Today, the Humans are Blank-ogamous series made an appearance on NPR’s Blog “13.7: Cosmos and Culture.” In her post “A Cultural Moment for Polyamory,” friend Barbara King (who has been very kind over the years by sharing my writing on social media), wondered why it is that polyamory and non-monogamy seems to have reached a critical mass.

She asks why is it being seen in so many different places recently? Have we crossed some threshold in society? I’m not sure. I think there is growing acceptance of different arrangements and relationship styles, at least in some corners of the country and the world.

It will be interesting to see how readers will respond to the post. NPR disabled the “comments” feature on their site some time ago because, as seems to be happening everywhere, comments became full of not-very-constructive, angry criticism about virtually everything. From monitoring social media, however, there doesn’t seem to be the reaction I thought there would be. Sometimes these things are crap shoots. Timing matters when a post is published, and maybe we’re all overwhelmed by news from the political world. Perhaps it’s Trump fatigue. Or, maybe polyamory has become mundane, and people aren’t reacting with the same degree disapproval they once did. It’s hard to say.

For my part, I didn’t argue in favor or against non-monogamy. I think it’s probably true that all types of relationships have their own pros and cons. Barbara quoted from a couple of places in the series, where I was basically saying that people are complex. 

In a blog post (one of a series) about humans’ flexible sexual behavior, Clarkin writes:

“In my readings, I noticed that different researchers seemed to arrive at a fairly similar model of erotic relationships, which is that they have three main components: sexual desire, passionate love (aka romantic love or infatuation), and companionate love (aka comfort love or attachment). One model included a fourth piece: mania or obsessive love.

These are among the more powerful of human motivations, but they do not always overlap perfectly, setting up the potential for flexibility as well as for conflict. One reason for this is that the different parts, whatever we want to call them — lust, romance, limerence, companionate love, friendship, commitment — are somewhat biologically distinct, and these can be arranged into different combinations and felt toward different people.”