The 82 Percent: Bonus Conversation with Heath Schechinger and Lily Lamboy
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Hi, listeners. Today, as part of our mini-series, The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family, we bring you an in-depth interview with Drs. Heath Scheschinger and Lily Lamboy from the Modern Family Institute.

who collaborated with us to bring you the series. In this conversation, we discuss the historical roots of the nuclear family and monogamy, how family and relationship structures have changed over the last century, the contemporary landscape of diverse families and consensual non-monogamy, and the future of love and family. We also dive into the work of the Modern Family Institute, their vision and mission, and current legal and policy advances.

This is the first of two conversations I'll have with Heath and Lily. Another will be presented in six weeks to wrap up the series. In the meantime, you can find out more about them and their work on their website, modernfamilyinstitute.org. So here we are, the first of two interviews with Heath and Lily from the Modern Family Institute.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family. A conversation with Heath Scheschinger and Lily Lamboy.

Lillian Heath, welcome to the podcast. I'm so grateful to have you guys on. So grateful to be here. Yeah, thanks for having us. First, I wanted to ask you just to tell me a little bit about yourselves and a little bit about your background and how you got to the Modern Family Institute. And Heath, I'll start with you. Sure. I'm a counseling psychologist, and I am also an affiliate faculty member at the Kinsey Institute. I

I started to see how the field of psychology was not really addressing the issue of how people were structuring their families and structuring their relationships. And that led me to eventually co-founding the first ever committee addressing relationship structure within the LGBTQ subdivision of

the American Psychological Association. And in addition, I also ended up co-founding the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition as well. So Lily, tell us about yourself.

Sure. I'm a political scientist and social theorist by training, which means that I focus on persistent inequalities at the intersection of class, race, and gender. I've been doing work in the space of community organizing since I was a teenager and founded my first national civil rights organization at 19, doing sexual assault advocacy work. And

That's really what brought me into doing diversity, equity and inclusion work, which I did professionally. I led that function at both Blue Shield of California and Stripe and left that about a little over a year ago to found this organization with Heath.

And the perennial question that I've been kind of pursuing for about the last 20 years is how do we shape our social, economic and political institutions in ways that help all human beings have a balance of material stability, healthy relationship and the freedom to be how they want to be?

And trying to think about how we distribute resources and how we can do that in a way that's more conscientious and scalable in the face of a political divide that sees it. One is framed as getting things just from the government, and the other is the individual being completely by themselves on an island with no government support. And I see the work that we do as really a third way, thinking about the way that people can come together and care for one another in ways that they already want to care for one another. How do we unblock that and facilitate it?

So I want to invite you both to just give us an overview of what the Modern Family Institute is, who it served, and why it's needed now. You know, I think at its heart, what we really value is creating a future where a family is defined based on its function, not its form.

And we believe that families are simply a space for consistent care and love throughout one's life and that everyone deserves a healthy family. And so we want to think about all the different ways that people are currently have historically and in the future can create a loving, consistent community of care.

I think that we're focusing on prioritizing, supporting people for where they are and their unique circumstances rather than some prescribed form, but really being adaptive and mindful of how our environmental culture and social circumstances have changed and really asking thoughtfully what forms of

might work best for the individuals in their unique circumstances rather than being a one-size-fits-all model for all of society. And practically speaking, we are first and foremost a research institute. So both Heath and I are...

recovering academics and folks who have doctoral degrees care deeply, deeply about research and also understand that research is only as useful as its application. So trying to be bridge builders between those two worlds in order to bring this mission to life. And that means engaging in deep storytelling, which is what we're doing here with you, Whit.

as well as advocacy and helping craft and design policies and laws in both our legal system and the workplace, as well as our professional associations that shape and influence the way that we offer therapy, offer medicine, and other kind of key points of access for the way that people lead their lives within their families and relationships.

So we, you know, we have this title of the series, right? The 82%. And I'd like to, if you guys can speak to how we arrived at that title and what that title means and why that's a meaningful number for us.

Yeah, so the 82% statistic specifically comes from the U.S. Census. We were looking at data from the 2020 U.S. Census, which breaks down household formation and structure and does that with reference to what we think of as the norm, which is the nuclear family, which means two married adults living with their kids.

