Thruple Scheduling
I’d never before felt so old as when I first saw Earl Sweatshirt’s debut video in 2011. Everything I knew of youth culture up until that moment had some reference point from my own experience to aid in sense-making, something around which I could wrap my grip and keep one foot in the game. But this was a watershed moment, a Rubicon to have crossed, a spacecraft from which to accidentally untether during routine exterior maintenance. It was as if seeing the Pinta and Santa María from the seashore having never before seen a ship, etc.
That was the benchmark for feeling old until my Brooklyn neighbor told me she was raising a child in a thruple. Suddenly making sense of when rap had become avant-garde to me was lightweight by comparison.
For fear of seeming the least bit Victorian, I stymied the flood of questions (How will the child address each of you? Who has sex with whom? Is the rent divided evenly?), moved upstate and summarily forgot all about it…
…Until this week’s episode of Sing For Science when I got to chat with Donnie Darko lead and singer-songwriter Jena Malone about polyamory alongside an expert who studies it. Dr. Amy Moors is a psychologist at Chapman University where she studies the evolving modalities of romantic relationships and how they’re perceived.
Jena’s journey with polyamory was inspired, at least in part, by her beginning to scrutinize our cultural hierarchy of relationships, where a monogamous marriage sits at the top and all else below. She shared with us a profound insight: “After the birth of my son I realized I’d never love another person as much as I love him.”
Jena points out that society exerts pressure on us to find one partner who can be our friend, lover, caregiver, co-parent, cheerleader, and everything else besides, while all other relationships take a backseat. Her lyric, I want to take the society out of you, she said, is perhaps the most loving thing a person could say to her.
Social constructs be damned, Dr. Moors pointed out that polyamorous or consensually non-monogamous people can experience something called compersion, where one person experiences joy from the fulfillment of their partner’s desires with another person.
Unable to wrap my head around the concept I found myself yet again without a map and took on the mantle of token fuddy-duddy when I offered up that it’s hard enough to maintain one relationship, let alone multiple.
Pressing further, I wanted answers to my aging questions about how a thruple might actually schedule their time with one another - Going on the math alone it’s at least 4x more complicated if not exponentially so. Amy responded: “A lot of people are not necessarily trying to replicate monogamy, …people who practice polyamory tend to be emotionally, sexually and romantically close to multiple people. …it’s a lot of communication around what they want and kind of making what lives in our head…reality and…amending things as you go on.”
But I needed more so turned to the robot with as plausible a hypothetical as I could come up with where I live:
