I have a confession to make. The first thing I thought when I saw a recent viral article about a lady whose polyamory is the talk of the town was, you can have all that going on and look like that! Not because the woman in question was unattractive, but because she looked like a normal 50ish woman who has not gone in for much if anything in the way of interventions. And yet she is swinging, as it were, from more chandeliers than you’d think a ceiling could support.
The people with the five spouses… Oliver Bateman said it best: “some parents have more time on their hands than others. i'm happy to get a BM break to myself.” It also makes me think, tangentially, of Richard Bucket telling Hyacinth that there are no other women, and saying, “one woman… is enough,” and the joke is of course that Hyacinth is more than enough wife for him to deal with. She is a lot. Hyacinth god bless her interprets this as loyalty, which in a sense it also is, as Richard is fond of her as well.
It seems like having a bunch of extra life partners would be not only tiring but would require a baseline level of non-misanthropy that yours truly (I identify not with but as Victor Meldrew) find difficult to picture. To each their own! But also, anyone with a modicum of suspicion realizes that some of these relationships are old-timey man-is-cad, woman-is-doormat, dressed up in the language and literal garb of ethical/negotiated/modern/consensual/Actually-feminist.
And you can’t even tell who’s meant to be who anymore, now that the sister-wife dresses have been incorporated into regular womenswear. (Got a pretty great one recently at Siberia Vintage myself.)
There are valid reasons to be skeptical of whether society is in a better place if monogamy ceases to be a default assumption. Do you know what is not one such reason? That the practitioners of many loves are would you believe it not the supermodel porn stars one might imagine.
A lot of the discourse has been this, though. People pointing out that contrary to what you might think (or, more specifically, to what a NY Post AI-derived image would have it), the polys are overweight, plain-looking, and badly-dressed, which is meant as some sort of gotcha. Here’s the thing: most people in the US (where this discourse comes from) are overweight (per medical classifications; I am neither inventing nor endorsing BMI here), and most people outside of Milan or whatever are plain-looking and badly-dressed. This is not a polyamorous thing. It is a normal-people thing.
Yes, people into lifestyles sometimes have a certain look or vibe or whatever, but they’re no better- or worse-looking than the general population. If they’re stereotyped as ugly, it’s a sort of backlash effect from the expectation that they would be uniformly gorgeous.
There is a terrible, nefarious, harm-doing-to-young-people myth that the only people in the world who are sexually active in any capacity are spectacular-looking. A glance at the world around you could alert you to the absurdity of this, but it’s strangely easy to believe, for anyone who is young and imagining they will never find anyone.
I almost think the best thing the polyamorous have going for them, PR-wise, is precisely that they aren’t a sea of Barbies and Kens. Their existence reminds that sex-having is not a reward for the 0.0001% looks-wise, nor something that ceases to become possible after 25. I find it heartening, even as a woman who thinks that lady’s lifestyle sounds unappealing and the sort of thing that causes people who don’t normally say think-of-the-children to be like, think of the children, to know that she gets to have it.
I think there are quite a few older, divorced, settled women, kids out of the house, who are happy to never marry again and yet love companionship and going out to nice dinners, that have a poly-adjacent lifestyle, although they would never label it that.
For what it's worth, Aella (who's a big time poly advocate) found a very distinct positive correlation between a high BMI and being poly (graph about 2/3rds down the page): https://aella.substack.com/p/bmi-and-personality-correlations
I don't know if we can or should draw too many conclusions from this. Aella's best guess when I asked her is that "unusual" things tend to correlate together which seems fair to me.
Also I recently wrote about how confused the language is that we use to talk about monogamy and polyamory: https://ymeskhout.substack.com/p/monopoly-restricted-trust