Polyamory

"I don't really see. Why can't we go on as three?"

When David Crosby wrote those words in Triad in 1968, he was not defending polyamory. He was asking a question so innocent that it still feels subversive. The song offers neither a manifesto nor a moral argument. It simply wonders why three people who love one another should be forced to become two. More than half a century later, the question remains unsettling, not because we have answered it, but because we have stopped asking it.

The remarkable thing about romance is not that it teaches us to love. It teaches us to count. Parents are expected to love several children without dividing their affection. Friendships accumulate without inviting moral suspicion. Communities are strengthened by expanding circles of care. Love, in almost every sphere of life, appears capable of multiplication. Yet the moment love becomes romantic, arithmetic intervenes. Two ceases to be the most common outcome and becomes the only acceptable one.

It is tempting to believe biology wrote this equation. Humans evolved to form pair bonds. Long childhoods demanded cooperative parenting, while jealousy protected reproductive investment from rivals. Exclusive partnerships increased paternal certainty and improved the survival of offspring. Monogamy, on this account, appears to be an evolutionary destiny.

Yet evolution tells a more complicated story. Pair bonding is not the same as exclusive desire. Humans are capable of deep emotional attachment while continuing to experience attraction beyond it. Literature has chronicled this tension for centuries, from Helen of Troy to Anna Karenina. Evolution did not eliminate competing desires. It merely equipped us to manage them.

Civilisation completed what biology began. Marriage became an institution for regulating inheritance, property, legitimacy, and social order. Exclusive unions simplified succession, stabilised families, and reduced conflict. Monogamy endured because it solved practical problems before it became a romantic ideal. Over time, a successful institution began to resemble a law of nature.

"Your mother's ghost stands at your shoulder."

The ghost is not merely a parent. It is culture itself. It is every fairy tale ending, every wedding vow, every religious commandment, every inherited expectation whispering that love reaches its natural conclusion only when it finds one other person. Long before we choose monogamy, monogamy has already chosen the stories through which we imagine love.

The opposite intuition appears in Netflix's Berlin. When the woman he loves proposes a relationship involving both her husband and Berlin, he erupts, "Fuck the Frenchies and their polyamory and free love." The irony is striking. Berlin is neither sexually restrained nor morally conservative. He lies, steals, seduces, and cheats with ease. Yet he cannot tolerate shared devotion. His objection is not to promiscuity but to divisibility. Love, in his imagination, demands sovereignty.

Between Crosby and Berlin lies one of humanity's oldest disagreements. Crosby wonders why love cannot expand. Berlin cannot imagine how it could be shared. Neither is really arguing about relationships. They are arguing about the nature of love itself.

The purpose of this question is not to prove that polyamory is superior or that monogamy is obsolete. Monogamy has brought extraordinary stability to families and societies. But successful institutions deserve explanation, not immunity from examination. They solve historical problems without exhausting human possibility.

Perhaps that is the enduring genius of Triad. It reminds us that every civilisation has an arithmetic of love. We are taught that one heart belongs to one other heart until the equation feels as objective as mathematics itself. Crosby's lyric quietly separates the two. One is arithmetic. The other is culture. Whether the answer to his question is yes or no matters less than recognising that it remains a question at all.