Did any Poly people watch Louis Theroux last night?

[PolyAnnie]

Just wondering what peiple thought of it as a representation of poly families.

I liked it.

I thought it showcased a lot of happiness and family ties. It showed that kids can be happy within poly families but it also showed the realities of it too. Such as a new person coming in to the fold or one person wanting a different living set up (experienced both)

I liked it because it showed normal poly families through good events and struggling just as all mono couples do too.

I thought it was so said especially the bits with jerry who was obviously miserable and jealous.
Lots of narcissism too.
Not a good advert for that lifestyle.

It made me cry.
Poor Jerry..
Definitely jerry agreed to this as the only way to keep Heidi, ditto gretchen and Joe.
Frankly I think Joe needed a kick up the backside, moping about when Heidi went home.
I thought the point they were all trying to make about the 'left behind' partner getting the benefit of their partner being happier because they have had a sexfest last night with mr/Mrs New rather fell flat when Joe looked fucjed off after Heidi went and both heidi and Joe said basically they wanted more time together ergo the time with their families was actually not happy time for them.
I wish Jerry and gretchen had balls to leave heidi and Joe.
I guess at best gretchen keeps a father for her kids and support in parenting while not having to provide for his sexual needs.. Can't see what Jerry is getting.
Heidi looked unbearably smug

It just reeks of entitlement and insecurity- and a crazy American "I'm such a free spirit" wankfest

I found the Joe pining thing a bit odd too and not exactly portraying what polyamory is about. Surely you would be happy with any of your partners, and just because Heidi went home doesn't mean he is alone. I don't think Joe and Heidi are actually polyamarous as they weren't happy with their original partners and as much as they put on a show for the cameras, it didn't seem like a happy group, especially when there are children involved.

Heidi’s face said it all when it was suggested her husband join in or watch

She looked repulsed

I felt so sorry for him.

It was not reflective of my experience of poly at all... But it's TV, it's meant to be emotive to watch, and tbh our poly isn't very. We do completely boring, ordinary things that people would watch and go 'oh.' rather than investing in storylines.

I'm interested to hear about your experience Rixeria.

Well, we all do quite ordinary things. Could be quite outing so will word carefully, but;
I have a male partner, T, who I have been with since I was in my teens and we have a daughter together. She doesn't know anything about our poly lives because she is a toddler and I don't want to complicate things for her, but maybe when she's older.

I have a girlfriend, K, who lives a train ride away. We meet up on weekends and evenings when schedules allow (she works shifts). Evenings mostly consist of making dinner together & watching a film or playing video games. Sometimes doing crafty bits together if there's a project we want to work on. Depending on T's shifts, either sleep over or not. Sex depends how tired we both are. If doing craft, sending excited pics of project to T or facetiming (she also says hi.)

She also has a girlfriend, so her time is roughly 1/3 with me, 1/3 with other girlfriend, 1/3 alone. We have a group chat and she & other girlfriend share photos of the places they've been together, and vice versa. Other girlfriend not someone I'd necessarily be friends with otherwise, a lot louder than me, but she's nice and we all get on well & sometimes go to events in our mutual interest together. For a particular interest that we all share, we sometimes go out all together including T and our daughter. K works with kids so they get on brilliantly. DD thinks K is just my friend, often asks to see her again.

T works shifts in London, so 3 days a week usually will visit his girlfriend either before or after work, staying over also according to schedules. She's very different to me! Way more assertive. I love what she does for him. She's got a lot more fight in the bedroom (we are also involved in the kink scene) and I know he appreciates having both aspects, someone to wrestle with and someone a little bit softer. I admire her so much, she's an inspiration to me and encouraged me to go for it with my studies & what I could achieve.

I also have an older male partner who I see less frequently due to distance but talk with every day. He never wanted to have a live-in partner and likes his own space. He doesn't like to socialise much, preferring the company of books to people. We talk about art & history a lot- he's an expert on a particular era of history but he just knows so much!- and I value how much he is eager to learn from me, despite being so knowledgeable in this area. I always feel as if I have something to give, as well as so much he gives to me. Sex with him, almost always as I don't visit him as often so it's very much a pouncing on each other when it happens kind of thing. He and T have a very good relationship, because he used to have a hobby-business in the same hobby that T wanted to learn for years before I met Older Boyfriend, so he gives advice on projects for that. DD has never met him, but knows he exists & is my friend. He has no other partners but in his own words was amazed even to have me, and anything more full-time would overwhelm him. He is still very involved with his field of expertise so that takes up a lot of his time.

