There is one issue that I have with this article and most discussions around polyamory. That is mixing in open relationships and poly. There is a massive difference between, you can do whatever sexually you want and dating other people. There is an emotional difference.
Myself, I am in an open relationship but I know that what I consider poly is a line I do not wish to cross. I know that just it is not for me. I don't consider myself poly. (To be very clear, this is not a judgement on being poly. I have several poly friends. I just don't know why we group all of them together)
Mixing these has made having discussions with some people more difficult. So I am not really sure why we are grouping all... non traditional relationship structures into poly.
That all aside. I find whenever this topic comes up to be quite interesting. I don't live in SF but I am a gay man. I know very few gay couples that are not at least "door ajar" as I have heard a few explain it. I have had a few people ask me why I am open, and honestly I don't like that question. To me the better question is, "why not?". And you may have a valid reason, maybe you are a very jealous person, maybe you just don't want too and thats perfectly valid.
But to me this boils down the problem isn't monogamy, being open, poly, or however you want to define your relationship (or lack of one). The problem is the assumption of monogamy. Not ever having that discussion, and honestly having the discussion without jumping to doing something because you think it's the way you are supposed too.
I do find some of the numbers presented here to be interesting, particularly the divide between men and woman. But I honestly can't really speak on that since I don't really have much exposure to this world outside of the LGBT world.
The poly vs open distinction is interesting because (anecdotally) I see some variation there between gay and lesbian relationships—it seems like gay dudes are more likely to be in a door-ajar couple, whereas the throuples I know are usually groups of lesbians!
Conversely, I don't see many poly gay dudes or door-ajar lesbian couples, and lesbians might be more monogamous on average.
Def agree that consensual non-monogamy (CNM) != polyamory, and there's a loottt of confusion out there around that distinction (and in this article and this HN thread, too).
I might be poly for the right people at the right time, but I'm not currently. However, I'm definitely CNM for life because all I want is to talk it out!
Well, that, and occasionally hook up with other people
They are often times grouped together because the people writing this blogs, articles, newspapers were never in a poly relation and have no clue about the topic they are writing (but of course they have an opinion without the experience and think it's ok to sell an opinion or morale piece as more than it is).
I think poly is kind of an umbrella term right now for a lot of different kinds of "multiple partners" type relationships. I am ENM (ethically non-monogamous) but if you're not familiar with the term (and most people aren't) saying poly is much easier. It is a bit like saying LGBT and including all the things that fit under the umbrella but aren't lesbian, gay, bi or trans.
21% of Americans have experimented with consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, far more than two decades ago
Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.
I've never seen a poly relationship make it past 10 years and I've never seen a poly relationship without significant issues that you wouldn't see in a monogamous relationship. Furthermore, there simply isn't enough time in the day for poly to work. You sleep for eight hours, work for eight hours, and then have eight hours in your day left for everything else. Even if you perfectly split your free eight between two people, you're going to quickly become a boring person whose entire personality is the fact that you're poly, god forbid you have a commute or a kid.
I think you're making the claim much bigger than it is. The narrow interpretation of "consensual non-monogamy" does not imply a relationship. Having a threesome with your partner and your best friend already qualifies. Making out with a non-partner while your partner watches might already qualify, depending on how the question is understood.
Time spent with different partners doesn't necessarily have to be equal. For instance a "comet partner" who you only spend a couple of days with every few months is one type of common poly relationship
> 21% of Americans have experimented with consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, far more than two decades ago
> Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.
I guess it depends a lot on how the terms are defined. If you include parallel dating (during the "non-exclusive" phase of dating), I could easily see this as being true.
I think this might be less of "I now have two families" and more of "we brought a third person into the bedroom for a bit of spice once in a blue moon".
After some sleuthing I believe the original source for that statistic is [1]. But that’s a study of single adults which is a wildly different population than adults as a whole.
Good thing you figured out that non-monogamy simply doesn't work. Must feel good to finally get to the bottom of that! I'll make sure to inform the millions of Americans currently practicing it that you figured it out - simple arithmetic!
It's wild that we can't differentiate lust and love, committed relationship and meaningless sex. That's the main thing I get from the confusion in the article and the confusion in the comments here about what even defines polyamory. It sounds to me like who you have sex with is the main and only thing that defines a relationship? Can people that wait to have sex until marriage ever be considered polyamorous while unmarried? If a married person gets close to a second person but doesn't do anything sexual with them are they still being monogamous?
I think people who like ideas like polyamory have misconstrued notions about what monogamy is, which is a general cultural problem in western societies these days.
