Thursday, April 23, 2015

Notes to: 11 Articles on Polyamory

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

There's just one more on my list: "A Critical Examination of Popular Assumptions About the Benefits and Outcomes of Monogamous Relationships" by Terri D. Conley, Ali Ziegler, Amy C. Moors, Jes L. Matsick, and Brandon Valentine. I'll have to tackle that one later, since it's rather long and deserves its own entry.

I went through a lot more than 11 articles and papers (somewhere between 20 and 30), but these are the ones which didn't provide redundant information that I had already nabbed somewhere else.

Material covered:

"On Triparenting"
  • "Although research indicates that single parenting is not by itself worse for children than their being brought up by both their parents, there are reasons why it is better for children to have more than one committed parent. If having two committed parents is better, everything else being equal, than having just one, I argue that it might be even better for children to have three committed parents." 
  • "Following recent changes [as of December 2011] in the UK, two women can both be recognized as legal parents of children conceived via medically assisted reproductive technologies. Interestingly, they are not both mothers. Instead, one is a mother and the other one a 'female parent'."
  • "Some possible disadvantages in having two rather than one parent might ensure [sic] from the fact that decision-making is made a bit more difficult, or at least slower (because, presumably, the parents have to communicate and reach an agreement together). This need not be a disadvantage for the children: two committed parents may have a better chance of reaching seasoned decisions, if only because they have the chance of defending and weighing various options between each other." 
  • "Research suggests that the earlier (even adoptive) children are informed about their genetic parents, the better the outcome, and that meeting their genetic parents has positive rather than negative outcomes." 
  • "An eventual dissolution of the relationships between the adults need not entail abandonment of the children." 
  • "It is far from obvious that there are intrinsic disadvantages for children in having more than one home, especially if continuity is ensured in other areas of their lives (eg, school, parental care)." 
  • "Having three parents may, indeed, attract stigma from peers, as may any other out-of-the-ordinary characteristic, such as having parents of another colour, shape, age, sexual orientation, accent, nationality, fashion style, etc. However, although stigma is a serious issue, its solutions are rather to be found in measures such as education against discrimination (all the way to bullying) than in avoiding any behavior or appearance that currently attracts stigma." 
  • "It is often taken for granted that collaboration in the area of reproduction and parenting ideally, or even exclusively, takes place between adults romantically involved with each other, and/or who are married to each other. This pattern is being sidestepped by some adults, who decide to seek partners exclusively and explicitly for co-parenting. It is easy to speculate on potential benefits of such a scheme. If people seek partnership specifically for parenting, they might arguably do a better job at selecting potential co-parents, because infatuation would not stand in the way of an honest evaluation of the potential partner's suitability as a parenting partner. If what you are looking for is a parenting partner, then your sexual orientation or otherwise your romantic preferences need not work as an eliminatory criterion. Ensuing children would not experience the deterioration o the romantic relationship between the parents, a divorce, pre- and post-divorce conflicts and animosities. They would arguably benefit from commitment by the parents directly to parenting and from the reduced risk of parental loss of interest in the children as a result of the loss ofinterest in the other partner." 

"Polyamory works for us" 
  • "In polyamorous lingo, our relationship is known as a 'V'; I'm the 'hinge' of the V and my two partners are the vertices."
  • "The right has spent years warning that we are the travesty waiting down the slippery slope of same-sex marriage. With every stride forward for marriage equality, I can count on turning on the TV to find conservative talking heads lumping families like mine in with pedophilia and bestiality. But liberals, for the most part, don't treat us much better. They're quick to insist that same-sex marriage would never, ever lead to such awful things..."
  • "Jealousy is born fro ma fear of losing a partner; if you believe that love and intimacy can be shared, and are not diminished by sharing, then that fear loses a lot of its power. It was liberating for my husband to step outside of the box that saw everyone else as some kind of threat." 
  • "Choosing to be polyamorous doesn't mean you instantly flip a switch that extinguishes all jealousy. But it does mean that we seek to understand why we're feeling insecure. Rather than saying, 'You can't do this with this other person,' we try to pinpoint what's missing from our own relationship. We say things like, 'I'm having a hard time, and I could really use some quality one-on-one time with you right now.' Being able to ask for what you need-- rather than direct negativity at a partner's other relationship-- is vital in a polyamorous relationship. Opening ourselves up in this way was a revelation for my husband and me. We became more connected with each other than we'd been in years." Radical Honesty. 
  • "Because polyamory don't [sic] rely on familiar social scripts, it's crucial to spell out terms and expectations rather than relying on assumptions." 
  • "My daughter, who will be 10 next month, has known that her father and I are non-monogamous for nearly as long as she can remember. She certainly isn't exposed to sexuality any more than children of monogamous relationships are; she sees child-appropriate displays of affection between me and both of my partners, and she lives in a stable, loving home... She adores my boyfriend, and his relationship to her is like that of a stepparent, or maybe the fun live-in uncle." 
  • "Being polyamorous allows us more breathing room to each be ourselves, rather than feeling like our needs are in conflict with one another." 

