About RVAPF

Founded in 2009, our group was created to provide a safe place where polyamorous people could share their experiences with others and offer support, help, advice, and sometimes just a shoulder to cry on. When a person steps off the path of monogamy and starts blazing their own trail, they often find new obstacles that no one taught them to overcome. One of the goals of RVA Poly Families is to offer a community of like-minded people to help make overcoming those obstacles easier.

Over the years our group has grown, and in many ways has become not just a support group but a community. We help each other move, or ask around when someone need a babysitter, or loan out our vacuum cleaners. We started out with only a monthly pot luck meeting during which we had a group discussion on poly topics, and those meetings still form the heart of our group. But we are growing into a more active dynamic in greater Richmond society, and find ourselves interested in reaching out to educate the public at large.

RVA Poly Families meets on the second Sunday of every month for a Poly Potluck. Everybody who can brings a dish to share and different members take turns hosting. Not only do these events allow us to socialize, but we usually sit down for a focused discussion of a set topic. Previous topics have included conflict resolution in relationships, coming out Poly to your extended family, polyamory and parenting, and polyamory and religion. We also occasionally have group outings, such as picnics, fall pumpkin picking, and a Valentine's group date.

Polyamory means different things to different people and we find that even within our group people have vastly different ideas (and solutions) for issues pertaining to relationships in general and poly relationships in particular. Our goal is not to tell people "how to do poly" but to help people by sharing our own experience of what has worked and what hasn't in our own relationships.

In many ways we are ordinary people. We are living our lives, paying our bills, and going to school or work. Some of us are old, some of us are young. Some of us are struggling financially, some of us are affluent. We come from all over the country, from every sort of religious background. Some of us are parents, some of us are married, and some of us are devotedly single. What unites us is a way of loving that is outside the set standard of our society.