Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Peña Guzman.

Welcome to Overthink.

The podcast, we're two friends who are also professors, put philosophy and dialogue with the everyday.

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

This is the fourth and final episode in our series on intimate relationships.

David, I've been thinking a lot about what we discussed in our last episode,

which was on open relationships.

In that episode, we concluded that if you really take seriously the queer and feminist critiques of monogamy,

it sort of seems like you should just be polyamorous, even though neither of us is, at least of this moment.

What do we make of this?

Is it true that polyamory seems to have more liberatory potential than other sorts of intimate relationships?

Well, it definitely seems as if a lot of queer theorists and feminist theorists believe so.

Many of them argue that polyamory is the way of the future. For instance, sociologist Mimi Shippers says that polyamory offers a way to

reorient not only our romantic relationships and our desire, but also gender and race relations.

And so on her reading, it has very radical potential.

Yeah, so this is a really radical claim to make. The idea that polyamory doesn't just reshape intimate relationships, but also reshap relationships more broadly. And I'm thinking here about how

when I was a teenager, I was having an argument with a very

strict conservative Catholic about gay marriage. And her reason for rejecting gay marriage was that

she thought it would ultimately lead to plural marriages. And I, you know, had some counter argument,

like, what are you talking about? That's a slippery slope fallacy.

Just because we extend marriage to people who are of the same gender doesn't mean suddenly we're going to have plural marriages. And then now, you know, like 10 or 15 years later, I'm like,

...