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First came traditional marriage. Then, gay marriage. Now,
there's a movement combining both—simultaneously. Abby Ellin visits the next
frontier of nuptials: the "triad."
Less than 18 months ago, Dr. Sasha Lessin and Janet Kira Lessin gathered before
their friends near their home in Maui, and proclaimed their love for one
another. Nothing unusual about that—Sasha, 68, and Janet, 55—were legally
married in 2000. Rather, this public commitment ceremony was designed to also
bind them to Shivaya, their new 60-something "husband."
Says Sasha:
“I want to walk down the street hand in hand in hand in hand and live together
openly and proclaim our relationship. But also to have all those survivor and
visitation rights and tax breaks and everything like that.”
Maine this
week became the fifth state, and the fourth in New England, to legalize gay
marriage, provoking yet another national debate about same-sex unions. The
Lessins' advocacy group, the Maui-based World Polyamory Association, is pushing
for the next frontier of less-traditional codified relationships. This community
has even come up with a name for what the rest of the world generally would call
a committed threesome: the "triad."
Unlike open marriages and the swinger days of the 1960s and 1970s, these unions
are not about sex with multiple outside partners. Nor are they relationships
where one person is involved with two others, who are not involved with each
other, a la actress Tilda Swinton. That's closer to bigamy. Instead,
triads—"triangular triads," to use precise polyamorous jargon—demand that all
three parties have full relationships, including sexual, with each other. In the
Lessins case, that can be varying pairs but, as Sasha, a psychologist, puts it,
"Janet loves it when she gets a double decker." In a triad, there would be no
doubt in Elizabeth Edwards’ mind whether her husband fathered a baby out of
wedlock; she likely would have participated in it.
There are no statistics or studies out there, but according to Robyn Trask, the
executive director of Loving More, a nonprofit organization in Loveland (yes,
really), Colorado, dedicated to poly-education and support, about 25 percent of
the estimated 50,000 self-identified polyamorists in the U.S. live together in
semi-wedded bliss. A disproportionate number of them are baby boomers. (Paging
Timothy Leary: Janet Lessin claims on her Web site that she's able to travel
astrally.)
As with a couple, the key to making a triad work is communication. The Lessins'
group specifically advocates something called "compersion": taking joy in
another person's joy. Thus, they know how to process jealousy. “We don’t have
anything take place off-stage,” says Sasha Lessin. “You witness your lover
making googly eyes and you share your feelings. It’s not difficult for most
people to be compersive once they feel they’re not being abandoned.”
Like most people in the poly community, the Lessins, who also helm the School of
Tantra (they take pleasure of the flesh quite seriously), take great pains to
discuss pretty much everything. Some people even write up their agreements like
a traditional prenup, detailing everything from communal economics to
cohabitation rules. And buoyed by an increasing acceptance of same-sex unions,
others want more legal protections. "We should have every right to inherit from
each other and visit each other—I don’t care what you call it, we’re not
second-class citizens!” says Janet Lessin. “Any people who wish to form a
marriage with all the rights and duties of a marriage should have the legal
right to. The spurious arguments of marriage being for procreation of children
is ridiculous.”
That said, Valerie White, executive director of the Sexual Freedom Legal Defense
and Education Fund, a legal-defense fund for people with alternative sexual
expression in Sharon, Massachusetts, says she believes that triads are actually
a great way to raise a family. "Years ago, children didn’t get raised in dyads,
they got raised with grandparents and aunts and uncles—it was much looser and
more village-like," says White. "I think a lot more people are finding that
polyamory is a way to recapture that kind of support.” For a year, Loving More's
Trask and her then-husband were both involved with another woman, who was a part
of the family. Trask's three children knew all about it. “I’m totally out,” says
Trask.
Many others aren't. Larry, Rachel and Andie would only talk to me anonymously,
due to the fact that Rachel, 47, works at large, traditional financial
institution in Manhattan. Larry, 56, met her on a commuter ferry two years ago.
At the time, Larry was a member of Poly-NYC, a polyamory group in New York; on
their fi rst date, he told her about it. Rachel had just gotten out of a
year-and-a-half-long relationship with, unbeknownst to her, a married man. “I
was so overwhelmed with Larry’s honesty," she says, "I said to him, ‘I need to
look that up and understand it.'"
A few months later, they met Andie, 56 at a poly retreat in upstate New York.
Andie has been has practiced "multi-partnering" since the early '90s, and was
giving a talk on the subject. Rachel turned to Larry and said ‘Wow, that’s
someone I would turn poly for!’ “She was so elegant and classy. I just felt she
was a beautiful person.”
While Larry, on the other hand, was not especially attracted to Andie, he was
fully supportive of Rachel exploring her attraction. She didn’t, but ran into
Andie at a few other events. Andie, in turn, began noticing the quality of the
relationship between Larry and Rachel. “They didn’t just go to those meetings
and do what happens to other poly partners, that they disappear from each
other,” she says. “They stayed together.”
