I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?
Not the best example. Does it never happen that one child suffers because he feels that his sibling is “stealing” his parent’s attention away from him? It’s something I have seen it happen before, even when the mother does love her sons equally -while her love might remain, the same could no longer be said about her “undivided” attention, which is what causes the problem in young children, when they are informed that they are going to have “a little brother”-. While it is not a rationally sound stance, that kind of jealousy is certainly not an uncommon emotion.
Furthermore, does it never happen that one of the sibling feels slighted because he is constantly compared to his more successful brother? While the mother might, in theory, love them both equally, life is not always as it looks on paper. It’s not uncommon to have a situation where there is a “preferred” child (maybe because he excells in sports, like the father, whereas the other brother doesn’t even like football, and prefers classical music).
To put it clearly, it’s also something Alicorn also underlined: # Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary. #. She later decided that the odds of that happening are lower than those that things might go wrong simply because of loss of interest. However, that does not mean that one should dimiss such concern out of hand with a “I don’t know why you would say this”, as if the fear of abandonment was not a real, “natural” emotion. Ultimately, the children in the example will always remain that mother’s sons, no matter what. A romantic relationship is not like that. Breakups do exist, it’s not as if the possibility that he/she might decide to pursue a monogamous relationship with a partner he/she met at a later date is might be a realistic concern. Not a concern that should necessarily stop you from pursuing a polygamous relationship, but certainly a concern to be considered.
I mean, I am just going off a tangent, here, but, first of all, we are comparing two very different kind of situations -the bond between a mother and a son, and the bond between two lovers-. While we might address the two bonds with the same words (love), that is, as Wittgensteing might have said, a mere problem of language -in practice, the romantic love between two people is different from what a child feels towards a parent, or a parent towards a child, or a sibling towards a brother-.
For example, take the bond between three siblings. If their parents were having another child, the relationship betweent he three children would not be affected -it’s not as if what they feel towards each other would be changed by the arrival of a little brother-.
On the other hand, in the case of a “best friend”, it is implicitly assumed that the “position” is unique, exclusive. One cannot have many “best friends”, one can have many “close friends”. In and of itself, the position of “best friend” implies exclusivity, thought it might often be compared to the bond between brothers.
This is a fact that was also highligthed in the original post by Alcyon: she highlights the fact that there is a difference between being someone’s “top” romantic priority and being someone’s “exclusive” romantic priority. As she puts it, the first part is 95% of the deal. However, I ALSO agree with Eliezer_Yudkowsky’s post:
Yes. Why would my being special to someone imply that they couldn’t have sex and/or long-term relationships with people they found attractive?
The fact that he/she might be seeing other people does not automatically imply that you don’t matter to her/him. Nor does it imply that what your share is any less real. However, it all boils down to how much value we attach to that last 5% that distinguishes “top romantic interest” from “exclusive romantic interest”. Because “unique”, “exclusive” obviously do not apply when the “position” is shared by two, six, n other people. At the same time, that does not mean that you should feel as if you were easily replaceable, like a car’s wheel. You are still a person. Your partner chose to be with you because he/she feels something for you. You just have to decide how much value you place on the fact that the relationship you share should be truly “unique”, “exclusive”, keeping in mind that there is no right or wrong, best or worse decision here.
I suppose no analogy would be perfect, but saying that kids can be jealous doesn’t seem to justify or explain rational adult emotion. I would certainly not agree that kids with siblings are ultimately worse off than those without!
Getting back to the original point of seeing one’s partner with another makes one feel non-special… I still don’t know why someone (some healthy adult with decent self-esteem) would say this. My guess is that I am finding it hard to understand because I have been in that situation, and the OP (jmed) hasn’t. So jmed is trying to guess what it would be like, but because it is so far our of his/her experience, he/she isn’t doing a very accurate job.
In my experience, such an event has no impact on my perception of my own specialness. Much like when a lover makes a new friend, or … I don’t know… discovers a new restaurant? These things are just (varying degrees of) nice and exciting.
I think that the issue here is something Alicorn explained in her post.
“I want to be someone’s top romantic priority, ideally symmetrically. [This is satisfied by me and MBlume having an explicitly primary relationship instead of each having a bunch of undifferentiated ones.]”
I guess that the original poster didn’t mean to say “special”, but rather “unique” or “exclusive”. In Alicorn’s post, it is made clear that they don’t have a “bunch of undifferentiated” relationships, but in my opinion, that’s what the first commenter understood, and probably, thinking about it, the idea of being so easily repleaced made him think “she considers me like a car’s wheel: I am not there? No problem, someone else will be”. That doesn’t have anything to do with his perception of himself, but with the perception of him he believes his partner might have.
