“It Didn’t Work”: 43 Stories About What It’s Really Like To Live In A Polygamist Household

Made an account to answer this one.

I was raised in a Muslim family. Islamic law allows a man to have 4 wives. My father was married to my mother for 25 years. When I was a teenager my mother found out he was married to another woman in another country. My father would go on many "business" trips and it turns out he was really just visiting his second wife. My mother was extremely angry when she found out and went to the US courts to get a divorce. But in Islam, the man has the power of divorce. In order for a woman to obtain a divorce she has to go through an Islamic judge or in a case where we live in the US with no Islamic judges around, an Imam. Well the local imams didn't think she had reason to be granted a divorce since polygamy is allowed in Islam. So my mother suffered for a few years while my father continued being married to her and this other woman. I tried to convince her to forget about the Islamic divorce and just divorce him by the US courts, take half of their property, and never speak to him again. But of course she didn't feel like she could go against the Islamic way. So eventually she kinda grew to accept it. It was hard on us because at one point we went through a rough financial time, and I got sick and had a lot of medical expenses. My father lost his job at one point and we did not have insurance, and so times were already hard but harder due to the fact that he was splitting his money between my family and his other wife (he had no kids with her but Islamic law requires a man to provide for all of his wives. So even though she was employed and had her own money he still had to give her money).

We all hated my dad for the longest time. He finally divorced his second wife and after a few years we really haven't forgiven him but he lives far away anyway.


I think an important thing to remember about polygamy is how the allocation of resources affects the kids. You have to remember that the average Joe in the US cannot support 15 kids from 5 different spouses. Even if both parents have a steady income, it's not fair to expect one spouse to sponsor your kids 80 percent while you poly give them 20 percent because you have 10 other kids from 3 other wives to worry about.

My dad had 4 wives over the course of his life, and 2 simultaneously. They didn't life in the same house, but my dad preferred to stay with my birth mother because of $$. Since I am Islamic, it's allowed but my mom hates it. How can she bear to handle her husband, being with another woman whenever he wants because he's also married to her? It's really unfair for both of them, and since he has kids with all 4 of them, I have half brothers / sisters I really never get to see. It's a hard life, honestly. He doesn't pay for rent and I don't understand why my mom still wants him. If she kicks him out, he'll just go to his other wife and she can't stand that. That's my story.

I'm totally late to this thread but my great uncle is a huge polygamist. He is in his mid 80s with 4 wives and 1 ex wife. He has 30 something children and nobody knows how many grandchildren. His oldest child is my aunt from his first wife, who left him after he married a third wife, and she is in her early 50s with two kids who are in their late teens. Meanwhile his youngest child is 3 years old and I'm pretty sure he has a couple grand kids in their mid 20s.

Lucky for his he is a millionaire and has the luxury to live in a rich neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya with two mansions and several servant homes. The bigger issue is how he is going to split his inheritance. Also, he never gave his children and grandchildren the same access to funds and picked favorites when schooling his kids sending his favorite children to elite boarding schools in the UK while sending his less favorite children to Kenyan boarding schools - which were really good schools but still don't compare to British boarding schools.

I was raised in a Polygamous family for most of my formative years. My grandfather had 9 wives while I was around, they were essentially my great aunts or something analogous to that. My dad only had one wife, my mom. None of my Grandfathers wives were mormon, none of them were born into that lifestyle and a few of them had college educations.

Its wasn't a cult so much as an alternative to what was viewed as a very corrupt and wasteful rest of the country/world. They homesteaded in the desert of southern Utah until the feds came and destroyed their houses, and after that they started the town that I grew up in.
I feel really lucky. I grew up around a large group of people who loved and supported me in their own way. Some of my uncles are my best friends and some of the most interesting, well adjusted, productive and responsible people that I know. We all learned how to play musical instruments, how to work hard and do right by the people that loved us. Many of my friends from outside my family have visited my hometown and all of them left with a more than positive impression. Some of my friends even consider themselves part of my family because of what my parents did for them, such as encouraging them to graduate high school or giving them food and shelter when they needed it.

