I would certainly agree that as the set of ways to be in relationship we refer to as “monogamy” gets smaller and smaller, the odds that it’s optimal for a given person dwindle.
I’ve utterly lost sight of why that’s interesting, or why we need all these labels.
Can you back up a little and summarize your goal, here?
My two main goals are to draw attention to why we privilege ‘monogamy wins’ or ‘monamory wins’ out of hypothesis-space in the first place, and to evaluate the usefulness of the categories under discussion, as a prolegomena to settling the duly clarified questions empirically.
We can start compiling research, and proposing new research, that settles this question; but we can only do so productively if we’ve clarified the question enough to isolate the plausibly very important variables. Surely some arities of relationships (2-person, 3-person, 4-person...) are better than others; but quality of relationship will also vary based on the structure of the network (degree and kind of connectedness), the temporal dynamics of the network, the level (and kind) of experience and honesty and affection of the participants, the sexual and romantic behavior, and for that matter how the relationship type is treated in the relevant society. (E.g., monamory could be more fun in our culture even if polyamory has more fun-potential in otherwise preferable hypothetical cultures.) Asking questions like these is more interesting, more clear, and more answerable than just ‘is polyamory better than monogamy?’.
If the research is fine-grained enough, it should also address the standard deviation from the ‘ideal relationship type,’ and discover if there are distinct macro-level population clusters with importantly different preferences, or whether it’s bell curves all the way down.
WRT why we privilege monogamy: well, we certainly haven’t always done so, so were I interested in the question I’d probably look at the history of marriage and the decline of polygamy and see what other factors were in play at the time.
WRT researching relationship quality, I would probably start by asking how I can tell a high-quality relationship apart from a low-quality relationship, then by going out in the world and seeing what kinds of relationship structures correlate with relationship quality.
The relationship between that second question and the “how many partners?” question is tenuous at best, but if I focus on the overlap as we’ve been doing (and thereby ignore the majority of relationship-space) my expectation is that I’d find nominally poly relationships correlate better with relationship quality than nominally monogamous ones, based on my observations about how easy it is to stay in a low-quality monogamous relationship vs. a low-quality poly relationship.
My expectation is also that this would be dwarfed by other factors we would see if we weren’t ignoring the rest of relationship-space.
Also, if we found anything remotely resembling a normal distribution of happiness around a single “ideal relationship type” that wasn’t a confounding artifact around some other factor, I would be amazed. To the point that I’d pretty much have to discard all of my current beliefs about relationships. I would probably defy the data instead.
WRT researching relationship quality, I would probably start by asking how I can tell a high-quality relationship apart from a low-quality relationship, then by going out in the world and seeing what kinds of relationship structures correlate with relationship quality.
The trouble here is that different relationship types serve different goals. You’re more likely to come up with a flowchart which takes you from values to recommended relationship type than the claim that relationship type X is better for everyone than all other relationship types.
I would certainly agree that as the set of ways to be in relationship we refer to as “monogamy” gets smaller and smaller, the odds that it’s optimal for a given person dwindle.
I’ve utterly lost sight of why that’s interesting, or why we need all these labels.
Can you back up a little and summarize your goal, here?
My two main goals are to draw attention to why we privilege ‘monogamy wins’ or ‘monamory wins’ out of hypothesis-space in the first place, and to evaluate the usefulness of the categories under discussion, as a prolegomena to settling the duly clarified questions empirically.
We can start compiling research, and proposing new research, that settles this question; but we can only do so productively if we’ve clarified the question enough to isolate the plausibly very important variables. Surely some arities of relationships (2-person, 3-person, 4-person...) are better than others; but quality of relationship will also vary based on the structure of the network (degree and kind of connectedness), the temporal dynamics of the network, the level (and kind) of experience and honesty and affection of the participants, the sexual and romantic behavior, and for that matter how the relationship type is treated in the relevant society. (E.g., monamory could be more fun in our culture even if polyamory has more fun-potential in otherwise preferable hypothetical cultures.) Asking questions like these is more interesting, more clear, and more answerable than just ‘is polyamory better than monogamy?’.
If the research is fine-grained enough, it should also address the standard deviation from the ‘ideal relationship type,’ and discover if there are distinct macro-level population clusters with importantly different preferences, or whether it’s bell curves all the way down.
Gotcha.
WRT why we privilege monogamy: well, we certainly haven’t always done so, so were I interested in the question I’d probably look at the history of marriage and the decline of polygamy and see what other factors were in play at the time.
WRT researching relationship quality, I would probably start by asking how I can tell a high-quality relationship apart from a low-quality relationship, then by going out in the world and seeing what kinds of relationship structures correlate with relationship quality.
The relationship between that second question and the “how many partners?” question is tenuous at best, but if I focus on the overlap as we’ve been doing (and thereby ignore the majority of relationship-space) my expectation is that I’d find nominally poly relationships correlate better with relationship quality than nominally monogamous ones, based on my observations about how easy it is to stay in a low-quality monogamous relationship vs. a low-quality poly relationship.
My expectation is also that this would be dwarfed by other factors we would see if we weren’t ignoring the rest of relationship-space.
Also, if we found anything remotely resembling a normal distribution of happiness around a single “ideal relationship type” that wasn’t a confounding artifact around some other factor, I would be amazed. To the point that I’d pretty much have to discard all of my current beliefs about relationships. I would probably defy the data instead.
The trouble here is that different relationship types serve different goals. You’re more likely to come up with a flowchart which takes you from values to recommended relationship type than the claim that relationship type X is better for everyone than all other relationship types.
Yup, I completely agree.