Stuff You Should Know - Polyamory: When two just won't do

Episode Date: April 7, 2015

In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck dive into the world of polyamory. Turns out polyamorists aren't weirdos and deviants, they're just regular folks looking for love from more than one person. Learn all you ever needed to know about this unique, but not so modern arrangement. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

attention bachelor nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all and now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable

happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. All of our wives and girlfriends are in the next room. All right. How are you doing, man? I'm good. I found this topic to be super interesting and I should say up front that our jokeiness that we always include in every podcast almost

is not meant to be disrespectful to anyone who is in a polyamorous relationship. Yeah. And we're not here to just kind of look at your relationship from the outside and poke at it and make fun of it or light of it. If you're enjoying yourself and everybody's on board and no one's being hurt, then we always say to each his own. That's right. But from the outside, polyamory might seem like a very strange arrangement. Well, I think to most people it seems like swinging. That's right. But it's not. No. It is not a lot of things. It's not cheating. Right. It's not swinging. Right. It's not polygamy. It's not... What was the other one? Well, it's not a lot of things. It's not dentistry. Right. Well, the point is we should stop...

It's not promiscuousness. Right. So what it is actually from... And I had no idea. I think my conception of polyamory was that it was basically kind of swinging and it was based on... I got the root couple thing, but it was mostly like a swinging kind of thing. But from research, I realized I was pretty far off. Yeah. Polyamory is, in a very odd way, a form of monogamy, but that it includes more than two people in this monogamous relationship. Well, not necessarily monogamous either, though. So... Because there can be arrangements where you're allowed to go out and do what you want on weekends with people. So I ran across something that that's technically considered monogamish as Dan Savage coined it. That sounds like a very

new word. It is new. Yeah. I mean, Dan Savage coined it. Yeah. But... Which means that I'm probably not going to put too much greens in it. But in the... From what I understand, and this... I got this from a polyamory site called... More Than Two. More Than Two. Great site. Franklin Vo is how I'm pronouncing his last name, Vo. Yeah. And I'm not kidding when I say it's a great site. If you are interested in exploring polyamory, it's super thorough and very, very helpful, I would think, just by going through it. And the impression that I got from him, from his FAQ, at least, was that it is a... The people in a polyamorous relationship are committed to one another. Yeah, true. And that they're rather in the same way that two people,

a couple, come together to form a monogamous relationship. Yeah. If you take that bubble and add another person or two other people or something like that, but there's still that bubble of monogamy, of commitment, of affection, that is more close to the definition of polyamory. Now, in real life, I'm sure it's different, and that there are different aspects to it or whatever. But supposedly, that's what I gathered. But I think polyamorous couples say, why would you even use a word like monogamy when it means mono? Right. That's the... Poly means more than one. Committed is the word I should use. Yeah, I think that's the trip. And so Dan Savage, come on, monogamish. Yeah. I knew more about this just because there was a

show, I don't know if it was HBO, it was probably Cinemax, that followed some polyamorous relationships. And so I knew that it was not just, hey, it's swinging or hey, I just want an open relationship. It's, you know, I'm in a triad. I've got a man and there's a woman and there's another woman. Or in another case, it was two couples. They all lived together. They were all in a committed relationship with one another. Right. I mean, we'll talk about, there is no standard for a polyamorous relationship. It can really be anything you want that works for you. Sometimes it's bisexual, sometimes it's not. Sometimes the two, it's really, I mean, we could go over a million scenarios. Really good. I was starting to break them all down, but it's like,

you really is whatever you can work out between yourselves is polyamory. But the point is to maybe put it on less fine of a point, but to get a little closer potentially to a correct definition. Polyamory is not monogamy because there's more than two people. Right. And it's not cheating because all of the people involved are on the same page about what they're doing. What they're doing, what their partners are doing, what everybody's doing, everyone's aware and consenting. That's right. So it's between those two things. So this is the opposite of the ESP podcast where apparently we never even said what ESP stood for. Yeah. A couple of people were like, hey, didn't catch what ESP stands for. Can you tell us? And I'm like, go listen again. And then enough people