I don't own my partner and she doesn't own me. I give myself freely to her and she does the same. It's not about expectation, but commitment. I promise her she's the only one for me, despite my very human desires, and she promises me the same thing. This is healthier than the pervasive "ownership" mental model, because we both very much are aware that we have human and animal desire, and understand that the commitment is freely given. We don't get mad at each other for being attracted to other people, and feel no jealousy, we would feel betrayed if the other broke the commitment, because we were promised something by the other.
The idea that monogamy is the default in relationships outside of marriage is a very new thing in US culture. There was a time, not so long ago, when the point at which monogamy began was marriage, or for some, engagement. Needing to define being single in over convoluted terms like "polyamory" is a bit ridiculous.
I've always been very casual about these things with partners. Some can't handle it, they're jealous by nature or something. Usually, being clear "we aren't committed until we talk about that and commit" is a pretty easy to digest thing for people, even if they default to the opposite usually.
On a less personal note, it's no coincidence I think that the most successful cultures in the world were and are monogamous by social expectation. Polyamorous social structures are not conducive to responsibility with regard to rearing children, and are more often than not to leave women in a difficult position. As such, women expect commitment from men where there are few options to prevent pregnancy. That's not to say anything about the spread of disease. Jealousy is still a problem, and leads to conflict. Polygamous social structures, the second most successful of the reproduction/sex oriented social structures, lead to swathes of unmarried men, and you get rejections from the tribe, hostile takeovers, warlike cultures designed to dispose of the men who will not hope to reproduce. Monogamy is the stable arrangement and it shows. Other more exotic complex social arrangements tend to be very niche, small tribal groups relegated to basically Africa, and don't scale well.
I think if young people want to have fun, do it, be clear, if someone doesn't like it that's their decision to not participate. But slapping labels on it like it's some revolution in sexual dynamics is silly. Be prepared to outgrow your exploration, read the allegory of Chesterton's fence to understand why.
Well said, monogamy is a structure for producing a stable child rearing environment — and by relation a stable society. It is entirely consensual where arranged marriages no longer take place.
I have no issues how people screw each other but monogamy has a purpose, and if your purpose is to raise a stable family your odds are best if you pursue monogamy.
Similar to comments above there's a difference between poly and open. I've not tried either but I've multiple good friends who are in "monogamish" relationships and it seems to work pretty well. For them the non-monogomy is just fun they have with others, but ultimately their partnership comes first. Otherwise it's very similar to the monogamy you describe but with agreed exceptions to sexual exclusivity.
It's not for everyone and it takes a lot communication (and low levels of jealousy) but it seems to work well at providing the structure and stability of marriage without forcing the full sexual exclusivity that some find constricting.
People nowadays don't want commitment, and when they have it they don't respect it anyway.
I think this attitude will sooner or later change back, when the bill will come due. Life is full of challenges and hardships, and having somebody you committed to and who's committed does help deal with stuff.
I think the raise in popularity of polyamory is largely a proxy measure for the raise in selfishness.
Where I am from marriage is forever and there is no way to dissolve it without burning in eternal fire - it’s very much about ownership.
Kudos on you to having a modern marriage but marriage in the past (and also now) also is about ownership.
It’s a literal contract between two people and you are legally obligated to take care of the other person.
Polyamory is a sign of comodification/casualness about relationships and sex, in an increasingly sexless and loveless period.
Sexless and loveless are both well documented in research and polls. People fucking less than past decades, fewer being in relationships than than past decades, and more reporting being alone and lonely than past decades.
It is a sign of increasing inequality / hypergamy as the most desirable 1% of men have multiple partners while the rest have none.
In other words human society is reverting to the way it always has been since the dawn of the agricultural age 12,000 years ago.
There was never any reason to believe that the monogamous system of the 1950s West was a permanent stable arrangement and indeed we are seeing its death in our own lifetimes.
I liked this, but I feel like it glosses over a significant dynamic that discolors both sides of the mono/poly split, which is "people not living the life they want".
Not that it's literally "coercive" -- they're not being forced to be in that relationship in any real sense. But the dynamic I often observe (well, infer from observations) is that a person would really like to monogamous or polyamorous (or a different kind of polyamorous---just, they want to be in a different status) but feels they aren't allowed to assert what they want from their partner(s), and a result is being somewhat "degraded" by the status of their relationship. They may even believe they are happy with everything, because it's the best thing they can feel they can get, but often (I suspect) there's an arrangement they would be much happier with, if they could bring themselves to insist on it.
After all a person ought to aspire to be physically and emotionally secure enough to assert what they need from their partners, even if that risks the partner leaving them, and they ought to be able to find partnerships in which their partner respects them enough to compromise or negotiate if it is something they truly need.
But I suspect a lot of people aren't there, and being mono/poly is often a "workaround": if you don't believe you can fully assert the relationship you want, sometimes you can get half of it by becoming monogamous/polyamorous instead even if it's not truly your preference. And maybe that lets you avoid the issue, sometimes for years. But it's never as as good as being able to get what you truly want.