So if you think of a sitcom from the 80s or 90s, like that's what we have in mind, The Simpsons, right? And what we were shocked to see is that only 18% of US households are configured in that way. Meaning that there are 82% of households that are not configured in that way. Our brains kind of just melted. We were like, what's everyone else up to?

And the truth is, even the data we have doesn't give us fine grained information about all the wonderful and maybe even challenging ways that people are trying to structure their families. We only have data like, you know, the fact that 28% of people are living alone. So 28% of U.S. households are solo households. Yeah.

We only have data on who's a single parent, quote unquote, but we don't necessarily know who lives next door to them. How are they forming their communities within their church groups? How are they forming their communities within a school group? So there's a lot that we're seeking to understand as researchers that helps give us a lot more texture around the many ways that people are living outside this quote unquote norm to create the communities of care that we call a family.

Yeah, and it's a shocking statistic. And I've been in conversation with both of you and seeing you talk and present that statistic to other people. I was amazed both for myself and when you ask other people, what percentage of households do you feel are in this nuclear family structure? And people routinely say 50, 60%.

And the fact that it's 18% shows this like perceptual gap between what we feel is the norm and what the reality is of what's happening and who is and isn't being served. And that's why storytelling is so vital. I'll just say we're so grateful to be partnering with you on this because that perception is only closed when people's stories are shared and especially stories that invite compassion, nuance, attention,

like the ones that are shared here on this podcast. So I think that this is the key way that we shift this. It's not just in presenting data, it's in presenting the qualitative, deep lived experiences of people.

It can seem like there is a particular right way to do family and to form or structure our relationships. But I think it's important that people know and see that they are not alone. That there is a number of people that we are featuring in these stories that have experiences of feeling like there is something wrong with them or that they are different. But the truth is that what they are doing is normal.

it became clear that we weren't just focusing on supporting a minority of people or a trend that was even new, but we're focusing on now, currently, the majority of families in terms of how they are structured and relationships in terms of how they are structured.

Granted, many of our laws and cultural norms were created in a particular era that prompted people to see their families and relationships in a particular way, but that is not how the majority are structuring their families and relationships today.

And as Lily mentioned, the census and other large data gathering bodies are capturing the broad brushstrokes, but we really feel like that there's additional work that is needed to capture the nuances of how people are building out their families and how they're structuring their relationships.

For many, that aspect of who they are, perhaps even their identity, is just as important, perhaps, as their sexual orientation, as their religious identity, or their racial identity. And so we really need to do more work in understanding the how. And I think it's important that we're acknowledging how people are being impacted.

and what some of the impact is of there being a one-size-fits-all model

that is promoted to society and having our laws and cultural norms really reflect that, right? My mind goes to how we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, right? Where half of Americans are feeling isolated or lonely and how that equates to smoking 15 cigarettes a

a day, I think of the friendship recession that we're in and how in 1990, more than half of men reported having at least six close friends. But in 2021, only about a quarter of men say the same, right? That people are struggling to fit this norm or feel this pressure to

to move out into the suburbs to marry the person of their dreams. And they achieve this ideal structure only to find that they are feeling isolated and that it is really difficult to try to raise children in the modern era where it takes two incomes to try to raise a kid and you're caring for your aging parents because we're having kids later. And I think that it is important that we're starting to have these broader conversations about

about how well this model is really serving us and serving society.

You know, given all these statistics that we've talked about here around isolation and alienation and family structure and the 82%, I want to kind of interrogate why, you know, how did we get here? And Lily, I've heard you say before that you don't use the word non-traditional families. You use the word diverse family structures. And I wondered if you could give us a bit of history as to how the nuclear family came to be the norm in the U.S. and some of the historical examples that can inform a new way forward now.

Yeah, absolutely. So the nuclear family as a term actually only arose in the 1930s, which makes sense because the concept of nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, right, those are relatively new scientific concepts even. So why would we have talked about it before then? But the idea of people living kind of alone in the sense of not living with an extended community and kin network in a village setting came first.

in the 20th century with people primarily leaving those village settings looking for economic opportunities. So you had a first wave of folks doing that in the pioneer era, and then you had kind of a second big wave in the 20th century of people doing that to move to places like company towns, right? Where GE or Ford was.

and really structuring their families as a husband, a wife, and their kids. And there's this idea that this is how things have always been. But even in the 19th and 20th centuries, there's so much evidence that that's not how people were living.