said it that I was like, oh. Extra sensory perception, by the way. And then we have just now defined polyamory for the last 10 minutes. So I think we're covered. I think we finally landed on it though. Yeah. It's a very fascinating thing. And here's how it works. Well, I think that the let's talk about why people are polyamorous. Right. So people who are polyamorous probably tend to think that monogamy is not for them. And if you're speaking from a like evolutionary perspective, monogamy is kind of a puzzlement. Yeah. Should we talk about that? Yeah. So monogamy looking through the lens of natural selection doesn't make sense evolutionarily because it lowers a male's ability to, it lowers his number of opportunities to carry on his genetic line.

And they're for the species. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And it was long thought by some that it was, monogamy came about so males could assist in the raising of the young. But there are some new theories now that make that seem a little less likely or actually a lot less likely. And ironically, well, not ironically, but coincidentally, they were both published. They were both published around the same time, these two new theories. Right. They came out at the, in enough time to really kind of compete with one another. Yeah. Because you know, when you look around the animal kingdom among non-avian, there are more birds that are supposedly cockroaches that are monogamous. Yeah. But if you rule out the birds and the cockroaches. Well, specifically mammals too.

Yeah. About 5% of the 4,000 mammal species give or take. Only about 5% are monogamous or made for life. Right. And so again, if you are strictly looking at it from the selfish gene theory, like the whole point would be to run around and copulate with as many females as you possibly can so that you can have more and more chances of spreading your genetic line. Yeah. And then, like you said, hence carry on the species. So to not do that, to just couple with one other person and have maybe a few kids rather than 30 with a bunch of different males and females. Right. Again, it doesn't really kind of make sense. So they've tried to explain this and there are some theories like you were saying. One of them is that if you are a rival male, one of the things you

have to do to get with another female, I think that's what biologists call it. Getting with. You have to kill her offspring. Right. Because while she's nursing, she can't ovulate and therefore you can't reproduce with her. That's right. But kill her kids. She's going to stop nursing. She'll be sad. But then you guys can have your own offspring. If you are a male that's staying behind after you reproduce with a female, then you have the chance to defend your offspring from being killed by a rival male. That's right. Explanation from monogamy. Yep. And that was in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and they found that out by studying behaviors of 230 primate species. And they felt so good about it that the guy who ran the study said,

this is it. We now finally know for sure. But that's not necessarily true. Right. Because there's another really great theory where they actually published in the journal Science and Studied 2,500 mammals, which is way more than the other study, Dieter Lucas and Tim Clutenbrock of Cambridge University. And they said, it's really about low density in females. It's that simple. Like when there aren't many females, that's where monogamy happens. Right. When they're spread out because they beat up on each other when they're in the same place, females. That's right. So they have to spread out geographically. Well, if you're a guy who's just running from female to female to female, you don't know what she's doing while you're not around.

So you don't know whether those kids are yours or not. So the best way to make sure that they're your kids is to hang around and be monogamous. That's right. So it's really similar to the other theory. You're staying around to defend the kids. In this one, it's a little less magnanimous. You're staying around to make sure that the female doesn't run around on you. Right. But then I saw a third theory that also makes sense too. And that is that the idea of males staying around to help raise kids was a strategy developed by lesser males in the primate kingdom. So like the alpha male, the top guys, they're having no trouble. They can go wherever they want. They're getting plenty of action. Right. But less nestlings like, hey, I can care for the kids. Exactly. And that that's a

