121. Martha Beck & Rowan Mangan: Polyamory & Throuple Life

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Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

We're already laughing around here because today

we have a double date with some of our favorite people.

We are so excited.

Are you excited?

I'm so excited.

Martha and Rowan.

I mean.

Dr.

Martha Beck is a New York Times best-selling author, life coach, and speaker.

She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, but who doesn't?

And Oprah Winfrey has called her one of the smartest women I know.

Her newest book, The Way of Integrity, I love this book.

I love this book.

I love this book.

Finding the path to your true Self was an instant New York Times bestseller, obviously.

Rowan Mangan is a writer, podcaster, and mom to a vivacious toddler.

Salty, Kletsy, and Aussie.

Roe co-hosts the Bewildered podcast, which all of you must listen to.

It is so good.

And also, I just feel like we're talking about some of the same things and it makes me really excited.

Okay.

Podcast with her wife, Martha Beck.

She also runs the Wild Adventures newsletter and community on Substack.

Ro is currently pursuing publication for her first novel, A Magical Realist Thriller, set on the west coast of Ireland, which I didn't know.

And I'm very excited for you, Rowan.

Thank you.

Cross fingers.

It's amazing.

Truly.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things listening.

It's so good to see your faces.

We miss you.

This double date is a first for us because we can do hard things listeners.

Martha and Rowan are missing one person

who is Karen because Martha and Rowan and Karen are in a polyamorous relationship.

Is that what that's how you describe?

Yeah, correct.

Okay, a thruple.

A thruple.

Right.

Okay.

So deeply satisfying domestic arrangement.

I would say that for me, too.

Said 1% of the population that they're in a deeply satisfying domestic arrangement.

Okay.

So can you talk to us first about how this all came together?

Because parts of it make me laugh so hard but martha you were married to a dude long time ago yeah married to a guy we got together but a long time ago had three kids he was gay i was gay out of that yeah got together with karen my first ever female female relationship and uh everything was uh good to go till we died until something happened

And what happened?

So the funny thing is that I start out, it's a bit embarrassing the way I start out in this story because I came in as a kind of Martha Beck groupie i don't see what's wrong with that

um

so i was all like misty eyed and excited and i put a lot of money that i did not have i was a single woman living in melbourne with a mortgage and a freelance career and i thought i you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna spend a ton of money to go on martha beck's African safari change your life adventure.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

And then I'm just going to become friends with her and be part of her life.

Now, a lot of people think that.

Yes, they do.

But I got it.

It was, well, here's the thing.

On the way.

So we do all this pre-work for these, these folks who come on the safari thing.

I just got back from there.

It's way out in the bush in South Africa and they're lions and everything.

And everybody has to do tons of psychological pre-work so that I know.

whom to sink the lions on.

Oh, of course.

Yes.

Get them out of the way early.

But on her way, we kept getting these updates from Rowan Mangen.

Rowan Mangan is in Paris, but her hotel got bed bugs and she hasn't slept for six days.

We're like, oh my God.

Then Rowan Mangen is in Cape Town.

She was mugged while trying to recover from the bed bug bites.

And she's on all kinds of hormonal treatments for the bed bug bites themselves.

Plus, she got a really bad hair dye job where they ruined her eyebrows and made her cry.

That is way worse.

Way worse than being mugged or bed bugs.

Yes.

Oh, no.

So I was talking to my other coaches, going, oh, my God, this poor woman.

The moment she gets here, I'm going to start working with her.

We're going to try to pull her out of whatever rage she is in because of this horrible experience.

So everybody gets together.

I spot her and I'm like, okay, immediately start to work with her.

Okay.

And I'm doing my coachy stuff and I'm thinking,

she's not reacting like a typical person.

Like,

she's taking this incredibly well.

And she's drawing meaning out of it and she talks poetic.

And I was, after about five minutes, I was just like, keep talking, Mrs.

Whatever your name is.

But what Martha didn't know is that I was also working with her because I have a superpower about being the ultimate teacher's pet.

There is no teacher's pet who can out-teach a pet me.

And I knew exactly what I was doing.

I had a plan.

Machiavelli.

It was shocking.

She was, and I found myself doing things I could not control, like grabbing her at one point and saying to her, you're my favorite, which you're not allowed to do, right?

No,

bad policy

for a client thing.

So you two are already connecting.

So we knew each other.

And then what happened was that Marty and Karen were living on a ranch in California and there was sort of two different residences on the ranch and there was a bit of a commune kind of vibe going on.

And so one of the other people who lived there asked me to come and do some writing work with her over a few months.

And I was like, sure.

Yeah.

And

I cut right to the day that Karen came to me because she got to know Rowan better than I really did.

And they were hanging out together a lot.

And one day she came to me.

I said, Marty, I need to talk to you about something.

I was like, all right.

She said, I'm having very unusual feelings about Ro.

I was like, like, really?

How so?

She's like, I just feel like this fire hose of love, like maybe,

maybe it's sisterly.

And I was looking at her and I was like, it is not sisterly.

You're in love.

And I expected to feel jealous, upset.

I had this bizarre reaction where I felt like I had hit, been hit by a train full of joy, just wham, so much happiness.

And I thought they were going to get together.

I'd move out of the the bedroom.

Ro would move in with Karen and I'd get the guest room.

No problem.

No problem.

I was, and I kept going, why am I so happy?

This should make me upset, but it doesn't.

Ro started coming to the, to our residence.

And the three of us.

We went into a very strange interlude.

Like strange.

It involved like sitting close together on the couch, the three of us.

All of us.

And like we planned the day around these times where we would get to sit close together on the couch.

and we would just sit there going this isn't weird this isn't strange and we talked about everything and the whole time we were sitting like mashed together on the couch going this isn't weird completely normal absolutely normal so were you telling yourself it wasn't weird but it did feel weird or did it actually okay so you were feeling it was weird but you were telling yourself it wasn't weird okay

it wasn't optional at least not for me like there was no option to not sit on the couch together.

It was like falling off a cliff and saying, well, I'm going to decide whether to hit the ground.

I had no control.

It freaked me out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so then over time, we sort of edged towards what was actually happening.

Cause the one thing about Martha and Karen is anyone who knows them, knew them,

that that is not ever going to break up.

That's not like that was not even in the realm of possibility with any of this stuff, not, you know, like the guest room, whatever, but.

they weren't going to break up.

That was not.

So it was all like, we had to sort of go, what is this?

What this,

and I can't, there came a point where I was like, I will keep this from getting weird because I am not famous, but I am quite well known among people who've heard of me.

Yeah.

So, and I write and talk about integrity.

I can't tell lies or keep secrets.

And

nothing weird can happen because I would have to tell the entire world about it.

So it's not going to happen.

Oh, the next few days or weeks, it was like literally trying to fight gravity.

It was like trying to hold ourselves on a little bar above the earth indefinitely.

And everything was pulling us together.

It was so, it was such a strange and wonderful thing for me.

How was it for you?

Strange and wonderful.

There you go.

But then we came to a point where I'd been spending so much time out there.

And it was like, okay, we're going to talk to the other people that we go and have dinner with and stuff on the ranch.

And so we made a little plan because we didn't want to lie, but we also

sometimes

were embarrassed as crap.

Yeah, we were embarrassed.

Why?

And so we were like, can you tell me what made you feel embarrassed?

So,

Abby, there's certain people who identify as polyamorous, and that's part of their sexuality.

Like that's part of their sense of themselves in the world.

And that

is so different from what happened for us.

So for us, we didn't even really know anything about it.

It was something that

happened.

We'd heard that term, but we didn't really hadn't thought about it.

We didn't really have a lot of language about it or knowledge of how that other people did this and how they might do it.

So it was just the weirdness, like just what you would imagine.

Just the now we have to go and say, we're really weird.

And the culture doesn't really.

go for that.

I mean, now parts of it are, but it's still considered super weird.

The way being gay was considered super weird when i was growing up in provo utah you know

but um we had this speech we made up we're going to go down and we row and i just crafted it right because we're of course you did we're like we're going to say we have developed a very strong family feeling

like

we feel very connected in a family way yeah it's like a family yeah it's a family it's a family this is an important word we rehearsed it then we went down to dinner in the other place.

And

when we walked in, someone had his

phone open and he was reading about polyamory.

There was like someone we kind of knew had done a post on Facebook that day about, I'm interested in this thing called polyamory.

And he was reading it out loud as we walked in with our family speech memorized.

And Karen has...

compared to us much lower impulse control about telling the truth

here we go.

She also likes to get the job done.

She doesn't want to dilly-dally.

She also, when things are awkward, just runs away.

So she

raised up on her hind legs as we walk into the room and hear this conversation.

And she goes, well, I love Rowan and I love Marty.

I'm going to go get Thai food.

And left.

There are about eight people in the room.

at that point.

Amazing.

The door slams after Karen.

And we're like, there was a long silence long silence and we were like

it's sort of like a family

oh that's so good it's so interesting because you know you are like pioneering in many ways because so many of us especially that we feel like we don't fit into the societal norms we then have to like look around and see what's available.

And you're like, I guess it's polyamory, but it doesn't totally fit.

So we got to try to make it our own thing.

I think you feel this the way about sexuality, Glennon.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

I just think that that's so freaking cool that you had the courage to do that.

I need to know what happened after, like, who broke the awkward silence after you said,

like, a family.

Like, what happened now?

I think I've repressed it.

I have no memory.

It's just like,

and I remember sort of looking at.

And I think I blurted out something.

And this was true at the time.

Nothing's happened.

Nothing has happened.

Because if it did, the way of integrity would have demanded that I tell it.

Exactly.

And Ro looked at me like, why did you have to bring that up?

You know that's what they're all thinking.

And I was like, but nothing happened.

She's like, we're not talking about things happening.

Right.

And I don't want to talk about happenings.

Yes.

Happenings.

No happenings.

It's like a family.

It's a fire hose of sisterly familial love.

That's what it is.

Can't you see that?

And you said, Martha, because didn't you say this about Karen too in the beginning?

You were like, I wanted anything else other than this thing to be true.

I know.

Except that it was undeniable, right?

I have all, I am doomed to be a cultural outcast.

I went to Harvard and chose to have a baby with Down syndrome, moved to Provo, Utah, capital of Mormonism, to become a lesbian.

Then I left Mormonism and started practicing polygamy.

Which is why you are our favorite person on the earth yeah she's returned to the ways of her ancestors my great my great-grandfather had three wives i have one more to go so we were talking about this this morning you haven't talked about this a ton publicly and abby was wondering if tell them what you were saying this morning you know early days in my lesbian acknowledgement and understanding I found myself having to teach the rest of my people about homosexuality because I was the only gay person they had ever known.

I was like a zoo animal you know and like they ask really inappropriate questions and things that heterosexual couples never have to deal with like exactly you know how do you have sex with a woman these kinds of questions i wonder how similar your experience is with that in terms of having to teach the people like like us right now like here we are asking you hopefully not too personal questions yeah do you feel like that like you're on display to answer people's curiosity questions

isn't it interesting that it is I've thought about this before, that there's such a strong similarity between, you know, like the whole gay thing and then this is that it's all people want to talk about is the sex.

Yes.

And there's been articles in the New York Times about thrupples and they've even said, you know, I remember one of them even said, obviously everyone just wants to know how the sex works.

You know, that thing about like you're...

you're coming out as gay to your parents and then they have to think about you having sex even though if you bring a you know heterosexual partner home they don't have to think about you having sex it's so funny that our brains automatically need to know that part.

And it's like, don't you want to know about how awesome it is to have a fight when there's a referee?

Yes.

Oh, this is exactly what we wanted to talk about.

That's what we want to talk about.

But can we just pause and repeat what Rowan said?

Because I don't think that people think about this enough that the coming out.

process is not just stressful because you are telling your parents you like another gender or the same gender.

It's stressful because you're sexualizing yourself in front front of your parents.

Because

you're sitting down and saying, I am a sexual being who wants to have sex.

And straight kids don't have to have that conversation.

Yep.

It's sexualizing yourself in front of people over and over and over again that is tremendous.

Absolutely.

That is so well put.

And we actually talked about this before we went on and we were like, oh, what do we do?

What do we do?

And we decided that if we were asked a direct question about how the sex goes, we would say, it's great.

It's great.

We would never do that.

We've been in that situation enough that we would never do that when i came out to my mom my mom's first question to me was

well do you have one of those strappy things

oh my god and i said i said i don't know how i got the like i had the most wise download of the history of my life in this moment and i said

have you asked any of my other siblings about the actual acts of sex.

And she said, no.

And I said, do you want to start now?

So it was my beautiful way of not having to answer that question specifically.

Wow.

Good, good move.

Can I tell you about Karen telling her mother who's in her 80s about the three of us?

Yes.

There will never be a story that starts with, can I tell you about Karen that I won't say yes to?

Oh my God, she is hilarious.

So Karen goes down to Florida to visit her mother, who's 80 what?

You know, she's getting on.

And she says, okay, so this is, because Karen doesn't care.

Karen is the most countercultural person.

She just doesn't care.

She's like, so mom, now there's three of us.

And

da-da-da.

She's just telling her.

And then this is what her mother says.

They walk in silence along the beach for a few more moments.

And then her mother says, oh.

Your father and I never felt the need for that.

That's so awesome.

Oh, but isn't that a beautiful way?

It's kind of beautiful.

It's non-judgment.

She thought about it for herself and then didn't judge it.

She just thought, oh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and I think that's why Karen is so relaxed about being countercultural because she knew for a fact that her parents would love her no matter what, and then all her siblings would love her no matter what.

And so, yeah, the whole getting interrogated and having to defend yourself and everything, she knew that wouldn't happen to her with her most intimate people.

Yeah, we didn't, I knew that too.

Yeah, with your, I, yeah, when I am open with the people I grew up with, they

don't like it.

They don't.

I think most people will relate to that.

Yeah.

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Can you talk to us about fight?

We're obsessed with fighting because we just, I don't know.

It just tells us more about...

a relationship than anything else, I feel like, our conflicts.

Yes.

So I do want to know how that goes.

Just take us back to your last fight.

Is it two of you that start fighting and then someone else references?

Oh, yeah.

So can you talk to us about how this works?

It's about to talk about.

It's the best.

You tell.

It's never, we've never had a fight where all three of us have been fighting.

Wow.

And it just naturally, every time happens, it's, it's the best.

Like to me, conflict feels very chaotic and scary.

And I never know.

Like it could go anywhere.

It could go really bad.

Right.

And so it's just honestly, it's your best case scenario.

It's someone sitting there going, oh, no, you do do that, actually, Ro.

Or, no, that is exactly what you said 10 minutes ago, Martha.

You did say that.

Or, no, no, Marty, you actually do sound passive aggressive.

And I didn't believe it either.

You know, so it's somebody telling the truth as they see it.

Who loves you both.

Who loves you?

Who's invested in the thing resolving?

So when you get into those arguments that couples have over and over, it breaks the pattern because there's somebody else like jumping in to say, No, that this is what you do, Marty.

You get all frantic and then you, and I'm like, I do.

And both of them are like,

hard to fight with that.

Yeah, there's a majority.

So, actually, I've changed more in positive ways.

Oh my God, more than ever before in my life in the six years the three of us have been together because

I'm outnumbered.

Yeah.

We're all outnumbered.

And so that when you've got two people telling their absolute best truth to you, it shows you your blind spots.

It shows you where, oh, okay.

It makes you think more and it makes you change more.

And we're like, how do people do this with two?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

That's so smart.

It would be like a two-legged stool.

That just does not work.

The stability of the three.

No offense.

No, no, sorry.

No offense.

We don't have your exact situation, but we do have three parents.

Yeah.

And

we also are an ecosystem that is very close.

And

so we do talk about how the hell do people do it with two people.

Like, that's a really great point that it's an ecosystem of love.

Yeah.

That's an

better than family.

That is.

It's like an ecosystem of love.

It's a fire hose of an ecosystem of familial love.

It's an ecosystem run by fire hoses.

Yes.

So what is most of your conflict about?

Ours is I'm controlling things too much.

Would you say that's it?

Yeah, yeah.

Or you're being too loud.

What are yours?

I think at the moment, it's probably parenting stuff.

Like we're having to dig into all those unspoken expectations about how we're going to raise this child.

They're not unspoken.

You speak them all.

They weren't unspoken.

They were unspoken before she came along.

And now it's like we're having to confront all the things that we did.

So I had, I had three kids in my early 20s and I was chronically ill the whole time.

I had massive chronic pain.

So they were kind of raised on a king-sized bed where I'd throw food occasionally.

I told them as they grew that I was going to write a self or a parenting book called Crawl Over There and Get Your Own Damn Bottle.

It would be a massive bestseller.

Oh, yeah.

But here's Ro.

And she's like, what do you think about parenting?

And I'm like, I don't know, feed them.

Whereas I'm like, I've read 16 books.

And, you know, they must have no screen time and they must do this and we're going to do this and we're going to use this sort of philosophy.

What do you think?

I've read on like nine different philosophies.

And I think if we just bring this from that style and this from that style,

you have never raised a baby.

And that is factually correct.

And so like I just got back from South Africa and all of them had been sick while I was gone and the baby was sick, but then the baby got well and all the adults got sick.

And I came home and I was like, no screens, right?

I've learned my lesson and ro's like i don't even care anymore

literally it whatever

so we're coming we're coming together tell me how that happened how did the baby like what were the conversations around the baby who is the most and also martha can you tell me how old your children are from your previous marriage and how old your current younger child is

So to say this, I just, we need to set up a few things around age.

It's just because she had her kids really young.

So it's going to surprise you when you hear how old.

I was 22, 24, and 26.

And now they are

35, 34,

36.

It's impossible.

So they're no longer in the picture in terms of being in the house.

Well, my son is because he has Down syndrome.

Got it.

He lives with us.

So, yeah.

And he's very cool.

Yeah.

And I love him.

And I have to tell you, he was living with Karen and me when

Roe entered the picture.

And I thought, how's this going to fly with him?

And let me tell you, Adam doesn't pretend anything.

And so I thought, oh, is he going to think this is so weird?

Is he going to be upset?

During the whole time that we were sitting on the couch together, he got so happy.

Yeah, he would just walk around grinning.

Just with this huge smile.

And may I also say all my children were like, cool.

They are the coolest people.

Like, if if they, one of them, I can't remember which one, probably not Adam, even said, We wondered if you had something like that going.

Yeah, they were like, Didn't you, weren't you doing that all along?

And we figured

it feels like something you would end up with.

Exactly.

They were so cool.

And people told us, Your children, they told me your children will hate you forever for this.

I mean, Roe's not that much older than they are.

And

I'm like, you don't know my kids.

They're pretty cool.

So then we're in Africa at that time.

And

Ro, we we go on these games, we go out to see the animals and we're silent.

We have this silence thing.

And we come back from this silent thing where we've been seeing like right up close to lions and elephants and rhinoceroses and things.

And Ro is crying.

And I'm like, what happened out there?

And she told me, do you mind that I'm telling you?

No, I love it.

No, no, of course.

She said,

I think.

Something connected with me out there.

She said it was like a little grub of consciousness and it said, I'd like to come down.

Could you please be my mother?

And she was just sobbing.

She's like, I don't know if it's right to bring a child into this world.

And I'm like, well, you know what?

If anybody solves all the problems humans created, it will be humans.

So if the right humans need to come, and this little grub was quite insistent.

Yeah.

So then we came and we did IVF.

Yeah.

So I was.

I was in my

late 30s at that point, mid-late 30s.

So it was like now a now or never kind of situation.

And Marty and Karen were great about it.

They're both older than me, and they were both pretty amazing about the prospect of having another tiny person.

Oh my gosh, it was so exciting.

You are downplaying this so hard.

There's so many needles involved in IVF.

And she was so tough.

And Karen and I had to learn to give shots.

It's a long, fun story for us.

And we had this little girl during COVID times.

And

God,

how do people raise a child with less than three women?

It's amazeballs.

Plus, Karen's a morning lark and we're both night owls.

So we've got the whole shift covered.

And this kid is just the absolute.

I mean, all kids are, right?

But we didn't have anything to do except sit in the house and avoid COVID.

And it was.

awesome.

Oh, God.

It's so beautiful.

I want to ask you about something which I've been thinking, which is jealousy.

And I've been thinking about this differently because like six months ago, we were doing a podcast and polyamory came up.

And I found myself saying, well, I mean, that's, it's great for everyone else, but I mean, it's just like not for me.

And I was like,

what an asshole.

It sounded to me like what people say, used to say about being gay.

Like, oh, I guess it's fine, but like, not for me.

Like there was a little bit of judgment in it.

And whenever I'm being judgmental, I always think there's something I don't don't understand.

So I started reading all these books on polyamory,

which, by the way, I still have cultural conditioning because if I'm out to dinner reading, I like hide the book.

I would too.

Okay, you would.

You probably know more about it than we do, Glennon, because we haven't read any of it.

I was just thinking I should read those down below.

Yeah.

So I'm reading this book called The Ethical Sweat.

And there's one called More Than Two, which is really good.

But.

When we talk about jealousy, most people, the reason I could never be in a polyamorous relationship because of jealousy.

And the way this one one book framed it was like, it's interesting because we as human beings decide that jealousy is something that we cannot experience.

But that's not how we feel about anger or sadness or heartbreak.

We don't not do

that because they might cause heartbreak.

We just go in.

We know that heartbreak expands us and we can work with it and then we continue.

And that is the way that jealousy was framed in this book about polyamory.

Like jealousy does come up, but it's not like just because jealousy might be there that it's a deal breaker for a relationship.

So do you all experience jealousy?

And how do you navigate it?

Not necessarily like sexually, but just like time and like all of the things, attention.

Attention, yeah.

Right.

You know, how do you navigate all of that?

I was really jealous at the beginning because Karen and Marty had been together for so long and they had so many patterns about how they would just check in with each other on the phone and everything.

And I was like, no, we have to have a group thread and you've got to call me sometimes and you've got to tell me that your day is going fine.

Because I was really scared that they were the unit and I was the third wheel coming in.

And that was really scary to me because it didn't feel

solid.

And so I had a lot of jealousy and a lot of demands

in the first, I guess, couple of years.

And we were like, yeah, we get that.

But I've been doing my self-help thing my whole career.

Karen had done it all too.

And one of the things that we'd done is that when we have negative emotions, we have like ways of dealing with it, psychological ways of finding out what's really going wrong.

And it's always a fear of scarcity.

It's fear there won't mean enough for me.

Well, I'm not big enough or good enough or whatever it is.

And we've been working on those things for years and years and years.

So we knew, we knew each other.

And because we knew each other so well, we both knew that we both loved Rowan.

And there's something called compersion I've heard about.

Have you read about this, Lennon?

No, compassion.

It's a poly word.

Okay.

Yes, it's the one poly word I know.

And it means compassion, I guess, but it's the joy in watching two people you love love each other.

So for Karen and me, because we'd done all this and because, you know, like we really were the ones who had all the advantages, like this, the solid couple.

It was a weird situation for all of us, but Ro was the one who was breaking the pattern, right?

So we would just talk about how

to help Ro feel like it was solid, because we both knew it was.

We knew that we were solid.

We knew we were solid with Ro.

We had no questions.

And that, I think, eventually just rubbed off on you.

Yeah.

I mean, time.

I mean, time was a huge part of it.

But I think the other thing that we do well is that we have a lot of rituals in our lives that involve the three of us.

And so through the day.

And so, you know, I think like, because Marty and I work together all the time.

And so, if someone was going to get jealous at this point, it would be Karen because she's doing different sorts of things with her day.

And sometimes she does feel, you know, like, I need some more time.

You know, can I talk about the rituals?

Yeah, I want to know them, please.

So, the first thing that happens in the morning, well, Karen gets up with the baby because she gets up at like, I don't know, two or some

ungodly hour.

No, she gets up around five or six.

It's the middle of the night.

So, she's up with the baby.

And at 9 a.m.

We try to be up and have enough caffeine in us to be functioning.

And we have what we call morning communion, which is at least an hour long of just being together.

The baby's zipping around and we're just connecting.

What we realize, what I realized, I guess, I won't speak for Roe,

is that the only thing worth living for is hanging out with the people you love.

Amen.

Period.

Amen.

That's, that is the joy of life.

So it's just time to be together.

And then we work and do things.

And then we starting at five, Adam decreed we shall have a together time.

People judge us for this too, because he's 30 something.

He's 34.

He likes a glass of wine.

It's what he likes.

So he calls it wine time.

So we all gather for wine time.

And that's an hour.

Then we have dinner together.

It's actually been so helpful because Adam, he's quite regimented in how he wants to spend his day.

It's rubbed off on us.

And I think we didn't necessarily mean to do this for the sake of our relationship, but that's like the downstream kind of effect.

So then after dinner, Ro goes off to put the baby down and Adam and I watch TV together.

We've been doing it forever.

And then we have Trinity Time, which is the best part of the day.

Trinity time involves television.

A little television.

A little.