"Polyamory: When three isn't a crowd"
  • "Many traditional marriage counselors and relationship therapists discourage non-monogamy, and in the absence of more research on the long-term effects of polyamory, modern science and academia hasn't reach a consensus on whether it's a healthy relationship structure." 
  • Ashley Tipton: "I've always thought it was better to live in a commune-type large family where you get to choose your loved ones. I came from a broken home where I had to take care of my sisters and alcoholic mother and I wanted something better than that for me and my kids." 
  • "Noel Robertson: "It's better to have the 'I'm scared' conversation than the laying down the ultimatum conversation." 
  • "In research and interviews with poly families, she [sociologist Elisabth Sheff] found that children ages 5 to 8 didn't seem to care about how the adults related to each other, so long as they were taken care of. Overall, they seemed to fare well as long as they lived in stable, loving homes. Living in a poly household didn't imply a child would prefer a poly lifestyle." 

"Polyamory-- Not Healthy For Children"
  • "Let's get real. Polyamory is not something you do for your kids to have a better life. Polyamory is something you do for yourself because it is something you want, you yearn for." Pardon? That seems to be an overly-broad generalization, doncha think? I for one am inclined to advocate for children having three or more parents where the system could work, even if none of those parents are romantically or sexually involved at all, as suggested in the paper "On Triparenting." So I don't see how one couldn't desire a polyamorous relationship for both oneself and one's children.
  • "They openly admit it is not always [as] grand as it is difficult to live a polyamorous lifestyle. In a polyamorous relationship, certain character traits are reported as necessity [sic; should be 'necessary' or 'necessities'], of which include; [punc. sic] patience, highly evolved communication skills, trust, open dialogue, mindfulness of what one is feeling and what one's partner/partners' [punc. sic] are feeling, respect for one another, 'rules' of each other's needs and wants must be followed, a lack of jealousy is necessary otherwise it could get ugly, and more... Hmm, sounds like skills necessary for any relationship, for the most part. Right? [ellipsis original]" Exactly. So I'm not sure where the author is going with this paragraph. Polyamorous relationships require the skills of any interpersonal relationship. What's the problem here? Also, all those grammatical issues. Really? Don't you have a proofreader?
  • "As children age and these significant adult figures in their life come and go (due to adult break ups with one's polyamorous partner/partners), children don't feel so loved, they no longer feel stable nor at peace." And that doesn't happen when two-partner relationships end in divorce or otherwise break up? Are you advocating for single-parent households or something, because that's the only way this might make sense in an argument. 
  • "In addition, it is their parent/parents['] reaction in response to the end of the particular polyamorous relationship they were in which also affects the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and coping/response reaction to the loss of of these children. For example, is the children's mother grieving and the father is not? Is the father angry about the end of the relationship whereas the mother is happy about it? Talk about confused children regarding where their loyalties should be." You do realize, right, that "confused children regarding where their loyalties should be" is a textbook scenario for traditional marriages that have ended in divorce. 
  • "As children age, there are those who knew from a young age of their parents' polyamorous lifestyle, then there are others who come to discover it later on. The later a child learns of this 'secret', the more confused and hurt they are... For example, cousin Bobby who has been living with us for the past few years really isn't cousin Bobby. He's mommy's lover." So, don't adopt children either, because some parents don't tell their kids about the adoption until later in life and this causes problems? 
  • "If children know the truth when they are young, it is a brain washing of sorts in that they will learn to accept this as a reality." Pardon? 
  • "Either way you slice it-- whether a child is accepting or not, whether a child feels misled or not, the fact still remains that loss of love, the end of significant adult figures in a child's life is devastating." For those playing along at home, the good doctor is presently advocating for an end to multiple-parent systems and a universalization of single-parent households. Or at least that's the only way that this argument would make sense.