If you were to film us on a day to day basis, to try and make a show out of it... You'd mostly see us cooking dinner in various formations, having conversations, and doing DIY. It would be really boring.

Rixera gosh it sounds like it's working for you and good for you if so but tbh my first thought was the boring practicalities of life, when you mention DIY and making dinner!

This is pure curiosity so feel free not to answer but I feel buried under life-work myself so when do you and T do school runs, clean the house, declutter, make school lunches, do homework, cook dinner, talk about your pensions, holidays, savings, care of elderly parents, work stuff, career progression, parents evenings, discuss your DD's progress, take her to birthday parties/activities or spend any time together as a family or as a couple? I can barely keep all that together with one partner and kids, let alone if he was away 3 days a week with his girlfriend and you home alone with your DD, and then you (presumably?) the rest of the week a train ride away with your girlfriend with T at home with your daughter? Plus the crafting, mutual interest outings, and the older boyfriend! That seems like a huge amount to juggle, do you have live-in childcare?

As I said, this is just pure curiosity!!

Sorry I missed that your DD is a toddler so I guess how are you planning to handle things like the school runs, activities, that kind of thing. But that makes me wonder even more how your childcare works and how you juggle it all!!

I think part of it might just be from being together a long time, and I have a crappy family so no commitments there, but we all sort of muck in together. Plus DD is thankfully very chilled & relaxed so childcare not too much of a stress. We have a childminder for when I'm working, but otherwise I do the lion's share of the childcare just because I work from home and it's easier.

In return we cook together & clean together as a family when we're all home, and make cooking and cleaning fun one-on-one time with DD when there's just one of us. She is only small so there's still novelty in bubbly washing up & choosing spices to go in dishes.

We keep our spending & saving in line with goals we chose about 3 years ago and check we're on track monthly. We have date night every Friday without fail, usually at home as due to family situation we are often our only childcare, but still dressing up nicely for each other, cooking a fancy dinner (one cooks and the other tidies up so our romantic atmosphere isn't dulled by plastic toys & crap everywhere!) And couples time with no phones unless absolute emergencies. We manage to get childcare from his parents perhaps twice a year so will go out either to an event we like, or to a ballet or something when we get the chance.

Weekends really depend on what's going on. Last weekend I had a date with K in London, so we went to the natural history museum together first, had lunch, met K for tea & cake at 4, then T took sleepy DD home to bed while K and I went to the show. He texted that she was asleep before they'd even got off the train :')

Parents evening 100% depends on T's work, we have our first one coming up (DD just started school) and I'm going to be there but it finishes before he would even be home from work. He was really disappointed though. I do the school runs because I'm here, I'm returning to work outside the home next year so she will be in after school club.

I think because we have so much time outside the home we really value it when we are home, so our DD is very close to both of us, and we fall into routine quite easily. Probably also because we know we have time out of the home. When I'm home alone, I'll do my best to get as much cleaning etc done as possible because I don't want to leave T too much to do when I'm out, and he does the same. Our house is not perfect and was worse when I had a lot of deadlines, but it doesn't feel overwhelming.

(is 3 a toddler? I call it a toddler but she's in nursery)

I found it excruciating to watch. It very much like Heidi wanted to sleep with other people without having the guilt, my husband and I thought she was taking the piss out her poor husband. And as an early years worker I thought that set up was verging on emotional abuse for those poor kids.

Poor Jerry. He looked miserable as sin.

It was weird all round.

auberbene, Gretchen said their two sex drives were mismatched, so having sex with each other exclusively would be more than she would like, less than he would like. i.e. Joe having another partner meant he got as much sex as he wanted/needed WITHOUT her having to have more sex than she'd like to.

Well hats off to you Rix, I always thought that poly lifestyles were only really possible when people were either young and/or childfree and could make the time for a real relationship with multiple partners but sounds like you're making it work for you guys. My two are in primary school and it feels like they take all of my and DH's time and attention just shuttling them around and keeping abreast of all the stuff that needs doing constantly, let alone spending time with each other!