Three months ago, they reconnected at yet another retreat, and this time the
three bonded on an emotional level. So they decided to figure out how to make a
three-way relationship work. This involves weekly conference calls where they
discuss the tenets of the relationship (honestly, respect, communication,
jealousy) and agree to undergo blood tests for STDs. They talk about what they
want out of life, and each other. “There are people who’ve been married 20 years
and never had these kinds of conversation,” says Andie. “I feel blessed.”
Akien MacIain and his wife, Dawn Davidson, have been counseling dyads, triads,
quads and once even a quint, in San Francisco for over a decade. On their web
site, they offer tips for creating agreements—among them, “Use Time Limited
Agreements Where Needed” (i.e., two weeks, two months, and so on) and “Check in
Periodically; Renegotiate if Needed.”
“A triad is a series of dyads, but it’s more complicated because if I’m in a
relationship with one other person, there’s my relationship with the other
person, her relationship with me, and the relationship that each of us has to
the couple,” says MacIain. “When you make it a triad there are four factorial
connections. It’s very hard.”
And yet some make it work. Doug Carr, Robert Hill, and Paul Wilson have been a
happy threesome for 29 years. The three men, who live outside Austin, Texas,
share a bed, a checking account, and joint real-estate properties in each of
their names—“a left-handed form of cementing the relationship in a legal
context,” says Hill, 69, a retired financier (because of their arrangement,
they, too, requested I use pseudonyms). Their ranch is split three ways; they
call themselves “husbands” and wear matching wedding bands. Back in 1980, when
they met at a furniture store in Dallas, Hill and Wilson were a confirmed dyad
for 10 years. Carr, now an assistant dean at a local college, fell for both of
them; they developed a friendship, which soon turned to love.
Wilson, 61, a consulting engineer for the health-care community, admits that
initially he was less gung ho. “I thought, how is this going to turn out? You
can’t read an article in Readers Digest, ‘Twelve Ways to make a Triad Work.’" He
finally saw the light on a trip to Vienna the three men took. “I decided to go
for it. I turned to them and said, ‘I love you,’ and I love you,’ and let’s make
it work.”
They held a commitment ceremony in 1984 for 20 friends, and then a reception for
200 in their house, where we “introduced ourselves to the world as a triad,”
says Carr, 49. They would like to marry legally, though they are not holding
their breath that it will happen any time soon. “As far as we’re concerned, in
the eyes of God we’re already married—and from an economic standpoint, we’ve
taken that as far as we can, ” says Hill.
Despite the fact that they are also “Dad, Daddy and Pappa” to the 4-year-old
quadruplets Carr sired with a lesbian20couple, they actually see themselves as
quite traditional. “We’ve patterned our relationship on the relationships of our
parents,” says Hill. “So many gay people throw away all the values they learned
at home. Some are worth throwing away, but a lot are not."
“The crux of
all this,” he says, "is commitment.”
Abby Ellin regularly writes the Vows column for The New York Times, and
previously wrote the Preludes column for that newspaper about young people and
money. She is the author of “Teenage Waistland”, but her greatest claim to fame
is naming “Karamel Sutra” ice cream for Ben and Jerry's.
WHY A DUCK? POLY AND BESTIALITY ON THE O'REILLY FACTOR
Fox News
As Cunning Minx says on her Polyamory Weekly podcast, it always comes down to
marrying goats. On Fox News's "The O'Reilly Factor," Bill O'Reilly adds turtles
and ducks to goats. He got wind of Janet and Sasha Lessin's "World Polyamory
Association" (from the Daily Beast article four days earlier that I posted
about), and yesterday he brought up triads and other abominations:
O'REILLY: All right, Hoover. I did not know this, but I had said from the jump
if you OK gay marriage, then you have to do plural marriage, which is now -- has
a name, triads. Three people getting married. There is a group in Maui, Hawaii,
called the Lessin's adversary group -- advocacy group, and it's World Polygamy
[sic: Polyamory] Association. They're associated with that. And they want to be
married....
Too bad O'Reilly's well-meaning foil doesn't draw the line between people and
animals either:
O'REILLY: If I walk in to the Massachusetts state house and say, "Hey, Governor
Deval Patrick, you've got to marry me and Lenny." All right? Because --
HOOVER: I would love to see that, by the way.
O'REILLY: Not only Lenny, but Squiggy too. All right? Or I walk in with the
O'Brien twins from South Boston and say, "Hey, you've got to marry me, because
you're allowing gays to get married, and I'm in the Lessin's group, the World
Polygamy [Polyamory] Association."
HOOVER: You've got to change the law, then. Because the law says it's between
two people.
O'REILLY: OK, but --
HOOVER: Not multiple people. By the way, the last time polygamy was on the rise?
1896, when Utah became the 45th state in the union. Not a massive movement going
mainstream.
[crosstalk]
...HOOVER: I don't buy into the slippery slope argument at all.
O'REILLY: You'd let everybody do whatever they want?
HOOVER: That's the slippery slope argument. That's if you allow one thing to
happen, then another thing, and another thing.
O'REILLY: Hoover, you would let everybody get married who want to get married.
You want to marry a turtle, you can.
