Title says it all.
In the United States, there is a television show called "Sister Wives"
It is about a man who has four wives and 16 children between all the wives.
The first three wives live with the husband in a home that divided into separate
apartment type living quarters for each wife and her biological children.
(I said biological because all the wives claim all the children as their children)...
and since there was no more room in the home, the newest wife and her children
have a house that is just blocks away from the main home.
Do you think polygamous marriages can actually ever work???
I don't know that polyamorous marriages are ever either entirely stable or fertile for cultivating healthy relationships.
But I also don't know why that means they should be illegal.
When it comes down to it, I really don't believe that very many aspects of the sexual or romantic relationships of consenting adults should be subject to governmental interference. Just because I don't find it appealing is not a good enough reason why you should be prohibited from doing it.
I think that in the past, most societies tolerant of polygamy were simply androcentric: men had power, women didn't, thus men could be permitted relationships with multiple female partners. It was not really polygamy so much as polygyny. If we were going to legalize it today, we'd have to do it egalitarian. Men could have multiple wives, women could have multiple husbands, and both could be true at the same time.
I think that the resultant experiments would largely serve to highlight the failure of overweening polygamous ambition. The simple truth is that we seek not only sex in marriage, but intimacy. And true intimacy is hard enough to cultivate between two people: between three or four it would be exceedingly difficult. Between five or six or more, it would be next to impossible, and almost surely result in chaos. In part, I don't see much harm in it being legal because, with the exception of Mormons and other religions that contextualize polygamy, and almost always androcentrically confine it back to mere polygyny, I would wager that most polygamous marriages would involve no more than three or four partners, which to my mind isn't really too far off from two partners, anyhow. I would also wager that polygamous marriages outside a rigorous religious context would probably be just as failure-ridden as regular monogamous marriages in the United States are, if not more so. And I just doubt whether polygamy would ever be truly mainstreamed.
Human beings have innate tendencies to sexual jealousy. Sure, with work and care, those tendencies can be overcome; but most people don't do the work and put in the care. And occasionally you'll find people who just naturally lack those tendencies, but they're quite rare (I have met a fair number of folks who claim to lack those tendencies, and all but one or two proved, ultimately, to be kidding themselves). When attempted as a real relationship dynamic, with truly egalitarian openness, I doubt the success rate would be more than one or two percent.
But none of that means it should be illegal. "Emotionally unhealthy" doesn't warrant criminalization, nor does "recklessly unwise." It's a free country, and we need to emphasize that. And this government, and these courts, and these law enforcement agencies, all have far better uses for their time and resources than being the zipper patrol, and checking in on whose hootie-hoo is being put into whose woo-hah, and where, and with whom.
If people are really interested in trying to marry in groups, let them go ahead and try to make it work, and in the meantime, why can't we as a society focus on some stuff that actually matters?