I've always thought poly sounded like rather a good idea, but I'm not sure now.

The appeal - the freedom - is shown as a sham by the tortured expressions of everyone in the documentary. No one's buying the use of faux therapy jargon to avoid answering questions they've asked themselves way before Louis rocked up. Messy - being human gets in the way.

I don't understand why everyone involved is named 'partner'; what's wrong with wife/shag/husband/ONS-at -an-eating-game? Is it a way to try and legitimise a perceived lack of something in the wetup?

Thank you! We are in the minority as most of our people are child free, but K and her other girlfriend - who
have been together for some time- are planning on combining households next year & eventually adopting their own LO if all works out. I'm excited for them and the nice thing about poly is that my DD will then have a sort of ersatz cousin as for now she has no family bonds really. Plus they will have all of our support to count on.

It might help having an only child, or just because my partners have experience with children as Older Boyfriend has a niece & nephew who now have kids of their own and K works with children, but it also feels like I have a whole team of people to ask for emotional backup or practical suggestions with DD if going through a rough phase, or conversely a whole team of people to cheer when she does something well. It was really nice having my phone blow up with loving messages on her first day of nursery! And then at 3:30 when we were home having that same flood of messages asking 'how did she get on?'

Thanks for sharing that, I think I would have preferred to have watched something like that, something 'ordinary' so to speak. Far more interesting.

I haven't watched it, I've found many of Theroux's previous documentaries rather excruciating and tragic to watch.

I've been in both monogamous and polyamorous relationships and I don't think I've felt the need to be anyone's "ultimate partner" since I was a teenager with rather unhealthy ideas about relationships and very low self-esteem that I tried to ignore by being trying to be others' ideal even with dating multiple people. I agree that monogamous relationships can be as healthy or unhealthy as polyamorous ones and probably is more about the people in it than the type of relationship, but polyamory does add complications - people are complicated & the more, the messier it will be - and anyone trying to sell it to others as somehow automatically easier / healthier / more natural / less pressured / psych-jargon that I see in pretty much every polyamorous group I've ever been in and videos I've seen I think might as well wear a red flag as far I'm concerned just as much as someone saying X can't possibly feel Y about Z. Polyamorous is just something - for many reasons - that some people do, build their lives around accommodating that and enjoy, some people do and don't enjoy even when they work hard trying to be accommodating, and some wouldn't touch with a barge pole. I think the first and last groups are equally sensible.

I live in a 3 adult house with 4 kids, I have a good friend who lives with one spouse and their kids & has a boyfriend with kids who has moved in around the corner and they do a lot happily together, I know someone else who seems to collect partners and unhealthily attaches a lot of her self-worth to how many she has. I've been in groups and seen the gamut of happy and ordinary expanded family life to men and women and couples who just seem to treat other people as potential sex toys or something one might have on a shopping list that needs to do and be X, Y and Z with no questions to the people who treat polyamory as ideological concept that anyone who doesn't follow to a T is wrong. I don't think any documentary is really going to cover that gamut very well, they tend to focus more on the ideologues than anyone else which is a shame but they tend to have more tension for TV ratings than anyone else.

Very sad way to live, really damaged women to accept this way of life.

I found the whole thing utterly depressing, nobody seemed happy at all, or if they did it was because they were the one holding all the cards!

@FuzzyShadowChatter well put :)

I had two thoughts after watching this episode..

Firstly, in each case there was someone who was clearly not happy with the set up but would rather stick with their partner and endure the situation rather than lose them altogether.

Then.. it seems these days that so many people date multiple partners at the same time, or cheat and their partners don't care/protest for whatever reason.. that polygamy doesn't even seem that unusual anyway.

I love LT but don't know how he endures some of the situations/people he encounters. Makes fascinating TV though.

Also Joe and Heidi were engaged?
What's the point of that?

I got the distinct impression that the ideal solution for Joe and Heidi was for Gretchen to leave him and she would then leave Jerry, and that neither of them really wanted poly at all, but they wanted to be sure they would have an ideal set up and no custody disputes