Rose
Hometown Greenwich Village
Place of Residence Brooklyn, NY
Occupation Editor
Xtina
Hometown Northern Virginia
Place of Residence Brooklyn, NY
Occupation Security analyst
Josh
Hometown Farmingdale, LI
Place of Residence Brooklyn, NY
Occupation Software sales
Josh and Rose began dating in 2002, Rose and Xtina began dating in 2003. They have been living together for several years and are now all fully in love with each other recently welcomed their first child.
At city hall before Rose and Xtina got married
Xtina carried their child
Rose and Xtina right before they get married
Baby Kit
Josh: Some of my favorite things? Three incomes.
Rose: There are a lot of economic benefits to having a three income, three adult family.
Xtina: Once the baby comes, three parents to one child? We might actually sleep!
Written inside their bathroom wall
Rose: The first couple years that we were living together we were in this tiny, little, cheap apartment that we had gotten deliberately as a way of trying this family idea. We didn’t want to have a kid until we knew that the three of us could make it work living together. Josh and I previously had this disastrous poly household experience.
Xtina: And Rose, your prerequisite to trying to have a child was us living together for a year before we even start trying, which is a perfectly valid. It ended up being two years.
Rose: So there were definitely a lot of difficult periods as we evolved and adjusted to one another. We found the ways in which our different personalities and habits kind of bumped up against one another.
Xtina and Rose getting married
Rose: I just have to have the freedom to develop connections in a way that makes the most sense for me and the other person, rather than having outside restrictions on what that connection can look like.
Laundry piles
Josh: One of the analogies I like to use for polyamory and why I don’t recommend it for most people is that polyamory is like a machine. Any relationship is like a machine. You have two parts with a monogamous relationship and that means there are two things that can go wrong. If you have a polyamorous relationship like a machine, there are more parts that could fail. The more complicated the machine, the more likely something can go wrong.
Xtina: Not just the parts but the connections between them.
Josh: And the connections, yea. More moving pieces means more room for failure.
On the fridge
At home with Kit
Xtina: One difficult thing I can think of is if two people are having hard times for whatever reason.
Rose: Usually we deal with that by all crowding together for a hug and then going off to our separate rooms. Or if one of us is having a really really terrible day, and the other is having an ok but not so great day, then that person will bootstrap themselves to take care of the person who’s having a really hard time.”
Xtina: And the nice thing is we have 3 people. So if we have one “crap”, one “meh” and one “sure”, then the “sure” person can go take care of the “crap” person. Mostly on my end, it’s just that if Rose and Josh are having a hard time, it makes me sad.
Josh: And if we’re all sick at the same time?
Xtina: That sucks rocks!
At home with Kit
Xtina: One of the things I would wish for if I had three wishes and a genie, is that poly relationships became boring as dirt. A non-starter. Just like monogamous relationships are boring. You don’t hear about your friend who’s monogamous. You just hear about your friend who is married. That’s how I want it to be for poly folks. I want it to be dull. I want it to be background noise.
Josh: The other thing is the idea that poly people are not more evolved. I want to stomp out that myth and sweep it into a hole or something. You are who you are and what you identify as doesn’t make you a better person. People who put forth that idea really annoy the hell out of me.
Co-working at home