Maybe I should not have put there those comments about children’s behaviour, because they seem to distract fromt he main point, I just wanted to note that even in a situation where fear of abandonment is not justified (the mother in question will always be their mother, even after the birth of her new child), there is still jealousy, as well as a subconscious fear. As pointed out by Alicorn, and considering adults and romantic relationship (which can, in fact, end), there is “Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary.”. In this case, we are talking about an event that could actually happen, and has to be accounted for. In the end, Alicorn concludes that the odds of their relationship ending because her boyfriend might prefer another woman to her would be lower than those of them breaking out because of simple loss of interest.
Also, in the thread where Alicorn’s partner talked about his view of the experience, occasional feelings of jealousy had been mentioned. Who said that emotions were rational? When had they ever been? Just because you intellectually know that you matter to a person, and repeat to yourself that you shouldn’t be jealous, doesn’t mean that you cant control what you are feeling. If being happy or angry, or sad, or jealous, was a simple matter of sitting down and pondering the situation, then it would be much easier. What could the original poster have been thinking about? I will try to make a wild guess: “if she loves me, shouldn’t she want me to be in her current lover’s place?” Or “how can I call this special, how can I believe that I truly matter to her, knowing that, had not I been there, she would be doing the exact same thing with someone else? How can I treasure this moment as if it was unique, knowing that I could easily be switched with any other element of a small set?” Or, even, “am I lacking something? Why am I unable to satisfy him, to not make him desire to be with other people? doesn’t he love me enough because of some inadequacy? then maybe I am not the right person to be with him… ”.
I am not saying that those feelings and thoughts are what one would call rational or logical, but I can easily see how they could arise. A simple bias? Maybe. Note that I am not stating that as a proto-argument against polygamy, I am simply trying to see where the original poster might have come from… I mean, try to think back to the time you first decided to give polygamy a try… did everything go well the first time, without problems or roadblocks? Reading some of the post in Alicorn’s boyfriend’s thread, it certainly doesn’t seem to be that way. Jealousies, attrites, conflicts, all augmented by the sole fact that, well, with more than two persons the dynamics are more complicated. Not that anyone should get discouraged because of such things, but from the posts of other polygamists, well… they all make it seem such a fluid, natural things to do, as if we were simply talking about getting rid of old intellectual chains and they “never” mention any roadblocks, acting as if they had always been above such silly, mundane emotions like jealousies or fear of inadequacy (i.e. from knowing that their partner thinks they are not “enough”). In particular, with regards to this last point, I should note that Alicorn herself considers “significant” that her boyfriend later told her that, knowing what he knows now, he would have agreed to a monogamous relationship in the past. It’s nice to know, even if you don’t intend to return to that situation. Others, reading the posts, don’t seem to have that problem, and actually are happy to know that there will be other people to “pick up the slack”, so to speak, when it comes to satisfying their partner’s needs (sexual, emotional,...) I must admit that I find that view admiringly selfless, but that in my brief polygamous stint that was an advantage I never experienced (rather, I had to deal with hidden and inexpressed resentment, feelings of inadequacy -at the time it made me think of one of Dario Fo’s work, in which a man asked his partner if they could have an open relationship, and then was distressed by the thought that he could be so easily replaced-).
Personally, the only thing I disagree with is the view of polygamy as this sort of panacea to save a relationship (now or in the future) from lack of interest. In my experience, the main issue in such cases is lack of communication. Without it, you could very well end up “alone in a crowd”. I would say that that’s where the problem originates most of the time, in monogamous or polygamous couples. If, as Elyzier said, the presence of more partners could help take some weight off your shoulders, it is also true that it adds a new layer of complexity to the whole situation, and I would say that the more difficult dynamics balance out the potential benefits.
I must say that, for me, the experience has not been a very good one. Mainly because of the aforementioned problems, which I was not able to spot in time. Still, I am open minded enough not to base my judgement of all polygamous relationship on my failed one. Who knows, maybe it was not the right time, maybe I could even give it another try in the future… but, my experience has made it rather difficult to consider it somehow “superior” to a monogamous relationship. I would not say it is “inferior” either, just different. It has its own set of difficulties and drawbacks. Consider that the “inner monologue” was almost straigh out of my ex’s mouth. I never heard a word of it while we were together (I noticed the unease, but, as people tend to do with uncomfortable truths, I left it alone at the time). All things considered I think that a polygamous relationship “could” work beautifully (some of them certainly do), and certainly, Elizier, for example, doesn’t seem to be bothered by such thoughts (considering he never even mentioned something akin to “explicitly primary relationship instead of each having a bunch of undifferentiated ones”). However, I think that expecting every experience to be like that, and to go smoothly, without obstacles such as those mentioned above, would mean being a tad too optimistic.