I read a statistic recently that 60% of Americans had a border living with them through the 19th century. So people were always opening up their homes, they were renting out rooms, and they were constantly sharing care duties with the other people in their local areas or neighborhoods.

So even when people were living a little bit more nuclearly, it was a lot more communal than we often think about it being now. And the idea of the nuclear family is actually a piece of propaganda in some sense that is emphasized and promoted by the U.S. government in the 1950s as a way to distinguish the American way of life from the USSR.

So this is a really important piece of history, which is that my husband's Ukrainian, his parents grew up in the USSR. So I know a bit more about this, right? People lived largely in multi-generational families in very small apartments with kind of everybody, right? Like my in-laws always say we lived in the hallway.

And not in a bad way. People had what they needed, but there was just a teeming with life. People were watching each other's kids. There wasn't this strong sense of like, this one is mine and only mine. And we don't talk to other families except at organized extracurricular activities. Like that was very much not the way of life in the USSR.

The U.S. engaged in lots of explicit campaigns to define Americana and define American life during this time period. And one of the main ways that they did that was by defining and emphasizing the nuclear family. But even at its height in 1970, where 40% of households had a nuclear family structure, it was still only 40% of households. And the majority of those by far were white and middle and upper class.

So I think it's really important to know that this has never been like a timeless traditional way that human beings have organized themselves. It is a specific way saying the way to be successful in our culture is to have this kind of family structure. And you actually see this globally with colonialism. India and other places start to make it illegal to marry more than one person once they start coming into marriage.

contact with Western civilizations that are requiring a certain way of being in order to have economic and social and political exchange. It's a very small minority of people on Earth who've ever organized themselves in a nuclear family arrangement. And it's actually becoming much more rare, I believe, because the context in which it ever even thrived to begin with was significantly more communal and

was one where women were not wage earners. So I think that's a really important part of this is that there was a respect

and a value placed on care work in an otherwise highly gendered and highly sexist context where women were expected to do care work, but there was still a lot of care work being done and shared amongst the community and amongst people in the community. Whereas in the 70s, you start to see women moving into the workforce. But what you don't see is a replacement for all that care work that makes sustainable sense.

You just see us paying low wages to people who have to abandon their own kids at home in order to make a living wage and aren't able to show up and be with their own children and their own elders and their own loved ones, which is the situation we're in now. But we haven't seen an increase in wages. We've seen a stagnation in wages. And so people now have to have jobs.

a two-age household for the most part to just survive, but that doesn't replace the need for the kind of community of care. So while they're doing it in isolation, they just don't have what they need. Period. End of story. Not just from a material perspective, but from a relational perspective.

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I want to interrogate as well what's at the heart of the nuclear family from a relationship perspective, which is monogamy, right? So not only is there this like parents with children in sort of an isolated living unit, but there's also an expectation that monogamy is a part of that structure as well. Can you tell us a bit about the history of monogamy and how that fits into the family structure we're talking about? My understanding is that for 90% of human history,

People did not live in settings that prioritized monogamy or where we see strong evidence of monogamy. So in hunter-gatherer societies, we see pretty egalitarian family and relationship structures with both men and women participating in sexual or romantic relationships with more than one person. The evidence for monogamy really starts with agrarian society. And that makes intuitive sense to me because that's when property ownership comes about.

Because if you have a farm, it means you're investing a lot of resources in one plot of land. So it makes sense that you'd want someone to care for it, right? And you'd want to be able to pass down that privilege to the people that you love. So that comes with this idea of transferring your property, usually to the oldest son, at least in Western civilization or the seeds of Western civilization. And so that comes with it, the expectation that you know who your oldest son is.

And in a world without birth control and in a world without paternity testing, it's very difficult to know whose son is yours unless the person that you marry is faithful and specifically kept kind of under lock and key. Both literally in some societies through purdah or through, you know, other very specific mechanisms that we see in Western civilization as well.

But also through social norms, which is the idea of virginity being completely sacrosanct, the idea of being a slut, being the worst thing you could possibly say about a woman, and a concept that doesn't even apply to men.

