Hannah Din
When we think of activism, we often think of action that inspires and uplifts, empowering underrepresented voices. Charlie Kirk, activist and founder of Turning Point USA, reared overseas to challenge the students at Cambridge University. However, Kirk is serving as a voice for, what he believes, to be the underrepresented voice of conservatism on university campuses.
The debate, streamed online on 19th May 2025, gave Kirk a way to push that same conservative tune that seems to be growing in America.
However, the students of Cambridge felt obliged to push back.
Expecting to be met with students taking “North African lesbian studies” (yes, this something he actually said at one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions in Britain), many who watched online saw a flustered side of Kirk. He used the opportunity to express his low view on Gen Z’s beliefs, formed by his idea that education has gone ‘woke’. Kirk even cited the growth of polyamory as evidence of our ‘degeneracy’ and different religious and moral frameworks. But is polyamory a problem that needs to be solved, or is it just a by-product of our modern world?
Is Polyamory Becoming More Common?
Across several debates of pre-approved questions submitted by students, Kirk returned to his beliefs on gender roles and family structures. He claimed that women who prioritise having families as their main ambition are far happier than women who don’t.
However, Middlehurst pointed out that the level of happiness from a typical woman cannot be accounted for just by having children. For example, Finland, which was ranked the happiest country in the world for the seventh year running, even has better social and gender equality policies, which can account for this stat.
Previous to this debate, Archie Mackintosh, behavioural researcher and founder of TruProductive, drew Kirk away from the basis of family patterns being linked to gratification and degeneracy. Instead, he focused the debate on the psychology of it all.
“‘My critique here is less moral and more psychological: while autonomy is important, responsibility and commitment are essential to long-term psychological wellbeing.'”
While Kirk and Mackintosh agree the nuclear family provides a stable environment for a child that often sees the best outcomes, Kirk wondered at why, recently, we’ve seen growing trends of polyamory in addition to the new types of family structures. Mackintosh argued that it is because we’ve seen a growth in adults who have formed different attachment styles and disorders than we have in previous years.
I reached out to Mackintosh after the debate, whose enthusiasm for this topic made him the perfect opponent for Kirk on this issue.
Mackintosh Interview
Q: How far do you agree that the increase in attachment disorders originating from absent parents is to do with a struggling economy rather than a prosperous one?
“The loss of internal stability caused by growing up in unstable home environments leads to decreased ability to form healthy relationships with others, as this was not a norm shown by the parent.”
A: “It’s less about whether a country is “struggling” or “prosperous” in absolute terms, and more about the ecological conditions children are raised in – particularly availability of consistent, emotionally responsive caregiving.
In many prosperous economies, both parents are often required to maintain a certain standard of living, leading to early reliance on daycare or overstretched parenting. At the same time, cultural narratives (often within certain strands of feminism) can devalue caregiving – framing full-time parenting as a form of patriarchal subjugation – which contributes to reduced investment in caregiving as a valid life path. In struggling economies, the same outcome arises via different means: chronic stress, instability and reduced emotional bandwidth.
So, while GDP rises, the quality of attachment-related ecology can still decline – particularly if prosperity leads to atomization, overwork or the ideological devaluation of parenting.”
So, Is It Really All Our Parents’ Fault?
Absent parents are by no means a sole experience for children in Gen Z or Millennials. It’s been pretty much all across the board, with Gen X referred to as the Latchkey generation. Both before and after acts of progression, there has always been one less present parent – even before divorce, men who worked were also away from home.
For parents who return home after the often alienating effects from work, the emotional bandwidth just isn’t there to adequately support children. They may prioritise adequate rest in preparation for the next work day in order to provide.
Although parenting is likely to be outsourced to caregivers and babysitters, these attachment issues stem from a lack of connection to an immediate parent.
Where Does Polyamory Come From?
Q: Are we seeking out more than one partner and seeing a growing trend of polyamory as a want for more stability, not less?
A: “I don’t think polyamory is typically about seeking greater stability. Rather, it seems to correlate more with high train openness, nonconformity and ecological cues of instability (where long-term pair bonding feels maladaptive). In that sense, it often emerges despite the need for stability – not because of it.
That said, prosperity enables the expression of atypical mating strategies – because people have more freedom to experiment, more insulation from the consequences of relational breakdown, and more ideological space to challenge norms. For some, especially those with outsider identities (e.g. neurodivergent LGBTQ+), polyamory can become not just a preference but a way to construct identity through cultural rejection.
My critique here is less moral and more psychological: while autonomy is important, responsibility and commitment are essential to long-term psychological wellbeing. Polyamory, as an expression of radical autonomy, can sometimes obscure that.
Also, it’s important to note that there are two very different types of mainstream polyamory. One is highly liberal, as detailed above; the other is more conservative, namely, polygyny. When multiple wives share one husband this does usually occur out of a desire for stability. Anthropologists measure this using the polygyny threshold model where, essentially, if a woman is able to gain more resources, care and adaptive benefit from sharing one man with other women than being monogamous with a lower value man, it may make adaptive sense for her to choose polygyny.”
The Sociological Side Of It All
The consensus is that, in the home, you learn norms and values from your family, and they teach you the moral compass you abide by for most of your life. It used to be a rare exception that children would turn to subcultures and rebel against these taught values.
When there is less importance on family for your ideals, we turn to other pockets of society to seek validation. I think this is what Kirk was looking for when he breached the topic of a new moral framework as he stood baffled by the fact that not everyone learns their morals from the Old Testament.
The loss of internal stability caused by growing up in unstable home environments leads to decreased ability to form healthy relationships with others, as this was not a norm shown by the parent. This then became externally held in whoever was showing us love.
“Hyperindividualism and self-sufficiency provided this sense of stability and helped to make us feel happy.”
When we explore the fallout of relationships, they can have a serious and negative impact in our lives. For some, it can feel like an absent parent all over again.
Children who observed the nuclear, “stable” family not serving them as it should, may grow to seek other relationship structures. An advantage of this is insulation from the consequences of relationship breakdown and feeling someone’s absence. It’s hard to negate this effect for people.
Are We Disillusioned With The Idea Of Soulmates, Life Partners And Families?
Talking anthropologically, it is natural for us to seek out tribes because it provides safety. But is that urge being channelled out of us if we’re in relatively safer times?
As disposable income increased, individuals became consumers rather than families. It became in the best interest for retailers to focus people on capital rather than building homes. Hyperindividualism and self-sufficiency provided this sense of stability and helped to make us feel happy.
In the arguments that both Mackintosh and I have made, there seems to be a disconnect in our ability to be self-sufficient emotionally, which starts in the home. I believe this has increased our need for these self-soothing ideas of life partners, but in practice has become harder to sustain. I don’t know if I’d say a rise in polyamory is a recession indicator but we seem to have entered an emotional recession, which has become a demarcation of young people’s experience.
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Featured image courtesy of Jonathan Borba on Unsplash. No changes made to image. Image licence found here.