I also dispute the fact that it should be considered inherently “superior” to a monogamous relationship. With respect to what measure? It seems like an awfully subjective judgement to make. If we took the ability of such an arrangement to keep everyone involved happy or satisfied, I would say that it does not fare better or worse than a monogamous relationship -it has its own set of “different” problems and complications, and I certainly wouldn’t call it “fail proof”-. Apparently polygamy and bisexuality seem to be “better” from the point of view of “immortal superbeings”. I must admit that I don’t understand the reason why. Experimentally checking such a fact would be impossible (as there are no moral superbeings I know of), and I wouldn’t know how to frame such a sketchy, undefined problem in a suitably formal fashion. The closest scenario I have ever seen depicted was Asimov’s description of aliens with long life-spans, in his fictional works (and that sort of promiscous relationships did seem to carry its own share of problems -it seemed to make the whole business “devoid of meaning”, as the original poster feared-, so I would call it a different, but not necessarily superior lifestyle). In general, when it comes to bisexuality or polygamy, I am open minded, but avoid attaching labels like “evolutionally superior” (as I saw in a post, I don’t remember the exact wording) to them, and in general I cannot see how its diffusion could be tied to longer life-span and society’s advancements (Ancient Greeks, for example, were largely bisexual, and yet nowadays, after Illuminism, and with much longer life-expectancy, that does not seem to be the trend, even in academic circles) or evolution (polygyny being the most common form of polygamy in verterbates, but polygamy being relatively uncommon amond human beings). Certainly, I could see how a more open minded society could be more tolerant towards those alternative lifestyles, and they could become more diffiused, but, for example, the fact that bisexuality is tolerated, nowadays, doesn’t seem to be leading to a return to ancient greece’s custom, despite the increase in knowledge and longevity, and the process of secularization.
I guess that the original poster didn’t mean to say “special”, but rather “unique” or “exclusive”.
Ok, then I would ask how the OP feels if their SO talked to another person. Or became friends with. Or found attractive. Or flirted with. There are some things that we can expect to be unique or exclusive in just about any relationship. (Certainly there are many things that are exclusive in my own primary relationship!) So it’s more a matter of changing where that line is drawn.
And as far as this: “Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary.” I would guess that monogamous relationships have to deal with this more (possibly far more) than do poly primary relationships. An appealing secondary is much less of a threat if your SO can get what they want from that person without having to break the primary relationship, if your SO can dispel the mystique, see that the grass really isn’t so green, etc.
In this case, we are talking about an event that could actually happen, and has to be accounted for.
An event that could actually happen in any relationship, not just poly ones. And like I said, I believe it’s more likely in mono relationships (whose track records are not stellar).
Also, in the thread where Alicorn’s partner talked about his view of the experience, occasional feelings of jealousy had been mentioned. Who said that emotions were rational?
Oh, I’m sorry if I implied that! Certainly they are not. But dark, unhelpful emotions are to be overcome, not given into. The mono relationship model seems to encourage jealousy, while the poly model seeks to overcome it. I would guess that, as a group, monos are more jealous than polys, because polys must learn to overcome it!
Just because you intellectually know that you matter to a person, and repeat to yourself that you shouldn’t be jealous, doesn’t mean that you cant control what you are feeling. If being happy or angry, or sad, or jealous, was a simple matter of sitting down and pondering the situation, then it would be much easier.
No, we can’t just reason away dark emotions, but we most certainly can illuminate them. Sometimes, upon examination, they turn out to be so silly that they just disappear. Other times they result from real problems that need to be addressed. But in any case, it’s best to try to understand where they come from. Jealousy can often be dispelled or dealt with. We are not helpless before it. It isn’t just part of the human condition, or “who we are”.
What could the original poster have been thinking about? I will try to make a wild guess:
Your guesses are probably accurate, and they make me a little sad… thoughts of mine in response: Loving others does not mean she loves you less. It most certainly does not mean that people are interchangeable!! (Hell, if people were all pretty much the same, then why would we ever bother with polyamory in the first place??) And why put so much pressure on yourself to be everything to one person? And even if you could be, would there be anything left of yourself?
from the posts of other polygamists, well… they all make it seem such a fluid, natural things to do, as if we were simply talking about getting rid of old intellectual chains and they “never” mention any roadblocks, acting as if they had always been above such silly, mundane emotions like jealousies or fear of inadequacy
Well, we all get their in different ways, and some come to it more easily than others. But perhaps it’s a bit like learning to ride a bike, juggle, or program: it seems hard at first, but once you get the hang of it, the hard parts seem almost laughably easy. “Just look forward and peddle faster!” Isn’t there a sense in which you, too, think that riding a bike really is just that simple? My 5-year-old certainly didn’t feel that way.
