Comments | baratron: this is not my beautiful life, this is not my beautiful wife

baratron

this is not my beautiful life, this is not my beautiful wife

Jul 04, 2006 16:25

From yesterday's Evening Standard, a review of the tv programme "Big Love" by Terry Ramsey:

As if life for Mormon polygamist Bill Henrickson wasn't complicated enough - with three wives to keep happy - tonight things get even more complex when he starts up an illicit relationship. And just to make it really bizarre, it is with one of his own wives ( Read more... )

thoughts, polyamory

Comments 12

aca July 4 2006, 15:40:33 UTC

I think the show is taking the whole mormon poligamy thing and dressing it up to make it sit with the general american viewing audience.

The fact that it's one bloke who has three female partners rather than what (as an outside observer, I give you) seems to be the norm of a rather mixed bag of interwoven relationships.

That said, can you imagine a major US network commisioning a show about the goings on of the London PolyGoth scene? :)

aca July 4 2006, 15:41:50 UTC

Bah, brane got ahead of me there:

interwoven relationships... seems oddest to me.

rjw1 July 4 2006, 17:03:39 UTC

i could see bbc3 doign it though.

aca July 4 2006, 17:08:29 UTC

Ah yes, but Thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded..., etc :)

alexmc July 4 2006, 15:42:35 UTC

> this is not my beautiful life, this is not my beautiful wife

Damn that television.

What a bad picture

alexmc July 4 2006, 19:05:48 UTC

Sorry - that Talking Heads quote may be a bit obscure... It is a song about a couple who are always getting into fights and then realise that they could write a tv programme about it.

baratron July 6 2006, 17:16:07 UTC

Nothing wrong with obscure song lyrics! My brain's full of them. Actually, I just figured it was the rest of the song that the title of my entry was from :) Google tells me it isn't, though.

Less than 104 words redbird July 4 2006, 21:27:18 UTC

My web does not involve three people sharing one partner, and only that one. It's geometrically more complicated; emotionally, I don't know, in part because easier for me might be harder for someone else.

cattitude urged me to go to Boston this past weekend, because he realized that adrian_turtle needed me right now. I mentioned this to Q, who observed that I'm fortunate to have Cattitude. My partners are not rivals, nor do they have neatly divided shares of my life. Rather, the four of us--and their other partners, and the other important people in our lives--are friends, and we cooperate to make our lives work.

Re: Less than 104 words sashajwolf July 6 2006, 13:17:00 UTC

One of the things I like about Big Love is that it's made very clear that the wives are good friends (in fact, they use the word "love" to describe their feelings), and they are shown co-operating quite a lot. It doesn't seem like they have neatly divided shares at all - they have separate houses, but they do the shopping and childcare together and refer to themselves as a single family. There's certainly some rivalry, though, of much the same kind that sometimes happens when people try polyamory for the first time and aren't quite sure yet how to make it work. I'm very glad that, like you, I don't seem to have that in my relationships these days.

sashajwolf July 5 2006, 10:47:08 UTC

dr_d and I caught an episode of this last week, and I'm planning to start watching it regularly (courtesy of his Tivo). In a lot of ways, I thought the family at the centre of it was very like us. It was quite a balanced portrayal - it showed both the occasional jealousies and the genuine affection between the wives.

I do have regular date nights with two of my partners, and I find that useful for planning purposes if nothing else. When I first started having poly relationships, it also helped me to feel more secure in the relationships, but that is less of an issue now. Fortunately, there is enough communication between us that rearranging a date night to accommodate other events doesn't tend to cause problems.

One of the side-effects of my health issues, particularly the hormonal ones, has been that I rarely want to have sex with anyone other than djm4, so that's an issue that has come up for us in a different form than in this story. I think we've handled it without any dishonesty, but it could easily have been otherwise, especially ( ... )

nou July 5 2006, 18:33:38 UTC

Barb's the oldest wife, isn't she, not the newest?

I didn't manage to get into the series. I just wasn't very interested by anything that happened in the first episode.

sashajwolf July 6 2006, 13:11:43 UTC

You're right, she is the oldest. I realised when we sat down to watch the episode last night that I'd got the names confused. Having watched the episode, it didn't seem to me that they were really "cheating" - none of the sex actually happens at times when the husband is supposed to be with one of the other wives, even the one that provokes Barb's comment that "it's Margie's night". I think the context for that one is actually that the husband has erectile problems, so she's worried that if he sleeps with her, he may not be able to "perform" with Margie later - but later in the episode he's shown throwing away his Viagra, so presumably that's not actually the case. dr_d said, and I think rightly, that the real reason they're describing it as an "affair" is that they're getting turned on by the secrecy, rather than that there is any real need to keep it secret ( ... )