Polygamy gets a bad rap because of the places like Colorado City and the injustices of the Mormon Church, but coming from a place of love it can be a wonderful thing. I'm not interested in the lifestyle of polygamy, but almost everything else my family did, from the family music circles, the big family dinners, the shared childrearing, the midwives and the fruit trees seems beautiful to me now that I am out here in the "real" world.

*edit* Sorry for the wall of text. I already posted most of this before, just thought it was worth saying agin.

I guess I am coming a little late. It worked well while my dad was still alive. Now that he has passed away it's hard to stay in touch with 31 siblings and two other moms while all of us pretty much work and getting together as a family is complicated.

This will probably get buried, but my grandfather grew up in a polygamous family in Utah. He apparently had a very rough childhood, and he really hates talking about it. His mother was one of 5 wives, and each family had minimum of 6 kids. He was the oldest of his family, and worked very hard to make sure all of his siblings needs were met. When he met my grandma, he had kept his upbringing a complete secret until they were married, and it was discovered many years into it. Although he hated the way he was brought up, he used his disadvantages to an advantage- he graduated high school with top marks, got into a fantastic college and attended Harvard as grad school. He is now an extremely successful lawyer and gave his family (my mom) a fantastic life and was a great father to them. He is one of the most inspiring men I have ever met.

I used to know a girl who grew up in a polygamist hippie commune. She seemed to have had a positive experience. She referred to her father's other wives as her "aunties", and always seemed to reflect very fondly on her experiences growing up. Her father was well-respected and a very hard worker, and I think this accounted for their relative success compared to other hippie communes.

The rough answer. It didn't work. Mostly due to my father being a terrible human being, and less to do with the actual practice of polygamy. Growing up with 3 "Moms" and 13 brothers of sisters, it leaves a man with a different perspective on life and relationships. I'm more partial to monogamy but have no issues with polygamy. It requires a great deal of commitment and hassle to balance number of partners and raise that many kids, and I am far to lazy for that kind of work. None of my siblings ended up in polygamist relationships, so if replication is a measure of success, then I'd say it was a failure.

I think that being raised in a society or community that considers this practice taboo is severely difficult for the parents, but more importantly is it's cruel to the children. This is probably why so many polygamists end up in fringe communities in more rural areas. We were raised with the knowledge that what our parents were doing was illegal and that we had to be secretive about our situation. In public my father's other wives were referred to as aunts and our half siblings as cousins. It made for interesting parent teacher meetings growing up. My father was very anti-government and left us with a great fear of child services in all his children and this taught us at an early age to bend truth or lie. Kind of funny how ironic that is as we were fairly religious and taught that such deceptions were inherently wrong.

It's interesting to see how each of us adapted to the circumstances and how many of us ended up leaving the brotherhood, and where we ended up. There are a number of gems in my family that you anyone would be impressed to have as their dearest friends and then there are those that were and still are difficult to get along with. Like any family it's a spectrum, we just had a bigger sample size...

Not me but I know a guy who was born there. He had a rough life and eventually was the second person kicked out of the community. His dad was the first.

He, let's call him George, has told me that it was hell. Boys are removed from school at age twelve to work in various different places. Girls are married off at that age. Pretty much everyone there is brainwashed.

His dad,we'll call him James, was getting close to being one of the top officials in the church side of this, and ended up realizing how corrupt they are and was kicked out. Because George was his oldest son (he had over 90 children) they kicked him out too.

George has been out of that community for about ten years now and runs his own construction company.

Last year he found out that his kids were not with their mother. He decided to try to get them back. After a lot of fighting with the community, he got the state court to order them to give George his kids. They ended of having to give them up.

