A polyamorous couple have revealed that they do not hide their relationships from their children.
Adam Lyons and his wife Eve are currently dating another woman and their children know all about it.
The couple believe in being honest about their polyamorous lifestyle with their kids Oliver, 14, Dante, nine, Orion, six, Ivy, five, and Dorian, three.
Adam, 43, a former Londoner who now lives in Austin, Texas, tells Metro.co.uk: “When children are raised around a rigid set of beliefs, it’s hard to see what they would be without those. If they are raised not going to school and being encouraged to take a balanced view of life, you get to see them being themselves.
“Statistically if you look at families, they are now more likely to include three parents than not- including step-parents or new partners. In a throuple, all of those parents hang out together and love each other.”
After being voted the “least likely to get a girlfriend” at school, Adam was determined to prove everyone wrong. He became a successful dating coach before embarking on a polyamorous lifestyle in his mid-twenties, meeting his first partner Brooke and moving to a ranch in Austin, Texas.
The couple went on to meet Eve, then a photographer, at Fashion Week and became a throuple, sharing a super-king sized bed and deciding to raise a family together.
The children are a mixture of Eve’s and Brooke’s.
However, in 2019, Brooke left the relationship, although the three remained close, while Adam and Eve continued dating and the children live with them.
Adam says: “We have probably dated 60 women in the last four years and the kids have only been introduced to two as our girlfriend. We don’t hide anything from them, but we are not sexually inappropriate.
“The reality is to the children, there is just another adult in the house, unless we say explicitly this is our girlfriend.
“One woman we’d been dating for nine months and she only met our kids in a group of our friends. There are people coming in and out of our house all the time because of work, our kids are more likely to get attached to our employees.
“We have actual discussions with our children about what a healthy relationship looks like and I think that is the role of the parent.”
The couple have age-appropriate conversations with each child, with the oldest, Oliver, 14, being most aware of their love life.
Adam says: “Kids are very smart and often much less judgemental than adults. With Oliver, he has the clearest idea of what we do – we talk about relationships, he knows what’s going on.
“I sat him down and explained there are different types of relationships, [that] we were three and then Eve and I separated from Brooke and now we date other people.
“He’s asked me for dating tips, including how to break up with a girl without hurting her feelings and I was so proud of him, it was such a great question to ask.”
Adam has now helped more than 350,000 men date successfully and says the main question he gets asked is about consent, something he aims to teach his children from the start.
He says: “Consent takes place every day in our household. I have four boys and a girl, I get them to ask for consent even when they are playfighting. If I don’t hear both of them say they want to fight, then they don’t do it. There’s not a world where they can lay their hands on people without their consent.”
The children are all homeschooled – following an online programme – but interact with other children their age at a Dungeon and Dragons shop owned by Adam and Eve in a nearby town.
Adam says their lifestyle hasn’t held the children back in any way.
He says: “We chose to homeschool because of the possibility of a school shooting – I never wanted my kids to be in school around guns or even to have that worry in their head.
“They are all straight-A students, a couple of grades ahead of where they would be in school, and they still get the chance to hang out with friends their age. And their friends don’t question our lifestyle, because kids don’t care about their parents’ relationships, they don’t talk about it, they’re too busy talking about Fortnite.”
Though Adam’s family set-up could be seen as unusual, he says “all of our family and friends comment on how well behaved the children are.”
