Polyamory as a Network?
This article titled “Polyamory in Paris: A Social Network Theory Application” in the Sexualities journal (2020) applies a very similar model of social network analysis as our model discussed in class, to the concept of polyamorous groups.
For those unfamiliar, polyamory can be defined as a consensual practice of having multiple romantic or life partners. It is easy to see how a group of individuals who each have multiple romantic partners can form a network, with each individual being a node that has edges to one or more other nodes within the network.
This academic journal claims to be the “first application of network theory to ethnographic data on a polyamory community,” and I was very interested in the novelty of the study (Bennion 2020). Specifically, I took interest in the graph (below) which was included in the academic journal and reflects the community of 62 polyamorous people that the researchers studied.
I found a lot of ways to extend and expand upon what the researchers discussed in the article, based on additional concepts we have learned about in class.
Though the article did not specifically name the principle of triadic closure, I noticed that it seems to apply in many (though certainly not all) cases within the graph (above). Assuming that bonds between romantic partners would generally be “strong,” I picked out many instances on the graph where I feel that the principle of triadic closure may have taken place. For example, when looking at nodes 24, 29, and 30, I wondered whether node 24 may have established strong ties to 29 and 30 individually and that later the edge [29, 30] may have formed due to both nodes’ proximity to node 24 according to the principle of triadic closure. Similarly, the cluster of nodes 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 demonstrates many complete triads (eg. 17,18,19 and 17,20,21 and 17,21,23).
After seeing so many triads in the graph, this led me to think about what would happen if we applied “values” to each edge within the graph. Two partners who have been dating for a long time and who are very embedded into each others lives may have a high value on the edge between them (eg. 10) whereas those who have just started dating and are not extremely close to each other may have a lower value on the edge between them (eg. 5).
This led me to think about two concepts that we recently talked about in class: stability and the one exchange rule. In class, we discussed how a triad/triangle is not a stable graph when there is a one-exchange rule. Clearly in polyamorous networks there is not a one-exchange rule. However, I still thought about what might happen if one person/node in a polyamorous triad did not have enough time to have two partners that they valued equally (eg. spent the same amount of time with, contributed the same amount financially to) because this could effectively impose something similar to a one-exchange rule within the triad. This might lead the other two people/nodes in the triad to compete with each other for the attention of that first person/node, which would enable that first person/node to capture the vast majority of the “value” in the triangle, at least if the people/nodes in the triangle did not have other outside options and both strongly wanted to pursue a relationship with the first person.
As I thought about the concept of outside options, my mind went next to the concepts of bridges and power. I considered how nodes involved in a bridge may have a lot of power to extract a lot of “value” from the relationships they are in. I looked at the graph (above) again and saw that edge [59, 53] forms a bridge and that nodes 59 and 53 likely serve as powerful gatekeepers of information and connections between the orange and light green portions of the network. Depending on the relative power of their neighbors, 53 and 59 may also have power to extract “value” from the relationships they are in.
Of course, as I close out this post, I think it is important to note on a conceptual level that romantic partners may not be seeking to manipulate or necessarily “extract value from” their partners – especially those in polyamorous relationships who are aware that their partner may have other partners and appear to be happy that their partner(s) are connected to others as well [eg. consider the concept of “compersion”]. However, I still thought it was very interesting that (a) there has been academic research done on how to model polyamorous groups as networks and that (b) I was able to apply novel concepts from class to this field since it is such a new field of academic research.
Citation:
Bennion, J. (2020). Polyamory in Paris: A social network theory application. Sexualities, OnlineFirst, 1