I should probably provide a corollary to this. It’s an interesting question and deserves more than a pithy one-word response.
Logistics:
It is difficult enough to coordinate the work diaries, social calendars, birthdays, anniversaries, dietary requirements, travel plans, in-laws, etc. of two reasonably busy people who live in close proximity to one another. The more people and locations you add, the more it compounds any orchestration problem.
Economics:
I claim romantic relationships do not enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, and the overhead of each additional relationship actually increases logarithmically. I also claim additional partners are subject to diminishing returns. In fairness, if this is accurate, it is less of a case against polyamory and more of a case against an arbitrarily high number of partners. Still, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the optimal number of typical partners for a given person is between 0 and 2.
“Love Anarchy”:
Much like the international system, my lovelife has no police force. I am generally quite pleased with this state of affairs. In a monogamous relationship my partner and I each have a single trade partner for our romantic resources. The quantity of those resources may or may not be to our exact liking, but the distribution is not contested. This is a relatively stable system. Once a third (or fourth, or fifth...) party becomes involved, we have a negotiation problem.
There’s no feasible method for someone to commit to a set distribution of time/effort/attention between partners. I’m not saying there should be, just pointing out that such things can’t realistically be budgeted for or enforced. The absence of such a mechanism makes polyamory highly unstable compared to monogamy, though I suppose this only really sits in the pro-monogamy column if you place a premium on stability.
Lets say Sarah has two partners Tom and Maria. Now Sarah has the wednesday afternoon free. The probablity that one of her partners has free time is higher than it would be in a monogamous arrangement.
The time needed is not necassary “everyone needed” but for “some suitable combination of people”.
Tom and Maria, on the other hand, have to take into account not only their own availability, but also Sarah’s and each other’s when planning their activities.
Meanwhile, if both Tom and Maria are available on the Wednesday, Sarah has a dilemma, and regardless of whether they’re both free, or who she ends up seeing, she will have to accomodate the other at a later date, at which point the entire process begins again.
You pretty much took the words out of my mouth. A relationship between two people already involves an awful lot of moving parts and give-and-take. Let alone the 3-body problem. Even Newton had trouble figuring that one out.
You’re right that the logistics are indeed more complicated in a polyamorous relationship; that’s probably one of the hardest parts of polyamory. But I’m not sure I agree with:
There’s no feasible method for someone to commit to a set distribution of time/effort/attention between partners. I’m not saying there should be, just pointing out that such things can’t realistically be budgeted for or enforced.
Even in monogamous relationships there are time and energy conflicts. People need to schedule their time between their partner, friends, family, work, hobbies, and personal time. The only method I know for committing to and scheduling time is to make a schedule with your partner(s) and discuss it with them regularly to make sure you’re keeping to it. You can schedule slots of time, and then if you’re missing that time with them, there’s a problem in that relationship and it needs to be reconsidered.
It’s one thing to compete for time and attention against a hobby or a job. It’s another thing entirely to compete for time and attention against another human being whose needs are essentially the same as yours.
I should probably provide a corollary to this. It’s an interesting question and deserves more than a pithy one-word response.
Logistics:
It is difficult enough to coordinate the work diaries, social calendars, birthdays, anniversaries, dietary requirements, travel plans, in-laws, etc. of two reasonably busy people who live in close proximity to one another. The more people and locations you add, the more it compounds any orchestration problem.
Economics:
I claim romantic relationships do not enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, and the overhead of each additional relationship actually increases logarithmically. I also claim additional partners are subject to diminishing returns. In fairness, if this is accurate, it is less of a case against polyamory and more of a case against an arbitrarily high number of partners. Still, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the optimal number of typical partners for a given person is between 0 and 2.
“Love Anarchy”:
Much like the international system, my lovelife has no police force. I am generally quite pleased with this state of affairs. In a monogamous relationship my partner and I each have a single trade partner for our romantic resources. The quantity of those resources may or may not be to our exact liking, but the distribution is not contested. This is a relatively stable system. Once a third (or fourth, or fifth...) party becomes involved, we have a negotiation problem.
There’s no feasible method for someone to commit to a set distribution of time/effort/attention between partners. I’m not saying there should be, just pointing out that such things can’t realistically be budgeted for or enforced. The absence of such a mechanism makes polyamory highly unstable compared to monogamy, though I suppose this only really sits in the pro-monogamy column if you place a premium on stability.
Actually the logistics is not so clear-cut.
Lets say Sarah has two partners Tom and Maria. Now Sarah has the wednesday afternoon free. The probablity that one of her partners has free time is higher than it would be in a monogamous arrangement.
The time needed is not necassary “everyone needed” but for “some suitable combination of people”.
Tom and Maria, on the other hand, have to take into account not only their own availability, but also Sarah’s and each other’s when planning their activities.
Meanwhile, if both Tom and Maria are available on the Wednesday, Sarah has a dilemma, and regardless of whether they’re both free, or who she ends up seeing, she will have to accomodate the other at a later date, at which point the entire process begins again.
You pretty much took the words out of my mouth. A relationship between two people already involves an awful lot of moving parts and give-and-take. Let alone the 3-body problem. Even Newton had trouble figuring that one out.
I toyed with the three-body problem joke, but couldn’t really fit it in :-)
You’re right that the logistics are indeed more complicated in a polyamorous relationship; that’s probably one of the hardest parts of polyamory. But I’m not sure I agree with:
Even in monogamous relationships there are time and energy conflicts. People need to schedule their time between their partner, friends, family, work, hobbies, and personal time. The only method I know for committing to and scheduling time is to make a schedule with your partner(s) and discuss it with them regularly to make sure you’re keeping to it. You can schedule slots of time, and then if you’re missing that time with them, there’s a problem in that relationship and it needs to be reconsidered.
It’s one thing to compete for time and attention against a hobby or a job. It’s another thing entirely to compete for time and attention against another human being whose needs are essentially the same as yours.