Cohousing-L Mailing List: Musings on polyamory thread

[Catherine Harper (tylik]

A couple of people have mentioned what a controversy this whole polyamory
thing has stirred up.  Maybe I'm not getting some pertinent posts, maybe
I'm just dense, but it seems to me to have stirred up relatively little.
Perhaps things are rumbling under the surface, perhaps there are some
heavy discussions in private mail.  

When I wrote my rather long winded post, I did so knowing that I wasn't
the only poly person on the list, and knowing that some of the poly folk
were afraid of mentioning the fact here.  I also knew there were some poly
people in various cohousing communities.  I figured that I'd pretty
thoroughly outed myself about the whole thing on this list five years ago
or so, so I was in a good position to speak, where others might not be...
and I'd never been entirely happy with how the last conversation went, so
I was also motivated to.  I kind of wonder now if I said too much, and
shut other people up.

What suprised me was how much private mail I've gotten over the last
couple of days.  Some interesting factoids: there are a lot more poly folk
on the list than I realised.  Oh, we're still probably talking about a
pretty small fraction of list membership, but it was a suprise to me.
There are more poly folk in cohousing communities than I realised.  Most
people seem to be afraid to talk about it in this forum.

(A couple people have asked if there are poly friendly intentional
community forums -- I'm looking around a bit, if anyone else knows of any,
I'd appreciate it if you'd drop me a note.  If there does seem to be a
need in this area, I know some folks who'd probably be happy to host
such....  personally... well, I guess an additional resource might be
useful, but I certainly won't be unsubscribing from this list any time
soon.)

In my experience a lot of people become interested in polyamory for some
of the same reasons people become interested in cohousing -- a sense of
wanting a closer community, an extended family, and so on.  A lot of
people play around with one idea or another for a couple of years, and end
up deciding it's too much trouble to deal with.  Some people stick with
it.  I suspect that if cohousing continues, and polyamory continues, poly
folk will keep showing up in cohousing forums for some time to come. 
(From my vantage point, it seems like the poly community has been slowly
growing for the last several years.  Hard to say if that's true -- there
are certainly more resources available than there once were.) 

                                Catherine