(Occasionally I mention this vibe to people and they react negatively---"who are you to question other people's decisions?", they say. And at one level they're right, because yes, everyone out there is pretty much day-to-day making the best decision they can see to make for themselves, so if they're coping with their world by being in a certain kind of relationship, it's not really our place to doubt them.
But on the other hand, you can sense when someone is not living their best life, whether it be living the relationship they want or having the job / friends / beliefs / sexuality / gender that they want. You can't be sure, but these things do show a bit through cracks in the way that people talk and act. So I think it's fair to observe this phenomenon and speculate about it, so long as you never push anyone to "admit" to it, or to change before they're ready.)
The downsides of being in a rigidly-defined monogamous relationship are all kind of obvious, I think. Most people do not experience love or attraction as zero-sum games: you can have a "crush" or whatever on Person B without diminishing your feelings for Person A. So a person in a monogamous relationship is going to miss out on some positive physical and emotional connections that might have been really enjoyable.
But...
I've known a fair number of people in poly/open/etc relationships over the years and they tend to be inherently unstable, even moreso than trad monogamy. Like you said, often one person wants more exclusivity.
Also... let's be totally honest. One partner is almost always going to have more access to sex and love outside the relationship. Either they are more attractive, more assertive, or simply have more free time, or any other number of reasons. So the "openness" never seems to work out in a totally equal and/or equitable way.
They also seem to run into the problem of time and energy. In the abstract, love and sex are not zero-sum games. But a person only has so much energy and so many free hours in a week. So in practicality, yeah. It does become a bit zero-sum.
Only issue is that when you get what you want, you might be convincing your partner(s) to settle for something they want less. Perhaps the mindset of "best I can get" and finding an acceptable compromise is the way to go.
I have a strong feeling that like many new things, poliamory is currently mostly/only getting get “positive marketing” narrative.
Basically: what’s being advertised is mostly the “happy path”. Everything goes well until it doesn’t, what then?
Relationships are hard. There are a number of ways things get messy (and/or toxic) with two individuals, somehow things should improve with more than two persons ?
I really hate "traditional values" on account of their peddlers and the history books full of horrors they have enabled but when literally every successful society and major religion has some semblance of a 1:1 rule even if the exceptions and edge case handling are different you kinda gotta take notice.
More of a one-to-many rule. Only one side is expected to be fully monogamous.
It's long been socially acceptable for men to have mistresses or even multiple separate families, so long as they had the resources to take care of them all. And the social faux pas of merely sleeping with other women is very recent.
There's a tragedy of the commons when it comes to the question of "what do all of the single people do?" Each relationship beyond monogamy can be thought of as "taking away" an opportunity from the partner you would have paired with had you been monogamous. ie a relationship opportunity cost.
Typically, societies with imbalanced relationship ratios, an in particular single males, tend to be more unstable. Should poly folks design their life around the consequences of disaffected young males? No, of course not. Nor should we artificially privilege monogamy to ensure social stability for obvious reasons of individualality and moral policing. We should study the phenomenon and remedy the male psyche to ensure social stability and discover, scientifically, the threshold at which we can expect it to be a problem.
Pretty good article. I think everyone could do with a little less pathologization of a lot of human behaviour. My wife has suggested in the past that we have another wife so that we can have more children[0]. I'm amenable to the idea but the logistics of this seem hard to me: our finances are fused, our desires are mostly unified, and it took me many years to find someone with whom this was easy to do. A two-party marriage like mine is straightforward for us both. There is a natural Nash equilibrium in responsibility splitting. We do so without explicit handling and simple nudges one way or the other suffice to recalibrate. I imagine long-term polyamorous relationships are easier to handle for people who have more explicit procedures in interaction or who are more comfortable with the uncertainty.
If there's an equivalent article which focuses more on the machinery of long-term polyamorous relationships that would be interesting.
0: It's not that we're old but that we will be old by the time we're done.
I've observed a number of poly relationships from the outside, as a friend of one or more of the participants. I've also been in a monogamous relationship for >20yr and I've lived on both coasts of the US in that time.
Generalizing wildly, "going poly" seems to be driven by one partner's selfishness and the other partner's desire to please. It has resulted in breakup of the original dyad in 100% of cases.
I thought this was a nice article. I myself am in a non-open poly relationship and it works quite well for us. It's also pretty common in my community (homos) because we all like the same sex
An underappreciated feature of nonmonogamy is that it makes ethical conflicts of interest a bit more challenging. This article doesn't discuss that explicitly, but does hint at it in some of the quotes
This article didn't really hit for me. It feels like I'm just reading the author's particular experiences run through a gauntlet of theorisation that ultimately does more to obscure than clarify the message.
