[UUPoly-L] Blogging

[alan7388@comcast.net]

> At the moment I am feeling overwhelmed by  
> the torrent of blog posts....

Jasmine, if you post the URLs of the blog sites, I'll be happy to wade in and help carry the load.

I just posted the following on LivelyTradition, responding to the latest by Rev. Tom Schade. (It turns out his church is just a 50-minute drive from me. Maybe I'll show up there some Sunday!)

-- Alan

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<i>"what if everybody did it?"</i>

    Tom, you KNOW this question is valid in some realms and ridiculous in others. For instance:

    What if everybody had only gay sex? The human race would fail to reproduce and go extinct. Does this mean nobody should be gay?

    Suppose every writer wrote only detective stories. Nothing else would be written and culture would collapse. Does this mean nobody should write detective stories?

    "What if everyone did it" applies to unethical behavior -- NOT to diverse behavior. Polyamory, done right, is highly ethical.

    And in such cases (I know may) the enlarged household is quite good for the kids. In one case, with twins in preschool, the kids expressed sorrow for their deprived friends who don't have both a Mom and a Mumsy. In that household, Mumsy is older and people not in the know assume she is the live-in aunt or grandmother. Such people have remarked to them how lucky the kids are to live in an "old fashioned" extended family.

    Personally, after years of consideration, my guess is that in 50 or 100 years when polyamory is widely considered a normal and legitimate way of life, about 10% of people will choose some form of it long-term, if only because monogamy is simpler. You see the trend already: vees are more common than equilateral triads, which are more common that quads, which are more common than quints. The more complex the relationship, the less frequently it occurs.

    But does this mean that nobody should have a complex relationship?

    Actually, if (nearly) everybody did do it, I like to think we'd have something like Robert Heinlein's vigorous society of the 44th century, which calls our era the Dark Ages. (Yes, I know science fiction is fiction... just like Ayn Rand's....)

    Cheers--

    Alan, member of UUPA (www.uupa.org)