Sex Edition

In his first week there, Tank overheard Chell and Spawn having rough sex. She saw him the next day and told him, "You know, he's not beating me in there." Tank didn't need any further explanation. Talking over the next few months, Chell learned that Tank had a submissive streak and wanted to be on the receiving end of a beating himself someday.

Chell and Spawn are in the BDSM community. They're also polyamorous — Spawn carries on romantic relationships outside the marriage. (All three are members of a pansexual group, which is the origin of the pseudonyms Chell, Spawn and Tank.) Chell is Spawn's slave; she had never invited a third party without her master's approval.

Tank finally returned one of Chell's phone calls that afternoon. "What do you want, and why did you call me?" he asked.

Chell told him, and he didn't like it.

"Well, too bad, because I'm on my way, and you're getting in the van," Chell said. At 11 a.m. the 34-year-old petite redhead was at the boy's door. She took him to a park two blocks away to talk.

Four hours later, Chell reached into her purse and withdrew a steel chain with a padlock hanging at the end. She wore a slim chain with a similar lock around her own neck. She'd bought them at Home Depot.

"I know you've always wanted one of these," she said. "And I can get you one. But you have to earn it."

Spawn came home that night. It didn't take much for Chell to convince him to accept Tank as his new slave.

Tank moved back into the house. Spawn and Chell's slave-master relationship, and their sex life, changed. Spawn could spend the night with one of them alone or with both. It took Tank six months to earn the collar.

Chell's idea to bring a third person into her marital bedroom wasn't just about fun. The trio has formed a powerful emotional bond — which is not unusual among polyamorous lovers. "There are things Spawn needs that I can't give him sometimes," Chell says. "I'm a small girl. I understand I can't deal with his needs in every situation."

There's little research on how such relationships work. This is where Terri Conley comes in. A University of Missouri-Kansas City assistant professor of psychology, Conley has begun a yearlong study of about 300 people in polyamorous relationships. She's preparing a questionnaire that will measure risk behavior, satisfaction, emotion and other psychological factors.

It's easy to assume that polyamorous relationships are all about threesomes or bringing home a stranger for your lover to share. But Conley believes her research might show that people in polyamorous relationships are safer from STDs — and may know a secret about how to make relationships work.

Conley didn't date in high school and found her friends' attitudes toward sex confusing.

Conley wasn't interested in having sex and didn't discuss it with her parents. "I very much thought sex in high school was wrong," she recalls, "and I was horrified to hear people in my high school were having it."

She stayed a virgin until college, where she had nonexclusive relationships with a man and a woman. Her first real boyfriend, Josh Rabinowitz, became her husband. He also holds a position in UMKC's psychology department.

They're open to exploring a polyamorous relationship. But they just adopted a 2-year-old girl from Kazakhstan, and Conley says their lives are too crazy to think about getting involved with someone else. "Maybe down the road, that'll be something we explore," she says.

Conley has taught a class on human sexuality since she came to UMKC in 2006. Her academic background is in gender and health stigmas and sexual risk practices. In a study she did while earning her doctorate at the University of California-Los Angeles, Conley had a team of men and women ask strangers to have sex. Most of the men said yes, and Conley concluded that the women's assertiveness indicated to men that they would be good partners. The women her researchers approached typically thought that the men were socially inept and therefore not good bets for sexual experiences.

Conley became interested in polyamorous relationships in California when she saw a mathematical simulation showing it was safer to have sex with 100 partners and use a condom every time than to have sex once with a partner of unknown health status and not use one. She started wondering about the way monogamy was sold as an answer during the early days of the AIDS crisis.