strategy that caught the attention of females who otherwise wouldn't have mated with these guys. Yeah. Because they're less nestling. And instead said, hmm, yeah, he's a dork. I can't stand his bow tie and a short-sleeve shirt. But he does do a pretty good job with the kids. So I'm going to be monogamous with this guy. So three pretty good theories to explain monogamy. None of them hold water for polyamorous. No. And everyone under the age of 35 is now looking up who less nestling is. That was a great reference, man. Thanks. It just popped up. All right. So the benefits, I believe, is what we were talking about before we delved into the theory. And I've always said monogamy, too, is not a natural thing. And that the reward of staying with one person is partly because of

that. Yeah. You know, it's not a natural thing. You sacrifice something in some way by being with someone. But the payoff is rich. That is wise words, Chuck. So we'll see if I end up married in 25 years. I'll confirm all this. Just kidding. Of course I will be. All right. So let's talk about the benefits. It is not just about having sex with more than one person. No, it's definitely part of it. It is part of it. But it is also about support and a greater, you know, it takes a village, they say. So if you have a larger village, then you're going to have more support and care and love and emotional support, all that stuff. Right. Exactly. And it's not a polyamorous relationship or group doesn't necessarily have sex with one another. Everybody sex is a big

component of it. But you also have what are called poly effective relationships. Yeah. We're like, let's say you have what you call it a triad. Is that a poly? A triad is three people. Yeah. Right. But that's what polyamorous call it. Yeah. So let's say you have a triad where neither of the of two women in a guy and neither of the women are bisexual, but they're still in a polyamorous relationship. Yeah. They would be poly effective. Like they have an emotional connection to one another like a couple would, but they're not sexually involved with one another. Right. They're poly effective. Right. That's another component of a polyamorous relationship. So the whole thing is not just satisfying your every sexual need with a bunch of different people. It's also

that I think they believe that you have a lot of different needs that one person can't necessarily satisfy beyond sex as well. It can be cultural interests. It can be pastimes. It can be what have you. And so the idea behind polyamory is you find those people in your life who combined make that single ideal person. Yeah. Rather than placing all that on one single person for better or for worse. Yeah. I looked at an example on the, what was it? Two for one? No. Two or more? More than two. More than two. More than two. More than two. More than two.com. I looked at one. They have a lot of just stories and examples of people like real stories. And this one lady was married to a guy who quite simply was not into a lot of the things she was into.

She was big into the theater, I think, in museums. Her husband didn't like that. They developed into a polyamorous relationship. And she had another man that was really into that stuff, an old high school boyfriend, I think. And he took up with another woman who had similar interests as him. And they all worked it out. And people would say, well, why don't you just leave the husband then who you don't have these things in common with and go with the old high school boyfriend. That's a neat story. She was like, well, because he's really needy. And my husband isn't. And we have a lot of great stuff. So it is literally, like you said, satisfying all my needs through multiple people. Because who can expect one person to be that

soulmate that gives you everything you need? Nice. And these suckers who are in monogamous marriages are just sacrificing certain parts of their life, like going to museums or whatever if it was this lady. So everybody, we're about to satisfy all of your needs with this commercial break. Hey now. Attention, bachelor nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my

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All right. And we're back. So Chuck, we were talking about why people do polyamory, right? Do polyamory. Let's talk about how the polyamory actually works. Yeah. I mean, anyone in a marriage that's, you know, things get more complicated as you get older. So I don't mean to talk down to people in their 20s, but relationships get a little more complicated as you get older and you get more responsibilities. So if you're married and you're in your 30s or 40s or 50s, you know it is or any kind of committed relationship. You know, it's logistically tough sometimes. Well, yeah, because you're like, I want this. And this other person who you share half of your estate with says, no, I want this or I want to do this or I want to do

that or I want a vacation here or there. Exactly. Just keeping up with schedules. It's all very complicated. It's all compromise. It's like there's one big compromise and you're compromising between two people's opinions. Imagine just throwing in one extra opinion that differs from the other two that has equal weight. Exactly. So that's basically what we're getting at is if you think your marriage is complicated, polyamory can be even more complicated. And they admit that it can be more complicated, but they say that, uh, and this is really what I gathered from reading that site in a bunch of articles is that two for one, two for one, you want to meet a great communicator, go talk to someone in a polyamorous relationship. Yeah. So that's one of the