And some cuddles while we watch television.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's, it's it's just being together and cuddling while we watch television.

And it is like you get up in the morning, you're having a bad day, you're feeling unwell or whatever you think, but Trinity time is coming.

Trinity time will come.

Trinity time.

Your day sounds like freaking heaven.

It's pretty good.

It's so good.

Yeah.

It's really good.

Do you guys have any rituals like that?

Well,

I'm thinking of Sunday snuggles.

Sunday morning is don't get out of bed.

Don't go do all the things.

Just stay in bed, read, Sunday snuggles, coffee in bed.

I would also say

our mornings are pretty ritualistic where whoever wakes up first usually takes the dogs out, makes the coffee.

The other person comes up within a few minutes.

I have a little window seat

that is cozy.

The dogs know about that like 20-minute time.

So they come up and snuggle with me.

And we have our evening too, if there's no soccer.

But everybody sits down together and it's family time.

We have dinner together as a family almost every night.

And there's nothing more important and wonderful to us than the TV couch time at night.

That's what I live for.

My whole life is just about trying to get back to the couch.

That's all I'm ever doing.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Me too.

Right?

I was just when I was in Africa, we'd get around the fireplace, the fire pit, and we'd tell stories.

And I really think that we are so fixated on TV because we evolved.

to do that.

And TV is a flickering light that tells stories.

And so we gather together and it's like gathering around the campfire.

And what you feel is the love of the village.

And that, I mean, it's just having a larger group taps into this primordial thing.

The culture says it's got to be the myth of courtly love ever since, not courtney love, courtly love.

It's from like the 14th century when people decided that being obsessed with your romantic partner and trying to fulfill every single one of each other's needs would be the gig.

But a lot of cultures have not done it that way.

And to me, rediscovering the feeling of a village around the fire,

we have a little village in our house and we could not do it with one person less.

It would just be so much sadder.

That's so beautiful.

It's sort of like a family.

It's sort of like a family.

I just break it.

Nothing's happened.

Nothing.

Of course nothing's happened.

No one's thinking about happenings.

No.

No.

But I just, I mean, if Martha Beck,

you just reframed my hours and hours of TV time as camping.

I'm camping.

That's all I'm doing.

I'm experiencing the outdoors.

I'm

returning to the village.

Yeah.

Glennon.

It's deeper than that, Glennon.

You are responding to the primordial urge for human bands to form emotional bonds around a flickering light.

It is deeper than nature.

It is.

evolutionarily essential.

Can you email me that so I can tell the kids that's what I'm doing when I'm watching the real housewife?

Well, we've got it now recorded.

Yeah, that's great.

I'll come to the house and lecture them.

Ro will kind of go, okay, professor, can you stop talking for 10 seconds?

No, I got a lot out of that.

Now I'm outdoorsy.

Yes, exactly.

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So, for those people out there listening who maybe have never heard of this way, what are some things that will inform them on how to have conversations with people?

Like, what are some things that have been hurtful to you?

What stupid ass things do people say?

Yeah.

That hurt your feelings.

How does the sex work is always

the bad one?

Like the same way you felt, Abby, with your mom.

It's like that thing of like, why do I have to talk to you about that?

It's not even that.

We've had people say to us, oh, yeah, I know a thruple.

And boy, do they have rules.

There's two men and a woman, and she gets to make all the rules and tells people what.

And that's what I get it.

And I'm like, no, you really don't.

So people make assumptions about what that is.

And they're always focused on the sex.

And they always think that it's like kinky sex.

I think it's just like that thing where I don't.

I think it's just the way that humans sort of come apart and come together, clump and everything, is always unique.

And so I don't know that there's anything we're doing

that

would even apply to other thrupples or other polls.

Necessarily.

I mean, they don't know.

We have not studied the matter.

No.

It's just your way of love.

It's a way of love, like gravity.

It's so beautiful.

I feel like this whole hour has been this, but what have you learned through this way of love?

that you think would be helpful for people in different ways of love that everybody can learn from to deepen their own relationships.

For me, it's that

keep your heart 100% open and be willing to be told where your blind spots are and to listen when somebody else, even if they're upset, listen to them.

And again, I wouldn't have learned that if we hadn't had the referee system, but it's made me open my heart.

much more non-judgmentally to everyone, all my friends and everything.

And we don't follow cultural rules.

So, breaking a cultural rule is not bad.

If someone's broken a cultural rule, I want to know what they were feeling and thinking at that moment because the culture is not interesting to me.

What they're going through is very interesting to me.

And that openness, it's made me much softer and more gentle.

And it's really helped me be a better person for sure.

Yeah, I think when you're

a weirdo against your will, it does help you develop compassion and imagination and everything.

It's the same with being gay.

Yeah.

I often think it must be really hard for people whose nature lines up exactly, like just happens to line up exactly with the rules of the culture

so that everything that feels natural to them is normal, you know, and in every way and they want to do accounting or whatever, you know, like I don't know good examples, but like, and then

it must be so hard to understand people, you know?

Does queerness make the transition to this kind of way of love easier?

It feels to me like you already had to navigate so many things outside of cultural acceptance that

does it help this transition to this way of love.