After talking to his kids. They were totally being brainwashed. They had been made believe that everyone outside of that community was of the devil. Nothing was good. Playing with toys was a horrible sin. You couldn't really do anything fun in that community. They are all happy to be out of it, but in it they had no idea what fun was. The kids lived in a house with 8 women taking care of around 90 children right before George was able to get them. It was crazy.

TL;DR I know a guy who was in polygamy, saw its corruptness, got kicked out, then got his kids out.

I personally did not grow up in a polygamist family, but my great grandfather was. He had two wives.

My last name is unique enough that I can ask someone with my last name "Which wife are you from" and they can tell you.

The funny thing was that he liked one wife more than the other and that resentment is still held by some older family members who are from the other wife.

Just a fun bit of family history.

My great-grandfather had three wives. His first wife couldn't have children, so he took two other wives and ended up having a ton of children. My grandfather came from his third wife, and he generally described his childhood as being fairly normal, albeit with half-siblings that he viewed more as cousins than siblings.

What was ironic was that after he married my grandmother, he took another wife (more of a mistress than anything, but he treated her like a wife) and had two kids with the second wife. He had sworn that he would never do the same thing his father had done, but he did it anyway. My dad (1st wife and my grandpa's kid) remembers the moment when my grandma found out and she was absolutely heartbroken. It led to a lot of fighting and it really messed up my dad. My grandpa was quite open about his second wife and frequently visited his second family. When he passed away about fifteen years ago, he left a lot of money to them.

My dad will never speak of his half-siblings. The second wife and her kids are banned from our side of the family and we will never have contact with them. There's a lot of enmity on our side, but not really so much on the second wife's side.

I made friends in school with a boy that came from a family of 3 wives and one husband for a total of 22 siblings. It would have been impossible to tell he came from a polygamous family because it was a boarding school, but he invited me over to his home for holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc.) Needless to say I had lots of questions after the first time, which he amusedly answered.

He felt that his experience was no different than if he had grown up in a household with extended family. He had his mom, his father, aunts, and a lot of siblings. He was close to his mom and she would be the main one raising him, but his aunts also raised him and treated him like a nephew. For siblings, he said it was no different than other families. There were some he was close with that he played with, then there were siblings that were far older that were like an additional parent, i.e asking if he had finished his homework, etc. (He said: "as if I needed any more parental supervision haha!"). His father he did not get as much time to see. He was often busy with work, but it was nothing obscene. His father still taught him how to ride a bike, went to many of his games, birds and the bees talk, etc. So he still had that father-son bond.

One of my cousins was raised in a polygamous family and they are honestly one the happiest families I know.

They live in a very large apartment building and they bought four apartments on four floors and have built stairs that go from one apartment to the one below it for easy traveling.

Legally, my cousin's parents are married. My uncle's main residence is with my aunt. He has two more wives. We'll call them Francine and Thundercat. Francine joined the family when my cousin was approximately 2 years old, and Thundercat joined the fun when he was around 4, and while the patriarch is not legally married to them, he did have commitment ceremonies where they got "married". They have rings and pre-nups and the whole shabang.

My cousin's mother only had one child.
Francine has none.
Thundercat has two.

My aunt and uncle both have high paying, high pressure jobs. They both work.
Francine owns a hair salon and a barbershop.
Thundercat is the stay-at-home wife.

Each woman occupies a floor with her kids, and the top floor is the common floor and my uncle's room.

There is a lot of planning that goes into the whole thing. Sometimes, my cousin would have a recital, but Thundercat's oldest child would have a soccer game, so my uncle would need to choose which one he would attend. They have a very detailed schedule and every minute of their day is planned.

Thundercat takes care of making dinner for the entire family, which is consumed on the common floor. Everybody eats together, then do the dishes together, watch TV together, etc. And then, they retreat to their own floors. Tundercat also is everybody's maid. She does all the laundry, cleans all the apartments, does the grocery shopping for everybody, etc.

