The Law and So-called Polyamory
Please note this means rape and child molestation are explicitly excluded as not acceptable behaviors, but polyamory, homosexual sex and even BDSM are not. Beyond that, defining what constitutes meaningful consent is a critical part of my thought processes.
One of the problems with polyamory that I haven't personally seen people talking about is that for monogamy we kind of have some of the power dynamics worked out. Nonetheless, divorce cases are still a shit show because bumping uglies has substantial legal and financial consequences.
And we mostly don't really have any of that worked out for polyamory. It's the wild west and you not only have no legal protections, the law is very much NOT on your side and is likely to actively shaft you.
How do I know?
The personal opinions about historic laws in the piece Paternity are shaped by conversations I had with men who talked about wanting to have a threesome with me and a male friend of theirs. And they never had a good answer for "So, what happens if I get pregnant and we don't know who the father is?"
What happens in most cases today is the woman -- that would be ME in this case -- is branded a ho and raises a bastard child that no one wants to pay child support for. So that's a big fat fucking NO from me and those threesomes never happened.
So I think most likely a lot of so-called open marriages boil down to a private deal between two people with legal protections -- including spousal privilege in court -- which facilitates predation upon other people.
So one possible scenario is a closeted gay woman in a heteronormative marriage with a husband could privately tell hubby "She's hot! I wish you would sleep with her and tell me about it." and hubby does so.
Odds are extremely extremely extremely poor that hubby is going to tell this chick the truth.
Most likely, he gives her a sob story about how his marriage is in trouble and he's considering leaving and if she sleeps with him, it's likely a combination of two things:
1. She has genuine sympathy for another human being she imagines is her friend or something because his marriage is in trouble, awwwwww poor baby, and she would like to help him resolve his problems or cope with his life falling apart.
2. If he has money, she hopes that sleeping with him is her winning lottery ticket in the Cinderella fairytale in her mind.
The couple in question can do this for years while pretending he's a philandering asshole and she's the long suffering virtuous wife. Countless women who know he's married and not faithful will sleep with him anyway hoping he's really going to leave her someday and hoping that if she's the bimbo in his bed currently when that finally happens, maybe she gets her Prince at long last.
Reality: Even IF he really left her, he probably won't marry you. Something like upwards of ninety percent of the time, the affair facilitates the divorce and then he dumps her and gets involved with someone who is a better match for him than she is.
And furthermore, in such a scenario, it's ALL a LIE. Their marriage isn't in trouble. He's not contemplating leaving. He's not being unfaithful because he's doing this not only with the wife's blessing, but at her behest to try to meet her needs.
And that means he didn't REALLY have the consent of the side dish because what she thought she was agreeing to was absolutely not what she was actually agreeing to AND the asshole she slept with knew it was all a LIE.
I've had genuinely open relationships.
With men I never met in the flesh.
The Bible and any other sources of social expectations concerning sexual relationships was developed long before phone sex or the Internet existed. Under the LAW, I don't know that I meaningfully "had an affair" with guys I TALKED to online and by phone.
We don't REALLY have good laws covering that scenario. We don't really have good mental models about the difference between a virtual relationship and one in meat space.
I write to explore such concepts because social stuff is interesting to me.
As best I can tell, a genuinely open relationship is first and foremost about honesty with each other and that honesty between two people married to each other in a heteronormative world where monogamy is the default norm typically is antithetical to polyamory.
The word polyamory means loving multiple people. It doesn't really mean fucking multiple people though it's sort of the PC updated justification for a swinging lifestyle where we pretend it's okay to sleep around because I LOVE them all!
You probably don't.
You may FEEL "in love" every time you have sex, but you know that is playing games with word definitions and you having The Feels isn't the same as you caring deeply about them all and striving to actually do right by everyone involved.
Are there polyamorous arrangements where multiple people are sexually intimate and genuinely deeply care about each other etc? Probably.
All the research-based data I've seen and all the anecdotal evidence I have suggests that is very much in the minority. The overwhelming majority of "open" relationships are not a case of everyone involved being extremely high-minded, deeply loving people committed to making sure no one gets hurt.
If you are old friends who have known each other for years and she gets married and you two still hook up once in a while and her husband has told her "Not my business." maybe you aren't hurting anyone.
If you are a married couple and using spousal privilege and lies to take advantage of other people, I hope someone throws you in jail.
If you are a pretty young thing and imagining some wealthy, powerful man is leaving his ugly old wife for you because you put out: ah ha ha ha ha, not likely.
She probably helped make him rich and powerful and there are countless dumb bunnies like you hoping they can trade youth, beauty and having the ethics of a ho for lifetime financial security in a May-December relationship where the appeal of December is Christmas presents.
And December will do all in his power to protect his wealth from May because it's hard to build a fortune, easy to lose it and you don't stay rich by overpaying for a ho.
He's looking for a ho that costs him LESS than one who charges by the hour, not MORE.
You ain't that special. LOTS of pretty young things who want to imagine they are good girls and the marrying kind will roll a man with enough money and tell themselves "I think I'm in LOVE!" to justify it.
So if you think you are pulling a fast one by being willing to break some rules because you think you're cute, maybe grow a second brain cell and do some reading and put your brain in gear because the research says: Extremely unlikely, sweetie.