After years of being in the national media spotlight for food carts, doughnuts, and bagpipe tootin' unicyclists, it looks like Portland is finally being patted on the back for something more interesting: POLYAMORY! As it turns out, we're pretty awesome at multiple person relationships—or at least better at it than other cities. Check out this story from today's edition of The Guardian, titled "Polyamorous in Portland: the city making open relationships easy."

...in Portland – home to swingers’ clubs, the most strip bars per capita, and annual porn festivals – it seems you can’t throw a stone without finding a poly relationship. Although there’s no official data supporting an exact number, various Meetup groups boast a few thousand members each, while other Facebook groups have hundreds.

“Portland is an amazing place if you’re poly, oh my god,” laughed Franklin, who is rarely seen without his bunny ears. (Given to him by a lover, he refers to the ears as “sexually transmitted”, meaning his other girlfriends now wear them too.) “It’s actually one of the most poly friendly cities I’ve been to,” he said, listing Boston, Tampa, San Francisco and Vancouver, British Columbia, as other poly hotspots. As for its social acceptability, Franklin said, “a lot of it is just exposure. It was almost impossible before the advent of the internet to find other people that were polyamorous.”

Read the rest of the article here.

While the popularity of polyamory in Portland may still be anecdotal, there's no denying I've met more people in open relationships here than anywhere else. For more, check out this interesting article from our sister magazine True Parent in which Heather Arndt Anderson explores how Portland parents in polyamorous relationships manage to balance their romantic lifestyle with having kids. And making it work!