So that gendered idea of a woman being confined sexually so that you can know where the progeny comes from is, in my understanding, kind of the seed of monogamy as a social institution. And it gets really amplified by the Catholic Church, which makes it sort of part of the religious doctrine.

Those belief systems and those property transfer systems that are seeded in the 10th, 11th centuries, those spread. They spread to every version of Christianity to some extent. And the Catholic Church, they figure out that they can create a system where the second son of a family always becomes a priest. The first son gets married, the second son becomes a priest. And if

The first son fails to produce a legitimate male heir, meaning you know where he came from, and he's definitely a boy, and he lives to 18. If that fails, the property goes to the church. So I just want to sit with that for a second.

It makes so much sense when you think about the history of Europe and you think about the fact that the Catholic Church remains the second largest property holder on earth after the British royal family. And I think about that because none of this has to do with love. None of this has to do with community. None of this has to do with care. It has to do with restricting women's freedom in order to ensure the transfer of property. Period. End of story. Peasants, I will say, serfs, did marry for love because they didn't have any property. Yeah.

So you do have these really wonderful institutions around love and marriage. So I don't want to say that this is the only way that monogamy has ever showed up or the only reason that we have it. But the reason we have it as a dominant social institution, my understanding is that it's really linked to both patriarchal conceptions of ownership as well as literal property ownership, which then spread when the Spanish and Portuguese start colonizing the New World and

And then, of course, the French and British and all those folks follow suit. So they're coming into contact with the populations that they pillage slaves, enslaved people from. So they are forcing family and relationship structures through often literally dividing up families and selling them off, which is horrifying. And then only letting people who are enslaved participate in monogamous marriage traditions.

And then the other thing we see is indigenous families who have lots of different ways of creating family, according to the anthropological record, getting murdered and then also getting forced into, again, familial institutions and arrangements against their will because they won't receive resources or legal protection otherwise.

So I think there's one more really beautiful piece maybe to land on, which is, you know, what can we learn from both historical and ongoing family practices, family and relationship structure practices?

So you see in the historical record, all of these, you know, explorers and missionaries who are traveling around the world and recording what they're observing. That's how we know a lot about the indigenous groups that were decimated. And there's this really lovely quote from a Naskapi indigenous Canadian tribe member to a 17th century Jesuit missionary who's just observing their culture at that point. And he says, you Frenchmen only love the children of your body.

But we love all the children of the tribe. And I love this quotation personally. I really resonate with this. This brings up this concept that you'll hear about probably in many of the stories here around alloparenting, which means loving the child of someone else. It doesn't have to be your biological child. You can be a parental figure to somebody who isn't of your own blood.

And that's something I personally practice in my life. I am very lucky to be kind of an auntie to a child who lives really close by, who I see regularly and help with care duties. And that's something that I think we've seen practiced throughout human history and across the world.

And that still happens in lots of places on earth. So this is one of these things where we think, oh, well, we've completely trended away from this. But actually, when you look at indigenous communities in South America, for example, you see communities like the Barrio Venezuela, where every man who has sex with a woman while she's pregnant considers himself to be the father and contributes to the child's development. And the woman chooses those men.

So it could be zero men, it could be two men, but it's considered a deep honor to be chosen to be a father. And I just want to sit with that for a second too, because think of how counter to our cultural norm that is.

I worked in domestic violence victim advocacy for a while, and I saw so many paternity suits and people who had to sue someone to show up as a father. And that is the norm in our society, the idea that fatherhood is a burden. It's a financial burden in particular. It's not necessarily considered to be an honor. I think by many it is individually, but just in terms of

our cultural standard and norm, what would it look like to live in a society where it was considered an honor to be chosen to help contribute to the development and life of a child, rather than think, I'll only ever do that if I have my own kid, A, and B, even if I accidentally have my own kid, I want to escape that burden.

And how many people wouldn't feel that need to try to escape that burden if our systems were adequately supporting people in the process of raising children where there was more community support for people so that that full responsibility didn't just singularly lie on two people? Exactly. Yeah, it's not about individual responsibility.

