It still sounds like you’re talking about poly as if it was a coherent whole, when it’s really lots and lots of different things, some with a longer history than others. Take a look at this map, for instance—and note that many of the non-monogamous behaviors may overlap with ostensibly monogamous practices. E.g this article, written by a sexuality counselor, (EDIT: removed questionable prevalence figure) basically says that swinging works for some couples and doesn’t work for others. Similarly, for everything else in that map, you could find reports from different people (either contemporary people or historical figures) who’ve done something like it, with it having been a good idea for some, and a bad idea for others.
I guess the main thing that puzzles me about your comments is that you seem to be asking for some general argument for why (some specific form of) polyamory could be expected to work for everyone. Whereas my inclination would be to say “well, if you describe to me the people in question and the specific form of relationship arrangement they’re trying out, I guess I could try to hazard a guess of whether that arrangement might work for them”, without any claim of whether that statement would generalize for anyone else in any other situation. For example, in Is Polyamory a Choice?, Michael Carey writes:
Meanwhile, there are some people whose innate personality traits make it very difficult to live happily in a monogamous relationship but relatively easy to be happy in an open one. [...] But there are almost certainly also some “obligate” non-monogamists who would never feel emotionally satisfied and healthy in a monogamous relationship, any more than a gay man would be satisfied and healthy in a straight marriage. [...] My experience suggests that perhaps half to two-thirds of polyamorists—those who want to be able to fully embrace multiple loving relationships, with sex as merely part of that (albeit an important part, just as it is in monogamous relationships)—are “obligate poly.” I’ve heard a lot of stories from people about having a few miserable monogamous relationships before they were introduced to the concept of honest, consensual non-monogamy.
I’ve also personally ran into cases of “naturally poly” people, who couldn’t prevent themselves from falling into love with multiple people at once, and who were utterly miserable if they had to kill those emotions: if they wanted to stay monogamous, they would have been forced to practically stop having any close friendships with people of the sexes that they were attracted to. For those people, it seems obvious that some kind of non-monogamous arrangement is the only kind of relationship in which they can ever feel really happy. (I don’t need to find an example of a visible community that has successfully practiced large-scale polyamory in order to realize that this kind of a person would be miserable in a monogamous arrangement.) At the same time, I also know of people are not only utterly incapable of loving more than one person, but also quite jealous: for those people, it seems obvious that a monogamous relationship is the right one.
Then there are people who are neither clearly poly nor clearly mono (I currently count myself as belonging to this category). For them the best choice requires some experimentation and probably also depends on the circumstances, e.g. if they fall in love with a clearly poly person, then a poly relationship might work best, but so might a mono relationship if they fell in love with someone who was very monogamous.
Then there are people who don’t necessarily experience romantic attraction to others, but also don’t experience much sexual jealousy and feel like having sex with others would just spice up the relationship they have with their primary partner: they might want to try out e.g. swinging. And so on.
E.g this article, written by a sexuality counselor, claims that some experts believe that there could be as many 15 million Americans swinging on a regular basis, and basically says that swinging works for some couples and doesn’t work for others.
I don’t believe that for a second and you should apply a little more critical thought to these numbers. What experts? What are they basing this on? Searching for this, I find nothing but echo chambers of media articles—“experts say”, “some experts think”, etc. Is 15 million remotely plausible? There are ~232m adults in the US, half are married, so 15m swingers would imply that 13% of marriages are open.
Slightly better are ‘estimates’ (or was it ‘a study’?) attributed to the Kinsey Institute of 2-4% of married couples being swingers, but that’s also quoted as ‘2-4m’ (a bit different) and one commenter even quotes it as 2-4% being ‘the BDSM and swing communities’, which reduces the size even more. All irrelevant, since I am unable to track down any study or official statement from Kinsey so I can’t even look at the methodology or assumptions they made to get those supposed numbers.
Fair point—the exact number wasn’t very important for my argument (I believe it would still carry even with the 2-4% or 2-4m figure), so I just grabbed the first figure I found. It passed my initial sanity check because I interpreted the “couples” to include “non-married couples”, and misremembered the US population to be 500 million rather than 300 million. (~4% of the adult population being swingers didn’t sound too unreasonable.)
I guess the main thing that puzzles me about your comments is that you seem to be asking for some general argument for why (some specific form of) polyamory could be expected to work for everyone. Whereas my inclination would be to say “well, if you describe to me the people in question and the specific form of relationship arrangement they’re trying out, I guess I could try to hazard a guess of whether that arrangement might work for them”, without any claim of whether that statement would generalize for anyone else in any other situation.
