You can chalk this up as another example of established traditions and norms going out the window as we plunge deeper into the insanity of the 21st century. There is an increasing amount of buzz going around suggesting that traditional two-person couples, including those in wedlock, are falling out of favor. More young people are delving into the world of polyamory where three or more people are in a relationship. This takes us into the territory of “throuples” and “quads.” At the New Yorker, Jennifer Wilson reviews a number of movies, television shows, and books that deal with the subject and explores ideas of how this trend wound up picking up steam. If you’re like me, though, you’re probably taking all of this in and asking yourself what the heck is wrong with these people.
A brief scan of popular culture will tell you that Tom, save for his critique of laissez-faire capitalism, is behind the times. Marriage has been drafty lately. Everywhere you turn, the door couples close behind them when they enter the sanctum of matrimony is being left ajar. Bored with the old-fashioned affair, prestige TV has traded in adultery for a newer, younger model, mining open relationships for drama. In fiction, consensual non-monogamy has appeared in a spate of recent books, including “Luster” (2020), by Raven Leilani, “Acts of Service” (2022), by Lillian Fishman, and Maggie Millner’s “Couplets” (2023), a novel whose title plays with the overlapping nature of coupledom among polyamorous young Brooklynites.
In cinema, the couple has been made passé by the au-courant throuple, with films like “Passages” (2023) and next year’s “Challengers” chasing the thrill of the third. In March of 2023, Gucci premièred a perfume ad featuring Julia Garner, Elliot Page, and A$AP Rocky all staring amorously into one another’s eyes to the fifties doo-wop tune “Life Is But a Dream.”
Here is the Gucci advertisement referenced in the excerpt above featuring Julia Garner, Elliot Page, and A$AP Rocky. It’s seriously difficult to tell who are supposed to be the men and who are the women in this advertisement, and frankly it just gave me the creeps.
These “plural relationships” used to be the exception and fell well outside of conventional marriages and relationships. It seems like there was a reason for that. It’s tough enough to make a marriage work with just two of you sometimes. Adding another person into the mix only complicates matters further. It also opens the door to jealousy rearing its ugly, green head if one person is lavishing more attention on one partner than the other.
But binary marriages being the norm is also more of a recent development. Plural marriages have been with us for all of recorded history. King David of biblical fame was said to have had eight wives. And he couldn’t hold a candle to Solomon who reportedly had 700 wives and 300 consorts. Mormons of the FLDS Church have been practicing polygamy since the beginning, even with it being outlawed in the United States.
One thing to note when looking over these historical records is the fact that it’s almost (but not entirely) always one man marrying multiple women. From a strictly evolutionary perspective, that probably makes sense. One man with ten women can produce ten children per year on average. But one woman with ten men will still only produce one unless she has twins or triplets. That was an important consideration in olden times when people were trying to expand their populations and grow their churches.
In the modern era in the United States, bigamy is technically still illegal in most cases, but it’s rarely prosecuted. And that’s only if you go through the formal steps of obtaining a marriage license and engaging in a ceremony. Many of the younger people being discussed in the linked article don’t bother with such formalities. They simply hook up in groups of three or more and set up housekeeping. Personally, I’ve never believed that the government should be in the business of regulating marriage, so if that’s what some people want to do and they can manage to make it work, I say good for them.
But it’s a personal choice for everyone and I can’t escape the feeling that building a lifetime relationship with more than one person is simply wrong. People grow up dreaming of meeting “the love of their life,” not the “loves.” Or at least that’s how it seemed in the world where I grew up. The idea of being part of a “throuple” just seems entirely offputting to me. Speaking from the perspective of a straight male, the idea of another man in the relationship is immediately unacceptable. And while some might find the prospect of a second woman exciting, it just sounds like far more work than I’d be able to keep up with. And what if the other two partners aren’t at least bisexual? We’re not looking at an equal “division of labor” scenario here and somebody is bound to feel left out at least some of the time.
I’m probably just too old and stuck in my ways to wrap my head around something like this. Perhaps the younger people in the audience see it differently. But I still maintain that this doesn’t seem like a societally healthy trend in my opinion.