That's interesting because we'll have really different experiences of that because

you had already sort of, and you're older than me.

And so you were, you were coming out in a different time and everything.

For me, I was mostly dating guys when we got together, but bisexuality had just, it was so sort of obvious to me that it had barely been worth stating.

Like I was very lucky in that I grew up in a very progressive sort of.

family and city.

You date your parents, right?

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Absolutely.

So when we were first together, we were in this, we were on this ranch.

And one of the things about being out in nature is it's very silent and there's not a lot of hubbub and it's hard to hide what's going on in a house.

So we would do this thing.

Roe's mom came to visit.

She was in the guest room.

We'd put, we would make Roe go to sleep in the family room.

And then she would tiptoe out and come into the bedroom after her mother was asleep.

So when she finally came out to her mother and she said, yeah, we're, we're all in a relationship.

Her mother's like, so you don't have to tiptoe around the house?

Yes.

So

how is your mom?

What was her ultimate reaction?

Like she already knew, obviously, but how did she handle it?

She was incredible.

She's awesome.

She's, she's just wonderful.

The thing was, she'd already spent enough time with the three of us to feel the energy.

And I think that's like 95%.

It is, you know, it's like everything else is just structures in your brain being around people and laughing with them.

And, you know, I was, I'm very lucky.

Well, and they feel the undeniability of it.

That's what happened with us.

When I was on the phone with my mom describing it, she was losing it and afraid.

Yeah.

But then when she came

and saw our family, there was no discussion after that.

It was just undeniable.

Yeah.

And that is the truth.

And if queerness gets people there, then thank God, get there someway, because life is hell if you don't have that ability to recognize love and participate in it, whatever form it takes.

And

life is heaven.

when you're so open and there are no categories that you love

everything that wants love and you love people loving each other.

Like I know from watching my kids, I have two, a non-binary child and a daughter, and they've both found amazing partners.

And one thing I know is there's nothing so beautiful as watching your child be with someone really great.

So I hope, you know, that's always my aspiration.

for how I show up with Rose parents, but they're so great.

They're just so great.

And me, I was already out on my ear.

I had no family of origin.

I'd broken all the rules.

I mean, Mormonism had defined the enemies of the church in the latter days as gay people, intellectuals, and feminists.

Screwed, Martha.

Oh, damn.

Damn.

I mean, the Antichrist, the devil incarnate, right?

Really?

I have literally been called the Antichrist in public.

And I always, I responded, I thought he would be taller.

God, yes.

So I already was on the outside of culture.

And so in a weird way, we were in a non-culturated bubble.

And it really helped us come together and bond for those first couple of years.

Yeah, I think if we'd been living in a city or been like we were 40 minutes from the nearest pint of milk, you know, at that point, there really was a lot of time to not be among other people and not have the culture reinforced and the weirdness of it reinforced.

It was just us.

And I don't know if we would have

made it without that time.

Martha, didn't you write about that like decades ago?

I feel like that one of your books mentioned that the importance of separating yourself completely for a while from culture to find out who you are.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's just a really ancient spiritual practice from all over the globe.

And I think everybody should get a chance to do it.

I was lucky to be able to physically move out there.

And when you are by yourself, and I think you can do it, maybe you have to create really strong boundaries.

The pandemic actually helped some people, I think, because when you are on your own for long enough, you start to feel what is natural for you.

And if you're in nature, nature pulls you toward your nature and you start to come out of culture.

And then only love makes sense.

Period.

Yeah.

That's it.

Rowan, you said

we do not live normal lives.

We have a very abnormal family and we are very, very happy.

Ah,

I just love it.

So many people are striving towards normal because that's what we're promised will make us happy.

And it's just so beautiful to hear you say, we are abnormal and very, very happy.

It's palpable.

We can feel it.

And we just always talk about imagining the truest, most beautiful relationship or family.

And you clearly have done it.

And I think it's gorgeous.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's the gates are open.

Whatever happens.

And that's the fun of it is you never know what adventure life is going to bring you when you say, I will live on this thread of

truth that I feel is my self.

It's like you're pulling this thread towards you.

And for me, it's spirit, right?

It's very spiritual.

And it will pull you into such adventures.

And you will say, this is too weird.

I can't do it.

But look what you guys did.

under so much cultural spotlight.

And look at the two of you.

You're just absolutely radiant.

Well, I have to actually acknowledge, Martha, you were one of the first people that we called in search of help and advice because

we didn't know how to kind of approach our love in the public eye.

And like you, Glennon, at the time, and I was learning about deep integrity and speaking the truth and never lying early in my sobriety days, you just gave us the best piece of advice, which is just all you need to do is love each other.

Out loud.

Out loud.

love each other out loud she said it's the truth i think in what we're talking about in our marriage and with your life and the way that you're loving it's just that's i i really think that that might be the only way

yeah i think it is i think so many ways have been tried and they are look around us they are disastrous

why do you follow the culture when you see what the culture has done right yeah and ultimately like the gender of the person we love or the number of people in the relationship any of these things are so fickle.

It's so much less important than the quality of how our lives feel.

Yeah.

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What would we do have many listeners who are in polyamorous or who identify as polyamorous, which is another beautiful thing that I think you mentioned earlier.

