Every new season of “The Great British Bake Off,” I prepare myself for surprising moments but they typically involve a sugar dome collapsing or someone’s ganache seizing. This season already brought a “make an American-style cookie” challenge where I had to google “what do British people consider an American-style cookie?” just to attempt to make sense of what I was seeing on screen. (Answer: larger and softer than a traditional biscuit in the UK.) Regardless, I certainly didn’t expect to watch Gabe, a fabulous and talented contestant, explain what a throuple was to Paul Hollywood and have Paul compare it to being married while also having an on-screen partner (the thought of which visibly repulsed Nigella).
I just don’t see how it works; I barely like Jeff every single day and the idea of finding another person to tolerate in addition to him seems impossible (or such was my experience on OkCupid in 2011). Then two years ago, The New York Times had a whole piece on a 20-person polycule and it became even less appealing to me. The article described balancing 20 individual adults plus children, multiple permutations of relationships, enough new labels for a whole glossary of terms, and three houses with various shared calendars.
I love logistics and planning and calendars and that sounds like an absolute nightmare. Planning around the custody of my kids was one thing but I can’t imagine having to negotiate custody of my spouse plus where we’ll live and when. It’s like one of those grid logic puzzles from Games magazine but the stakes are higher and also your husband is sleeping with other people. Someone in the group bragged about how it was all female-run, but, I mean, no shit, it’s managing multiple shared calendars and three households.
To be clear, I don’t have a problem with consenting adults arranging their relationships however makes them happy, it’s just very hard for me to see how this could work for me. And, clearly others agree, as, much like I’ve never received any invites to Burning Man, no one has asked me to join their polycule. As a result, I’m spared the logistical overhead, the complex relationship dynamics, and the hierarchy, or lack of one.
Except I accidentally volunteered myself for the hardest version. I didn’t join a couple; I joined a family that had been running (albeit not that well) long before I showed up, and whose best stories had already been told.
According to my cursory research in the world of polyamory, an established couple adding a third tends to end in power imbalances and fail more often, while groups that last usually form organically. A La Trobe University study published just last month found that couples who search for a third person, or unicorn, to join them often grow closer through the search and then end up overlooking the needs of the newcomers (which any longtime viewer of “Sister Wives” could have told you without a psychology degree).
A stepfamily has no ability to form organically, because by definition there is always an established family unit with years of history and then there is the newbie. I opted into the structure experts say has a lower success rate. One of Jeff’s ex’s more complimentary insults for me ages ago was “unicorn princess [expletive that I don’t want to quote]” — so maybe she knew exactly how this was going to unfold.
With all the different ages, comings, and goings, our family has never operated as one constant group. Both of the younger two moved in with us within a year of Oldest leaving for college, so we always had a very different relationship with Oldest. The other two kids were with us all the time while she was across the country except for holidays.
Those dynamics made building ties for the future tough but outside of that we also lacked a shared history. While I’m aware of that academically, at no time was it more apparent to me than on Father’s Day this year when we had all three kids together. It started with Youngest pulling up a list of questions she found online that everyone should ask their fathers — except most of them were for their dad to reflect fondly on and share stories of the good old days. Even when Jeff attempts to share a happy memory, it always feels like I’m watching a black and white film reel with Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings playing in the background.
We quickly moved to everyone telling their own stories about happy memories with their dad. Approximately 95% of them were about playing video games and 100% of them were from before I entered the picture, 12 years ago. My ability to stay engaged in a conversation about people watching someone else play Halo in the early 2000s wasn’t even there when it was the early 2000s so it didn’t take much for Oldest to notice I was drifting. She tried to transition to more recent stories of trips and travel and weird ways we attempted to stay connected in Covid. I was grateful for the pity and kind of proud she knew to steer the conversation that way.
Gabe and their partners call themselves a boy band, but unfortunately, “Bake Off” only allowed one “loved one” per contestant to join them on the episode. Gabe picked (hopefully based on baking abilities and not love) just one of the band to participate and left the other at home.
I still don’t want to join a polycule — and, for the record, no one’s asked. With all the kids out of the house, Jeff and I are very very comfortable keeping our band a duo.
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