Three or more adults may share a home, finances, and parenting duties, but the law generally does not treat a throuple as a three-person legal marriage. Adults who are doing life together but not legally married often face legal vulnerabilities that married couples avoid through the legal recognition of their relationship.
There are legal gaps that throuples or other polyamorous relationship structures should be aware of before a breakup, medical emergency, or death. Thankfully, there are tools these families can leverage to protect themselves from legal uncertainties down the road.
Estate Planning for Throuples
One of the best ways a throuple can protect their interests is with a comprehensive estate plan. DIY estate planning forms work for some people, but complex estates and unconventional families usually benefit from an estate planning attorney’s expertise.
Some of the estate planning documents polyamorous partners should have include:
- Healthcare Proxy or Medical Power of Attorney: This designates who can make medical decisions on your behalf if you have become unable to do so yourself. This is critical if you have a severe illness, sudden accident, stroke, or coma and cannot speak for yourself. You can also create a hospital visitation authorization and HIPAA release can permit members of your relationship can bypass restrictive “immediate family only” hospital policies.
- Financial Powers of Attorney: This authorizes a trusted partner to handle everyday finances, like paying bills, managing joint housing expenses, or accessing bank accounts, if you are unable to do so yourself.
- Wills and Trusts: Non-married partners have no automatic legal inheritance rights under state laws. This means that if you die without a will, intestate succession laws will award your assets to blood relatives. A revocable living trust and a pour-over will allow you to transfer property, real estate, and money to your chosen partners without them going through probate.
Parenting Rights in a Poly Family
Parental rights pose unique challenges for plural families. Most family courts and parentage laws recognize a maximum of two legal parents. It varies by state law and exceptions exist, but most states only consider biological parents, adoptive parents, or those listed on the birth certificate as having legal parent status.
This means that all adults in the home who play an active parenting role may not have legal standing in health, educational, or custody decisions without specific safeguards in place. Securing formal legal parentage status usually entails pursuing a second-parent adoption or state-specific de-facto parentage to ensure all caregivers in the home are recognized.
Multi-parent families can also create a parenting agreement. This outlines parenting responsibilities, decision-making ground rules, and financial obligations among all adults raising the child.
Polyamorous families using surrogacy or donor insemination also need formal gestational carrier or donor agreements. These documents explicitly establish parentage for intended caregivers upon the child’s birth and squash potential parental claims by a biological parent or surrogate.
Don’t try to DIY these. You’ll want to get help from an attorney.
Poly families should also provide their children’s schools and healthcare providers with the appropriate legal documentation, such as copies of powers of attorney or medical consent. Also consider providing a list of all adults who have permission to make decisions, access records, or receive information about the child.
Property Rights With Collective Ownership
When multiple partners own property together, it’s even more important to detail ownership structure in writing from the start.
Your deed structure and how you hold title determine what happens to real estate if an owner leaves or passes away. Tenants in common allow each partners to hold a percentage of ownership that doesn’t have to be equal. With tenants in common, a partner can leave their ownership share to anyone they choose by way of a will or trust.
Alternatively, joint tenancy with right of survivorship requires equal ownership shares. It automatically distributes a deceased partner's share among the surviving owners, bypassing probate. Neither structure is universally "better" for a poly relationship. The best choice depends on your finances and your family's goals.
Now let’s say a poly family is comprised of three partners, two of whom are legally married to each other. In this type of situation, state marriage laws and title structures intersect in ways that require careful planning. An attorney can help you structure the property's deed and draft a multi-partner cohabitation agreement to ensure all three partners' financial contributions, equity, and inheritance rights are respected.
Throuples who own their home (and even those who rent) may benefit from a cohabitation agreement. A cohabitation agreement is like a prenuptial agreement in that it defines financial responsibilities, equity splits, and other obligations in the event of a breakup. It can also establish buyout rights or force the sale of property if a partner leaves the relationship.
Some Cities Offer Greater Protections for Poly Families
Some cities, like West Hollywood, offer greater legal protections for these non-traditional relationships. West Hollywood’s city council passed an ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on family structure, including polyamorous and consensually non-monogamous relationships. These protections apply to housing, public accommodations, businesses, and city services.
West Hollywood isn’t new to this. The city has been a trailblazer for non-traditional families, instituting a public domestic partner registry in 1985, 30 years before same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide in 2015.
Other cities like Oakland, Portland, and Cambridge, MA have adopted similar protections.
Polyamory vs. Polygamy vs. Bigamy
Polyamory is not the same as polygamy or bigamy. While each relationship may define its own rules a bit differently, polyamory generally refers to having multiple romantic relationships at the same time with the consent of everyone involved. A polyamorous relationship may comprise three or more partners and can take many configurations. It does not require legal marriage, although some individuals in the relationship may be legally married to each other.
In contrast, polygamy (think Sister Wives) refers specifically to the practice of having multiple spouses at once, while only being legally married to none or one of the spouses. Bigamy, which is illegal in all 50 states, is entering into a legal marriage while still legally married to someone else.