I think the argument goes through the same way though. I understand your position to be: a culture in which a variety of different relationships are accepted and respected (among both leaders and ordinary citizens), and LW-style polyamory is one of those many varieties, can be stable, productive, and generally successful and high-utility. The question remains: why don’t we see historical examples of such societies? While you’re right that even nominally monogamous societies usually tolerate some greater or lesser degree of non-monogamous behavior, the kind of polyamory practiced by some prominent LW members is, I think, without such precedent, and would be condemned in all historically successful societies (including, I think, contemporary american society; while we don’t imprison people for it, I don’t think we’d elect a leader who openly engaged in such relationships, for example).
Yes, there’s a small self-selecting bay area community which operates in the way you describe. But I don’t think that community has (yet) demonstrated itself to be successful; other communities have achieved the same level of success that they currently enjoy, and then undergone dramatic collapse shortly after.
Well, one possibility would be that a polyamorous inclination is simply rare. In that case, we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt large-scale polyamorous practices for the same reason why we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt e.g. large-scale asexual or homosexual practices.
But then there’s also the issue that most societies have traditionally been patriarchal, with strict restrictions on women’s sexuality in general (partially due to early contraception being unreliable and pregnancies dangerous). If you assumed that polyamory could work, but that most societies in history wouldn’t want to give women the same kind of sexual freedom as men, then that would suggest that we could expect to see lots of polygamous societies… which does seem to be case.
But I don’t think that community has (yet) demonstrated itself to be successful; other communities have achieved the same level of success that they currently enjoy, and then undergone dramatic collapse shortly after.
What counts as success, anyway? Does a relationship have to last for life in order to be successful? I wouldn’t count e.g. a happy relationship of five years to be a failure, if it produces five years of happiness for everyone involved.
Well, one possibility would be that a polyamorous inclination is simply rare. In that case, we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt large-scale polyamorous practices for the same reason why we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt e.g. large-scale asexual or homosexual practices.
I don’t think I would necessarily expect that.
Of course, it depends a lot on what we mean by “large scale”. A society with a 5% Buddhist minority can still have large-scale Buddhist practice (e.g., millions of people practicing Buddhism in a public and generally accepted way). I would say some U.S. states are visibly adopting homosexual practices (e.g. same-sex marriage) on a large scale, despite it being very much a minority option, for example.
In the absence of any other social forces pushing people towards nominally exclusive monogamy/monoandry (and heterosexuality, come to that) I would expect something like that kind of heterogeneity for natural inclinations.
Of course, in the real world those social forces exist and are powerful, so my expectations change accordingly.
But then there’s also the issue that most societies have traditionally been patriarchal, with strict restrictions on women’s sexuality in general (partially due to early contraception being unreliable and pregnancies dangerous). If you assumed that polyamory could work, but that most societies in history wouldn’t want to give women the same kind of sexual freedom as men, then that would suggest that we could expect to see lots of polygamous societies… which does seem to be case.
I think you’re putting the cart before the horse there. If patriarchy is a near-human-universal, doesn’t that suggest there’s a good reason for it?
What counts as success, anyway? Does a relationship have to last for life in order to be successful? I wouldn’t count e.g. a happy relationship of five years to be a failure, if it produces five years of happiness for everyone involved.
My impression is that the downsides of breakup dominate the overall utility compared to the marginal increase from having a better relationship. Particularly in the presence of children.
My impression is that the downsides of breakup dominate the overall utility compared to the marginal increase from having a better relationship.
My impression is the reverse. Breakups tend to be sharply painful, but the wounds heal in a matter of months or at most a few years. But if you’re unwilling to consider breakups, being in a miserable relationship is for the rest of your life.
If patriarchy is a near-human-universal, doesn’t that suggest there’s a good reason for it?
Sure—it was probably a natural adaptation to the level of contraception, healthcare, and overall wealth available at the time. Doesn’t mean it would be a good idea anymore.
And if you wish to reinstate patriarchy, then singling out polyamory as a suspicious modern practice seems rather arbitrary. There’s a lot of bigger stuff that you’d want to consider changing, like whether women are allowed to vote… or, if we wish to stay on the personal level, you’d want to question any relationships in which both sexes were considered equal in the first place.
My impression is that the downsides of breakup dominate the overall utility compared to the marginal increase from having a better relationship. Particularly in the presence of children.
That sounds unlikely in the general case (though there are definitely some spectacularly messy break-ups where that is true), but of course it depends on your utility function.
or, if we wish to stay on the personal level, you’d want to question any relationships in which both sexes were considered equal in the first place.