Others, reading the posts, don’t seem to have that problem, and actually are happy to know that there will be other people to “pick up the slack”, so to speak, when it comes to satisfying their partner’s needs (sexual, emotional,...) I must admit that I find that view admiringly selfless
Interesting! I very much feel this way, but I don’t think there’s anything selfless about it: it’s a relief to me. A relief to know that I don’t have to try to change myself to be everything to her (an impossible task), and a relief to know that she won’t have to leave me (or cheat) to get the things I can’t give her.
but, my experience has made it rather difficult to consider it somehow “superior” to a monogamous relationship
If I implied that it was superior, I apologize. Everyone should do what works best for them, of course. We have found that it was the right choice for us.
I also dispute the fact that it should be considered inherently “superior” to a monogamous relationship.
As would I.
If we took the ability of such an arrangement to keep everyone involved happy or satisfied, I would say that it does not fare better or worse than a monogamous relationship
Hmm… not sure I know enough to say, though monogamous relationships have a pretty awful track record, don’t you think?
-it has its own set of “different” problems and complications, and I certainly wouldn’t call it “fail proof”-.
But is it more failure-resistant than monogamy? I would guess so, but I don’t really know.
Also, I get the impression that monogamous couples would consider a happy 10-20 year relationship that ends in something other than death to be, in some sense, a failure. But I think many polyamorous people would consider such a relationship to be a huge success. My point being: if there really are different ideas of what constitutes success/failure, then it’s hard to compare based on that.
With “superiority”, I was not exactly referring to your post, but to a general trend I noticed in other posts, where bisexuality and polygamy were (I think, admittedly, half jockyingly) publicized as “evolutionally superior” (?), at least if we were “immortal superbeings”. According to mdcaton’s post (quote: “I’m often on the defensive when polys talk to me, because there is a good bit of evangelism and insistence that monos are morally inferior, emotionally immature, etc.”) that does seem to be a trend, though the Alicorn’s post, nor your review seemed to contain any sort of “zealotic” element.
To restate my opinion, I don’t think of the polygamous arrangement as necessarily superior, nor inferior, mainly because it’s a highly subjective decision to make, and what could work for someone might not work for someone else. On paper, it sure seems to solve many problems -which is why I agreed to give it a try in the first place-. To name a few: the fact that, through you might feel jealousy and some amount of fear (because of the potential risk that your partner might change her mind and unceremoniously “dump” you to enter in a monogamous relationship, which, considering sex and the general level of intimacy involved with “third parties”, would in my opinion increase with respect to a “proper” monogamous relationship -by that I mean one in which the people involved are faithful and sincere with one another-, at least if said partner was not exactly sure about what she wanted from a polygamous relationship -so, arguably, this woudl not apply to a “proper” polygamous relationship either, I guess-… but that’s debatable, and not really the issue here), cheating would no longer be an issue (though, if you were comfortable and open enough to sleep with other people in a polygamous, I doubt that would have been a cause of worry), and certainly, if something was to happen to one of the two, the other would have the support of third parties and you wouldn’t need to worry about him/her facing the situation alone -in that sense, the support-structure seems to be superior-.
That often clashes with the reality of things, and emotions like jealousy, anger, inexpressed fears, competitiveness gone out of control. Of course, those negative aspect could be handled through good communication,which would likely be the key to even a successful monogamous relationship, and therefore a generally good strategy when dealing with unsatisfaction, etc. … which was one of the reason you stated in favor of polygamy: more often than not, unsatisfaction does not arise from an to give your partner what she wants, but from the inability of even acknowledging that such a need exists, either because of inattentiveness or a general desire to act as if “it was all ok”. It was what happened in my case (ironically, at the time we had a polygamous arrangement she was unsatisfied with), through of course that is not enough to make a genetal case in favor or against polygamy.
The only question that remains is: could it have worked, with proper communication, but the added pressures caused by the unfamiliar polygamous context? Or were there deeper problems? I don’t really have the answer to that. I woulnd’t go with the first answer or principle, because, to be fair, at the time “proper communication” was not exacly abundant (no thanks to my own unwillingness to acknowledge the problem, maybe spurned by the irritation that she had been the one to push me into that situation to begin with).
But in general… I don’t know. For the moment, finding “one” right person to be with does seem like a difficult enough problem… falling deeply in love with more than one, and then trying to arrange a situation in which we could “all” be together? I definitively woulnd’t say no on principle, despite the past experience (as a matter of fact, I think that it would be impossible to give a definitive qualitative judgement, and each situation should be judged on a case by case basis), but for the moment I don’t like my odds (for me, in particular, “emotional” intimacy and the prospect to open up to another person do come easy, and the prospect of developing that kind of connection with more than one person does seem unrealistic, at least in my case -before, it was mostly a physical or intellectual connection, rarely at the same time-).