My uncle divides his night time equally every week. Two nights with each wife, and one night spent alone. He has a room and his office in the communal apartment so he also has somewhere to spend some Me time.

Everything works fine for them. It's definitely not the life that I would want to live, but one of Thundercat's children has been very vocal about wanting multiple wives when he's older.

It works well for them. They have three people providing for 7 family members and seem to have found a good balance of individual family time and all the families combined time.

It was really weird at first, but my uncle has been married to my aunt for 25 years, to Francine for 20, and to Thundercat for 18 years. They are the only couple in my family that are still married, so I would say they are doing something right.

**TL;DR: One man, three wives, three kids, 4 apartments, job, alone time, scheduling, one big happy family.**.

I didn't realize it growing up, but over the years, I've come to accept that my dad is a polygamist. My situation could be best described as the dad with the "secret family on the bad side of town"(yes, that's a quote from "Modern Family").

My mom and dad met at work, where my mom was a secretary for my dad's family business. I don't know if he was still married with his first wife, but they started seeing each other and 6 years later, I was born. He bought her a house, a ring, and she referred to him as her husband even though no actual paperwork existed nor did he live there. The last time I remember him sleeping at our house, I was in fourth grade.


I suspect he is is still married to the first wife because I've seen pictures of them on the social section of city newspapers and, more recently, Facebook. Also, where else would he sleep? From these sources, I also know he has (at least) two children, both in their mid-30s, and at least one grandchild. I've met my grandparents once over dinner when I was 14, and ever since then I get $100 from my granfather for Christmas, which my dad delivers, so for all I know, it's really all from my dad.


My grandma passed way last year, and my dad sent me an email to tell me. I honestly felt nothing except empathetic for my dad. I met the woman for three hours over 5 years ago. She seemed lovely and gave me the longest hug ever, but that's it. She did give me $2000 around the time she started getting sick. She divided her life savings amongst her grandchildren (over 40 grand kids), so at least I know I was on her list of grandchildren. My family and I just don't talk about my dad's other family, and I would never ask to meet his kids. They are significantly older, so I feel like it was up to them to reach out to their younger half-siblings. The fact that they haven't tells me they don't want to. There are many things I just know now not to ask. I am in my twenties now and I still don't know where my dad sleeps at night.

My relationship with my dad is pretty good. He's always been supportive of everything my siblings and I do, and I still talk to him about once every other week or so, same as my mom. He's pretty much my guide as to what to look for in a future dad for my children and what to avoid in a spouse. I can live with this dichotomy; I figured it out when I was 9. I understand parents are just people, with their own faults, and it's up to me to weigh both and appreciate them for their good qualities while accepting yet not approving of their faults.

Looking back, my exes often had a lot of his qualities. Although these qualities are ultimately the reason they are exes, it is something I am constantly on the look out for in fear that that's what I'll end up with.

Twist at the end, my mom and dad separated when she found out he was seeing someone else. This new woman was younger, so at least he's consistent. I had moved out of the house, so I don't know how much tension there was day to day. However, one of my friend's parents were going through a divorce at the same time, and I remember thinking how the legal battles made it so much worse. How long it took and the fights over property made it so much more emotionally exhausting. My parents seemed to have a much cleaner break. She no longer wears her ring nor refers to him as her husband. The house and cars were always on my mom's name, so she has that. My dad gives my mom a set amount of money for the basic expenses. He said he would stop that if my mom ever got together with someone else, which I thought was a horrible way to manipulate her until I found out that this is standard alimony law.

I wonder if my dad will eventually have a child with this woman. I'm already trying to figure out how I can find out about this potential half-sibling and get to know them like his other kids didn't with me and my siblings. I have this morbid theory that we will all eventually meet and be able to know each other at his funeral.

Muslim. As already mentioned in this thread, Muslim men can have up to 4 wives at a time. My mother was my father's second wife. His first wife didn't know until about a year before he passed away (in 2001, two weeks before my 9th birthday). One of his sons, my half-brother, was the only one who knew at the time.

