Interesting. Very vivid insight into how the hacking was accomplished. A question I have from the outside looking in is about motivation, what makes people want to be poly in the first place?
Alicorn, you said that your primary motivation was MBlume. (Or generalized, ‘a specific person.’) MBlume, what was your primary motivation?
I and my partner sat down as very earnest 16 year olds (23.5 years ago and yes we’re still together) because we both agreed we were annoyed by unexamined defaults inherited from society and upbringing. We said we were fine with being monogamous if after careful consideration we decided we wanted it, but we didn’t want to just drift into it.
Thus we sat down and spent quite some time cataloging what we thought monogamy would provide us, and how much we valued those things. Week after week we seemed to keep coming back to the conclusion that we didn’t actually think we needed or even greatly wanted those things, and so we started considering whether that meant we wanted explicitly to not be monogamous. It remained an ongoing (low-key, non-fatiguing) discussion for a few months, and then we said, ok, non-monogamous. (This was really before “poly” had gained much traction as a term.)
It remained a theoretical construct for maybe another six months until there was a convergence of opportunity and interest for one of us, and we took some first steps. In hindsight we made a lot of rookie mistakes that I think people would avoid more easily today given there are now many poly resources and communities online and in realspace. (For example I helped vote for the creation of the alt.polyamory newsgroup which I think was very important in its day for developing poly discourse.)
I guess I’ve answered the “how” but not the “why”. Our motivation was actually not what it gained for ourselves but how we felt about the other. No doubt this will sound hopelessly idealistic but a quick summary is that we wanted someone to have more opportunities in their live due to us loving them, rather than fewer. I had trouble reconciling what it meant to me to love someone with actively preventing other good relationships in their lives.
(This by the way is why “being untroubled by one’s partner(s) being with others” is more critical to my concept of poly than “being involved with more than one person”. Consider that monogamous cheating satisfies the latter.)
We were adorably earnest at 16. We also poked at our attitudes towards having children, and to materialism/wealth/possessions. I’m not recalling anything else that we discussed up-front like that. Maybe home ownership.
Results: we identified discrepancies in our desires for some of these things and flagged them as something to be extra careful in figuring out, and also identified some congruences which meant less conflict than expected, but we also flagged them explicitly as something to re-examine every five years.
We’ve been together 23 years and have toggled our position on one of the points; the others have (EDIT) not changed substantially.
I sort of stumbled into poly when I was 17, but I was motivated to continue with it because I frequently found myself dating one person while also being attracted to others. Why deny myself people I want when I could be dating them? If I had to be dishonest or hurt people’s feelings or otherwise act unethically to do so, I wouldn’t; this is why I’m generally opposed to cheating. Being poly lets me have the relationships I want to have, and it lets the people I love have the relationships they want to have, too.
:) Of course. Or at least the hurts that come from dating other people have analogous hurts for the monogomous where you hurt them by not dating them even though the feelings have developed.
Here’s a response to roughly that question from when I was just starting out, though I should add that I am now much happier practicing polyamory under a “committed primary” model as described in Alicorn’s first and third bullet points in section two.
I’ve actually been poly for most of my adult life. I only ever had two monogamous relationships growing up, one of them an LDR that evaporated when it became clear we weren’t going to be able to relocate to be with each other. At this stage in my life I had already heard of polyamory and had grown up vaguely wondering why nobody ever seemed to do it, and suspicious of the general refrain from adults I asked that it was impossible or unethical.
It seems to be an instinctive matter of orientation for me—I love deeply and intensely, but I don’t seem to stop forming such connections once I’m in a relationship, and once I started dating other poly people, I never really went back. I find it difficult to conceive of being in a monogamous relationship now; I’m sure there are at least somewhat realistic scenarios where pragmatic factors could cause me to not pursue other relationships, if I were living in such a situation with a single primary partner who wanted monogamy—but that’s not where I find myself today, and I have absolutely no desire to trade my current life for it. I’m also quite sure I wouldn’t be as happy, in such a situation, as I am in my current relationship network, and would regret the sense of lost opportunity.