20 years… on one hand, idealistically, I would say “forever”, but looking at the statistics, well… and yet, 20 years… that’s almost twice my age, trying to predict what could happen in such a long time span would be impossible -as pointless as trying to predict where I would have been now more than two decades ago would have been-.
The conclusion, I guess, is that if you are comfortable with it, it would be a wonderful arrangement, but that it wouldn’t necessarily appeal to everyone (Alicorn mentioned people with her “mental makeup”, and indeed I think that part of it is a matter of natural inclination, or at least deeply rooted cultural influence -i.e. bisexuality in Anchient Greece-). At this time, for example, I certainly don’t feel the need to give it another try, through that’s just me: if anyone is thinking about it, focusing on the worse case scenario won’t do them any good, and would probably just end up paralyzing them. People like Alicorn and Elizier certainly seem satisfied by the outcome, so there certainly isn’t any reason to dismiss it based solely on peer pressure -always keeping in mind, through, that it’s no magical formula to save a failing relationship, nor a fool proof method that guarantees success, or improves your chances (as I said, the benefits are balanced by other kinds of complications, so I woulnd’t necessarily call it a “more easy to handle” arrangement -it could be, if you are prepared for it, open minded, not jealous, suitably trusing (when it comes to emotional intimacy, for example, I am not, despite efforts to correct that)-)-.
I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?
Not the best example. Does it never happen that one child suffers because he feels that his sibling is “stealing” his parent’s attention away from him? It’s something I have seen it happen before, even when the mother does love her sons equally -while her love might remain, the same could no longer be said about her “undivided” attention, which is what causes the problem in young children, when they are informed that they are going to have “a little brother”-. While it is not a rationally sound stance, that kind of jealousy is certainly not an uncommon emotion.
Furthermore, does it never happen that one of the sibling feels slighted because he is constantly compared to his more successful brother? While the mother might, in theory, love them both equally, life is not always as it looks on paper. It’s not uncommon to have a situation where there is a “preferred” child (maybe because he excells in sports, like the father, whereas the other brother doesn’t even like football, and prefers classical music).
To put it clearly, it’s also something Alicorn also underlined: # Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary. #. She later decided that the odds of that happening are lower than those that things might go wrong simply because of loss of interest. However, that does not mean that one should dimiss such concern out of hand with a “I don’t know why you would say this”, as if the fear of abandonment was not a real, “natural” emotion. Ultimately, the children in the example will always remain that mother’s sons, no matter what. A romantic relationship is not like that. Breakups do exist, it’s not as if the possibility that he/she might decide to pursue a monogamous relationship with a partner he/she met at a later date is might be a realistic concern. Not a concern that should necessarily stop you from pursuing a polygamous relationship, but certainly a concern to be considered.
I mean, I am just going off a tangent, here, but, first of all, we are comparing two very different kind of situations -the bond between a mother and a son, and the bond between two lovers-. While we might address the two bonds with the same words (love), that is, as Wittgensteing might have said, a mere problem of language -in practice, the romantic love between two people is different from what a child feels towards a parent, or a parent towards a child, or a sibling towards a brother-.
For example, take the bond between three siblings. If their parents were having another child, the relationship betweent he three children would not be affected -it’s not as if what they feel towards each other would be changed by the arrival of a little brother-. On the other hand, in the case of a “best friend”, it is implicitly assumed that the “position” is unique, exclusive. One cannot have many “best friends”, one can have many “close friends”. In and of itself, the position of “best friend” implies exclusivity, thought it might often be compared to the bond between brothers.
This is a fact that was also highligthed in the original post by Alcyon: she highlights the fact that there is a difference between being someone’s “top” romantic priority and being someone’s “exclusive” romantic priority. As she puts it, the first part is 95% of the deal. However, I ALSO agree with Eliezer_Yudkowsky’s post:
Yes. Why would my being special to someone imply that they couldn’t have sex and/or long-term relationships with people they found attractive?
The fact that he/she might be seeing other people does not automatically imply that you don’t matter to her/him. Nor does it imply that what your share is any less real. However, it all boils down to how much value we attach to that last 5% that distinguishes “top romantic interest” from “exclusive romantic interest”. Because “unique”, “exclusive” obviously do not apply when the “position” is shared by two, six, n other people. At the same time, that does not mean that you should feel as if you were easily replaceable, like a car’s wheel. You are still a person. Your partner chose to be with you because he/she feels something for you. You just have to decide how much value you place on the fact that the relationship you share should be truly “unique”, “exclusive”, keeping in mind that there is no right or wrong, best or worse decision here.
I suppose no analogy would be perfect, but saying that kids can be jealous doesn’t seem to justify or explain rational adult emotion. I would certainly not agree that kids with siblings are ultimately worse off than those without!