He lived with his first wife and family. He had 9 other kids, one of which had passed away a few years before I was born. My mother and I lived in the same city. Actually, we lived about 10 minutes away from his house, but we'd only see him on Fridays for about half an hour each time. Because he was so much older than my mother, his granddaughters, my nieces, were around my age so he would bring them over sometimes to play. Even then, he would spend most of the time talking about work and finances with my mother.

When he passed away, I didn't even cry. Well I did, but only because I saw my mother crying and I hated that. I also cried because we had to cancel my birthday party even though we'd already given out the invitations. The fact that he had to stay with his first wife meant that I had not formed a father-daughter connection with him.

I wasn't angry, because it seemed like staying with his family was the right thing to do. I later found out that he was planning on leaving his first wife but my mother convinced him to stay with her because she was getting ill. It did obviously suck growing up without a present father figure, but it's pretty cool having a bunch of (much) older siblings with kids that are my age (some of whom already have their own kids, making me a great aunt). After his passing his family hated us because of inheritance issues. My mother gave up her part of the inheritance so they would agree to let me have mine. We eventually found peace together, and my step mother still regrets the way we were treated. It would've been horrible if our families didn't eventually get along.

Not gonna use some throwaway. My dad was pushed to marry at a young age before even finishing high school. After many, many years and wanting to divorce his first wife, he met and married my mother while in another country. He couldn't divorce first wife because of family and also because she had no means of supporting herself. She didn't want to be divorced even though she doesn't really like him (must be the money) and wanted my dad to just end it with my mom. Well my dad didn't end it with my mom and basically spent his life trying to balance his relationships with his two wives. The relations between the siblings are alright but wife #1 refuses to have anything to do with my mom.

The problem with the family though is the effect it has on the kids. My dad would travel back and forth to take care of both families. But the absences from his travels and the hate of wife #1 toward my mom has had some mental tolls to the kids (everyone thinking he favors one family over the other, etc.). I can't talk about my mom with the other members of the family. Its like everyone is playing a tug war with my dad.

My brother's girlfriend is from a polygamist family. They were Mormon and lived in Mexico, and her dad had two wives. After a while, her mom got fed up with the other wife and left for the U.S., bringing half the kids with her. My brother's girlfriend has something like 16 brothers and sisters, and she is the oldest. Her dad is super wealthy, and both of his wives were basically just baby machines. The dad comes up from Mexico every few months to visit, but from what I hear, it's usually pretty tense and all the kids resent him.

Well, my family lives in Hurricane, UT, which is very close to a polygamous compound. At least it was before the whole Warren Jeffs fiasco, I think a lot of them have since left. What I can comment on is that the boys in those families often get kicked out around age 13 or 14, so that there is less competition for the females, and the girls feel they have no choice but to marry an elder 30 or so years older than her. The little boys I've met who've been abandoned usually miss their families very dearly, but reject Mormonism and polygamy in the end.

My dad had three wives and he married them each 10 years apart. His first wife was his high school sweetheart, his 2nd wife (my mom) he met at church, and his 3rd wife he also met at church.

Imagine you are a young woman in love, you get married at 18, are madly in love with your husband, and have a couple of his kids by age 27. Then suddenly, without much warning, he starts courting an 18 year old from church. And instead of getting sympathy from your parents and siblings, they start congratulating you on finding such a wonderful sister wife. You have nobody to grieve to. You have to watch your love-struck husband and his pretty bride while you change diapers and mop the floors.

I used to hate my mom's older sister wife because she treated me like dirt. Then when I got older I started seeing it from her perspective (this was after I fell in love with my own husband). So I don't really blame her for not liking my mom's kids.

