"Four partners, one love: It's polyamory "

CNNMoney did a piece on polyamory:

Imagine being in a serious relationship with your husband, a boyfriend, a girlfriend and dating around on the side -- that's polyamory. It's not new, but is infiltrating tech culture.

The anthropologist they consult is surprisingly ignorant on the subject. Has it never occurred to her that people feel obligated to construct monogamous relationships only, and thus hiding and cheating become common? And what does she count as failure? Most monogamous couples break up, but that never becomes a sign that monogamy itself was the problem. If you have multiple partners, just by probability you're more likely to experience at least one breakup: there are more people to break up with! But polyamorous relationships usually don't explode the way monogamous ones do, because the participants (if they're doing it right) have already established open lines of communication.