'I live with my wife, our kids - and my partner. The questions are unrelenting.'

The following is an adapted excerpt of Prudish Nation: Love, Life and Libido, by Paul Dalgarno (Upswell Publishing).

The most recent Australian Census, on August 10, 2021, came with a warm assurance that, beyond the raw data, 'every stat tells a story'.

As Andrew Henderson, Census Executive Director and National Spokesperson, said at the time: 'No community is too small to count. We want to make sure everyone is represented so we're urging people to complete now.'

I needed little prompting – filling out online forms during Melbourne's interminable-feeling lockdowns constituted a decent night's entertainment. My bigger concern was how to tell my story within the options provided. It wasn't going well.

Watch: What is polyamory? Post continues after video.

I knew what my household looked like. My 12-year-old son was upstairs in his room with the door shut, despondent after a day of homeschooling. I was downstairs in what had once been a lounge room attending Zoom meetings for a job that would shortly end in redundancy thanks to the economic impact of the pandemic on Australian universities. 

My 10-year-old was in his dressing gown. My partner, Kate, was serving soup and noodles into five bowls. She'd recently found employment again after the pandemic rendered the performing arts company she'd been working for redundant, in every sense. My wife, Jess, was on her phone, speaking to her mum – our children's grandma – who was at home 25 kilometres away in Donvale, which may as well have been Delhi given the travel restrictions.

I was sitting at our kitchen table, nodding encouragingly at my younger son as he slapped down spoons, chopsticks and placemats, feeling annoyed that I couldn't even get past question-bloody-two in the census.

Who spent the night of Tuesday 10 August 2021 in this dwelling? Mark all that apply, like this: 

• You
• Spouse/partner
• Adult family members (including adult children, parents, siblings and extended family members)
• Babies, children and teenagers
• Unrelated housemates, flatmates or boarders
• Visitors or friends who will spend the night of Tuesday 10 August 2021 in this dwelling

What I wanted to do, but couldn't, was amend the second box from Spouse-slash-partner to Spouse-plus-partner. Because that was my reality – the stat that would tell my story and theirs, the snapshot of my life and the lives of those I loved and lived with on Tuesday, August 10, 2021.

To be fair, I didn't need the ABS to remind me that my situation was unusual.

In 2020, I published a novel called Poly about a couple with young children who open their marriage and end up living polyamorously.

I'd made the decision months earlier, in agreement with my publisher, to be open about the fact I had IRL experience of polyamory. And the downside was this: for every question anyone asked about the novel during interviews and online book events, there were five or six about my personal life.

I bumbled through answers as best as I could, to questions such as:

What is polyamory? 

It's basically having more than one partner, or being open to that...

And do the husband and wife have to agree?

Yeah, I guess. But it doesn’t have to be a husband and wife, or a couple even. You can be single, a throuple, a quartet...

Do you get jealous?

Me personally?

Yeah.

Yeah, I do, but the theory is you can get beyond that, to something called ‘compersion’, which basically means you're happy your partner is enjoying intimacy with someone else. I'm rubbish at it.

What's a normal day in the life of a polyamorous person?

Right, yeah, that's a tough one... I'm guessing it would typically start with breakfast, maybe muesli or toast...

Seriously. Try answering (quickly, during a radio interview, say), curly questions of this sort, switching out polyamory for something else. What's a normal day in the life of a monogamous person? Do straight, gay, lesbian, bi+ or asexual people get jealous? What is monogamy? It's hard, and not because you're embarrassed – it's just difficult to know how other people are, or should be, behaving, unless you're in the business of deciding how other people should be conducting their lives, which, now that I think about it, is actually pretty common in religion, politics, media and nosey neighbours.

I do feel fairly safe assuming that polyamorous people – in common with most of humanity – aren't having sex all the time, even though that seems to be a common misapprehension. Life would become unmanageable, not least because, as a poly person, you need a bit of time to update your shared Google calendars and keep partners apprised of every aspect of your emotional life. Likewise, poly people are generally not indiscriminate with who they want to hook up with (even though some people – cis straight men after a few drinks mostly – tend to think the opposite when a woman says she's poly). 

I'm guessing poly people are about as keen as anyone else (i.e. not much) to answer prying questions from strangers about who sleeps where in a private household. I'd even speculate that most (like the vast majority of people, regardless of sexuality, orientation or relationship structure) are just trying to get through the grind of the day-to-day as best they can.

And ideally be counted in the census.

Image: Supplied.

Paul Dalgarno’s latest book Prudish Nation: life, love and libido is out now, RRP $29.99

Paul Dalgarno is the author of the novels A Country of Eternal Light (2023) and Poly (2020), and the memoir And You May Find Yourself (2015). His writing has appeared in Guardian Australia, Archer, Australian Book Review, Penthouse and many other publications. He lives in Melbourne.

Feature Image: Supplied.

TAKE SURVEY ➤