There are people who are circumstantially polyamorous, like you,

a memoir, circumstantially polyamorous.

A memoir.

I don't know.

I like what Rowan said earlier.

I like a weirdo against my will.

Yeah, I think that's another good one.

Yes.

I like getting a shirt.

Yeah.

That one's insane.

Yeah.

Excellent.

So either one, maybe one could be the subtitle.

Right.

Yeah.

That works.

But that's a whole nother thing.

I mean, we have friends who have come to us and said, listen, just like along the way i realized that my identity is queer i have realized that my identity is polyamorous i was made to love yeah and at first people think oh wait what but really the only reason we say wait what is because we've we've been culturally conditioned to believe in monogamy yeah

right so so it's two different things correct it's an it's an identity and a circumstance that can happen when Karen comes home and says, I'm in love with Rowan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we shouldn't presume to speak for

anyone other than ourselves, because it is a circumstance for us.

And I think that it's quite a different thing for many people in the way that they want to love.

And I don't know how other people experience it.

But I do love that queerness has sort of broken the cages.

Being gay when we were growing, or when I was growing up,

it was so weird that they wouldn't even put it on.

There was a show that had one gay character and they wouldn't show it in Utah.

That's how bad they were about it.

So then it was like, okay, you're exactly like straight people, only both the same gender.

So, okay, we can we can handle that.

And that becomes, do you have one of those strappy things?

Yes, exactly.

Who wears the strappy thing?

It's like, who wears the pants?

Yeah.

We both wear pants.

Yes.

But yeah, and then there's something going on.

I honestly, I said, this whole thing is spirit.

My whole life is about spirituality.

And for me,

the soul is genderless.

And so I think that's what's happening is that the soul is being let out of its cultural cage.

And kids, really brave kids, are saying, I am none of the things culture says I am.

Let me tell you about myself because that's.

That's the person you're dealing with.

And if you love a cultural image, a paper doll that I put out to fit the culture, you don't love me because you don't know me.

And I think we've all been living like that for centuries.

And I think it's shifting now in a way that is deeply spiritual.

It's a homecoming to the soul.

Yeah.

Don't you think, because you have a non-binary kid, how you said, right?

Yeah.

We feel like the queer elder aunties now.

Like, so whenever anybody has a non-binary kid, we get the call first and they're like,

can you queer auntie them?

You know?

So whenever somebody tells me now that their kids told them they're non-binary, I just think of that kid as like, oh, yeah, that kid's really smart doesn't it just feel like

they're like because it's like emperor has no clothes it's like yeah gender isn't freaking real so it would make sense that some kids are going to see the matrix early and be like oh i see that i've been assigned a role to play but i actually don't feel like playing that role for you Yeah, right.

Super smart.

So this is, this is someone who actually knows what's going on.

Exactly.

I also have to, I have to put in a shout for my kid-in-law.

My daughter married a non-binary person too.

And the non-binary people that I know are amazing.

And I don't know if all non-binary people are amazing, but damn, these two you have are.

Well, talk about anybody who has really tried to.

excavate themselves.

And if they're young, to me, I'm like,

that is a person that is really trying to not just figure out themselves, but the world and seeing all of these bullshit barriers that we're all told and made to live within.

Well, you two are amazing.

Tell me,

both of you.

We do this thing called the Next Right Thing, where we just tell people one little thing they can do, which let's just tell people one little thing they can do to do a homecoming, as you said earlier, to return home today to who they are.

Because really, this is just all about.

authenticity.

Everything you're talking about is just about being true to self.

What can people do do today to return to themselves?

So with our podcast Bewildered, and we're always about like, where's the culture here?

What is the culture telling us to do?

Because it's so invisible.

And so the thing that always occurs to me with this is I ask myself, if I want to find a way to come home, is it's really simple, but it's like, is this optional?

Because I think we forget how many things are optional, but that feel compulsory.

And so sometimes I'm just like, wait a second, I think that's one of the optional things, like going out to that thing or being among humans or something gross like that.

Like

it's, it's optional.

You took mine.

Oh, no.

No, go on.

Say,

I have a methodology.

I have a method.

Here's a graph.

I'm a self-help mother.

Okay, so write a list of things you have to do and then read through it and see if there's anything you don't want to do.

And you can go like write as many things as you can until you get to something you don't want to do.

And then ask yourself, do you really have to do it?

Exactly what she said.

Optional.

So if, and when you find something that you don't want to do and you don't have to do, don't do it.

God, I love it.

I love it.

I'm doing that today.

Oh, gosh.

There we go.

She's the list guy.

She's the list maker.

And then I get off my easel.

And guess who gets to do the things that she doesn't want to do and doesn't have to do?

This guy.

Philly.

You need another person.

That makes sense.

I decided what every woman needs is a wife, but now I'm thinking what every woman needs is two wives.

That's good.

Two wives.

You are a dream.

We love you so much.

Thank you for trusting us and sharing this hour with us.

For the rest of you, this week when things get hard, don't forget we can do hard things and make your list and cross off whatever you don't want to do or have to do and return home to yourself.

See you next time.

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