(Remember that I have one of those?)
If you are a $3 or more sponsor, click here to read about how I am confused about monogamy. If you are not, feel free to get into arguments about polyamory on this thread anyway, arguing about polyamory is one of my small pleasures.
PDV said:
Let it not be said that I didn’t help someone start an argument when they wanted one:
More Than Two is bad, actually.
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ozymandias said:
I feel like it’s hard to argue with that unless you say why you think it’s bad.
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Elle Benjamin said:
More people, more problems! Especially if (like me) you’re misanthropic about most people.
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LeeEsq said:
One thing that I think works against polyamory in Western society is that its going to be very difficult to create a polyamory legal construct that conforms to the requirements of liberalism like equality between the genders or under the law. Marriage is a legal concept as well as a relationship. The marriage certificate is about taxes, owning property together, making decisions about kids, and letting the hospital staff know that they can probably trust you to make decision for an incapacitated spouse, and many other things.
If polyamory is going to be a thing and mass phenomenon than the government is going to create laws to govern it whether polyamorous couples want this or not. There will be disputes and turning to the courts to work them out. Creating a working legal structure for polyamory that is both equitable, liberal, and not a legal cluster f*uck is not going to be easy. Its why legalized polyamory lasted longer in the more authoritarian and patriarchal cultures than the egalitarian ones. Saying one man can have x number of spouses and he has legal authority over them is a lot easier than Man A can be married to Women A and B and Woman B can be at the same time be married to Man B and C while Woman C is also married to Woman D from a government’s perspective.
This might explain why many polyamorous people have anarchist or libertarian leanings. It allows a sort of hand-waiving over the legal aspects of romantic relationships.
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Aapje said:
Many polyamorous people seem to have one primary partner and a bunch of more casual partners. That can generally work as just an open marriage, where the primary has the marriage benefits and the secondaries don’t.
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Fisher said:
Then there’s also Heinlein’s “line marriages,” which have never actually existed but would do a good job of frustrating inheritance taxes.
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ozymandias said:
I agree with Aapje that the single-primary model is pretty easy from a legal perspective: even if I choose to live with my secondary partner, it is very unlikely we will acquire the sort of shared assets that require the government’s help to sort them out, and I probably shouldn’t make their medical decisions. (It does make child support more complicated, but fortunately I support replacing child support with a generous social safety net so I can punt on that one.)
I suspect the easiest way to handle multi-partner marriages is simply to declare that everyone involved is married to everyone else. I think it is genuinely fairly uncommon for Person A to be significantly financially entangled with Person B and Person C, but Person B and Person C aren’t significantly financially entangled with each other; if you’re in that complicated of a situation you should probably hire a lawyer and not rely on the off-the-shelf agreement that marriage represents. I think this is unintuitive to a lot of people because B and C might not happen to be lovers, but really there’s no reason why one should have to be lovers in order to get married anyway.
The real difficulty is how easy it would make immigration fraud, although I’m pretty sure I’d be fine with decriminalizing immigration fraud. It is kind of creepy that the US government feels it is entitled to poke its nose into your marriage to see whether it’s “real” or not.
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LeeEsq said:
I’m an immigration lawyer. There are immigrants from polygamous Muslim societies that attempt to get around the legally enforced monogamy in the United States, and you can be denied Lawful Permanent Resident status for the intent to commit politically (and they do ask about this on the forms), and the United States government is not happy with it all even though it is technically not illegal because only one marriage is registered with a license.
If the single-primary/open marriage model becomes more widespread, the law will step in because thats what the law or government does. I also think that the more common polyamory becomes than the increased likelihood of turning to the courts when things go wrong and disputes arise become. Not everybody is going to deal with these issues with level-headed calmness.
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