"Yes, it was good being a chick to three men, and each of them on his own trip, each wanting a different thing, so that the world filled out, and interplay, like a triple-exposed photo, made indefinite space. I have since found that it is usually a good thing to be the woman of many men at once, or to be one of many women on one man's scene, or to be one of many women in a household with many men, and the scene between all of you shifting and ambiguous. What is not good, what is claustrophobic and deadening, is the regular one-to-one relationship, OK for a weekend, or a month in the mountains, but not OK for a long-time thing, not OK once you have both told yourselves that this is to be the form of your lives. Then begins endless claims, and jugglings to avoid boredom, and the slow inexorable closing of God's infinite horizon, like the red-hot tightening walls in Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum", walls that move in inexorably and choke the life out of your world.
In the Middle ages there was the chasity belt--but that at least could be dealt with, with a hacksaw if nothing else. In our parents' day there was marriage, there sometimes still is, and that is ugly enough, but it is a legal form, and can be dealt with by more of the same, more papers. It is unpleasant, but it is only one form of the monster. The real horror, the nightmare in which most of us are spending our adult lives, is the deep-rooted insidious belief in the one-to-one world. The world of "this is my old man." Live with five, and you have the same claim, but it is spread out, ambigious, undefined. What is unfilled by one will be filled by another easily, no one hung up guilty and inadequate, no one pushed to the wall by demands that he/she can't meet."

-- Memoirs of a Beatnik by Diane Di Prima