It's a collective benefit to all of us that we have children and that we have children who are cared for and loved and able to inherit the world that we're trying to create. Yeah. And I think it's important to note that the nuclear family model is and can be beautiful and work for so many people today. And I think that it's

necessary for those individuals to be nested within a community and or they have the resources to be able to pay and afford for creating the community of support around them with child care or elder care so that they can also go to work and form a community and have a personal life, right? It truly takes a village not just to raise the children but also to support

the parents who are seeking to raise the children as well.

Yeah, I love when I get, you know, a thorough history lesson on something because it always helps me understand that what I thought was either natural or just the way people are is entirely constructed in a brief historical and social context. So it's just an amazing eye-opening experience to talk to you guys. And even given the diverse relationship structures I found myself in, and I still, I learn so much every time I'm in these conversations. So it's really beautiful.

One more little fact, only three to five percent of mammals, of the 4,000 mammals we know about on Earth, practice any form of monogamy. And of those three to five percent, most of them practice social monogamy, so they might pair bond, but they don't practice sexual monogamy.

So I just want to say that those two things can be different. You can say, hey, I have a lifelong commitment to this person. They are my person and I love them and I'm going to stick with them. I have that. I'm married. I love being married. And I also, that doesn't mean that I don't have other deep, close friendships and it doesn't mean that I can't pursue sexual or romantic connections outside of my pair bonds.

So I just wanted to share a little bit of that. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I feel like anytime there is a monogamous pair bond in nature, it's sort of lauded as this, like, we'll see these birds do it, right?

But ignoring the fact that all these other animals don't. But it's like this rare condition, like, we'll see they do it. Yeah, and I think that's where the conversation would ideally evolve, is not that there's a one-size-fits-all model for everyone, but that we all have to address this issue of how do we create security and assure commitment to a relationship while also acknowledging our capacity for autonomy, our need for self-actualization, our

our desire to grow and the capacity that we're living longer and are in relationships longer than we have been previously. And a number of other factors, such as what Lily mentioned, that we are the second generation to be experiencing or to have access to birth control. And so a lot of our norms and values

environmental circumstances, even technology that shaped a model being ideal in a particular time period does not apply in the same way, giving these shifts in our circumstances. And how do we adjust so that we can help people have the tools and resources to really address this desire for security as well as our desire for newness and novelty

within our current framework. And no one model is ideal. The data is not suggesting that consensually non-monogamous relationships are on average lasting any longer or are any more necessarily broadly satisfied. But it's also not saying that they're lasting any shorter or less satisfied. But really what matters is that people have a sense of congruence or agreement about what their relationship agreements are and that they're communicating well about them.

That's a perfect segue into my next question. And I wanted to ask you, Heath, you know, can you dive deeper a little bit and tell us more about the contemporary trends in family and relationship structures and how the monogamous nuclear family is shifting from this 1950s norm that we set up?

Yeah, we're seeing a lot of trends, you know, some of them Lily referenced, but people are increasingly prioritizing their own happiness, just leading to more diverse relationship structures. And there's also greater acceptance around diversity more broadly and a growing sense of diverse family form and relationship structures that are supported by just there being increased visibility and representation in media and popular culture. And we're seeing an increase in

The number of single parents by choice, chosen families, LGBTQ+ families, people living with friends or extended family members, blended and step parents and families, as well as polyamorous families, they're all on the rise.

And there's a number of trends that we're seeing in terms of how people are raising children, where in the 1960s, three-quarters of American children lived in families with two first-time married heterosexual parents, but now today, less than half do. The majority of kids in the U.S. aren't growing up in a nuclear family today.

And there's a number of people who are single parents and trying to raise their kids while maintaining a full-time job. And so the number of single-person households has doubled since 1960 and is now representing roughly 28% of all households. And we're also seeing an increase in people who are aging alone.

One particular statistic around that is that a third of women who are over 65 are now widowed and almost half of women over 65 are

are unpartnered. So where my mind goes is I have a lot of curiosity about how do we bridge that gap? How do we address that shift so that people can have access to forming community or their own form of family, even in these circumstances that they find themselves in, right? And so if people are investing more in their

chosen family or their friendships, they're much better off than if they're investing singularly in one particular relationship.

