A brief scan of popular culture will tell you that Tom, save for his critique of laissez-faire capitalism, is behind the times. Marriage has been drafty lately. Everywhere you turn, the door couples close behind them when they enter the sanctum of matrimony is being left ajar. Bored with the old-fashioned affair, prestige TV has traded in adultery for a newer, younger model, mining open relationships for drama.
What are all these open couples, throuples, and polycules suddenly doing in the culture, besides one another? To some extent, art is catching up with life. In the latest season, Ethan Will Sharpe and Harper Aubrey Plaza are an attractive young couple stuck in a sexless marriageβuntil, that is, they go on vacation with the monogamish Cameron Theo James and Daphne Meghann Fahy. After Cameron and Harper have some unaccounted-for time together in a hotel room, Ethan tracks down an unbothered Daphne, lounging on the beach, to share his suspicion that something has happened between their spouses.
That night Ethan and Harper have sex, the wounds of their marriage having been healed by a little something on the side. These shows, with their well-off couples ready to experiment with open relationships as a marital pick-me-up, depict the surprising fate of a radical social proposal.
Non-monogamy, once the province of utopian communities like Oneida, which maligned matrimony as just another form of private ownership, is increasingly being presented not as a threat to bourgeois marriage but, rather, as a way to save the institution and all that it affords.
Gleason, offers some explanations for how this came to be the state of our affairs. Gleason argues, persuasively, that contemporary polyamory as a set of ideas and practices was articulated by the kind of free-love advocates best positioned to survive conservative backlash in the nineteen-eighties. These tended to be socially liberal fiscal conservatives who wanted love to be as free as the market.
