids. Totally disfunctional situation.
It's his right to state an opinion on "immoral," but in looking at the rest of nature it seems that monogamy is the rarity, the one that may be going against the laws of nature.
Why? I know a monogamous pagan couple that's already way past the national average in length of marriage.
Not exactly. I had friends who tried an open marriage against my advice, and it ruined them. But that was sex outside the marriage with different people, basically a license to cheat.
In this case we're talking polyamory, basically one big marriage, everybody loving the other as husband and wife, and in this case wife and wife. Notice this one didn't dissolve until someone cheated -- went outside the marriage -- just like in a real marriage.
Still, are they out of their minds? Especially when children are involved!
Lord have mercy, are these folks self-centered, or what? It doesn't matter what it does to anyone else as long as it feels good to them.
LOL! The "head chimp" looks a lot like Marshall Applewhite. ;)
You're right. Polyamory (or at least, serial monogamy) is probably the way we are designed to operate, biologically. Culturally, though, it causes all sorts of difficult problems.
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