1. Being a very particular sort of person (I'm going to guess specifically Bay Area tech or tech-adjacent rationalist), the author is surprised to find that his personal experience of poly dating is different to what the statistics say. Is it the author's social group? His preferences? A limitation of his context? Nope, it's "statistics, culture, and biology". I find this to be generally true of rationalist writing: why reflect when you can generalise?
2. "most things conceptualized as identity are silly" is a pretty significant axiom to assert halfway down a section on definitions, immediately underneath the Classical Greek Forms of Love infographic. The article's first conclusion is just this same premise restated, leaving me suspicious of whatever reasoning occured in between.
3. It's hard to even find the author's actual perspective through all the equivocation. Monogamy and polyamory are both deluded in their own ways, they both say they're natural, but really the most natural thing is... incel-tier sexual economics? And maybe that's bad, or maybe not, so you should do what feels right for you. But also it's really about your attachment wounds, so maybe just do whatever's easiest. Or maybe just pick one and stick with it. But you can (and probably will) change your mind. In conclusion, the important thing is to be thoughtful and considered in our choices and the effect they have on society.
As far as I can tell, the actual truth of this piece is that the author is in a community where polyamory is the norm. He really tried to make it work for him but it didn't. He's not poly anymore and kinda thinks the whole thing is busted, but doesn't want to alienate his community. So he's just wafting a general sense of intellectualised discontent into the air and hoping for the best. I mean, fine, but I don't think we needed to get to Level Seven of The Spiral to do it.
I am someone who experienced the "longterm partner decided she wanted to be poly" heartbreak. When she told me, I asked her why she would choose to stay with me rather than just be single and date as many men as she wanted. She told me something along the lines of "I love you, I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but I don't feel like one person is enough for all the love I have". I wasn't terribly happy with that response, and she broke up with me a week later (while a man who she wanted to be poly with was staying with her). She left me because she wanted to change the parameters of the relationship and I didn't
Afterwards, oddly enough, I wound up in a friendship for a while with a different woman who had just broken up with her fiance for almost the same reason. In her case she had always been open about wanting to be Poly, her fiance had been okay with it, and I guess changed his mind the closer they got towards marriage. She left him because he wanted to change the parameters of the relationship and she didn't.
I wound up talking to the second woman a lot about polyamory and my unhappiness with how my ex had treated me. One night we met for coffee and she basically spent the whole time trashing me. She called me a loser for still being upset about my ex, she told me I was a miserable sad sack of a person and I needed to get over it, etc. Once she was done with that, she proceeded to tell me (in unwelcome and unwanted detail) about a lot of the latest sex parties she had been attending and how excited it made her to be living her fantasies. Then she casually asked if I wanted to go back to her place and screw (which was not our relationship up to that point). I declined, told her I didn't want anything to do with her anymore and left. She spent a couple of weeks asking me what she had done wrong. I mostly ignored her but even when I tried to explain she just argued with me, then eventually she cut me off with a long tirade where she acted like it was her choice not to have anything to do with me anymore, not mine
I'm aware that n=2 is not statistically significant, but those two encounters happening within the span of a few months kind of convinced me that people who are Poly are self-centered, emotionally stunted, and absolutely not suitable for any kind of long term relationship
Yeah a lot of monogamous relationships end these days too, but if this is representative of even a small fraction of poly people, I wonder if you can even call poly a relationship at all, really
I'm always wary of definitions for things that require complex explanations, and are subject to debate. That doesn't mean it's invalid, but it just speaks to - and I hate to say this - a possible influence of academic studies or literature or class content.
I once asked a person who described themselves as 'ethically non-monogamous' what that meant, if it were possible to love more than one person. I was told I was presumptuous, I needed to do more reading, and she gave me multiple paragraphs that interspersed terms like 'the traditional family model' that suggested this was coming from literature.
So - unpopular opinion, and an alternative to "the world is reverting back to the original state of our ancestors with polyamory and hypergamy" -- what if a lot of these definitions are lifestyles that are catching on, due to certain personality proclivities that have always existed, and by making complex explanations we've given them acknowledgment?
In other words, niche lifestyles that have been very much studied and many academic essays written.
While reading the definitions I was imagining this flat male comic with gender jokes "monosaturated, am I right?" When I came to the quotes I was kind of relieved to see women representing this experience.
I think evolutionary speaking, it is neither that humans are by nature strictly monogamous nor polyamorous. I think what people are confused about is that evolution often benefits from conflicts of interest between individuals. It also can both benefit from societal norms and from deviations from them. It can benefit from honesty and from deception. It can benefit from people doing their best to figure out and live by what their personal nature is and by people trying to overcome their nature to become something they think is better than that.
A lot of people don't seem to realize polyamory versus open relationship. Polyamory is about holding multiple relationships. Open relationship is more about the physical act, without additional relationships.