  • "These are just but a few relational clinical concerns I have for children who are raised in a polyamorous home, as to the negative affects [sic] it will bring on them when they become of mating age." The wording suggests that our author does not actually know, but is making what are, essentially, guesses. Plausible-sounding guesses, perhaps, but only because the evidence they may or may not sit upon (the author does not cite sources) comes from studies of children with divorced parents. Once again, we have the argument that single-parent households, being the most stable, and by definition incapable of divorce or separation, are the best. 
  • "Not unlike when parents get divorced, children are heartbroken over the loss of one parent. Except, polyamory breaks [sic] ups for some children are worse than divorce. Why? The answer is because in many divorces there is still visitation, time spent with each parent. Typically both parents remain involved in the children's life [sic; should be 'lives']." This assumes that all divorced couples continue to care for their children, rather than one half dropping or being forced out of the picture, and that polyamorous units which have broken up do not continue to stay in the lives of the children involved. 
  • "Children of parents who are polyamorous also learn about the importance of keeping a family secret. Family secrets, oh those skeletons in the closet that children keep, never healthy as they age." What is this, I don't even, this horrible sentence structure, oh my eyes. But anyway, this has nothing to do with polyamory itself, but the consequences of a possibly undeserved stigma against polyamory. Next you'll be telling us that interracial couples shouldn't be a thing in some places. And, in case it needed mentioning, not all polyamorous units keep it a secret. 
  • I was hoping to get an opposing point of view that made me reevaluate my present beliefs. Instead, much like what happens when one peruses Answers in Genesis in order to get the Creationist argument, I am that much more convinced that, assuming proper dispositions on the part of those involved, there's nothing wrong with polyamory. The idea that this is the best that the author could come up with is more damning to her position than anything that the pro-polyamory faction could have come up with. 

"Children, Stigma, and Polyamorous Families"
  • "As with all sexual minorities, kids in poly families (or poly kids for short, even though I do not mean that the children themselves are polyamorous) are at risk of being hurt by the stigma attached to their parents' romantic lives." 
  • "The most common way for kids in poly families to deal with the potential for stigma was to pass as members of divorced families. This was generally fairly easy because divorce and serial monogamy are so common now that many kids have multiple parents, so the poly kids simply blended in with their peers." 
  • "Similar to children from same-sex families today (or overweight children, kids who stutter, or have too many freckles) or divorced families 30 years ago, poly kids can get teased for being different or having weird families." Exactly. It's nothing inherent in polyamory, but a result of our tendency to Other people. 
  • "The presence of multiple adults with advanced education [most polyamorous individuals have college educations] makes it a lot easier to homeschool, and pooling income makes it more feasible to send kids to private or alternative schools." 

"5 Myths About Polyamory"
  • "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... 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." 
  • Melissa Mitchell: "Polyamorous relationships are relatively independent of one another. 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." 
  • "Bjarne Holmes, psychologist at Champlain College: "About 30 percent or so of the polyamorous population would say they think of one partner as being primary." 
  • "Bjarne Holmes: "What I've come across most is actually configurations of two males and a female living together." 
  • "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." 
  • "Bjarne Holmes: "They [polyamorous groups] communicate to death." 
  • "Polyamorous people report feeling energized by their multiple relationships and say that good feelings in one translate to good feelings in others." 
  • "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." 
  • "Kids also reported liking having multiple adults around 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." 
  • Elisabeth Sheff, former Georgia State University professor: "One of the main things this does indicate to me is that these families can be really good places to raise children. Not necessarily that all of them, definitionally, are, but that they may be, depending on how families work it out." 