I think that happens; it’s hard to imagine e.g. a president with anything other than a traditional family (were/are the Clintons equals? More so than those before them, but in public at least Hilary conformed to the traditional “supportive wife” role (in a way that I think contrasts with Bill’s position for the 2008 primaries)). To a certain extent LW is always going to seem cultish if our leaders’ relationships are at odds with the traditional forms for such. And I don’t think that’s irrational: in cases where failures are rare but highly damaging, it makes sense to accord more weight to tradition than we normally do.
(on the voting analogy: I’d be very cautious about adopting any change to our political system that had no historical precedent and seemed like it might increase our odds of going to war, even if it had been tried and shown to be better in a few years of day-to-day use. I don’t think that’s an argument against women having the vote (they’re stereotypically less warlike—although it has been argued that the Falklands War happened because Thatcher felt the need to prove herself and wouldn’t’ve occurred under a male PM), but it is certainly an argument for not extending the vote to non-landowners and under-21s. In as much as war has declined since the vote was extended to non-landowners and under-21s—which is actually, now that I think about it, really quite surprising—I guess that’s evidence against this position)
It still sounds like you’re talking about poly as if it was a coherent whole, when it’s really lots and lots of different things, some with a longer history than others. Take a look at this map, for instance—and note that many of the non-monogamous behaviors may overlap with ostensibly monogamous practices. E.g this article, written by a sexuality counselor, (EDIT: removed questionable prevalence figure) basically says that swinging works for some couples and doesn’t work for others. Similarly, for everything else in that map, you could find reports from different people (either contemporary people or historical figures) who’ve done something like it, with it having been a good idea for some, and a bad idea for others.
I guess the main thing that puzzles me about your comments is that you seem to be asking for some general argument for why (some specific form of) polyamory could be expected to work for everyone. Whereas my inclination would be to say “well, if you describe to me the people in question and the specific form of relationship arrangement they’re trying out, I guess I could try to hazard a guess of whether that arrangement might work for them”, without any claim of whether that statement would generalize for anyone else in any other situation. For example, in Is Polyamory a Choice?, Michael Carey writes:
I’ve also personally ran into cases of “naturally poly” people, who couldn’t prevent themselves from falling into love with multiple people at once, and who were utterly miserable if they had to kill those emotions: if they wanted to stay monogamous, they would have been forced to practically stop having any close friendships with people of the sexes that they were attracted to. For those people, it seems obvious that some kind of non-monogamous arrangement is the only kind of relationship in which they can ever feel really happy. (I don’t need to find an example of a visible community that has successfully practiced large-scale polyamory in order to realize that this kind of a person would be miserable in a monogamous arrangement.) At the same time, I also know of people are not only utterly incapable of loving more than one person, but also quite jealous: for those people, it seems obvious that a monogamous relationship is the right one.
Then there are people who are neither clearly poly nor clearly mono (I currently count myself as belonging to this category). For them the best choice requires some experimentation and probably also depends on the circumstances, e.g. if they fall in love with a clearly poly person, then a poly relationship might work best, but so might a mono relationship if they fell in love with someone who was very monogamous.
Then there are people who don’t necessarily experience romantic attraction to others, but also don’t experience much sexual jealousy and feel like having sex with others would just spice up the relationship they have with their primary partner: they might want to try out e.g. swinging. And so on.
I don’t believe that for a second and you should apply a little more critical thought to these numbers. What experts? What are they basing this on? Searching for this, I find nothing but echo chambers of media articles—“experts say”, “some experts think”, etc. Is 15 million remotely plausible? There are ~232m adults in the US, half are married, so 15m swingers would imply that 13% of marriages are open.
Slightly better are ‘estimates’ (or was it ‘a study’?) attributed to the Kinsey Institute of 2-4% of married couples being swingers, but that’s also quoted as ‘2-4m’ (a bit different) and one commenter even quotes it as 2-4% being ‘the BDSM and swing communities’, which reduces the size even more. All irrelevant, since I am unable to track down any study or official statement from Kinsey so I can’t even look at the methodology or assumptions they made to get those supposed numbers.
Fair point—the exact number wasn’t very important for my argument (I believe it would still carry even with the 2-4% or 2-4m figure), so I just grabbed the first figure I found. It passed my initial sanity check because I interpreted the “couples” to include “non-married couples”, and misremembered the US population to be 500 million rather than 300 million. (~4% of the adult population being swingers didn’t sound too unreasonable.)