Multiple loves, versus getting it on with others once in a while, but not forming lasting relationships with them.
My partner and I have open relationship. We don't "date" other people, and actively avoid the baggage that comes with people who try to turn it into that. But a sexcapade or romp is fair.. we might be sexy, but not the only sexy people on the planet.
I don’t think the author is saying this is their opinion but this sentence stood out to me:
Monogamy is coercive.
For a lifestyle that tries to sound “open,” this is an incredibly judgemental view to take on the many people who don’t live your lifestyle.
Some of this attitude reminds me of hearing “nobody cares if you’re not tattooed” in my tooth, from tattooed people. Right before insisting I should get a tattoo to be like them.
To be clear, I don’t care what 2, 3 or 30 consenting adults do in their personal lives. I wonder if the negative view of monogamy is just the immaturity of youth and those people have since grown out of that position?
> I wonder if the negative view of monogamy is just the immaturity of youth and those people have since grown out of that position?
There are powerful entities, including religions and country laws, that either make life easier for people pratcicing the monogamous relationship style or just outright force that style on masses of people. This force spawns resistance, and the negative view you mention is an expression of this resistance.
The author of the post was quoting a book as saying that, and criticizing the book at the same time, so it sounds like you're more or less agreeing with them.
>To be clear, I don’t care what 2, 3 or 30 consenting adults do in their personal lives. I wonder if the negative view of monogamy is just the immaturity of youth and those people have since grown out of that position?
The negative view of monogamy that these people convey is an attempt to justify their lifestyle to people who don't like it, or to recruit more people to their lifestyle. One could argue that both monogamy and nonmonogamy have selfish aspects, but monogamy has proven more successful as a strategy for human society. Of course polyamorous people would debate that with you, but the disadvantages of polyamory are so obvious that it isn't easy to justify.
The negative view of monogamy is the Internet amplifying the most controversial "hot take" because it gets more clicks than "Do what thou will".
I was monogamous with my wife for about 8 years and I loved her and I think I still love her even though we broke up and probably won't be together again romantically ever.
I would say that monogamy, right now, is _not for me_. I just crave adventure, I'm a contrarian, I want more out of life than the standard, I want to sleep around. The revealed preference is that I want every aspect of my life to be "different" whether that's desktop Linux, veganism, changing my gender, etc.
If I had left that marriage and got into another monogamous relationship, in a few months I'd be wanting to date other people again.
[+] [-] nerdjon|1 year ago|reply
Myself, I am in an open relationship but I know that what I consider poly is a line I do not wish to cross. I know that just it is not for me. I don't consider myself poly. (To be very clear, this is not a judgement on being poly. I have several poly friends. I just don't know why we group all of them together)
Mixing these has made having discussions with some people more difficult. So I am not really sure why we are grouping all... non traditional relationship structures into poly.
That all aside. I find whenever this topic comes up to be quite interesting. I don't live in SF but I am a gay man. I know very few gay couples that are not at least "door ajar" as I have heard a few explain it. I have had a few people ask me why I am open, and honestly I don't like that question. To me the better question is, "why not?". And you may have a valid reason, maybe you are a very jealous person, maybe you just don't want too and thats perfectly valid.
But to me this boils down the problem isn't monogamy, being open, poly, or however you want to define your relationship (or lack of one). The problem is the assumption of monogamy. Not ever having that discussion, and honestly having the discussion without jumping to doing something because you think it's the way you are supposed too.
I do find some of the numbers presented here to be interesting, particularly the divide between men and woman. But I honestly can't really speak on that since I don't really have much exposure to this world outside of the LGBT world.
[+] [-] spondylosaurus|1 year ago|reply
Conversely, I don't see many poly gay dudes or door-ajar lesbian couples, and lesbians might be more monogamous on average.
[+] [-] kyletns|1 year ago|reply
I might be poly for the right people at the right time, but I'm not currently. However, I'm definitely CNM for life because all I want is to talk it out!
Well, that, and occasionally hook up with other people
[+] [-] siva7|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] theasisa|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] spott|1 year ago|reply
How does one move from a monogamous relationship to a poly relationship except through an open relationship?
[+] [-] e40|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tastesPrpl|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] choina|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] jimbob45|1 year ago|reply
Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.
I've never seen a poly relationship make it past 10 years and I've never seen a poly relationship without significant issues that you wouldn't see in a monogamous relationship. Furthermore, there simply isn't enough time in the day for poly to work. You sleep for eight hours, work for eight hours, and then have eight hours in your day left for everything else. Even if you perfectly split your free eight between two people, you're going to quickly become a boring person whose entire personality is the fact that you're poly, god forbid you have a commute or a kid.
[+] [-] tremon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] quux|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nordsieck|1 year ago|reply
> Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.