Getting back to the original point of seeing one’s partner with another makes one feel non-special… I still don’t know why someone (some healthy adult with decent self-esteem) would say this. My guess is that I am finding it hard to understand because I have been in that situation, and the OP (jmed) hasn’t. So jmed is trying to guess what it would be like, but because it is so far our of his/her experience, he/she isn’t doing a very accurate job.
In my experience, such an event has no impact on my perception of my own specialness. Much like when a lover makes a new friend, or … I don’t know… discovers a new restaurant? These things are just (varying degrees of) nice and exciting.
I think that the issue here is something Alicorn explained in her post.
“I want to be someone’s top romantic priority, ideally symmetrically. [This is satisfied by me and MBlume having an explicitly primary relationship instead of each having a bunch of undifferentiated ones.]”
I guess that the original poster didn’t mean to say “special”, but rather “unique” or “exclusive”. In Alicorn’s post, it is made clear that they don’t have a “bunch of undifferentiated” relationships, but in my opinion, that’s what the first commenter understood, and probably, thinking about it, the idea of being so easily repleaced made him think “she considers me like a car’s wheel: I am not there? No problem, someone else will be”. That doesn’t have anything to do with his perception of himself, but with the perception of him he believes his partner might have.
Maybe I should not have put there those comments about children’s behaviour, because they seem to distract fromt he main point, I just wanted to note that even in a situation where fear of abandonment is not justified (the mother in question will always be their mother, even after the birth of her new child), there is still jealousy, as well as a subconscious fear. As pointed out by Alicorn, and considering adults and romantic relationship (which can, in fact, end), there is “Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary.”. In this case, we are talking about an event that could actually happen, and has to be accounted for. In the end, Alicorn concludes that the odds of their relationship ending because her boyfriend might prefer another woman to her would be lower than those of them breaking out because of simple loss of interest.
Also, in the thread where Alicorn’s partner talked about his view of the experience, occasional feelings of jealousy had been mentioned. Who said that emotions were rational? When had they ever been? Just because you intellectually know that you matter to a person, and repeat to yourself that you shouldn’t be jealous, doesn’t mean that you cant control what you are feeling. If being happy or angry, or sad, or jealous, was a simple matter of sitting down and pondering the situation, then it would be much easier. What could the original poster have been thinking about? I will try to make a wild guess: “if she loves me, shouldn’t she want me to be in her current lover’s place?” Or “how can I call this special, how can I believe that I truly matter to her, knowing that, had not I been there, she would be doing the exact same thing with someone else? How can I treasure this moment as if it was unique, knowing that I could easily be switched with any other element of a small set?” Or, even, “am I lacking something? Why am I unable to satisfy him, to not make him desire to be with other people? doesn’t he love me enough because of some inadequacy? then maybe I am not the right person to be with him… ”.
I am not saying that those feelings and thoughts are what one would call rational or logical, but I can easily see how they could arise. A simple bias? Maybe. Note that I am not stating that as a proto-argument against polygamy, I am simply trying to see where the original poster might have come from… I mean, try to think back to the time you first decided to give polygamy a try… did everything go well the first time, without problems or roadblocks? Reading some of the post in Alicorn’s boyfriend’s thread, it certainly doesn’t seem to be that way. Jealousies, attrites, conflicts, all augmented by the sole fact that, well, with more than two persons the dynamics are more complicated. Not that anyone should get discouraged because of such things, but from the posts of other polygamists, well… they all make it seem such a fluid, natural things to do, as if we were simply talking about getting rid of old intellectual chains and they “never” mention any roadblocks, acting as if they had always been above such silly, mundane emotions like jealousies or fear of inadequacy (i.e. from knowing that their partner thinks they are not “enough”). In particular, with regards to this last point, I should note that Alicorn herself considers “significant” that her boyfriend later told her that, knowing what he knows now, he would have agreed to a monogamous relationship in the past. It’s nice to know, even if you don’t intend to return to that situation. Others, reading the posts, don’t seem to have that problem, and actually are happy to know that there will be other people to “pick up the slack”, so to speak, when it comes to satisfying their partner’s needs (sexual, emotional,...) I must admit that I find that view admiringly selfless, but that in my brief polygamous stint that was an advantage I never experienced (rather, I had to deal with hidden and inexpressed resentment, feelings of inadequacy -at the time it made me think of one of Dario Fo’s work, in which a man asked his partner if they could have an open relationship, and then was distressed by the thought that he could be so easily replaced-).
Personally, the only thing I disagree with is the view of polygamy as this sort of panacea to save a relationship (now or in the future) from lack of interest. In my experience, the main issue in such cases is lack of communication. Without it, you could very well end up “alone in a crowd”. I would say that that’s where the problem originates most of the time, in monogamous or polygamous couples. If, as Elyzier said, the presence of more partners could help take some weight off your shoulders, it is also true that it adds a new layer of complexity to the whole situation, and I would say that the more difficult dynamics balance out the potential benefits.