In case you're curious, the 3rd wife was disabled and not very pretty. My dad married her because he knew his first wife could not handle another beautiful, young wife. Also, the disability check from the government was a bonus for our family. He didn't have any kids with wife #3, she was just kind of around. But she was really helpful and sweet.

So anyway, my mom was the favorite because she was the prettiest. This made the first wife mad. The 3rd wife kind of went unnoticed, but she was too stupid to realize that she was miserable.

This is coming as a bit of a surprise to me. As a child of a polygamist family, I never expected to see this much curiosity towards my situation. That being said, I'm seeing a lot of negative answers. But I've decided to give not only some positive looks into the situation, but honest.

First of all, let me say that my upbringing was not only good, but amazing. My mother did a lot of the raising of her children, but during the time my dad was around, he was amazing at teaching all of us the values we needed in life, and I respect and admire my father and his wives for raising us as well as they did. Now that I'm older, I can see all of the problems that come with this situation, and the problems all of my parents must have went through. They didn't keep that bottled inside, they talked about it, and made it work. They didn't let the problems that had been created by their marriage affect their children's lives.

My particular family has 1 Dad, 5 Moms, 36 children, and many pets, including 5 dogs, 6 cats, 3 goldfish, and 2 hamsters.

I am the 8th child out of 10 from my mother. I went to a private school until 6th grade. The school consisted mainly of children from polygamist families, but still had some children from outside of our community attend.
7th to 10th grade I went to a public school. This is where I learned that it was not normal to have multiple mothers, but I didn't receive any negative feelings from my schoolmates because of it. Most of my school (including the teachers) were just curious about my situation, and were befuddled that I had over 30 siblings and could name every single one of them when they could barely remember their second cousin's name.
When I made it to high school, I had 2 brothers in 11th grade when I was in 9th. 1 brother was a shy type, and was in choir and was part of the school Speech and Debate team, and the other was more popular, and he was not only in Choir and part of the Speech team, but also joined the Track and Cross Country team. I wanted to be like both of my older brothers, so I joined all of the above as well. I was a normal high school student. Most everybody liked me (though I wasn't necessarily popular), and I didn't hate anybody.

It was about this time I realized that everyone had different beliefs. But I was raised to respect everyone I met, so I inquired about the many different beliefs at my school, mostly consisting of Christians, Baptists, and some Catholics and Atheists. I went to some of the churches and found most of the speakers to be quoting the same bible and, for the most part, the same ideals as the Church that I went to regularly.

I don't really know what else you guys would like to know about, so I guess I'll just list some random facts that come to mind. My mother is the 3rd wife, and we all lived in the same state until a few years ago, when my mom and one other wife moved to the state we are now. All of my fathers' wives are still married to him, we just live in different states, so it's quite a unique situation, one of the consequences is my father having to drive about 1000 miles round trip to see all of his children and wives. My family lives all over the country now, from Denver to California and anywhere in between. So not so many states, I guess. Most of my siblings don't associate themselves with Polygamism anymore, but some of them do.

Now, I'm not trying to paint a perfect picture here. This is just my childhood and how I was raised. I'm sure some of my other siblings can paint a very different picture depending on the mother they had, since all of the wives raised their children very differently. But my mother did a fantastic job at raising us. You know those different faces you pass on the street belonging to a person who has a different lifestyle than you? I know most of those types of people. All different types of people have came from my family. I've got Atheists siblings, Baptist siblings, vegetarian siblings, gay siblings, all sorts of people in my family. But they're still my family, and I love them like siblings no matter what lifestyle they choose.

I might have bored you with my comment, but again, this is just my childhood from my view. It is not perfect, and honestly, I'm probably one of the lucky ones, because most of the people I see raised in this type of situation are ..."scarred" one way or another. If any of you want to ask me questions of any sort, I'll be more than happy to answer them. And if there's a lot of different types of questions, maybe an AMA. As for now, it's bedtime, so I won't get to your questions until tomorrow.

Thank you for your time, guys. Have a nice day.