I guess it depends a lot on how the terms are defined. If you include parallel dating (during the "non-exclusive" phase of dating), I could easily see this as being true.
[+] [-] jandrese|1 year ago|reply
I think this might be less of "I now have two families" and more of "we brought a third person into the bedroom for a bit of spice once in a blue moon".
[+] [-] CrazyStat|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2016.1...
[+] [-] kyletns|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] krupan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] big-green-man|1 year ago|reply
I don't own my partner and she doesn't own me. I give myself freely to her and she does the same. It's not about expectation, but commitment. I promise her she's the only one for me, despite my very human desires, and she promises me the same thing. This is healthier than the pervasive "ownership" mental model, because we both very much are aware that we have human and animal desire, and understand that the commitment is freely given. We don't get mad at each other for being attracted to other people, and feel no jealousy, we would feel betrayed if the other broke the commitment, because we were promised something by the other.
The idea that monogamy is the default in relationships outside of marriage is a very new thing in US culture. There was a time, not so long ago, when the point at which monogamy began was marriage, or for some, engagement. Needing to define being single in over convoluted terms like "polyamory" is a bit ridiculous.
I've always been very casual about these things with partners. Some can't handle it, they're jealous by nature or something. Usually, being clear "we aren't committed until we talk about that and commit" is a pretty easy to digest thing for people, even if they default to the opposite usually.
On a less personal note, it's no coincidence I think that the most successful cultures in the world were and are monogamous by social expectation. Polyamorous social structures are not conducive to responsibility with regard to rearing children, and are more often than not to leave women in a difficult position. As such, women expect commitment from men where there are few options to prevent pregnancy. That's not to say anything about the spread of disease. Jealousy is still a problem, and leads to conflict. Polygamous social structures, the second most successful of the reproduction/sex oriented social structures, lead to swathes of unmarried men, and you get rejections from the tribe, hostile takeovers, warlike cultures designed to dispose of the men who will not hope to reproduce. Monogamy is the stable arrangement and it shows. Other more exotic complex social arrangements tend to be very niche, small tribal groups relegated to basically Africa, and don't scale well.
I think if young people want to have fun, do it, be clear, if someone doesn't like it that's their decision to not participate. But slapping labels on it like it's some revolution in sexual dynamics is silly. Be prepared to outgrow your exploration, read the allegory of Chesterton's fence to understand why.
[+] [-] __turbobrew__|1 year ago|reply
I have no issues how people screw each other but monogamy has a purpose, and if your purpose is to raise a stable family your odds are best if you pursue monogamy.
[+] [-] ck425|1 year ago|reply
It's not for everyone and it takes a lot communication (and low levels of jealousy) but it seems to work well at providing the structure and stability of marriage without forcing the full sexual exclusivity that some find constricting.
[+] [-] znpy|1 year ago|reply
I think this is the main point.
People nowadays don't want commitment, and when they have it they don't respect it anyway.
I think this attitude will sooner or later change back, when the bill will come due. Life is full of challenges and hardships, and having somebody you committed to and who's committed does help deal with stuff.
I think the raise in popularity of polyamory is largely a proxy measure for the raise in selfishness.
[+] [-] portaouflop|1 year ago|reply
Kudos on you to having a modern marriage but marriage in the past (and also now) also is about ownership. It’s a literal contract between two people and you are legally obligated to take care of the other person.
[+] [-] switch007|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] coldtea|1 year ago|reply
Sexless and loveless are both well documented in research and polls. People fucking less than past decades, fewer being in relationships than than past decades, and more reporting being alone and lonely than past decades.
[+] [-] daymanstep|1 year ago|reply
In other words human society is reverting to the way it always has been since the dawn of the agricultural age 12,000 years ago.
There was never any reason to believe that the monogamous system of the 1950s West was a permanent stable arrangement and indeed we are seeing its death in our own lifetimes.
[+] [-] ajkjk|1 year ago|reply
Not that it's literally "coercive" -- they're not being forced to be in that relationship in any real sense. But the dynamic I often observe (well, infer from observations) is that a person would really like to monogamous or polyamorous (or a different kind of polyamorous---just, they want to be in a different status) but feels they aren't allowed to assert what they want from their partner(s), and a result is being somewhat "degraded" by the status of their relationship. They may even believe they are happy with everything, because it's the best thing they can feel they can get, but often (I suspect) there's an arrangement they would be much happier with, if they could bring themselves to insist on it.
After all a person ought to aspire to be physically and emotionally secure enough to assert what they need from their partners, even if that risks the partner leaving them, and they ought to be able to find partnerships in which their partner respects them enough to compromise or negotiate if it is something they truly need.
