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Fort Washington, Pa. — The audience members at the annual Poly Living convention — think hippies, retired science teachers, a high quotient of male ponytails — are singing what might be the only song ever written about polyamory.

She lives with her sweetheart Jen

And Jen's husband whose name is Glenn

It's a lifestyle that has been alternatively misidentified as Swinging, Wife Swapping and Really Greedy.

Now they raise their kids together

And are happy more than ever

Polyamory isn't about sex, polys tell you. It is about love. It is about loving your primary partner enough to love that they have a new secondary partner, even when their New Relationship Energy with that person leaves you, briefly, out in the cold. It's about loving yourself enough to acknowledge that your needs cannot be met by one loving person. It's about loving love enough to embrace it in unexpected form — like maybe in the form of your primary's new secondary! — in which case you may all form a triad and live happily together.

And so some 100 people, a small fraction of the 15,000 polys on the mailing list of convention sponsor Loving More, have gathered here at a Holiday Inn for two days of seminars with such titles as "Hap-Poly Ever After: Long-Term Poly Partnership" and "Kids and Poly Relationships: A Human Relations Primer About Melding All Your Loves."

Anita Wagner, 54, with a chart of the different connections of her partners at the at the annual Poly Living convention in Fort Washington, Pa. "Many of us tried to make monogamy work," says Wagner. (Jim Graham/The Washington Post)

Of course, sex is a part of love. Which is why the pastor leading "Love and Marriage in Bible Times" is talking really loudly, to combat the noises coming from the tantric sex workshop next door. Which is why another workshop deals with navigating a "threesome, foursome, or moresome."

Which is why a lot of monos think the whole thing is just an excuse to get some. But really, is there anything going on here that we haven't seen on "A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila"?

What you really want to know is this: What does it mean to have a healthy relationship?

"One thing I like to say is, polyamory ain't for sissies."

This is Anita Wagner, 54, a legal secretary with a buoyant Tennessee drawl, flowing clothes and cheerful lipstick. If there is such a thing as a typical poly story at this conference, Wagner's is it. Like a lot of the middle-aged attendees at this conference, Wagner was married, twice — traditional marriages that weren't supposed to involve cheating but did anyway.

She thought she might be bisexual, but ignored those feelings to focus on raising her daughter. Once the second divorce was over and the daughter was grown, "I realized that, being the bighearted person I am, I was denying myself something that we all need."

That was love. Big Love.

So she lived with Jim, and they drove each other batty. Then she met Tim, and now they live together, but she still sees Jim, and also Carla. Tim, Jim and Carla, of course, have other partners, and when Wagner maps out those connections as far as she can, the number reaches 18. Her relationships are "V's," the most common poly type, which means she is the connection point between multiple other people. She sees Tim and Jim, but Tim and Jim do not see each other.

"Many of us tried to make monogamy work," Wagner says. But monogamists would break off "perfectly good relationships" just because of intellectual incompatibility, for example, or because one partner liked ballet and the other liked bowling. Doesn't it make more sense, polys ask, to keep the good parts of a relationship, and find another boyfriend who likes "Swan Lake"?

The compartmentalization of affection: It's completely at odds with today's Disney Princess/Coldplay-lyric view of marriage, in which your spouse is your lover, best friend, therapist and Wii buddy, and you also have identical taste in movies.

But as people are increasingly expected to self-actualize clear to the grave, what are the chances that they'll pair up with someone who is on the exact same path of discovery?

Thought: Maybe you can have it all. You just can't get it all from the same person.

It's the thought that illustrates a paradox in polyamory: Its practitioners have astonishing optimism for humans' endless capacity to love, to share, to forgive, to grow, to explore. But that optimism seems rooted in a cynical belief that the monogamous are stuck in a myth that leads to cheating, unhappiness or divorce court. They believe, as do some evolutionary biologists, that most humans do not have endless capacity to be faithful to just one person.

There's a vague aura of entitlement to polyamory, the concept that one deserves complete romantic fulfillment.

More than one presenter at Poly Living's sessions utters a variation of this statement: We're just doing what everyone else is doing anyway. The difference is that we're not lying about it.

"People in my generation are recognizing that they have more choices when they're deciding what they want their families to look like," says Diana Adams, 28, a polyamorous lawyer who specializes in alternative family law in New York. "This is an important historical moment because of the gay marriage conversation. We're becoming more accepting of gay parents, of single parents."

About a dozen poly parents discuss both changing public perception and the daily grind of child-rearing at the "Kids and Poly Relationships" seminar.

"My oldest son is very attached to our current girlfriend," says one male participant who wants to know how to protect his son. "It's happened before with a relationship that didn't last."

"My 13-year-old is embarrassed of us," says another concerned dad, with an expression of profound shame.

The session leader, a clinical therapist, laughs. "All 13-year-olds are embarrassed of their parents."

When you watch people interact at Poly Living, it can seem that we humans have no idea what makes people happy inside relationships, or what arrangements people need to navigate the world.

Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, a professor attending the conference from Puerto Rico, puts it this way: "What is my sexuality? I don't know. I'm an artist. One day I paint a face, the next day I paint a landscape. Why should I paint the same thing every day?"

There is, however, jealousy — especially from mono-poly couples, the ones in which one half of the relationship never planned on sharing.

Joe LaVasseur, 25, and his girlfriend, Victoria, 28, who asked that her last name be excluded because her other partner is not out, were a couple like this. They met four years ago, and by the time he learned she was poly ("Something I had no experience with," he says), he was too smitten to stop seeing her.

"It was hard," LaVasseur says. "I'd always identified my self-worth by my relationships. I felt really insecure that I wasn't enough for her."

They developed a system. If Victoria so much as thinks she's interested in someone else, she tells LaVasseur immediately. "Then, later, I'll say, `I'm thinking about kissing them,' " says Victoria. "And then, `I'm thinking about getting serious.' "

Ironically, what helped was LaVasseur's meeting Victoria's other partner, with whom she lives. He recognized how different he and the other guy were, and that what Victoria got out of that other relationship would not compete with what they had.

Whatever their lifestyle is, it's not easy, and it doesn't allow for a whole lot of me-time. "Sometimes," says Victoria, "I have to pull out my planner and say, `We have three hours on Sunday. Want to see a movie?'"

Later that night, Victoria and LaVasseur are facilitators at a cuddle party — a nonsexual outlet for people of all ages to spoon, tickle, pat and snuggle one another. The two of them aren't sitting anywhere near each other; in fact, LaVasseur is demonstrating proper cuddle etiquette with another woman, one old enough to be his mother.

Victoria looks on contentedly; she catches his eye and they smile.

They seem ridiculously in love.