three as a bird

(many possible titles for this piece have been percolating in my brainpan...most of them pretty bad)
The Power of Three.
Three's Company.
When Two Become Three.
When Three Become Fun.
(yes, those were Spice Girl homages)
The Giving Three.
Born Three.
The Chimes of Threedom.
I Feel Three.
(any more semi-obscure song references, you wonder?)
No, but how 'bout "A Three Grows in Brooklyn". Whee!
(okay, i'll stop now)
I have seen the future, the future of love.
Alright, what i've seen is less vague and poetic, but "i've seen the future, the future of the child-rearing family unit" doesn't quite have that MLK panache.
The ship of marriage is creaking and leaking. Will it be patched, or will the bulkheads split wide, pouring all of our throbbing erections and yearning uteri into the sea of humanity, with nary a life preserver to be found?
Some blame feminism for marriage's woes. This is not entirely baseless, as modern woman embraces the concept that she's more than a cow (yes Daddy, moo, yes husband, moo). But i think it's truer to say that capitalism killed Dick and Jane, by isolating them in their single-family dwelling. Cut off from any support system, is it any wonder that even the most loving couples are at each other's throats after a decade or so? In a time gone by, extended families lived under the same roof, providing on-site marriage counseling and full-time babysitting.
So marriage is dying. Okay. If it were up to me (and it may well be), we can toss the baby, the bathwater, and the unrealistic treatment of monogamy out the window.
But someone's gotta raise the kids.
Whither shall we go? (drumrolls, please)
Him and her...and him.
Or her and him and her. Or him and her and that other one who's never felt comfy with the whole him/her thing. Whatever.
Crazy talk? Sure. But lay down your sense of decency, and think about it.
In the two-parent isolation paradigm, there's no reprieve from the presence of the other (except in bolting to the pub, or the arms of the nearest Mr. or Mrs. Jones). Introduce a third person into the mix, and you suddenly have a buffer between any two personalities, to keep them from scraping each other raw.
In the two-parent paradigm, once children arrive, the honeymoon is over. There always has to be one parent looking after the kids, so couples find their together time essentially gone. With three parents, that third set of hands means that any two of them can run off at any time, to rediscover the joy and love that brought them together in the first place.
Need i even mention the added benefit of slowing down population expansion, in a world ill-suited to supporting six billion, to say nothing of the ten billion coming in the lifetime of anyone not named Abe Vigoda? Curiously, this side benefit may be the way this paradigm gets in the door, as nations search for ways to stem a literal human tide. It wouldn't be the first time a great idea came to fruition not because of its merits, but because of some fluke of history.
Not convinced? Ready for the most compelling part of the argument? Three (or even four or five) parents would be a FAR healthier atmosphere in which to raise children. Sometimes the personalities of a child and parent clash. It doesn't mean anyone's right or wrong - some personalities just clash. In the two-parent paradigm, there's little escape from that, and parents/children end up with decades worth of emotional trauma, just trying to coexist. In a multi-parent paradigm, there are more human resources to deflect any conflicts. It's like always having your favorite aunt or uncle around. Kids would be less neurotic, and parents would be less stressed (and less likely to break up the family, which is the rule these days, not the exception).
So how would this new paradigm work? To be sure, it would take a generation (or three) to adjust. There would be pitfalls, the biggest being that NO ONE PERSON can be the focus. There has to be deep affection between each member, strong enough to survive the loss of any one of them.
Is this necessarily a bisexual paradigm? Not at all! Each family would work that out for themselves. You could have one threesome who share everything at any time, another threesome in a conventional heterosexual menage a trois, or another who keep the sex limited to just two at a time. Heck, you could even have her and her and her, or him and him and him. Go crazy. However you arranged it, this paradigm would undoubtedly lay to rest the specter of homophobia just as surely as couples like Tiger and Elin (and their beautiful babies) will forever end racism on this rock. By the way, did you notice how i slipped the phrase "conventional heterosexual menage a trois" into the discussion? Sneaky, eh?
Beyond affection, there would have to be a natural balance between the three parents. Personality clashes and synchronicities would have to even out. Disputes would be settled by majority, but as long as the members of the majority shifted from time to time, you'd be okay. If two of the three love tennis, but the third hates it, there would have to be other mutual passions to offset the imbalances.
And the best part of all?
A million girlfriends (and a few boyfriends) would never again have to pretend they like STAR WARS.