I’m not poly., but I’d like to be—it seems by far the most functional outlook on relationships. It takes many potential problems with monogamous relationships and completely eliminates them without introducing new problems in their place.
It just seems better. I hardly have any relationships as a monogamous person, though, so . . . there’s not a lot there for me to be poly, LOL
Posting years after your comment, but as somebody who is relatively new to poly myself, I want to mention: that thing at the end of Alicorn’s post, with the “all kinds of popular”? It didn’t hit me quite that hard, but it did hit. I get more interest and don’t have to turn people down when they say “by the way, I’m married, is that a problem?” (actually asked, in sentiment if not verbatim, a couple of relationships ago). I’m a guy, ~90% straight (though I’ve thought about hacking that, and a few years ago I’d have said 95% or more), very nerdy but with an atypical life story, and had a hell of a time finding relationships up until about three years ago.
I’d also be curious, if you happen to see this, what your thoughts on poly are now. Did you ever try to hack it? If so, why, and did it work? Are you happy with your current poly-or-not status? What would you have estimated your probability of being where you are now to be, 3.5 years ago? Where do you expect to be in a few more years?
Hi. I apologize: this is a pretty long reply—but thanks very much for your comment. :) I really appreciate the opportunity to follow up like this on something I said a few years ago.
My thoughts on being poly. haven’t changed. I still think it’s the most functional romantic outlook. Although, after re-reading my comment: “without introducing new problems in their place” is somewhat of a loaded statement. If someone has a difficult time being polyamorous, then it introduces a lot of problems. Not to dwell on this too much, but that part of the comment was a bit circular: If a person is already poly., then, of course having a poly. relationship solves problems. Perhaps it would have been best to say “Since the society in which we’re raised is largely monogamous, being poly. solves a lot of problems at the cost of having to exert more emotional effort against that norm.”
… or something to that extent.
Three and a half years ago, I thought the likelihood of my entering a relationship in the first place to be very low. I didn’t want to be in a relationship at all. This thought persisted up until the beginning of my relationship a little over a year ago (which was just a friendship at first, but ended up functionally being the same thing as a relationship—so we just went with it).
I wouldn’t call our relationship polyamorous, but it’s open. Pretty early on, we had a discussion that essentially came down to “You do what you want and I do what I want.” That is, if I sleep with someone else, then it’s ok—and if she sleeps with someone else, then it’s ok. This is pretty limited to physical activity. I don’t think either of us would be comfortable with “I have another girlfriend/boyfriend.”
This actually did not take any hacking; it came very naturally to the both of us, and I am happy with it. In fact, I really like this relationship. When I talk about it, I feel like a grandfather showing off pictures of his grandchildren—in a “Look at this, look at this!” sense. I have to consciously stop myself from talking too much, haha. (Thinking about it a bit further, too, actively having multiple girlfriends might be more effort than I’d want to exert.)
We both expect this to be a long-term relationship, and think it most definitely has the potential to last a long time.
Thanks for the reply, and no apology needed; I write long comments myself!
The “without introducing new problems” part is actually kind of funny in this time context, since I had just spent a while on the Negative Polyamory Outcomes? post, and poly definitely does sometimes cause problems. If nothing else, I think it introduces new ways to screw up, in terms of both emotional and physical health… but it can also be pretty beneficial when everybody involved can handle the emotions involved. The cost of going against a societal norm will be very context-dependent, I suspect; a bunch of the LW crowd apparently live in the SF Bay Area, where it’s fairly common and has minimal societal costs, but some of us are in less-progressive areas.
Congrats on the happy relationship (against earlier expectations). I wonder how many people would be able to just slide into a consensually non-monogamous (dammit, we need better words; even that phrase isn’t accurate) relationship when they hadn’t previously thought of themselves as poly. It came easy to me—I’m actually kind of upset by jealousy in general, and once I found other people who were OK with this relationship style it just fell into place—but a lot of people do seem to have hang-ups with the idea.
Interesting. Very vivid insight into how the hacking was accomplished. A question I have from the outside looking in is about motivation, what makes people want to be poly in the first place?
