Polyfamily

Polyfamily describes a polycule whose connections are dense enough and entwined enough that it operates as a family unit, rather than as a collection of separate romantic relationships. Polyfamilies share infrastructure — a household, often finances, sometimes parenting — across a group of adults who may be in various pairings, triads, or quads with each other.

Polyfamilies form in a number of ways. Some emerge from a triad or quad consolidating its life together. Some grow from a kitchen-table polycule whose members move closer to each other over years and gradually share more infrastructure. Some are intentional from the start — a group of adults who want to build a chosen family together and find romantic connections within it. The structure is the same regardless of origin: a multi-adult unit that the members and often the children involved treat as one family.

Legal recognition of polyfamilies is limited. A handful of US municipalities (Somerville, Cambridge, Arlington in Massachusetts; Berkeley, Oakland in California) have begun recognising multi-partner domestic partnerships, with some local benefits attached. Federal and most state law continues to recognise marriage between two people only. Polyfamilies typically have to construct their legal infrastructure piece by piece — cohabitation agreements, healthcare proxies, durable powers of attorney, wills, beneficiary designations — to approximate the legal recognition that marriage provides to two-person households.

Polyfamilies that include children are studied in Elisabeth Sheff's longitudinal research; the consistent finding is that children of polyfamilies tend to describe their wider family-of-chosen-adults positively, with the structural variables predicting wellbeing being stability and low conflict, the same as in two-parent families.