Polyamory for the Practical

Please Don't Feed the Quad

"All right folks.   Step this way.   Stay behind the velvet ropes and don't tap on the glass.   We don't want to startle them.   Hey, you there! Kid with the ice cream cone! What do you think you're doing? Get away from there.   Can't you read the sign? Please don't feed the Quad!"

I put up a website about a year ago.   It was a modest little thing.   I just wanted to have a resource available for polyamorous people who wanted to live in poly families.  Since I also wanted to find other poly families so we could talk, I started an e-list.

I feel like a complete dork even complaining about this.   I put up the site; I started the e-list.   But, lately, I've begun to feel like the Poly Freak Show.

Because I'm poly? Hardly.   There are thousands of poly people out there. Because I live in a poly family? Naw, there are tens of families like ours.

It's stuff like this:

Curious69: Hey, I noticed UR poly

GoddessofJava: Yeah, I am

Curious69: whats it like?

GoddessofJava: Mostly, like this: http://www.geocities.com/polyfamilies

At this point, there will be a several minute pause.   Presumably, the person is now looking at the site.

Curious69: That's kewl.   Hey, do you live near East Nowhere, Idaho?

GoddessofJava: Well no, we don't.   Why?

Curious69: I wanted my wife to meet you

While not verbatim, this does run along the basic lines of a conversation I have about once a week.   My wife tells me that she has had it happen five or six times, herself.   We would blow this off, but some people will message us pretty persistently angling for invitations to meet us.   It's creepy!

The randomly curious™ well, they're just that.   Randomly curious.   That doesn't bother me.   It's harmless and it's human.   The persistent ones have never really done anything other than be annoying, but it makes you wonder.   What do they expect to see that they are so very adamant about wanting to meet us?

About a hundred and fifty years ago, there was a poly family of about 250 people led by a man named John Humphrey Noyes.   They believed that since "in the Kingdom of Heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage" that it was sinful to have one specific mate.   All adults in the community were to consider all other adults in the community their spouses.   (They were a part enough of Victorian times that they were not too sympathetic to homosexuality, by the way).   They were a poly family that had a business you've probably heard of even today.   It's called Oneida Ltd.  and specializes in silver and stainless tableware.

Why do I bring this up? Well, they used to give tours of their large home and grounds in the summer time, charging about a dollar for the tour and a picnic on the ample grounds of the community.   It was a fair source of income for them.

I sometimes feel tempted to do something similar, though my spice would likely tie me up and pour cold water on my until I came to my senses.   One husband and my wife have both complained that they feel this pressure to be "functional" all the time.   We're human here at OLQ and are sometimes downright dysfunctional, even if I don't write articles about it.   There are days that are gray, cold and rainy with the women suffering from PMS, the children being whiny and the men annoyed and bored.   Happy marriage? Yes. One Poly Day is an actual report of a real live day in my family that happened exactly as I described.   But not every day is like that!

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