Social Resilience and Polyamorous Families
PROJECT BACKGROUND
Since 2000, polyamorous families have moved from near-total obscurity to a recognisable, if contested, presence in public life—appearing in legal disputes, policy debates, and a growing body of scholarly work. Yet this visibility has not translated into understanding. Polyamory, which involves maintaining multiple consensual, intimate relationships with the full knowledge and agreement of all involved, challenges the mononormative assumptions embedded in social institutions, legal frameworks, and cultural narratives about what family is and should be. Polyamorous families remain poorly served by empirical research and are routinely misread or erased by the very systems designed to support them.
This project takes the complexity of that position seriously. Polyamorous families are not simply defined by what they lack but by what they construct: interpersonal networks, shared caregiving arrangements, and flexible relational structures that can sustain family life under considerable internal and external pressures. At the same time, they face stressors that are distinct and, in many cases, structurally produced: stigma, legal ambiguity, and exclusion from services that assume a particular family form. These are not incidental difficulties. They have documented consequences for stability, well-being, and access to support.
The question this research pursues is not whether polyamorous families face adversity — they do — but how they meet it. This project examines the social resilience of polyamorous families. Specifically, the adaptive strategies they develop when institutions fail them, when social scripts do not apply, and when they must, in effect, build their own frameworks for family life. Resilience is the chosen lens here, not because these families are exceptional, but because it directs attention toward capacity and agency rather than deficit. The aim is to produce knowledge that is specific enough to be useful — to those working in family justice, policy, and service provision — and honest enough to reflect the actual diversity of Canadian family life.
SOCIAL RESILIENCE
In this project, social resilience is understood as a fundamentally relational and processual phenomenon. It extends beyond individual coping to encompass the ways in which families collectively negotiate stress, mobilise resources, and sustain functioning over time. Critically, this framework resists interpretations of resilience as mere adaptation to adverse conditions. Rather, resilience is understood here as a potentially transformative capacity, one through which families do not simply accommodate structural pressures, but actively contest and rework the norms, institutions, and relational logics that produce those pressures in the first place.
For Canadian polyamorous families, social resilience cannot be disentangled from the myriad structural conditions that necessitate it. Stigma, legal exclusion, and institutional non-recognition are not minor annoyances or problems to be managed; they are the products of a normative order that privileges monogamous, conjugal family forms and marginalises those that fall outside them. The resilience practices of polyamorous families, which include intentional communication, negotiated interdependence, non-centralised caregiving, and the construction of chosen kinship networks, are therefore not simply functional adaptations. They constitute relational and political acts: deliberate refusals of dominant family norms and the articulation of alternative modes of care, belonging, and mutual support.
This framing draws attention to the generative dimensions of polyamorous family life as a site of structural critique. In sustaining themselves against (and in spite of) hostile institutional conditions, these families do not merely survive; they produce new and thriving relational infrastructures, ethical frameworks, and collective practices that challenge the assumed universality of what renowned sociologist Dorothy Smith describes in her (1993) article as the “Standard North American Family”: “a conception of the family as a legally married couple sharing a household. The adult [man] is in paid employment; his earnings provide the economic basis of the family-household. The adult [woman] may also earn an income, but her primary responsibility is to the care of husband, household, and children. Adult [men and women] may be parents (in whatever legal sense) of children also resident in the household” (Smith, 1993, p. 52).
Social resilience, in this sense, is not a property that families either possess or fail to enact. It is a practice through which they produce alternative social and relational possibilities.