the chief requirements of polyamory. Got to be able to talk about all this stuff. I've seen it put as you have highly evolved communication skills. Yes. I would not be a good polyamorous. Oh, me either. No, man. I wouldn't last two days. No, I stink. I stink at communicating. I think I'm just doing fine. And it turns out, wait, I didn't say that. Chuck, is this bothering you? Well, no. Yeah. But it's really bothering me. Well, that's another thing too. Not only do you have to be a great communicator and get your point across and read other people and listen and that kind of thing, but you also have to be honest about your feelings. And one of the things that polyamorous face, just like anybody else is jealousy. Yeah. We did a pretty good episode on jealousy

a while back. Yeah. Jealous much was the name of it. Yeah. Yeah. With a question mark. Jealous much. Right. Um, and so they deal with jealousy and, and they deal with it apparently, ideally again, this is from more than two.com in a way where it would take a pretty intelligent, calm person to approach the feelings of jealousy like this, which is basically deconstructing it. So the guy at more than two.com kind of gave a good example where he was saying, um, you're in a polyamorous relationship and it bugs you when your spouse kisses their other spouse in front of you. Right. And he, he says the correct thing to do basically here is to stop and say, okay, why does that make me jealous? Right. And if you are honest with yourself, you'll say,

well, it makes me jealous because I worry that the other spouse, and by the way in a polyamorous relationship, the plural of spouse is spiced. Is it really? Yeah. So if you're married to two people, you have two spice, um, which is kind of funny. Sure. You got a spicy, uh, love life. Anyway, when the other spouse, if, if you're worried that your spouse is kissing his other spouse, he's going to think that that spouse is a better kisser than you and think, well, that spouse is, if he's a better kisser, then you, he wants to be with him more than me. And if he wants to be with him more than me, then, uh, he's going to leave me. I think jealousy is often rooted in your own insecurities for sure. Right. So what this guy was saying is if you spell this out,

you realize that there's a lot of hidden assumptions and your jealous feelings and that when you confront them, you will probably discard a lot of them. If you find that, no, this is correct. This person really would leave me because that person's a better kisser. Um, then you would ask yourself, do I want to be with somebody who would leave me because somebody else is a better kisser? Yeah. Um, so if you can approach this kind of stuff in this manner, then maybe you'd be a decent polyamorous. Yeah. Uh, there's a lady named Terry Connelly, a professor of psychology and women's studies at University of Michigan. Uh, go Wolverines. Yeah. And she's go blue. She's one of the, well, not one of the only people,

but there haven't been many studies on polyamory. Um, one reasons is because it's under reported in a lot of cases because people, some people may not like to be, uh, really out front with it. Yeah. And for good reason. Yeah. For very good reasons. But, um, she did some studies and polls and things. And she found that jealousy is in fact, uh, she said, quote, much higher in quote among monogamous pairs than non monogamous ones. And I think for the reasons you just said, um, she also found, um, she interviewed 1700 individuals, poly, um, I'm sorry, monogamous individuals, 150 swingers, 170 people in an open relationship and 300 polyamorous individuals and said that polyamorous tended to have equal

or higher levels of sexual satisfaction. Uh, and people in open relationships tended to have lower sexual satisfaction than their monogamous peers and polyamorous peers. So, and we should say open is not the same as polyamorous. Again, in a polyamorous group, the people in the group form a closed whole. Yeah. In an open relationship, it's like there's two people who are connected, but they're also facing outward and the whole world's up for grabs, basically. Right. In an open relationship, you know, right. It's not. So in a polyamorous is not an open relationship. An open relationship is not polyamorous, but a polyamorous relationship could include swinging from what I understand. Yes. And did you know that swinging apparently

