More Love

Bandits is one of my very favorite movies.  It has crime, drama, comedy and one of the best endings of all time.  If you haven't seen it, please stop reading this and go and watch it because I'm about to tell you the ending.  Why is it so great?  Because the girl, ends up with the guys.  Not the guy.  But guys.  She doesn't choose one, she chooses both.  Brilliant.  Loved it.  

Which leads me to this topic of polyamory.  Just to clarify, I'm using the term polyamory, which is defined as the desire to have multiple intimate relationships with the consent and knowledge of all involved.  Most of the time, people think of the sect of Mormans where a man marries multiple wives as shown in such shows like Big Love and Sister Wives.   I've been watching Sister Wives for a while and what I can say about the women on the show is that they all are very vocal about this life being a choice that they made.  They each have their own relationship with their common husband, they all appear to love each other and their children appear to be very loved and very happy.  Yet, this is an example of where a man can have multiple wives or relationships (as only one of wives is legally married to the man.) but not vice versa.  But there are other examples of this, more recently explored on Anderson Cooper's new daytime show where he invited three guests, two men and one woman who are in a polyamorous relationship, live together, raising the son that two of them conceived.    The two men are not involved with each other, only the woman is involved with both of them.   A lot was discussed, from shared parenting to dating outside the current relationship triangle and comments from the audience were mostly oppositional.  You can watch the episode online but Anderson Cooper's final comment really told the story "Clearly, there is a lot of love here."  And while the therapist on this show emphasized that jealousy is a particularly difficult problem for these relationships, this applies to all relationships.  One of the other claims is that these relationships often don't go as deep or intimate emotionally, and yet from both examples (Sister Wives and the Poly-couples) they would argue differently.  

I'm hoping to interview some people who are currently dating and identify as polyamorous as this is a great example of dating and relationships outside of the box.