When I told a friend that I have a wife and a girlfriend, he asked, “Oh, so you’re a polygamist?” How can I respond to such a misunderstanding?
—NotIntoHarems
Alas, some people confuse polyamory with polygamy (and polygamy with polygyny). There are several fundamental differences, which you can explain when you get a comment like that.
For starters, polyamory is totally egalitarian among the genders. Polyamorous women can and do have loving relationships with multiple men as much as men have relationships with women. With a poly MF couple, the man sometimes has an outside relationship, or the woman, or both. There are many polyamorous FMF triads, but also many MFM triads (and MMM and FFF triads among gays and lesbians). There are also larger poly groupings, cohabiting or not, comprised of four or more, in all the gender combinations, involved with each other sexually in all the mathematical permutations, depending on orientation and personal desire.
So, polyamory is the practice of multiple emotionally loving relationships, with honesty and full communication, and those relationships may include sex as desired and agreed. Nothing is said of gender. In contrast, polygamy as practiced now or in the past by some religious groups or other cultures typically has entailed the right of men to have multiple wives or female partners, but the women are not allowed the same right to take on two or more male partners. Strictly speaking, this is “polygyny”. (The opposite is “polyandry”, a woman having two or more male partners, which has also been practiced in some places in some periods.)
Also, polygamy is about multiple marriages (or equivalent committed relationships). Polyamory also encompasses long-term committed relationships but can include less involved “secondary” or dating relationships as well (we might say “relationships lite”), where there is a commitment to treating each other fairly and honestly but not necessarily an expectation of long duration, sharing finances and residence, and all that.