I think the argument goes through the same way though. I understand your position to be: a culture in which a variety of different relationships are accepted and respected (among both leaders and ordinary citizens), and LW-style polyamory is one of those many varieties, can be stable, productive, and generally successful and high-utility. The question remains: why don’t we see historical examples of such societies? While you’re right that even nominally monogamous societies usually tolerate some greater or lesser degree of non-monogamous behavior, the kind of polyamory practiced by some prominent LW members is, I think, without such precedent, and would be condemned in all historically successful societies (including, I think, contemporary american society; while we don’t imprison people for it, I don’t think we’d elect a leader who openly engaged in such relationships, for example).
Yes, there’s a small self-selecting bay area community which operates in the way you describe. But I don’t think that community has (yet) demonstrated itself to be successful; other communities have achieved the same level of success that they currently enjoy, and then undergone dramatic collapse shortly after.
Well, one possibility would be that a polyamorous inclination is simply rare. In that case, we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt large-scale polyamorous practices for the same reason why we wouldn’t expect any society to adopt e.g. large-scale asexual or homosexual practices.
But then there’s also the issue that most societies have traditionally been patriarchal, with strict restrictions on women’s sexuality in general (partially due to early contraception being unreliable and pregnancies dangerous). If you assumed that polyamory could work, but that most societies in history wouldn’t want to give women the same kind of sexual freedom as men, then that would suggest that we could expect to see lots of polygamous societies… which does seem to be case.
What counts as success, anyway? Does a relationship have to last for life in order to be successful? I wouldn’t count e.g. a happy relationship of five years to be a failure, if it produces five years of happiness for everyone involved.
In general agreed, but a quibble about:
I don’t think I would necessarily expect that.
Of course, it depends a lot on what we mean by “large scale”. A society with a 5% Buddhist minority can still have large-scale Buddhist practice (e.g., millions of people practicing Buddhism in a public and generally accepted way). I would say some U.S. states are visibly adopting homosexual practices (e.g. same-sex marriage) on a large scale, despite it being very much a minority option, for example.
In the absence of any other social forces pushing people towards nominally exclusive monogamy/monoandry (and heterosexuality, come to that) I would expect something like that kind of heterogeneity for natural inclinations.
Of course, in the real world those social forces exist and are powerful, so my expectations change accordingly.
I think you’re putting the cart before the horse there. If patriarchy is a near-human-universal, doesn’t that suggest there’s a good reason for it?
My impression is that the downsides of breakup dominate the overall utility compared to the marginal increase from having a better relationship. Particularly in the presence of children.
My impression is the reverse. Breakups tend to be sharply painful, but the wounds heal in a matter of months or at most a few years. But if you’re unwilling to consider breakups, being in a miserable relationship is for the rest of your life.
Sure—it was probably a natural adaptation to the level of contraception, healthcare, and overall wealth available at the time. Doesn’t mean it would be a good idea anymore.
And if you wish to reinstate patriarchy, then singling out polyamory as a suspicious modern practice seems rather arbitrary. There’s a lot of bigger stuff that you’d want to consider changing, like whether women are allowed to vote… or, if we wish to stay on the personal level, you’d want to question any relationships in which both sexes were considered equal in the first place.
That sounds unlikely in the general case (though there are definitely some spectacularly messy break-ups where that is true), but of course it depends on your utility function.
I think that happens; it’s hard to imagine e.g. a president with anything other than a traditional family (were/are the Clintons equals? More so than those before them, but in public at least Hilary conformed to the traditional “supportive wife” role (in a way that I think contrasts with Bill’s position for the 2008 primaries)). To a certain extent LW is always going to seem cultish if our leaders’ relationships are at odds with the traditional forms for such. And I don’t think that’s irrational: in cases where failures are rare but highly damaging, it makes sense to accord more weight to tradition than we normally do.
(on the voting analogy: I’d be very cautious about adopting any change to our political system that had no historical precedent and seemed like it might increase our odds of going to war, even if it had been tried and shown to be better in a few years of day-to-day use. I don’t think that’s an argument against women having the vote (they’re stereotypically less warlike—although it has been argued that the Falklands War happened because Thatcher felt the need to prove herself and wouldn’t’ve occurred under a male PM), but it is certainly an argument for not extending the vote to non-landowners and under-21s. In as much as war has declined since the vote was extended to non-landowners and under-21s—which is actually, now that I think about it, really quite surprising—I guess that’s evidence against this position)
There are many relationships where the “marginal” increase from not being in that relationship anymore far outweigh the downsides of the breakup.
Sure there are good reasons. Physical strength is one. Not being in a semi-permanent state of either pregnant or breast-feeding is another.