Alicorn, you said that your primary motivation was MBlume. (Or generalized, ‘a specific person.’) MBlume, what was your primary motivation?
Other poly people please feel free to reply also.
I and my partner sat down as very earnest 16 year olds (23.5 years ago and yes we’re still together) because we both agreed we were annoyed by unexamined defaults inherited from society and upbringing. We said we were fine with being monogamous if after careful consideration we decided we wanted it, but we didn’t want to just drift into it.
Thus we sat down and spent quite some time cataloging what we thought monogamy would provide us, and how much we valued those things. Week after week we seemed to keep coming back to the conclusion that we didn’t actually think we needed or even greatly wanted those things, and so we started considering whether that meant we wanted explicitly to not be monogamous. It remained an ongoing (low-key, non-fatiguing) discussion for a few months, and then we said, ok, non-monogamous. (This was really before “poly” had gained much traction as a term.)
It remained a theoretical construct for maybe another six months until there was a convergence of opportunity and interest for one of us, and we took some first steps. In hindsight we made a lot of rookie mistakes that I think people would avoid more easily today given there are now many poly resources and communities online and in realspace. (For example I helped vote for the creation of the alt.polyamory newsgroup which I think was very important in its day for developing poly discourse.)
I guess I’ve answered the “how” but not the “why”. Our motivation was actually not what it gained for ourselves but how we felt about the other. No doubt this will sound hopelessly idealistic but a quick summary is that we wanted someone to have more opportunities in their live due to us loving them, rather than fewer. I had trouble reconciling what it meant to me to love someone with actively preventing other good relationships in their lives.
(This by the way is why “being untroubled by one’s partner(s) being with others” is more critical to my concept of poly than “being involved with more than one person”. Consider that monogamous cheating satisfies the latter.)
Were there other social defaults you examined? If so, with what results?
We were adorably earnest at 16. We also poked at our attitudes towards having children, and to materialism/wealth/possessions. I’m not recalling anything else that we discussed up-front like that. Maybe home ownership.
Results: we identified discrepancies in our desires for some of these things and flagged them as something to be extra careful in figuring out, and also identified some congruences which meant less conflict than expected, but we also flagged them explicitly as something to re-examine every five years.
We’ve been together 23 years and have toggled our position on one of the points; the others have (EDIT) not changed substantially.
This is adorable.
I sort of stumbled into poly when I was 17, but I was motivated to continue with it because I frequently found myself dating one person while also being attracted to others. Why deny myself people I want when I could be dating them? If I had to be dishonest or hurt people’s feelings or otherwise act unethically to do so, I wouldn’t; this is why I’m generally opposed to cheating. Being poly lets me have the relationships I want to have, and it lets the people I love have the relationships they want to have, too.
You do have to hurt people’s feelings. That’s a rather unavoidable part of romance. :)
Oh, well, yes. But not specifically about dating other people. And it is generally something I try to avoid where I can.
:) Of course. Or at least the hurts that come from dating other people have analogous hurts for the monogomous where you hurt them by not dating them even though the feelings have developed.
Here’s a response to roughly that question from when I was just starting out, though I should add that I am now much happier practicing polyamory under a “committed primary” model as described in Alicorn’s first and third bullet points in section two.
I’ve actually been poly for most of my adult life. I only ever had two monogamous relationships growing up, one of them an LDR that evaporated when it became clear we weren’t going to be able to relocate to be with each other. At this stage in my life I had already heard of polyamory and had grown up vaguely wondering why nobody ever seemed to do it, and suspicious of the general refrain from adults I asked that it was impossible or unethical.
It seems to be an instinctive matter of orientation for me—I love deeply and intensely, but I don’t seem to stop forming such connections once I’m in a relationship, and once I started dating other poly people, I never really went back. I find it difficult to conceive of being in a monogamous relationship now; I’m sure there are at least somewhat realistic scenarios where pragmatic factors could cause me to not pursue other relationships, if I were living in such a situation with a single primary partner who wanted monogamy—but that’s not where I find myself today, and I have absolutely no desire to trade my current life for it. I’m also quite sure I wouldn’t be as happy, in such a situation, as I am in my current relationship network, and would regret the sense of lost opportunity.
