Polyamory is more widespread than you’d expect and often it has nothing to do with cults or religion

THE Hill-Thompsons* are like any other young family expecting their first baby.

They’re buying maternity clobber on eBay, weeping during ultrasounds and giggling when the malapropistic midwife leading their prenatal classes advises them to gouge their birth companions carefully.

There is, however, one thing about the Hill-Thompsons that makes them a little unusual: there are three of them.

Mari (a 33-year-old student doing her second degree), Sara (a 32-year-old uni lecturer) and David (a 35-year-old IT geek) have been a sexually monogamous, three-way unit for six years.

They are not religious, they’re not cult members and they’re not even that into group sex.

They just happened to all fall in love with each other at roughly the same time.

For the most part, the Brisbane trio have kept the details of their polyamorous private life to themselves. But they are slowly coming out of the closet now Mari is eight months up the duff. Sara is also hoping to conceive in the not-too-distant future.

Telling people about their super-sized relationship is complicated by a lack of unloaded language options. Threesome sounds too sexy and there is no triplicate version of the word couple.

“Usually we just tell people there are three of us,” Mari says. “But polyfidelitous might be the best technical term.”

Polyamory, also known as ethical non-monogamy, is billed by many activists as the new gay; the next sexual revolution. It’s separate from swinging, in that (as the Latin root suggests) emotion is involved. Its also very different to religious polygamy such as that portrayed on the HBO TV show Big Love.

In short: more than two people, more than just sex, God optional.

Books, blogs and academic research into the practice are all rising, as is the predictable outrage from traditionalists and even from some non-traditionalists who say the trend muddies the gay marriage debate.

While a common joke is that the complexities of poly relationships leave little time for activism, in Canada on Monday the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association will begin fighting for group marriage rights in that nation’s supreme court.

“What they plan to say,” the Vancouver Sun has written, “is that polyamory is a more highly evolved form of family-conjugal relationship that is beneficial to all of its participants; the way of the future, if you will.”

The CPAA contends that at least two million Canadians live in polyamorous relationships, many belonging to what is known as the friends with benefits category.

It’s hard to know the number of polyamorists in Australia because for some reason the question isn’t asked on the census. There is, however, at least one in Britain.

Actress Tilda Swinton, 50, shares a house with playwright John Byrne, the 70-year-old father of her twins. Her other companion is 32-year-old Sandro Kopp, an artist she met while filming The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Kopp had a small role as a centaur.

“The arrangement is just so sane,’ Swinton has said. “John and I live here with our children, and Sandro is sometimes here with us, and we travel the world together. We are all a family.”

Byrne agrees, saying of Kopp: “We all love him dearly.”

Given the ubiquity of cheating spouses (there are now commercial websites devoted to facilitating marital infidelity), it seems grossly hypocritical to judge those who are open and ethical about having more than one lover.

But Mari, Sara and David endure way more than their fair share of rude and weird reactions. Their jog-as-a-family neighbours won’t wave back to them and Sara’s mum thinks she is some kind of insatiable, nymphomaniac adulteress.

“But dammit, we’re not freaks!” Sara says. “We’re not hurting anyone. And we have three earners, three minds to think through situations and now three people to care for a baby.”

The story of how the Hill-Thompsons came to be the Hill-Thompsons is long, complicated and, at times, tragic.

Mari and David are high school sweethearts who have been together for 16 years and married in 1999.

“My only other relationships were crushes on girls in my childhood,” David says. “I had never have thought I would find myself in a permanent three-way relationship until it happened.”

Mari and Sara bonded as friends in the late 90s after Mari was raped. Sara then ended up in an abusive marriage in Colombia before visiting Mari and David in Brisbane in 2004. She and Mari got together within days. Then things progressed.

“David found the term polyamory online,” Mari recalls. “I was really relieved to discover that there were other people who had found they could love more than one person at once.

“Sara had asked me lots of questions that I felt were very scientific: I had just wanted her to say she felt the same, and to kiss me!”

Six years later, negotiating life together still involves tricky logistics and sleep rosters. In the early days, they slept in a queen and a single bed pushed together with a lumpy piece of foam filling the gap and a couple of stitched-together sheets on top. Now they take it turns to sleep in twos, only slumbering altogether (sideways in a king-sized bed) a few times a week (pregnant bellies permitting).

“Our schedule has changed over the years and I am sure it will continue to change,” Mari says. “We also alter the sleeping rotation if anyone is likely to feel particularly lonely sleeping by themselves for whatever reason.”

As for sex, the gang tend to avoid the three musketeers approach in this domain, too.

“It takes a lot of brainpower to think about three people’s sexual pleasure and emotional states at once,” Sara says. “Having to think that hard makes sex difficult.”

Another intriguing aspect of the arrangement is Mari and Sara’s status as committed feminists. It certainly confounds assumptions that they are the hapless members of some sort of harem. After all, while some chauvinist types might think David is fortunate to share his life with two women, others might regard living with two feminists as involving two too many.

Life, meanwhile, goes on.

The triumvirate is attending hypnobirthing classes, negotiating who will stay home and who will work, and reading a book called Psycho Kitty in the hope of making their crazed cat baby-friendly.

And as they count down the days until the birth of little Kate next month, they are convinced that any stigma their daughter faces in the community will be well and truly countered by the 50 per cent increase in the usual loving parenthood quotient she will have at home.

Source: theaustralian.com.au