…this article makes me laugh. Out loud, even, as happened in the doctor’s office early this morning. It’s about a woman and her two husbands. She just couldn’t “shake the feeling that some part of me was repressed.” She knows what she wants: “When I learned about polyamorous relationships, I knew that’s what I wanted. My husband wasn’t so sure, though.” …”One of the biggest hurdles in non-monogamy — probably the hurdle — is jealousy.” …
For crying out loud, if I was to try and clip all the parts that made me laugh, I’d have to paste the entire article. This of course, with the exception of where she talks about her daughter, which sobers me right up. In general, however, the Onion couldn’t do this any better–they should just cut and paste the whole thing and click the magic publish button.
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Hell, it’s hard enough to get two parents on the same page about raising a child. What happens if there is a disagreement about how to raise this child? With three people in a relationship, do they take a vote?
It’s all very well and good when things are working out well, and if they are working out well, more power to them. I wouldn’t want to live their lifestyle, and, I’m honestly not sure how I would react if my sister brought home a boyfriend along with her husband, but what goes on in the family home certainly is none of my business.
But when the s**t hits the fan, how do you sort out the carnage? A three-way custody battle? The more people there are in a relationship, the greater the potential for really, really messy breakups.
God help us if we should ever try to legally recognize this. Can you imagine what kind of circus our family court system would be? (I mean, it’s bad enough now.)
Talk, talk, talk, rationalize, rationalize, rationalize. Then it bursts apart. Suicide. Parent-child murder. Abandoned children. why do people choose to live in hell while they are still alive?
Talk, talk, talk, rationalize, rationalize, rationalize.
Sex addiction is an awful, awful thing.
Kanga, you raise a good point. I believe there is research showing that children are more likely to be abused when unrelated adults live in the home. I’ll have to look that one up to be sure.
Well, when a kid has been hurt, the first person of interest that the police check out is the live-in boyfriend. But it doesn’t logically follow that the mother’s boyfriend is likely to hurt the children in the household. Most fellows are emphatically NOT a menace to children.
The problem I have is that we have a history of common law and legal case precedent that has built up regarding marriage since the beginnings of our legal system. The norms by which society treats marriage is based on the model of one-man-one-woman marriage, and these norms don’t necessarily apply very well to polygamous or even same-sex-headed families.
Off the top of my head, I can see one major potential legal pitfall for this relationship. Suppose the boyfriend were to father a child. Now, the law where I live, and I presume in other jurisdictions as well, presumes that when a woman gives birth to a child, her husband is the legal father. It would be a bit of a legal hassle to get the boyfriend’s name put on the birth certificate. And if they didn’t go through the legal hassle to get that taken care of, and the relationship were subsequently to disintegrate, who knows what would happen in a custody battle for the child.
You can’t distinguish, legally, between marriages. The legal norms that apply to one marriage necessarily apply to all marriages. And so, in trying to find a set of norms that apply to all the different types of families, what we are ending up with is a set of amorphous ambiguities that really mean nothing at all.
There have been several cases in which the infidelity of the wife has led the husband and father to kill the children and take their own life. Open marriage does not work, and is simply the prelude to an explosion of incredible destruction. This woman is delusional. Board games with the live-in boyfriend? She is not even honest with herself.
This is a recipe for disaster.