I must say that, for me, the experience has not been a very good one. Mainly because of the aforementioned problems, which I was not able to spot in time. Still, I am open minded enough not to base my judgement of all polygamous relationship on my failed one. Who knows, maybe it was not the right time, maybe I could even give it another try in the future… but, my experience has made it rather difficult to consider it somehow “superior” to a monogamous relationship. I would not say it is “inferior” either, just different. It has its own set of difficulties and drawbacks. Consider that the “inner monologue” was almost straigh out of my ex’s mouth. I never heard a word of it while we were together (I noticed the unease, but, as people tend to do with uncomfortable truths, I left it alone at the time). All things considered I think that a polygamous relationship “could” work beautifully (some of them certainly do), and certainly, Elizier, for example, doesn’t seem to be bothered by such thoughts (considering he never even mentioned something akin to “explicitly primary relationship instead of each having a bunch of undifferentiated ones”). However, I think that expecting every experience to be like that, and to go smoothly, without obstacles such as those mentioned above, would mean being a tad too optimistic.
I also dispute the fact that it should be considered inherently “superior” to a monogamous relationship. With respect to what measure? It seems like an awfully subjective judgement to make. If we took the ability of such an arrangement to keep everyone involved happy or satisfied, I would say that it does not fare better or worse than a monogamous relationship -it has its own set of “different” problems and complications, and I certainly wouldn’t call it “fail proof”-. Apparently polygamy and bisexuality seem to be “better” from the point of view of “immortal superbeings”. I must admit that I don’t understand the reason why. Experimentally checking such a fact would be impossible (as there are no moral superbeings I know of), and I wouldn’t know how to frame such a sketchy, undefined problem in a suitably formal fashion. The closest scenario I have ever seen depicted was Asimov’s description of aliens with long life-spans, in his fictional works (and that sort of promiscous relationships did seem to carry its own share of problems -it seemed to make the whole business “devoid of meaning”, as the original poster feared-, so I would call it a different, but not necessarily superior lifestyle). In general, when it comes to bisexuality or polygamy, I am open minded, but avoid attaching labels like “evolutionally superior” (as I saw in a post, I don’t remember the exact wording) to them, and in general I cannot see how its diffusion could be tied to longer life-span and society’s advancements (Ancient Greeks, for example, were largely bisexual, and yet nowadays, after Illuminism, and with much longer life-expectancy, that does not seem to be the trend, even in academic circles) or evolution (polygyny being the most common form of polygamy in verterbates, but polygamy being relatively uncommon amond human beings). Certainly, I could see how a more open minded society could be more tolerant towards those alternative lifestyles, and they could become more diffiused, but, for example, the fact that bisexuality is tolerated, nowadays, doesn’t seem to be leading to a return to ancient greece’s custom, despite the increase in knowledge and longevity, and the process of secularization.
Ok, then I would ask how the OP feels if their SO talked to another person. Or became friends with. Or found attractive. Or flirted with. There are some things that we can expect to be unique or exclusive in just about any relationship. (Certainly there are many things that are exclusive in my own primary relationship!) So it’s more a matter of changing where that line is drawn.
And as far as this: “Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary.” I would guess that monogamous relationships have to deal with this more (possibly far more) than do poly primary relationships. An appealing secondary is much less of a threat if your SO can get what they want from that person without having to break the primary relationship, if your SO can dispel the mystique, see that the grass really isn’t so green, etc.
An event that could actually happen in any relationship, not just poly ones. And like I said, I believe it’s more likely in mono relationships (whose track records are not stellar).
Oh, I’m sorry if I implied that! Certainly they are not. But dark, unhelpful emotions are to be overcome, not given into. The mono relationship model seems to encourage jealousy, while the poly model seeks to overcome it. I would guess that, as a group, monos are more jealous than polys, because polys must learn to overcome it!
No, we can’t just reason away dark emotions, but we most certainly can illuminate them. Sometimes, upon examination, they turn out to be so silly that they just disappear. Other times they result from real problems that need to be addressed. But in any case, it’s best to try to understand where they come from. Jealousy can often be dispelled or dealt with. We are not helpless before it. It isn’t just part of the human condition, or “who we are”.
Your guesses are probably accurate, and they make me a little sad… thoughts of mine in response: Loving others does not mean she loves you less. It most certainly does not mean that people are interchangeable!! (Hell, if people were all pretty much the same, then why would we ever bother with polyamory in the first place??) And why put so much pressure on yourself to be everything to one person? And even if you could be, would there be anything left of yourself?