HOOVER: Due process. I want to abide by the law. If the law says I can marry a
turtle, I'll marry a turtle. Last time I checked, we're a Judeo-Christian
culture that doesn't allow me to marry turtles.
O'REILLY: You've got to take a stand. You've got to take a stand, now. You would
be for, then, putting the umbrella over all groups.
HOOVER: I am for what the law says. I do not support polygamy.
O'REILLY: That's a copout. Total copout.
HOOVER: No, I don't support polygamy. I support two people, couples, marriages.
O'REILLY: OK, but then you have to explain why two and not three.
CARLSON: And then you don't call it marriage anymore. It's not marriage anymore.
O'REILLY: Explain why two and not three? And you can't.
HOOVER: I think that the crux of our foundation of our culture depends on --
O'REILLY: On two.
HOOVER: -- two people, yes.
Watch the video on Fox (May 11, 2009), or read the whole transcript on Media
Matters for America ("fighting conservative misinformation"). The O'Reilly
Factor is part of why the upcoming generation voted overwhelmingly against
Republicans.
Incidentally, remember that the term "slippery slope" frames everything as all
downhill. Accept the term and you've already lost. Reframe it as a "sticky ramp"
upward. As Theresa Brennan (of Polycamp Northwest fame) once put it, awkwardly,
Giving blacks the vote, women the vote, contraception — it's all a slippery
slope to a place of better social justice and acceptance.
Bonus! Here's a quick promo about triad marriages on Fox and Friends.
Question: Is there such a thing as bad publicity? Before you say "of course,"
consider that most people have no idea that serious group relationships are
possible. Getting it into the culture that people actually do this, even if
they're icky, will make the idea thinkable... for those who need to discover
they're not alone.
Update, next day: On MSNBC's "Hardball," David Shuster ridicules O'Reilly's
marry-a-turtle argument as "ridiculous," "illogical," "stupid."
--- In WorldPolyamoryAssociation@yahoogroups.com, "Janet Kira Lessin"
<lemuriancenter@... wrote:
TRIADS: MR. & MRS & MRS ... OR WHATEVER by Charles Coleson
Reprinted from BreakPoint
Earlier this month, Maine became the fifth state—and the fourth in New
England—to legalize same-sex "marriage." Five thousand miles away in Hawaii,
Sasha and Janet Lessin are hoping to build on New England's example.
If they are successful, no one can seriously claim to be surprised.
Writer Abby Ellin described how the Lessins gathered with friends and held what
was dubbed a "commitment ceremony." The "commitment" being celebrated wasn't a
renewal of their marriage vows—it was the incorporation of a third party, "Shivaya,"
into their so-called "triad."
That's the word the Lessins and other advocates of "polyamory" call a
relationship between three people. Unlike bigamy and polygamy, in which one man
has multiple wives, in a "triad," each party is a "spouse" to each of the other
parties. In the Lessins' ase, "Shivaya" is both Sasha's and Janet's "husband"
and vice-versa. Or whatever.
In a saner, more sensible time, antics like those of the Lessins would be
shocking. But in case you haven't noticed, we are not living in sensible times.
The acceptance of same-sex "marriage" has been made possible by a profound shift
in our understanding of marriage. We no longer see marriage as an institution
defined by someone and something other than the couple, like tradition, religion
and even biology.
Instead, marriage is the product of the couple's understanding of their
relationship. It's the product of certain feelings and willingness to make a
public commitment to another person. If these are present, the reasoning goes,
denying people the right to marry because they "happen" to be of the same sex is
arbitrary and unjust.
The problem, as the Lessins and others have noted, is that, given this
reasoning, denying them the right to marry of the basis of the number of
partners is also arbitrary and unjust. The only difference between them and
similarly-situated same-sex couples is Americans' discomfort with the idea.
And as courts never fail to tell us, one man's discomfort is another man's
irrational prejudice. Besides, in a culture like ours, attitudes can change
quickly. If I had told you in 1984 that, by 2009, same-sex "marriage" would be
legal, would you have believed me?
That's why advocates of polyamory emphasize their "commitment" to the other
members of the "triads." The more comfortable people become with these kinds of
arrangements, the closer people like the Lessins come to their stated goal: that
is, in their words, being able to "walk down the street hand in hand in hand in
hand" and also enjoying "all those survivor and visitation rights and tax breaks
and everything like that . . ."
Of course, many advocates of same-sex "marriage" insist that this can't happen.
But if feelings and commitment define a marriage, what's to stop "triads" from
being the "next frontier of nuptials?" Certainly not logical consistency.
As Sasha, Janet, and Shivaya remind us, the reasoning that made same-sex
"marriage" possible goes hand in hand in hand with all sorts of arrangements.
Copyright © 2009 Prison Fellowship. Used with permission.
Dr. Sasha (Alex) and Janet Kira Lessin produce the World Polyamory
Association's annual Harbin Hot Springs CA Polyamory Conference September
11-13,where the polyamorous people meet and celebrate multi-lover relationships.
http://www.worldpolyamoryassociation.com
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World Polyamory Association 
