the best position is 5th wife... huh, the more you know. :P

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I was flipping through channels last night & stumbled across a Dawn Porter documentary on TLC. It was the Polygamist's Wife episode of Dawn Porter: Extreme Wife. (TLC has renamed the series Forbidden Love, but I like the original name better

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Sometimes I think that polygamy gets a bad rap because the only exposure most people have to it is through the news stories about the more cult-like group. I think that anything can be 'bad' if taken to the extreme. There are unfortunately quite a few of heterosexual monogamous relationships that are rooted in male dominance & statoury rape, other religions besides Fundamentalist Mormonism engage in child abuse, & anyways I just think it's wrong to condemn an entire movement for the actions for individual members.

Maneuvering is right! It was fascinating to hear about how different families worked out 'sleep' schedules & how the wives dealt with jealousy and what was expected of them. I do wish the wives had more freedom; it was depressing to hear from a First Wife who talked about how she had lived with resentment of the Second & Third Wives for over a decade before she realised that they made her family better for their involvement.

It's an interesting twist on marriage too. For most people, marriage is a commitment between two people for the rest of their life. If you engage in polygamy, that commitment will either exist for a period of time until your partner makes another commitment with someone else or, in the case of non-First Wives, you never have that person to yourself at all. Some people can be happy with just a fraction of their partner, and some can't.