Found: Science fiction approx 1970?

I can’t recall the author or title, but the story involved family groups that had multiple wives and husbands. I’m thinking I read it in the 1970s, but it could have been the 80s.

Well, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is the first book to come to mind. Give me time and I can probably come up with more. Any other details you can think of?

Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long stories? And seconding The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

Heinlein did use it in several books. If you're willing to go to the 80's, then Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury is a possibility too.

ETA. Although the polyamory isn't usually the first thing people remember from that book, normally it's the cannibalism or the scarrification.🥴

>3 saskia17: I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Heinlein.

Could it have been one of the Darkover books?

Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis? It was first published in the 80s and republished as Lilith's Brood in 2000.

The short story The Song of N'Sardi-El by Diana Paxson, collected in Millennial Women in 1980, has space farers living in polyamorous groups.

was it one of Ursula K. Le Guin's stories about the four-person marriage structure called a sedoretu? There's one here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/le_guin_03_14_reprint/
Looks like other ones are "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" and "Unchosen Love" if the linked one isn't it.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang?

Think Moon is a Harsh Mistress too.

Might have been The Door into Shadow by Diane Duane though that is fantasy.

>4 pjfarm: Thank you. Sorry for the delay. I’m pretty sure it’s Courtship Rite. The cover looks right and also the descriptions of the story.

I'm glad you found it. Enjoy the re-read, it's a book I really liked the last time I read it, even with the strange and very disturbing parts. 🙂