How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms

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Fifteen years ago, when Rich Austin was in his early forties, he and his wife watched the HBO show “Big Love,” about a polygamous family of fundamentalist Mormons in Utah. “I kind of got hooked on it,” Rich told me. “I had a string of broken relationships, so I was joking, ‘Well, maybe if I was a polygamist, I wouldn’t have that problem.’ ” He had a daughter, from a fling a few years earlier, whom the couple were raising together. They were swingers, but Rich wanted more than unattached sex, and broached the subject of polygamy with his wife. The marriage soon broke up.

In 2008, Rich met Angela Hinkley, and soon told her how much he liked the show. “I felt I had to have Angela on board from the start,” he said. They got engaged, and, around the time Angela became pregnant, they started looking for another woman to join them. Online, they met a nineteen-year-old, Brandy Goldie, and after months of chatting she visited them at their home, near Milwaukee. Then she stopped communicating; her mother temporarily thwarted her plans to enter a polygamous union, but, six months later, Brandy called Rich and said, “If I asked to come back, would you ever take me back?” He said, “In a heartbeat.”