started among World War II Air Force pilots and their families? You knew that? Yeah, because you supposedly, if your, uh, husband died in battle, it was just sort of understood that that woman would then take up with another servicemen, correct? I guess, but with another married servicemen or what? I don't know about that. Well, apparently it started out with like what they called that wife swapping in World War II in the Air Force, like specifically the Air Force, not like, oh, American servicemen, like the Air Force. So I guess they know who it was. I think I've told the story about the Lana Swingers Club was very close to my phone number growing up. And we used to, I was a kid. I had no idea what it meant, of course. And I used to

answer the phone and people would be like, is this the Lana Swingers Club? They'd just be like, my mom would just remember it was so like troublesome to her and she kept the whistle next to the phone and would blow a whistle into it. It's so funny to think about now. Very funny. I still remember that number, too. Do you remember your original phone number? 3829040. 9819019. Nice. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. I'm sorry for anyone who has those numbers today or to the Atlanta Swingers Club, which is still operational, I'm sure. Yeah. All right. Another thing we need to talk about are STIs, sexually transmitted infection. You would think that it would be higher in a polyamorous relationship. And they don't have statistics.

It may or may not be the case. But what they are adamant about is lots of testing and lots of access to those results and being super open about those results, apparently much more so than people in monogamous relationships, like new relationships. They found that people in new monogamous relationships are often very shy about talking about their sexual history and potential infections and things, whereas they're really upfront about it in polyamory. Yeah. And they kind of have to be. And they kind of just make it a normal, open thing. But that's part of that open, honest communication that's kind of a hallmark of polyamory. It has a practical application in defending against STIs. Yeah. There was one study in 2012

in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that found that unfaithful, like cheaters, not like a cheater. You're in a monogamous relationship and you're cheating. Oh, yeah, I saw this. They're much more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior and to keep it a secret than someone in a polyamorous relationship. You go off and you cheat and you keep quiet and you do something super risky, you know, hook up with someone randomly that you don't know. And that's just, that's kind of like the opposite of polyamory from what it sounds like. Right. With polyamory, it's like, okay, it's time for your weekly STD test. Right. I want to see the paper.

And we're not hooking up with some random person there. If there's one thing that there's a lot of in a polyamorous relationship are rules. Yeah. If you haven't picked up on that yet. Yeah. You got to have the ground rules laid down. How much time are you going to spend with this person versus that person all the way down to rules in the bedroom? It sounds a little gross, but fluid swapping is a big deal. So there's a thing, one of the ways they protect against STDs is, well, let's talk about some of the arrangements. Okay. All right. Because I think we need to, because these different rules that we're talking about

here will apply differently to different types of relationships. So obviously there's a triad. You can also have a quad. I can imagine that you could go up to six, eight, whatever. The point is, is when you have a group that are equal to one another, where everybody's equal to one another. Yeah. That's one, that's one form of the polyamorous relationship, right? Yeah. There's another form that's hierarchical, right? Which is based on a core couple that are, are married. Yeah. They would be the primary and then say each of them has a significant other. Yeah. Like a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Those would be the secondaries. And then maybe they have another person that they're, they're close to, they see once in a while, maybe they live out of town, something like that. That would be potentially a tertiary relationship, right? Yeah. Like you break the twister game out and they show up. Right. So the, the, the difference between the two is with the hierarchical relationship, the hierarchical format, the, the person that you're spouse, the core group, the core couple people, they're the ones who are going to get the most time, the most attention. They're going to have more power to say veto the others.

Yeah. Veto is a big deal. Yeah. In a, in the other relationship that forms like a triad or a quad or six people or something like that, where everybody is equally weighted, that's, that, that, that you wouldn't have like a high, there's no hierarchical structure to that. Yeah. And it depends on how you want to structure things. They're both completely valid as polyamorous relationships. It's just, you know, up to you basically. And so you said the veto power is a big deal. Yeah. I think it's always to be honored.

