- “Open” relationships and marriages – “committed”
couples who give one another permission to participate in intimate
relationships with others.
- Intentional expanded families (sometimes called
“polyfidelity”), where a group of more-than-two adults decide to consider
themselves a family, and some (or all) of them maintain sexual love
relationships with two or more other family members. Poly families often decide that their
sexual activities should be “kept within the family”, but there also are
provisions for allowing new people to join the family.
- “Intimate networks” where most (or all) parties
regard themselves as “single” and “date” one or more people who also are
open to the idea of polyamory.
- Tribal-family – event/gathering/activity-based
polyamory – sub-groups within shared-interest “communities” who connect
sexually with certain friends at large gatherings of those communities
(e.g., retreats, workshops, summer camps, conventions), but not
necessarily at any other time. The
rationale is that people who share a passion for the common subject matter
/ subculture are their “tribe” or “family”, and that sexual intimacy is a
way to celebrate and/or deepen those bonds. Some committed couples may feel it’s OK
to open the boundaries of their relationship in the particular milieu, but
not all the time or as part of their “everyday lives”.
- “Spontaneity-Oriented, Free-Form (or “Structure
Free”) Polyamory” where individuals have a number of friends who are
occasional lovers. In most of these
friendships, the expectation and sense of “relationship” is much more
diffuse than with monogamy or the first four poly lovestyles described
above. Most of these relationships
function without specific dating schedules or other explicit processes for
building and maintaining intimacy.
The friends spend intimate time together when opportunity allows
and they both are in the mood for one another’s company. A famous quote from the late Katherine
Hepburn may help to articulate this style of polyamory, “Sometimes
I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live
next door and just visit now and then.”
With this style of polyamory, though, the friends/lovers usually
don’t live next door, and there can be a strong emphasis on the “now and
then” qualifier.
- “Passive Polyamory”, where a
“committed” couple deliberately omits any commitment to monogamy from
their agreements, but remain monogamous in practice. People in these relationships are
contented with their monogamous lives, and do not actively seek other
partners. But both people
acknowledge the possibility that they or their spouse could fall in love
with somebody else just in the course of normal living. So, the couple foregoes the rigid
expectation of monogamy, so that each person will have “the space” to
acknowledge and consider outside attractions as honestly as
possible. A number of people with
this arrangement have said that it significantly improves the quality of
their own relationship, because they know they can’t “take each other for
granted” quite so much, and they work much more proactively at building
and maintaining their own intimacy.
And several have commented, “Do we really want to let “sex” be the
only thing that makes our relationship special? So, let’s take sex down from the
pedestal…”
- Some flavors of “swinging” probably qualify as
polyamory, even though a certain number of polyamorists continue to insist
that “swinging” is something different.
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