Suppose I (and my wife) decided after much prayer and discussion that our family would be better with another wife in the picture. We don't live in a state with any noticeable population of polygamous households. How or where do we find like-minded people to even discuss courtships or that sort of thing?
Hi, Edward
I found my family on the Sac-Poly Yahoo group and there are a lot of other sites where you can meet poly-minded people or just chat with them. I am not an expert on poly so I don't want to really say what sites to go to but maybe the people who read my blog have some sites they like and will share?
I liked what you said with: We don't live in a state with any noticeable population of polygamous households.
That because it is probably not true! I had no idea that California had a LOT of poly people until I started looking. Most of the poly people I ran into were not religious or are pagan (their words, not mine) but then some are religious and they really keep it all on the downlow so you don't know they are there. We used to live near Roseville, California and almost none of our neighbors knew we were a poly family.
The Fundamentalist LDS people are in a few states but then I get email from some of them who live in states I don't think most people know about. I won't say where to protect their privacy.
One bit of advice if you want to be left alone is don't call your 2nd wife your wife anywhere in public. She can be a friend who lives with you, your mistress, you can even say she is an ex-wife and no one will ever care. In my house I just say I live here is all and that's all people ask.
Poly is not easy for some people but if your wife is 100% in favor of it I think it is beautiful. You get to have a best friend in the house who knows everything. That is the other thing, if you have any secrets and want to keep them then poly is not for you. Like with us there are three women who really know Steve and we talk and when something is up one of us notices something, another noticed something else, the third noticed something more, and then we talk and put it all together.
I will keep you in my prayers that no matter what you decide to do it is the right thing for you both!
Megan
But a single man seems to have no where to seek poly minded woman/women. Oh, well. . . .
ReplyDeleteI disagree with your comment Megan that a person should not call the 2nd wife "wife" in public. Sure, if you do, you're asking for strange looks and questions, but we have found that if you answer those questions honestly, people usually react in surprisingly positive ways. I never would have agreed to be a 2nd wife if I had planned to be in the closet about it. That would make me feel like what I was doing was wrong. In fact, I would love the chance to challenge any anti-polygamy laws in court. We are non-religious, and a very loving and supportive household that pays taxes (legally!), lives very public and straightforward lives, but choose to support more than one spouse in our home. That's the only difference between our family and other families.
ReplyDeleteThe more we poly people hide in shame, the more shameful we look to others. My family is public and open. (I even write a parenting column in our local metro-daily newspaper.) We have yet to receive any negative responses from anyone who finds out -- except from people who claim to be devout Christians. Other than that, people tend to get over their initial shock that two woman could share a husband without hating each other and without being meek or religiously brainwashed, and after the shock they realize we are the same people they thought we were before they knew the truth. We have lost no friends, and only a handful of family members to this truth -- and those family members are people we didn't really want in our lives anyway.