And I think that that's one of the many ways of having conversations about relationship structure diversity. Not promoting one model over another, but simply having conversations about relationship structure diversity can really support our culture and society in evolving and adjusting to our current circumstances.

We also need to address the fact that currently, when it comes to monogamous relationships, a third of them are experiencing sexual infidelity. One third. And that this continues to be one of the leading causes of divorce or families fracturing in our current culture. Many domestic violence cases are rooted in experiencing romantic jealousy.

How might that be different if we were introducing conversations about normalizing our capacity and for security and our desire for novelty or experiencing connections with other people over the course of a lifetime? And we gave people structure and ways to talk about that in a healthy way.

There are currently about 5% of people who are engaging in consensual non-monogamy, but recent polls are indicating that one third of Americans, that their ideal relationship structure is something outside of monogamy.

So what is the impact of roughly a quarter of our society being in a relationship structure that is not congruent with who they actually are or what they perceive as being ideal for themselves?

How is the stigma that exists towards consensual non-monogamy keeping people from having authentic conversations about their curiosity and they can intentionally try to structure that in a safe way or in a way that feels good to everyone involved? And how might that help avoid a number of people cheating on their partner and potentially causing a fracture in their relationship?

It's so powerful, that statistic, too, of how many people are living in these contexts that they, in a sense, even themselves self-report they don't necessarily even want to be in or that their ideal would be something else. I feel like that as well speaks so powerfully to the way in which we sacrifice our self-actualization to some extent for the social norms that lend us to feel a sense of belonging and the degree to which that power of these structures have over our actual personal choices in our life.

Yeah, people feel like they don't have a choice. It's really difficult to approach that conversation or just be honest about where your curiosity lies. So people have to resort to a more unhealthy option. And I don't think they're always doing it intentionally, but they feel like that's their only option.

We had a friend who told me that it was found out that she was either sleeping with her in a relationship with somebody else and her board seat was in question because of that. And she had to lie and say that she was cheating on her husband.

Because there was more of a framework for accepting cheating than for her to tell the truth and that she was actually in a consensual polyamorous relationship and had been seeing that person for two years with her husband's explicit consent.

I hope that there is a time that we will look back and really see how ridiculous it is that there's such suffocation on just having conversations and bringing this topic into the light so that we can promote health. It's not promoting one particular model over another, but simply introducing

reminding people that they have options and it can be healthy to talk openly and honestly about what relationship structure is best suited for you.

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I think that it's important that we acknowledge that the nuclear family, while successful for many during a particular era and will continue to be an important and helpful model, an ideal model for many, that it was essentially an experiment. It thrived in a specific context, but it doesn't fit the evolving circumstances of our society. Our focus should be on valuing the function of families over the form.

and ensuring that our laws and cultural norms reflect and support the varied ways that people live and form connections today, and that everyone should have access to resources within a community of care that makes sense for their unique circumstances, where they can foster stability, love, and lifelong support.

And I also think it's important that we are framing this question in understanding the shifting cultural perspectives about what marriage or partnership is in our life more broadly.

One of my favorite psychologists is named Eli Finkel, and he promotes this idea that over time we have functionally moved up Maslow's hierarchy of needs when it comes to what we expect from our marriages.

Previously, when there weren't as many resources available, it was more pragmatic marriage for survival. And then we eventually moved to this model of marriage for love. And now we're entering this era where we're engaging in and pursuing marriage for self-actualization.

That our expectations for marriage have shifted into a model that expects a partner to help us self-actualize. And that can be really difficult if we are relying on only one person for that.

There's also these broader trends of us, in part because of the nuclear family model, becoming more isolated. We're spending less time with our friends after we get married. And so there's a lot of pressure on the marriage to be our everything, right? Or what Dr. Finkel calls the all or nothing marriage era.

And I think in some ways it limits our capacity to really help our partner self-actualize when our default expectation is that I am the only person that can really effectively help you self-actualize. And I don't think that has to come necessarily through non-monogamy. I think that it's important that we are promoting models of really staying invested in our friendships,

that we're really staying invested in our family relationships, and that really promoting that having a community of support is essential for helping our marriages and relationships thrive today. And Lily, what do you see as the vision for the future? I see the vision as a world where care is centered, valued, and equitably distributed in a way that's not tied to the gender we're assigned at birth.

