PolyLove

About the movie

In Canada, 48% of marriages end in divorce.* In business, if your product is failing for half of your customers, then you need to fix it or offer something better.PolyLife is a documentary that explores non-monogamy and how it demands radical rethinking -- in how we approach our romantic relationships.More and more people are experimenting with monogamish relationships. We commit to each other, but have a porous boundary around our relationship, meaning we've agreed that it's OK for either of us to express romantic feelings toward other people or to be physically intimate with other people, so long as we're honest and transparent about our intentions with one another.The thought is that these things don't diminish the integrity of a relationship. Rather, they deepen the understanding of each other's wants and desires, and give us the space to grow independently, without growing apart. There's even a new word for the emotion of feeling happy for a loved one's bliss in another relationship. Goodbye jealousy, hello 'compersion'.There is a stigma around 'cheating' and yet it is still more socially forgivable than discussing non-monogamy or polyamory. So why non-monogamy now?Well, people haven't changed much, but their environment has. Just think: Monogamy established itself thousands of years ago, when society was ruled by scarcity of resources and potential mates were in limited supply.We're now living in a period of great (though unequally distributed) abundance where our basic needs are sufficiently met, and reproduction is a choice. As a result, the reasons to be with a single mate for life are less urgent. With the rising ambivalence toward commitment, statistically most millennials will put off marriage indefinitely. In place of monogamous pairings, hookup culture flourishes and "open relationships" are commonplace. These are merely rational economic responses to excess inventory and changing expectations of romance. Viewed in this context, conventional monogamy is getting long in the tooth.But just because more young people are choosing to say, "I don't" than "I do" doesn't mean monogamy is irrelevant. It just means that there's now more than one option for building meaningful and satisfying relationships.SOURCE 'Divorce demography' Stats Canada 2013