Possibilities (4/?): Chosen Family Revisited

This idea is really a variation on the theme of chosen family, but it’s one that seems more common among celibate communities. This idea is one that, to me, could be just as good as the first, and feel more realistic, since it has fewer moving parts. The model looks something like this:

Kitchen	?	Common Bed	Art Studio/ Office
A (Me)		Living Room/	Dining Room
B+C

               This model can be summarized as “traditional monogamous romantic/sexual pair with an additional single person grafted on.” and it seems to me that this type of relationship is harder to separate from the romance supremacy culture - as evidenced by the summary. However, I’ve talked to people in this type of relationship, and that in itself says something about the plausibility of this type of relationship. This relationship subtype has a lot in common with the larger chosen family type: The long-term nature, the focus on the set of relationships as a whole, with each member an equal, etc.

               I retained the common bed in this model even though this scenario makes that possibility less likely, it still stands for an ideal level of physical intimacy in a family relationship. The question mark remains in the diagram because even though this is a more trod path, every relationship is unpredictable, and also because I’m almost certainly forgetting important aspects of good relationship.

               This model’s strength is in the plausibility and in the size of the community that can be formed. The drawback is the anxiety around the relationship between the romantic/sexual couple and the single person, since society will privilege the romantic/sexual relationship over their relationship to the single person, the single person might always have a fear that the couple might leave them or treat them as a less important part of the whole. I’ve spent less time thinking about this model over the first one, but I can definitely see the appeal of fewer moving pieces and possibly the depth of relationship that can form between three people as opposed to six or more, but on the other hand the other model’s distance from the norm adds a sort of commitment to that distance that this model doesn’t intrinsically entail.