But I suspect a lot of people aren't there, and being mono/poly is often a "workaround": if you don't believe you can fully assert the relationship you want, sometimes you can get half of it by becoming monogamous/polyamorous instead even if it's not truly your preference. And maybe that lets you avoid the issue, sometimes for years. But it's never as as good as being able to get what you truly want.
(Occasionally I mention this vibe to people and they react negatively---"who are you to question other people's decisions?", they say. And at one level they're right, because yes, everyone out there is pretty much day-to-day making the best decision they can see to make for themselves, so if they're coping with their world by being in a certain kind of relationship, it's not really our place to doubt them.
But on the other hand, you can sense when someone is not living their best life, whether it be living the relationship they want or having the job / friends / beliefs / sexuality / gender that they want. You can't be sure, but these things do show a bit through cracks in the way that people talk and act. So I think it's fair to observe this phenomenon and speculate about it, so long as you never push anyone to "admit" to it, or to change before they're ready.)
[+] [-] JohnBooty|1 year ago|reply
The downsides of being in a rigidly-defined monogamous relationship are all kind of obvious, I think. Most people do not experience love or attraction as zero-sum games: you can have a "crush" or whatever on Person B without diminishing your feelings for Person A. So a person in a monogamous relationship is going to miss out on some positive physical and emotional connections that might have been really enjoyable.
But...
I've known a fair number of people in poly/open/etc relationships over the years and they tend to be inherently unstable, even moreso than trad monogamy. Like you said, often one person wants more exclusivity.
Also... let's be totally honest. One partner is almost always going to have more access to sex and love outside the relationship. Either they are more attractive, more assertive, or simply have more free time, or any other number of reasons. So the "openness" never seems to work out in a totally equal and/or equitable way.
They also seem to run into the problem of time and energy. In the abstract, love and sex are not zero-sum games. But a person only has so much energy and so many free hours in a week. So in practicality, yeah. It does become a bit zero-sum.
[+] [-] hakunin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] znpy|1 year ago|reply
Basically: what’s being advertised is mostly the “happy path”. Everything goes well until it doesn’t, what then?
Relationships are hard. There are a number of ways things get messy (and/or toxic) with two individuals, somehow things should improve with more than two persons ?
[+] [-] potato3732842|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mywittyname|1 year ago|reply
More of a one-to-many rule. Only one side is expected to be fully monogamous.
It's long been socially acceptable for men to have mistresses or even multiple separate families, so long as they had the resources to take care of them all. And the social faux pas of merely sleeping with other women is very recent.
[+] [-] kelseyfrog|1 year ago|reply
Typically, societies with imbalanced relationship ratios, an in particular single males, tend to be more unstable. Should poly folks design their life around the consequences of disaffected young males? No, of course not. Nor should we artificially privilege monogamy to ensure social stability for obvious reasons of individualality and moral policing. We should study the phenomenon and remedy the male psyche to ensure social stability and discover, scientifically, the threshold at which we can expect it to be a problem.
[+] [-] butlike|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nkingsy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|1 year ago|reply
If there's an equivalent article which focuses more on the machinery of long-term polyamorous relationships that would be interesting.
0: It's not that we're old but that we will be old by the time we're done.
[+] [-] jpm_sd|1 year ago|reply
Generalizing wildly, "going poly" seems to be driven by one partner's selfishness and the other partner's desire to please. It has resulted in breakup of the original dyad in 100% of cases.
[+] [-] malfist|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] novia|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xkcd-sucks|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sgentle|1 year ago|reply
1. Being a very particular sort of person (I'm going to guess specifically Bay Area tech or tech-adjacent rationalist), the author is surprised to find that his personal experience of poly dating is different to what the statistics say. Is it the author's social group? His preferences? A limitation of his context? Nope, it's "statistics, culture, and biology". I find this to be generally true of rationalist writing: why reflect when you can generalise?
2. "most things conceptualized as identity are silly" is a pretty significant axiom to assert halfway down a section on definitions, immediately underneath the Classical Greek Forms of Love infographic. The article's first conclusion is just this same premise restated, leaving me suspicious of whatever reasoning occured in between.
3. It's hard to even find the author's actual perspective through all the equivocation. Monogamy and polyamory are both deluded in their own ways, they both say they're natural, but really the most natural thing is... incel-tier sexual economics? And maybe that's bad, or maybe not, so you should do what feels right for you. But also it's really about your attachment wounds, so maybe just do whatever's easiest. Or maybe just pick one and stick with it. But you can (and probably will) change your mind. In conclusion, the important thing is to be thoughtful and considered in our choices and the effect they have on society.
As far as I can tell, the actual truth of this piece is that the author is in a community where polyamory is the norm. He really tried to make it work for him but it didn't. He's not poly anymore and kinda thinks the whole thing is busted, but doesn't want to alienate his community. So he's just wafting a general sense of intellectualised discontent into the air and hoping for the best. I mean, fine, but I don't think we needed to get to Level Seven of The Spiral to do it.
