I was in a late-night email check, not planning to rezz nor to mind any second life business tonight, but one group notice pointed to JIRA asking for enabling multiple partners. Officially recognized polyamory!
Well, polyamory is always a lovely issue. One of those that can keep me out of bed (hmm, that sounds strange now) for a bit more tonight.
For those of you that are not so relationship-experimental and wonder "what's that Greco-Roman word she is talking about now" here's a short bit of Wikipedia:
Polyamory (from Greek πολυ [poly, meaning many or several] and Latin amor [literally “love”]) is the desire, practice, or acceptance of having more than one loving, intimate relationship at a time with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved.
If anyone is in doubt, it is not the same as swinging, promiscuity, partner swapping or alike. It is having more than two in the loving family. It is open which kind of relationship your significant others will be in.
Well, it had to happen. Polyamory is a widespread practice in meatspace, let alone the grid of our imaginations. It was a question of time when reshaping of the partner feature will come up. For now, partnership is exclusive to one person and it is a short straigh-forward process that costs 10L$. One nice thing was that nobody asks about the gender setup of the new partnership, not even the species of the partners. Unlike meatspace, you can register your marriage even if you are gay dragons. Only thing you cannot is to have more than one partner at a time.
What really bugs me here is that "consent of all participants in a partnership" part of the JIRA. Not that that consent is not necessary. Consent of all the participants is needed, in this as in all the other things we do. For many other, if not all things, that's the only rule that distincts do's from dont's. But do we have to complicate the process and load the databases with all the emails of consents of the all involved? Do we need Lindens to check if we all agree about our relationships? Or we can behave like grown-ups and live in our families in a healthy and responsible way?
Sure, somebody can ask why do we feel the need to inform the Lindens about that significant person(s) at all? Why do we need a special field on a profile page to show who we share poseballs with? And if we feel like screaming somebody's name to the whole world (hey, there is at least a bit of the crazy-in-love screamer in each of us!), why don't we use that big about me field? There is enough space there, for all the partners and all the wows and all the sweet and naughty things we feel saying. Much nicer than simple bearucratic info partner field offers. On the other hand, if you can be officailly monogamus, why not having a possibility to be officially polyamorous?
There's quite a few issues with this. How do you feel about it? Polyamory itself? Polyamory being offical? Bearucracy around it? What partnership means to you?
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