"Real Polyamorous Families"
  • "We never lived as a triad or quad[;] though I was always open to that possibilitity, it was not something we were seeking. Over the years I have seen many poly folks hold this up as an ideal but the reality is it is challenging enough for most of us to find one compatible person we can live with and much more challenging to find two or three." 
  • "Polyamory is focused on relationships rather than sex..."
  • "My children are not privy to the details of my personal sex life but they do meet the people who matter and are important to me and part of my life. They see my snuggle with different people and they see Jesus [not that one] do the same. They are completely aware we love many people and that some are intimate partners." 

"Polyamory and Children" 
  • "Dr. Elisabeth Sheff is an assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University. She conducted her doctoral research on polyamorous families with children in the mi-1990s and later decided to attempt a longitudinal study of these and other families." The article "5 Myths About Polyamory" referred to Sheff as a former professor. I wonder what became of the study. 
  • "In an open marriage or single-parent household, it's quite common for secondary partners to visit regularly, stay over on weekends, or stay for weeks at a time and perhaps for them to become housemates or move in for trial periods as a prelude to a more permanent arrangement. In situations like this, lovers often take on roles similar to those of aunts and uncles rather than coparents." 
  • "The common perception that children in poly (and nonheterosexual) families are at higher risk for sexual abuse than those in monogamous families, which appears to be completely unfounded according to Dr. Sheff, also makes people nervous about talking to her." 
  • "GLBT (sic) research has found that essentially all the pressure the children of homosexual parents face is from outside the family. In other words, nothing has been found in the families themselves that's a problem for the children, but they do encounter judgments, prjeudice, and negative attitudes from outsiders, such as teachers or neighbors, or are concerned about appearing different." 
  • "Dr. Pallota-Chiarolli decided that writing a novel for young adults would be one way to support teens who are struggling to reconcile the realities of their bisexual and/or polyamorous families with the heteronormative mainstream culture. The result was Love You Two, which is the tale of a [sic] Pina, a young Australian woman who accidentally discovers that her mother loves two men. Then, when she turns to her uncle for help, she learns that he's bisexual. It's all very confusing for Pina, who loves her mother but has trouble integrating the realization that there are different ways to love." 
  • "Most of the young adults I know who were raised in child-centered polyamorous families seem to end up giving a higher priority to bonding and sustained intimacy than to freedom, whether they are male or female."

"Is Polyamory Bad for the Children?"
  • "I think we need to be cautious about drawing any firm conclusions from the two rather limited studies of the implications for the children of polyamory. I'd like to see studies in which the children of polyamorous parents are compared to children from other family types, and the research is conducted over time (longitudinal studies). I'd also like to see objective measures in addition to the answers to interviewers' questions." Seconding this. 
  • "Did you know that the United States outranks all other Western nations in terms of relationship instability?" 
  • Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round: "...family life in the United States involves more transitions than anywhere else. There is more marriage but also more divorce. There are more lone parents but also more repartnering. Cohabiting relationships are shorter. Over the course of people's adults lives, there is more movement into and out of marriage and cohabiting relationships than in other countries." 
  • "An interesting question, I think, is whether the partners of polyamorous adults are more (or less) likely to stay involved in the lives of the children after a partnership dissolves than are the partners of serially monogamous adults. There is no relevant research that I know of." 

"Free love gets a fit of the wibbles"
  • "'Metamor' describes the relationship one has with one's partner's other partner. Then there is the concept of 'new relationship energy' (NRE)-- the 'honeymoon period'. This is especially important for polyamorists who have to overcome natural feelings of jealousy." 
  • Dr. Barker [no first name given]: "Your partner might be wild about a new relationship, and it's not particularly easy to handle, but because it's got a name, NRE, it's easier to deal with." 
  • Dr. Barker: "It's [wibble] a kind of jealousy that doesn't represent a massive sexual threat; it's a smaller version of jealousy. You can say 'I'm wibbly'-- I'm really OK but a bit shaky, and I need some reassurance.'" 
  • "Another is 'frubbly', which describes the positive feeling of seeing your partner with another lover." 
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