These days, I barely see my friends. It’s not because of midterm season, and it’s not because of Swine Flu. It seems like every time I turn around, I bump into someone else who tells me they’re managing multiple romantic liaisons. They find themselves with just no time left over for the little things: Sleeping, eating, socializing—with so much sex to be had, the other activities pale in comparison. As irritating as it’s becoming to have one-sided conversations with my friends’ voicemail machines night after night, I’m fascinated by this rash of polyamory. Let’s go to the case studies:

Early on in my time at Brown, I befriended a boy who is an expert juggler. I’m consistently amazed at the number of balls he can keep going. Unfortunately, you won’t see him practicing on the Main Green with the rest of the juggling club. The kind of balls he uses would scandalize the tour groups and send the chipper guides into apoplectic shock—if you get my drift. Between intense volleys of BBM’s briskly dispatched from his Blackberry Pearl, this friend, who also happens to be an Econ concentrator, tells me the maxim that has allowed him to perfect his craft: “To avoid emotional attachments, diversify your portfolio.”

Another friend of mine has done an impressive job assembling a very diverse portfolio.  Within a two-week span she acquired not one, not two, but THREE paramours. For successfully debunking the myth that only men can play the field, I salute her. But she insists that she’s exhausted. She tells me that although it’s fun to have three lovers, each one so different from the next, at the end of the night it’s just too much c*ck. Unlike my friend the juggler/economist, this friend is having trouble keeping all of her balls in the air, so she asks for my advice. Which guy should she choose? The sweetest one? The sexiest one? Or the one she enjoys the most (despite the fact that he has told her many times that he doesn’t want a relationship)?

Another friend is dating a girl who can’t commit. This friend tells me that she really likes said commitmentphobe; she’s even ready to fall in love with her. But while this girl dawdles, my friend tells me that she could use a distraction, just to take the edge off.

I’m sorry—did I miss something? What’s going on with all of this multifarious sex? Is it something in the water?  It must be, because, on Monday, even David Brooks wrote an Op-Ed piece called “Cellphones, Texts and Lovers” about the way text messaging facilitates sexual multiplicity.

Brooks quotes Wesley Yang, a journalist for New York Magazine, from a piece about the magazine’s notorious sex diaries—anonymous online accounts of readers’ every booty-call and budding romance. Yang’s comment speaks specifically to the use of cell phones, but I’d say it’s also an accurate description of what drives polyamorous situations in general. “People use their cell phones to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead,” Yang says. “Everyone is on somebody’s back-burner, and everybody has a back-burner of their own, which they maintain with open-ended texts.” I think Yang is absolutely right, but I’m torn. Does this repackaging of emotional and physical needs indicate a trend towards empowerment—of reaching out and grabbing what you want or need wherever you can get it—or is it annihilation of our instinct to find one person who satisfies all (or at least most) of our emotional and physical needs?  If we can’t find the latter, should we opt for the former? Or, by igniting these sparks of fulfillment but never properly setting each other’s worlds on fire, are we just isolating and confusing ourselves more?

In determining whether juggling balls and diversifying one’s portfolio is helpful, harmful, or simply a fact of life in a post-modern world, I remain unsure.