Group Marriage - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• Interest in, and practice of nonmonogamy is well known in modern science fiction fandom. Group marriage has been a theme in some works of science fiction — especially the later novels of Robert A. Heinlein, such as Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, Time Enough for Love, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Stranger in a Strange Land describes a communal group much like the Oneida Society. A domestic partnership consisting of four people who are all married to each other features in Vonda N. McIntyre's Starfarers series.

• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress describes line families in detail. The characters argue that the line family creates economic continuity and parental stability in an unpredictable, dangerous environment. Manuel's line marriage is said to be over 100 years old. The family is portrayed as economically comfortable because improvements and investments made by previous spouses compounded, rather than being lost between generations. Heinlein also makes it a point that this family is racially diverse. A passing reference to Heinlein's marriage forms is made in David Brin's Infinity's Shore, where a sapient bottlenose dolphin crewmember is noted as belonging to a "line marriage, one of the Heinlein forms."

• Group marriages of three partners (called triples) are described as commonplace in the 1966 novel Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. The novel's protagonist, a female starship captain Rydra Wong, once lived in a triple, until one member died and another was put in stasis for an incurable illness. Other crew members, especially those who worked in close three-person teams, are noted for this type of relationship.

• Group marriage is advocated in Robert Rimmer's 1968 novel Proposition 31, the story of two middle-class, suburban California couples who turn to a polyamorous relationship to deal with their multiple infidelities as an alternative to divorce. The novel is written as a case study by a psychologist supporting a fictional ballot initiative "Proposition 31" that would amend the California Constitution to permit polyamory relationships. In the book, the solution to the couples' problems with adultery and the impregnation of one of the couple's wives by the other couple's husband is to commit to a group marriage to raise their five children in a home compound in which the husbands rotate among the wives. The book is a plea to pass this proposed proposition to offer an alternative to divorce.

• Line marriage is also commonly practiced in Joe Haldeman's 1981 novel Worlds. Haldeman describes how individual families joined forces to avoid inheritance taxes.

• Group marriage is a central plot element in Donald Kingsbury's 1982 novel Courtship Rite. A six-partner group marriage (three male, three female) is considered the ideal norm in the alien society described in the novel; the main characters are in a five-partner group marriage, and much of the dramatic tension hinges on there being more than one candidate for the sixth position.

• Group marriage is briefly addressed in the 1989 Star Trek novel Star Trek: The Lost Years, by J.M. Dillard. A minor character, Lt. Nguyen, enters into a group marriage, and this is portrayed as a relatively normal occurrence. Additionally, in Star Trek: Enterprise, the alien Dr. Phlox comes from a world where such relationships are the norm.

• William H. Keith, Jr., under his pseudonym Ian Douglas, describes line marriages as the norm, with large family clans extending through many generations, in his Heritage Trilogy, and its two sequels Legacy Trilogy and Inheritance Trilogy. These three trilogies are about the US Marine Corps battling aliens over a period of a thousand years.

• In the television series Caprica, the character Sister Clarice is a participant in a group marriage.

• Several short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin take place on the planet O, where a four-person marriage, called a sedoretu, is common. The sedoretu consists of both a man and a woman from each of two moieties; since it considered incest to have sex with someone of the same moiety, each participant in the marriage has a sexual relationship with only two out of the three other participants.

• In the Earth's Children series by Jean Auel, the Sharamudoi practice group marriage in the form of "cross-mating" a couple from their land-dwelling clan with a couple from the water-dwelling clan. Children of both couples are considered progeny of all four mates, but the sexual relationships between cross-mates is not clear.