Polyamorous Percolations
Their household, in a quiet neighbourhood on the outskirts of San Francisco, looks like any other. A little boy in pyjamas answers the door when I knock, smiling around a large strawberry stuck in his mouth. His mother Heather, an artist with oval glasses and pink hair, is cooking in the kitchen with her boyfriend Gordon, a computer-network engineer with an understated manner. The dining room is pleasant, airy and smells of roasting chicken. Heather's husband Jim, along with housemates Noemi and Alicia, are bustling about the table, opening wine, putting out place settings and making sure Heather and Jim's son (the strawberry eater) brushes his teeth before going to bed. Noemi, a park ranger who is pregnant with Jim's second child, offers me some bread and cheese.
The group's network of relationships is fairly typical in polyamorous circles, where it's not unusual to hear somebody introduce a "husband's girlfriend" or "my wife and her boyfriends". Noemi does her best to explain the history of the family, but it sounds like a logic puzzle. "If you really want to understand all of our relationships, it might be easier if we drew you a chart," says Heather (see Diagram). "I'm not dating any of them," says Alicia, a librarian. "My boyfriend is poly, so I guess I'm poly by association."
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