I’m not poly., but I’d like to be—it seems by far the most functional outlook on relationships. It takes many potential problems with monogamous relationships and completely eliminates them without introducing new problems in their place.
It just seems better. I hardly have any relationships as a monogamous person, though, so . . . there’s not a lot there for me to be poly, LOL
Posting years after your comment, but as somebody who is relatively new to poly myself, I want to mention: that thing at the end of Alicorn’s post, with the “all kinds of popular”? It didn’t hit me quite that hard, but it did hit. I get more interest and don’t have to turn people down when they say “by the way, I’m married, is that a problem?” (actually asked, in sentiment if not verbatim, a couple of relationships ago). I’m a guy, ~90% straight (though I’ve thought about hacking that, and a few years ago I’d have said 95% or more), very nerdy but with an atypical life story, and had a hell of a time finding relationships up until about three years ago.
I’d also be curious, if you happen to see this, what your thoughts on poly are now. Did you ever try to hack it? If so, why, and did it work? Are you happy with your current poly-or-not status? What would you have estimated your probability of being where you are now to be, 3.5 years ago? Where do you expect to be in a few more years?
Hi. I apologize: this is a pretty long reply—but thanks very much for your comment. :) I really appreciate the opportunity to follow up like this on something I said a few years ago.
My thoughts on being poly. haven’t changed. I still think it’s the most functional romantic outlook. Although, after re-reading my comment: “without introducing new problems in their place” is somewhat of a loaded statement. If someone has a difficult time being polyamorous, then it introduces a lot of problems. Not to dwell on this too much, but that part of the comment was a bit circular: If a person is already poly., then, of course having a poly. relationship solves problems. Perhaps it would have been best to say “Since the society in which we’re raised is largely monogamous, being poly. solves a lot of problems at the cost of having to exert more emotional effort against that norm.”
… or something to that extent.
Three and a half years ago, I thought the likelihood of my entering a relationship in the first place to be very low. I didn’t want to be in a relationship at all. This thought persisted up until the beginning of my relationship a little over a year ago (which was just a friendship at first, but ended up functionally being the same thing as a relationship—so we just went with it).
I wouldn’t call our relationship polyamorous, but it’s open. Pretty early on, we had a discussion that essentially came down to “You do what you want and I do what I want.” That is, if I sleep with someone else, then it’s ok—and if she sleeps with someone else, then it’s ok. This is pretty limited to physical activity. I don’t think either of us would be comfortable with “I have another girlfriend/boyfriend.”
This actually did not take any hacking; it came very naturally to the both of us, and I am happy with it. In fact, I really like this relationship. When I talk about it, I feel like a grandfather showing off pictures of his grandchildren—in a “Look at this, look at this!” sense. I have to consciously stop myself from talking too much, haha. (Thinking about it a bit further, too, actively having multiple girlfriends might be more effort than I’d want to exert.)
We both expect this to be a long-term relationship, and think it most definitely has the potential to last a long time.
Thanks for the reply, and no apology needed; I write long comments myself!
The “without introducing new problems” part is actually kind of funny in this time context, since I had just spent a while on the Negative Polyamory Outcomes? post, and poly definitely does sometimes cause problems. If nothing else, I think it introduces new ways to screw up, in terms of both emotional and physical health… but it can also be pretty beneficial when everybody involved can handle the emotions involved. The cost of going against a societal norm will be very context-dependent, I suspect; a bunch of the LW crowd apparently live in the SF Bay Area, where it’s fairly common and has minimal societal costs, but some of us are in less-progressive areas.
Congrats on the happy relationship (against earlier expectations). I wonder how many people would be able to just slide into a consensually non-monogamous (dammit, we need better words; even that phrase isn’t accurate) relationship when they hadn’t previously thought of themselves as poly. It came easy to me—I’m actually kind of upset by jealousy in general, and once I found other people who were OK with this relationship style it just fell into place—but a lot of people do seem to have hang-ups with the idea.