So I really hope for a world where care work is considered to be a valuable and beautiful part of being a human being rather than a burden or a chore to be put on somebody else. And that takes the form of sharing that work rather than saying it's one person's job to do all of it. And our current work model makes it really difficult to show up in a consistent way in a community of care.

And the reason is that most people have to engage in a minimum of 40 hours of paid work per week just to get by. That's not to live like some beautiful, amazing, idyllic lifestyle. That's just to not fall into poverty.

And so I want to tie this back to the gender conversation we had at the very beginning of this talk, which is that we've seen so much progress in the gender equity evolution and revolution in this country. But that largely took the form of women and non-binary folks being able to emulate masculinity in the form of going to wage earning jobs and making revenue and profits that largely go to shareholders.

I want to see a world where gender equity goes both ways, where there's an equal,

you know, we equally loud men and, you know, folks across the gender spectrum who say care work is amazing and I want to learn how to do it. I want to take some time off, not just two weeks when my kid is born. I want to work 20 hours a week so that I'm contributing to helping my aging parents, to helping my kids with their homework, to, you know, being, you know, showing up and directing a community play, right? These are awesome things that some people will never have the opportunity to do.

And rather than seeing it as something that we just try to squeeze in in the off hours, we try to do a little bit of care work here and there, or we pay someone else to do it, what would it mean to really radically recenter our economy around a balance between paid revenue generating work and community supportive care work?

So in all these shifts that we've been talking about, you know, this historical nuclear family and now this shift from that nuclear family based on monogamous, based on love relationships to this diverse family structures and the goal of self-actualization and this vision for the future that seems to already be coming into being. It seems to be not something that's in the far future. It seems to be something that's emerging right now. And yet,

there are a lot of cultural forces and challenges to realizing that vision. So I invite each of you to speak to what those challenges are. What are the challenges that are most urgent in realizing these visions that you have for the future? Yeah, I think it's important that people know that there are different options out there, that they know they're normal. I think that so much of it, that there's just blinders on there being viable alternative options.

I think it's notable that there are so many people that are concerned about having children today, despite our species being very much oriented towards wanting to pass on our offspring, to have so many people that are concerned about having children. And understandably so, right? There's concern about doing all of that with one other person.

And I think it's just important to note that you are not alone in wanting to think outside the box around that, that you're wanting to push back. You're wanting to imagine that there's something different, something better.

And I think that it's important that we're starting to articulate how our cultural norms and laws may not be serving us in really living the most thriving lives. And that it's okay to have those conversations. It's okay to push back and to ask for something different. That we're starting to imagine what life can look like in returning back to community.

I think we've been over-indexing on individualism, and we need to course-correct that a little bit and find ways to promote people being more communal and relying on each other more. And I think that these changes call for a collaborative effort that really transcends political divides.

By focusing on our shared values such as stability, love, community, and care, we can work together to create a society that truly supports every individual's right to form and sustain meaningful connections.

I also think that it's important that people start coming out and talking openly about their ideal family form or their ideal relationship structure. Whether that's non-monogamous or monogamous, or if you want to build your family with your best friend, beautiful. Let's start talking about that in a way that we feel empowered and that we realize that we are not alone. We are part of the other 82%.

And I think it's also important to note that change is coming. We are on the precipice of these topics being increasingly in the Overton window where tangible change is possible.

We talk about from a relationship structure standpoint that a third of Americans are wanting to explore or have conversations, are curious about being in a relationship structure, something other than monogamy. And that's even higher amongst people under the age of 39, right? 44%.

people under the age of 39 are curious about structuring their relationships in another way. I also think it's important to note that despite there being these perceptions that consensual non-monogamy is essentially for people who are part of the white, liberal, wealthy, elite class, but when we actually get into the data and what the data is indicating, it's not the case.

that consensual non-monogamy is agnostic to race, religion, political affiliation, class, and even faith. Consensual non-monogamy has its roots in libertarianism, right? Of people just really promoting and doing what they perceive is what makes sense to them. So I think it's important that we're

acknowledging that this is not something that is just practiced by one particular group. And it is time that we really create a coalition of people who are committed to having these conversations in earnest and are willing to reach across the aisle and come up with solutions that truly center around families and healthy relationships. Lily, what do you see as the challenges and the vision?