Right. So with, if somebody is, is, is meeting somebody new and wants to date them, they basically have to go to the rest of the group that they're committed to in this committed relationship with and say, I got this person, I'd like to bring them under the group. I don't know this, but I can imagine that is a huge thing, especially in a long established polyamorous relationship. Yeah. You know, like bringing a new person in, I'll bet that would be really big deal. Can you imagine being that dude and showing up? Right.

It's like the worst job interview of all time. Especially if you don't know what's going on. Oh yeah. Plus in the hierarchical structure, then I can imagine the veto power probably just rests with the two core people, maybe slightly in the secondary people. Right. Probably not at all in the tertiary people. Yeah. They're just there for twister.

But with the, the STI thing, if you are what's called body fluid monogamous. Yeah, which I was kind of joking about that. It sounds gross. It's really not at all. That's basically saying that we can have sex with each other without condoms. And I'm sorry. I'm saying you and me. I thought you were talking to somebody behind.

But maybe the secondary and I have to wear condoms and we don't exchange those fluids. So intimately and freely. Or if you're in a group, like everybody in the group might be body fluid monogamous. If they are agreed that they can go outside of the group, they would not be. Or if it's a hierarchical structure, yeah, that primary couple would just be body fluid monogamous and everybody else would be, you'd have to wear condoms. Yeah. Or it may not even involve sex.

Maybe your secondaries or you go on dates with and you can go to first and second base and that's where it ends. It's really all about the people in the relationship working out what works best for them. All right, so let's take a break here and talk more about the polyamory right after this. Okay, Chuck, we're back. One of the things that I found interesting about polyamory was that they had to coin some terms because they were really breaking new ground here in trying things with the relationship.

Yeah, there's a whole glossary at two or more. Spice is the plural of spouse. And then there's a word called compersion that's very much associated with polyamory. And it is basically the mirror image of jealousy. Yeah, it's being super happy that your primary has found someone else that they really love and are satisfied with. Yeah, and not just your primary. Anybody you're polyamorous relationship with.

Yeah, that they've found happiness with somebody else. You're happy for them because of that. Right. So yeah, that's not a normal thing for most people, especially people in traditional monogamous relationships. Yeah. So polyamorous people kind of, I guess, stumbled upon this thing and had to come up with the name for it and they call it compersion.

Yeah, and if you think to yourself as a monogamous person, well, this person goes off, your wife all of a sudden is sleeping with another man. What's to keep her from really falling in love with him to the extent that she no longer wants to be with you? Of course that can happen, but that can happen in your regular marriage as well. And if the only thing that's binding your marriage is that you've got bigger problems in your marriage, if the only thing binding you to that marriage is the marital contract that you feel like you have to stay true to.

Right. You know? Like in a regular marriage, you should want to be with your husband and your wife. Like it doesn't matter what the piece of paper says. Right. I would guess, and again, I don't know. I would guess that polyamorists have some sort of structure or mechanism to deal with that. Like if, especially if there is a, if that happens where somebody starts out as a married

couple, but then they include a third person and become a triad. If one of them really starts to fall for the other one, that doesn't mean that the initial couple is going to break up and that couple is going to split off. That's not polyamory. That's not how it works. So I wonder what kind of mechanism they have to deal with that. Like checks and balances. Yeah.

Yeah. There's got to be something. They did do. There was one study in the electronic journal of human sexuality in 2005 that said polyamorous couples who had been together more than 10 years listed love and connection as the most important factors in their longevity and monogamous couples listed religion and family as the most important reasons. Yeah.

And that's what I was sort of clumsily trying to say. Yeah. The only thing keeping you together is the fact that your husband or wife hasn't slept with someone else. Or your parents are going to be disappointed. Yeah. It's, I mean, those aren't reasons to stay married. Right.

