I suppose, given Americans’ fondness for postmodern taboo-breaking, it was inevitable that polyamory would go mainstream. Recently, it’s been the subject of lifestyle articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, The New Yorker, and More, a buzzy memoir by Park Slope wife and mother, Molly Roden Winter. Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline, came out of the closet in Vanity Fair, raving about polyamory as a “creative and expansive way of loving … about deep connection, committed partnerships, reliable family, and supportive community,” and Tik Tok is crowded with posts by young poly folk. In fact, according to a 2023 Pew Research study, the majority of Gen Z-ers have given the practice a Good Housekeeping seal of approval: 51% of adults younger than 30 agree that open marriage is cool. The dating apps Feeld and Ok Cupid have introduced non-monogamy into their filtering systems; can other dating sites be far behind?
Plenty of skeptics have piled on since the media has taken up polyamory. They point out the undeniable truth that our species has shown a marked talent for jealousy, distractibility, egotism, STD’s, and unplanned pregnancies. How could a creed that endorses multiple concurrent sexual partners not aggravate all of those problems, leading to more divorce, separation, single-parent households, damaged children, and heartbreak? Well, it can’t, but the normalization of polyamory probably won’t affect everyone equally. It will likely conform to the old saying, “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”
In fact, the polyamory craze is a textbook example of what Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs.” Henderson has particular insight into this polyamory moment, not because he claims direct experience of the practice but because of his miserably chaotic childhood. Now a Ph.D student in psychology at Cambridge, and a popular Substacker, he is the author of the forthcoming memoir Troubled. In it, he chronicles how his father disappeared before he was born and how child welfare authorities took him from his drug-addicted mother when he was three. Over the next years, he cycled through multiple foster homes until he was finally adopted by a couple in a down-and-out rural California community called Red Bluff. A year later, Henderson’s adoptive parents split up. He had a few years of stability with his adopted mother and her female partner, but then their relationship fell apart too. Some of his friends in Red Bluff lived in similarly tumultuous circumstances. They landed in jail, dead, or chronically stoned, but for a variety of reasons—luck, impressive but underdeveloped cognitive gifts—he escaped that fate. Rob enlisted in the Marines, and from there, went on to get a BA from Yale.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies
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Kay S. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. She is the author of several books, most recently The New Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter here.
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