So I see two main challenges. One is our kind of a deep centuries-old social norm, which I will call mononormativity. That's a term that we use often, which just refers to the idea that it is normative and preferred to be in a monogamous relationship. That's the social expectation of you from birth.

And we live in a society that has incentivized monogamy, right? You literally get tax breaks among many other social privileges. You can only, you know, all of our wills and testaments are set up around it. It's actually illegal still in 20 states to commit adultery.

So there are huge consequences still, both socially and legally and financially, for not participating in a monogamous marriage structure. And I think until we both change the social norm and we change those actual laws to reflect updates to those norms, I think it's really challenging for people to come out and to be clear about what they want. And that's why we see two-thirds of people who...

who identify as consensually non-monogamous experiencing discrimination and severe social stigma. There's a lot of family alienation. There's a lot of ostracism. And so I think that's, you know, people just want to be loved. People want to belong.

I think you said this really beautifully earlier, Whit. So when there's a choice between belonging and living in a way that works for you, so many people are currently forced to choose belonging. And we'd love to see a world where that's not a forced choice.

So my final question here, given everything we've been saying and given all the momentum that's happening right now in our society, what are the wins we're currently seeing to combat some of these challenges? Yeah, so in terms of some of the wins that we've been seeing, more recently, Berkeley, California became the fourth city in the United States to pass ordinances offering protections on the basis of family and relationship structure.

So there are a coalition of different organizations. The Modern Family Institute is one of those organizations that have been drafting and offering support in terms of

passing these ordinances that offer protections not just to families that fall outside of the nuclear family, but also polyamorous relationships and other forms of diverse families and relationships. And now Cambridge, Somerville, Oakland, and Berkeley all have ordinances offering these protections for the first time in history.

I think it's important not just from the perspective of the actual number of people that are protected and might feel more safe acknowledging how they are structuring their family and relationship, but it starts to generate a conversation. And so we're seeing more and more dialogue in media and across the country on this issue, which I think is, it could be argued, is just as important now

to the actual protections that these individuals in these cities are receiving. Yeah, and I think that leads well into a second huge shift that we've been observing and participating in, which is around storytelling and around social narratives.

I get a Google alert on certain topics every day, and I've just seen an influx in the last six months of discussions around things ranging from polyamory to friendship marriages, right? People who are marrying their friends across the world. We're seeing a trend around this in Japan even. So people who are really thinking about restructuring their relationships in

in ways that center care and stability and balance that with freedom and self-expression. And that also kind of look at the modern constraints around having to share resources more now that we're facing a more challenging economy and a changing climate. And I will just caution, I think we're sort of equivalent to the mid-90s or early 90s in terms of our media portrayal of things like consensual monogamy. It reminds me of our Will and Grace era era.

where there is a lot of stereotyping. There isn't necessarily a lot of nuance in how these relationships are getting depicted in popular media. And so I think part of me is like, oh no, it's not perfect. And part of me is like, I'm so happy that we're starting this journey.

And I've seen as a queer person, I've seen us go from a world where I literally never saw a bisexual woman on television to a world where it's like weird if a teen show now doesn't have at least two queer characters from what I can tell. Yeah.

And it's really amazing to have seen that in my own lifetime, to see trans characters and trans characters that are just hanging out and having a good life instead of being centered as struggling. So I'm hopeful that these smaller glimpses into consensual non-monogamy, friendship, marriage, all of these things that we're seeing in popular media now are just the start of a much wider kaleidoscope of social representation of the many ways that people live and love.

Thank you, Heath and Lily. This has been a beautiful conversation and I can't wait to have another conversation with you at the end of our series. This is just the first of our conversations here. And so when we wrap up in six weeks, we'll come back and hear from you again. Sounds great. Thanks so much, Whit, for partnering with us and we're honored to be on the show with you. Absolutely. Thank you so much. We can't wait to hear all the stories that are to come.

Today's episode featured Heath Schesinger and Lily Lamboy, co-founders of the Modern Family Institute. If you'd like to find out more about their work, you can find them on Instagram at Modern Family Institute. Visit their website at modernfamilyinstitute.org or contact them at info at modernfamilyinstitute.org.

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