[+] [-] bluefirebrand|1 year ago|reply
Afterwards, oddly enough, I wound up in a friendship for a while with a different woman who had just broken up with her fiance for almost the same reason. In her case she had always been open about wanting to be Poly, her fiance had been okay with it, and I guess changed his mind the closer they got towards marriage. She left him because he wanted to change the parameters of the relationship and she didn't.
I wound up talking to the second woman a lot about polyamory and my unhappiness with how my ex had treated me. One night we met for coffee and she basically spent the whole time trashing me. She called me a loser for still being upset about my ex, she told me I was a miserable sad sack of a person and I needed to get over it, etc. Once she was done with that, she proceeded to tell me (in unwelcome and unwanted detail) about a lot of the latest sex parties she had been attending and how excited it made her to be living her fantasies. Then she casually asked if I wanted to go back to her place and screw (which was not our relationship up to that point). I declined, told her I didn't want anything to do with her anymore and left. She spent a couple of weeks asking me what she had done wrong. I mostly ignored her but even when I tried to explain she just argued with me, then eventually she cut me off with a long tirade where she acted like it was her choice not to have anything to do with me anymore, not mine
I'm aware that n=2 is not statistically significant, but those two encounters happening within the span of a few months kind of convinced me that people who are Poly are self-centered, emotionally stunted, and absolutely not suitable for any kind of long term relationship
Yeah a lot of monogamous relationships end these days too, but if this is representative of even a small fraction of poly people, I wonder if you can even call poly a relationship at all, really
[+] [-] mancerayder|1 year ago|reply
I once asked a person who described themselves as 'ethically non-monogamous' what that meant, if it were possible to love more than one person. I was told I was presumptuous, I needed to do more reading, and she gave me multiple paragraphs that interspersed terms like 'the traditional family model' that suggested this was coming from literature.
So - unpopular opinion, and an alternative to "the world is reverting back to the original state of our ancestors with polyamory and hypergamy" -- what if a lot of these definitions are lifestyles that are catching on, due to certain personality proclivities that have always existed, and by making complex explanations we've given them acknowledgment?
In other words, niche lifestyles that have been very much studied and many academic essays written.
[+] [-] stkdump|1 year ago|reply
I think evolutionary speaking, it is neither that humans are by nature strictly monogamous nor polyamorous. I think what people are confused about is that evolution often benefits from conflicts of interest between individuals. It also can both benefit from societal norms and from deviations from them. It can benefit from honesty and from deception. It can benefit from people doing their best to figure out and live by what their personal nature is and by people trying to overcome their nature to become something they think is better than that.
[+] [-] ksaj|1 year ago|reply
Multiple loves, versus getting it on with others once in a while, but not forming lasting relationships with them.
My partner and I have open relationship. We don't "date" other people, and actively avoid the baggage that comes with people who try to turn it into that. But a sexcapade or romp is fair.. we might be sexy, but not the only sexy people on the planet.
[+] [-] scott_w|1 year ago|reply
Monogamy is coercive.
For a lifestyle that tries to sound “open,” this is an incredibly judgemental view to take on the many people who don’t live your lifestyle.
Some of this attitude reminds me of hearing “nobody cares if you’re not tattooed” in my tooth, from tattooed people. Right before insisting I should get a tattoo to be like them.
To be clear, I don’t care what 2, 3 or 30 consenting adults do in their personal lives. I wonder if the negative view of monogamy is just the immaturity of youth and those people have since grown out of that position?
[+] [-] phoe-krk|1 year ago|reply
There are powerful entities, including religions and country laws, that either make life easier for people pratcicing the monogamous relationship style or just outright force that style on masses of people. This force spawns resistance, and the negative view you mention is an expression of this resistance.
[+] [-] ajkjk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wakawaka28|1 year ago|reply
The negative view of monogamy that these people convey is an attempt to justify their lifestyle to people who don't like it, or to recruit more people to their lifestyle. One could argue that both monogamy and nonmonogamy have selfish aspects, but monogamy has proven more successful as a strategy for human society. Of course polyamorous people would debate that with you, but the disadvantages of polyamory are so obvious that it isn't easy to justify.
[+] [-] 01HNNWZ0MV43FF|1 year ago|reply
I was monogamous with my wife for about 8 years and I loved her and I think I still love her even though we broke up and probably won't be together again romantically ever.
I would say that monogamy, right now, is _not for me_. I just crave adventure, I'm a contrarian, I want more out of life than the standard, I want to sleep around. The revealed preference is that I want every aspect of my life to be "different" whether that's desktop Linux, veganism, changing my gender, etc.
If I had left that marriage and got into another monogamous relationship, in a few months I'd be wanting to date other people again.