Polygomy
Read an article about some dude who started a polygamous dating website. Had some good points, but somehow let his muslim faith tarnish the whole thing. Talked about being rewarded by his god in the afterlife for doing good.. Women being less sexually active than men.. etc.. while possibly true, not really what made me think.
While his website was aimed at getting multiple wives for males, and making the whole thing seem slave-esque i will say. Lets think about this a bit more openly.
Lets take the situation closes to his. 1 man, 2 wives. I guess according to him the man should go make money while the women stay at home. But in our world, a man can work from home. I mean i could work from home support 2 wives and kids. What if the women also worked from home. Graphic designers freelance writers etc.. what if the man was having a bad year.. and all the money was coming from the women? Is this still his “god-approved” kinda relationship? The reason this all sounds weird, is because we are still using these outdated and very mysogynistic terms such as “wife” and “husband”. Lets rephrase this. A guy and 2 girls share a flat. They get along well and all have jobs and generally have a very family like atmosphere, cooking together, supporting each other emotionally etc. Now lets say one day one of the girls gets pregnant. It is possible that it was the guy, but they aren’t in a relationship, she dates other guys, and its possible its not his. He knows it, she knows everyone knows it. And to drive the point home, lets say the other potential father was foreign and a one night stand and there is no way of tracking him down. The guy being a good friend and genuinely caring about the girl offers to help her raise the kid, not wanting to leave a friend in shit all by her self. She has a promising career and couldn’t possibly do both. The other girl also living there also offers to help for much the same reasons, but also because she doesn’t have as much of a promising career, her work is more sporadic and artistic in nature, and she loves kids. And she offers to spend time with the kid too maybe in exchange for the mother, who has a solid career taking care of living expenses etc.. . And now you effectively have a polygamous relationship, however without the slave-esque approach outline by our muslim brother. This is just a group of people who are raising more humans together, that get along, no one is forced to do it, there are no binding contracts before god, its just people helping each other out and doing the best they can. You might ask, ”but what about sex?”, well what about it? They are free to have sex with each other or anyone else they see fit. Use condoms, take birth control pills.
The issues that come to mind first are, what about when they decide they no longer want to live together? What about custody of the child? What if one of them just keeps getting pregnant? What if one of them becomes impossible to live with? can he/she get voted off the island?
And then we move to the relationship of one woman and 2 men. What is the power dynamic like? You see how just those 2 sentences made you think of a relationship with 2 men competing for the love of one woman? Whereas in the passage above, you at no point even thought of the other girl sleeping with the guy or trying to impress him. You see how framing this as a relationship makes the whole thing ridiculous and mean, and “what does he/she get out of it?”
A group of people who complete each other, who get along, who can be honest with each other from the start, who are not trying to trick the other one into marrying them, but who simply live together because they care about one another is the answer. the issue is the whole institution of marriage. It skews everything into some bizarre mess of obligations and debts to one another that are completely unnecessary.
People get divorced and have ugly custody battles because they are always lieing to each other, probably from the very start. If you’re honest and open about your intentions and fears and desires, then you can find someone who accepts you with those fears, desires and intentions maybe its one person, maybe its more, it really doesn’t matter. The problem isn’t the amount of people the problem is the institution that forces you belong to someone else.