You know. So we already touched on also the idea that if you are in a polyamorous relationship, you, you know, you might not share a lot of interests with your primary, but you've got the ones that your primary is not interested in. You get to share with your secondary or your tertiary or whatever. Right. Right. So just having more people to spend life with, that's another benefit of it. There's a lot of drawbacks to being in a polyamorous relationship that I think any

polyamorous would readily admit as well. Sure. Just being in a quote fringe sexuality, I think. Living your romantic and reproductive life, as we'll talk about in a minute, in complete contrast to societal values is, that's got to be tough. Yeah. And, you know, over the years, acceptance of this has been zilch to- That's good to say.

You better be saying peaked. No, zilch to confusion to these days, a little more open-minded about things. I did see one poll here from, I think it was in April of this year, actually, where they polled about 1,300 heterosexuals on how willing they would be on a scale of one to seven to commit nonmonogamous acts, like adding a third party to the relationship. And depending on the scenario, 16% of women and 31% of men chose four or higher on that scale would ask if they'd be willing to pursue, like try something like that out, basically. So it's...

I wonder what it was before. I don't know. Lower. So did you say before that there was this 2002 survey that found that predicted as much as 10% of people? That's high compared to other studies I've seen. Yeah. I saw, like, at the most, maybe 4%.

Yeah. I can't imagine 10%. There's just no way. Because, I mean, I'm pretty hip. You know, I know what's going on. And I would just be blown away if it turned out that one in 10 people were in a polyamorous relationship and just managed to keep it secret that much. Yeah, I agree.

But secrecy is a big part of this. And that's not to say that shame is a part of a polyamorous relationship. But secrecy is just out of necessity a pretty big aspect of polyamorous relationships, mainly because, like we said, it's in stark contrast to social values. And if you've got a kid, you're at risk of having your kid taken away. Yeah. Plus, I mean, you'd spend half your life explaining this to everybody. Right.

You know, there was the one case and I couldn't find up any follow-up about this young woman. But April, what was her last name? De Vilbus. Yeah. She was on the MTV show in the late 90s and had a child and had two men in her life, a triad. Yeah. And everyone was happy. The kid was healthy and happy.

And everything was great. And the grandmother sued for custody and won it. Yeah. Because the court basically made a moral judgment that this is a depraved lifestyle. Yeah. And this is in spite of the fact that the court sent its own shrinks to go evaluate the home and the family and didn't find that the kids were in anything but a loving, supporting home. Yeah.

And were happy and healthy. Still, it didn't matter because she was living a depraved lifestyle so she lost her kid. I can imagine that in almost any state in the union, you would be at great risk of losing your kid if you came out as a polyamorous family. Yeah, probably. It's one thing I think as far as society goes to be like, okay, you guys just go do your own thing, whatever floats your boat, that's fine. Just keep it out of our faces.

Keep your little polyamorous lifestyle quiet. But if it turns out that there's kids that are being brought into that, like either they already existed or you're having kids with multiple partners in this polyamorous relationship, I think society's threshold for understanding and working the other way really reaches an end for better or for worse. So I think there is a real threat and there's a real threat still in part because there's very little scholarship on the impact that a polyamorous upbringing has on children. Yeah, they don't know.

No, no one knows. Polyamorous will say, look, dude, you have no idea how much our child is loved. My wife loves our kid. I love our kid. Our wife loves our kid. So not only does our kid get to be raised by two loving parents, our kid gets to be raised by three loving parents equally. There's more of a division of labor.

It's just the kid's great. And on the other side, you'll find blog posts by people who are authorities on the other side saying, no, there's just no way because you're at risk of a divorce, but it's a non-traditional divorce. Whereas under a normal divorce, we have a social structure to support kids who are going through that. With this, it's like that doesn't make any sense and the kid's going to have all sorts of issues. And then if you don't tell your kid while you're raising them, when they get to college and figure

out what was going on, they're not going to trust you any longer. But none of this, almost none of it, is based on studies. It's all just moral judgments on one way or the other. Yeah. I think it's pretty funny. I bet the same people that don't think a child should be raised by a single parent also probably think three or more. They're like just two.

Yes. Not one, not three or four or five. Two is perfect. Yeah. So who are polyamorous? Elizabeth Sheff is a sociologist who's done a lot of interviewing and she finds, generally, they are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, generally white and liberal and educated. Many of them are highly educated, master's degrees to the tune of like 40% compared to 8%.

40% master's degrees? Yeah, that's what I saw. Wow. Compared to 8% in the general population. Gotcha. And she says, rarely are they religious, but when they do, it's usually paganism or unitarian universalism. Apparently, there's a lot of overlap with the BDSM and cosplay communities.

And here's another term, hunting the unicorn. Did you come across that? No, I didn't. Now I'm disappointed in myself. That is, she said that a lot of couples are introduced or interested in polyamory by start looking for a woman, bisexual woman, to enter their relationship. So I want to try it. I want two women.

The woman's like, I would like a woman as well. And so let's go out and find that. That's called hunting the unicorn. What else? I got nothing else. I mean, I did look up a little bit of the history of this kind of thing and there was, have you ever heard of the Oneida commune? Yeah, I think we touched upon that in communism.

Oh, really? I think so. Well, they were, it sounds like a cult, but it's super interesting because it was in the 1840s in upstate New York and Oneida, New York, where you usually don't in the 1840s hear about things like free sex and polyamory, but that's exactly what was going on there. A lawyer named John Humphrey Noyes basically started a free love commune in the 1840s in New York. And by some accounts, it was a very feminist group because women were encouraged to only have sex when they wanted to, which, you know, in the 1840s that wasn't the norm.

But it was also, as it turned out, not so great in many ways because they like had sex with teenagers and the more I read about it at first, it sounded like this commune. And then 10 minutes later, I was like, no, this was a cult. Right, gotcha. And it had religious undertones. And the weirdest thing out of all is Oneida silverware that is still popular today. It was formed from that commune. Yeah, I remember hearing it as like some sort of cautionary tale or whatever.

Yeah. And there was only like 300 of them, but apparently they, I think it was all about having lots of kids to keep that commune going was the main reason. But they did not encourage monogamy at all. They shunned it. If you were caught like really rooting down with one person, they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Can't do that.

Go off and have sex with someone else right now. Get your priorities in order. Basically. Get your head together. Yeah, I'm sure there's a documentary on that clan that'd be interesting. I'm sure. Sure. If you want to know more about polyamory and other alternative lifestyles,

you can search those in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Here's some more on tea. Hey guys, listen to tea in a massive tea connoisseur for the last seven years. I was really impressed. I expected to listen and pick out a bunch of little mistakes, but I was pleasantly surprised. However, you guys did leave out what?

I can't wait to skewer them on this one. No, I don't think so. Aaron sounds like a nice dude. You left out one major category of tea though. And it's spelled P-U-E-R-H. Pure air is what I'm going to say. He said it's probably the most unique tea out of the six types. Tome to the Yunnan province of China

is the only tea to be fermented, not oxidized. What this means is that pure air is, and I know that's wrong, is able to be aged for years and years and tastes better as it ages, just like wine and some pure air on the market that several decades old goes for thousands of dollars per disc. Disc? Yes, disc. Traditionally, pure air is stone pressed into a disc form called a bingcha and is sold in that disc form. And it has a forced floor flavor and is brewed at about 205 to 210 degrees Fahrenheit.

I gotta try that stuff. Yeah, it sounds good. He said I could go on and on, but that's the gist. Great job overall, guys. I know it's tough to fit it all in one episode. Tea could easily be its own college class with all the cultural history behind it. Take care. And that is from Aaron Krauss, who's a developer at thesociety.org.

That is T-H-E-S-O-C-I-E-T-E-A.org. Thanks a lot, Aaron. And your cohorts at the society. Sounds neat. It sounds like the one you needed, Cole. Yeah, I like it. Okay, if you want to get in touch with us, you can... Let's see, what can you do, Chuck?

Tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. It's gonna be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about.

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