Well, we all get their in different ways, and some come to it more easily than others. But perhaps it’s a bit like learning to ride a bike, juggle, or program: it seems hard at first, but once you get the hang of it, the hard parts seem almost laughably easy. “Just look forward and peddle faster!” Isn’t there a sense in which you, too, think that riding a bike really is just that simple? My 5-year-old certainly didn’t feel that way.
Interesting! I very much feel this way, but I don’t think there’s anything selfless about it: it’s a relief to me. A relief to know that I don’t have to try to change myself to be everything to her (an impossible task), and a relief to know that she won’t have to leave me (or cheat) to get the things I can’t give her.
If I implied that it was superior, I apologize. Everyone should do what works best for them, of course. We have found that it was the right choice for us.
As would I.
Hmm… not sure I know enough to say, though monogamous relationships have a pretty awful track record, don’t you think?
But is it more failure-resistant than monogamy? I would guess so, but I don’t really know.
Also, I get the impression that monogamous couples would consider a happy 10-20 year relationship that ends in something other than death to be, in some sense, a failure. But I think many polyamorous people would consider such a relationship to be a huge success. My point being: if there really are different ideas of what constitutes success/failure, then it’s hard to compare based on that.
With “superiority”, I was not exactly referring to your post, but to a general trend I noticed in other posts, where bisexuality and polygamy were (I think, admittedly, half jockyingly) publicized as “evolutionally superior” (?), at least if we were “immortal superbeings”. According to mdcaton’s post (quote: “I’m often on the defensive when polys talk to me, because there is a good bit of evangelism and insistence that monos are morally inferior, emotionally immature, etc.”) that does seem to be a trend, though the Alicorn’s post, nor your review seemed to contain any sort of “zealotic” element.
To restate my opinion, I don’t think of the polygamous arrangement as necessarily superior, nor inferior, mainly because it’s a highly subjective decision to make, and what could work for someone might not work for someone else. On paper, it sure seems to solve many problems -which is why I agreed to give it a try in the first place-. To name a few: the fact that, through you might feel jealousy and some amount of fear (because of the potential risk that your partner might change her mind and unceremoniously “dump” you to enter in a monogamous relationship, which, considering sex and the general level of intimacy involved with “third parties”, would in my opinion increase with respect to a “proper” monogamous relationship -by that I mean one in which the people involved are faithful and sincere with one another-, at least if said partner was not exactly sure about what she wanted from a polygamous relationship -so, arguably, this woudl not apply to a “proper” polygamous relationship either, I guess-… but that’s debatable, and not really the issue here), cheating would no longer be an issue (though, if you were comfortable and open enough to sleep with other people in a polygamous, I doubt that would have been a cause of worry), and certainly, if something was to happen to one of the two, the other would have the support of third parties and you wouldn’t need to worry about him/her facing the situation alone -in that sense, the support-structure seems to be superior-.
That often clashes with the reality of things, and emotions like jealousy, anger, inexpressed fears, competitiveness gone out of control. Of course, those negative aspect could be handled through good communication,which would likely be the key to even a successful monogamous relationship, and therefore a generally good strategy when dealing with unsatisfaction, etc. … which was one of the reason you stated in favor of polygamy: more often than not, unsatisfaction does not arise from an to give your partner what she wants, but from the inability of even acknowledging that such a need exists, either because of inattentiveness or a general desire to act as if “it was all ok”. It was what happened in my case (ironically, at the time we had a polygamous arrangement she was unsatisfied with), through of course that is not enough to make a genetal case in favor or against polygamy.
The only question that remains is: could it have worked, with proper communication, but the added pressures caused by the unfamiliar polygamous context? Or were there deeper problems? I don’t really have the answer to that. I woulnd’t go with the first answer or principle, because, to be fair, at the time “proper communication” was not exacly abundant (no thanks to my own unwillingness to acknowledge the problem, maybe spurned by the irritation that she had been the one to push me into that situation to begin with).
But in general… I don’t know. For the moment, finding “one” right person to be with does seem like a difficult enough problem… falling deeply in love with more than one, and then trying to arrange a situation in which we could “all” be together? I definitively woulnd’t say no on principle, despite the past experience (as a matter of fact, I think that it would be impossible to give a definitive qualitative judgement, and each situation should be judged on a case by case basis), but for the moment I don’t like my odds (for me, in particular, “emotional” intimacy and the prospect to open up to another person do come easy, and the prospect of developing that kind of connection with more than one person does seem unrealistic, at least in my case -before, it was mostly a physical or intellectual connection, rarely at the same time-).
20 years… on one hand, idealistically, I would say “forever”, but looking at the statistics, well… and yet, 20 years… that’s almost twice my age, trying to predict what could happen in such a long time span would be impossible -as pointless as trying to predict where I would have been now more than two decades ago would have been-.
The conclusion, I guess, is that if you are comfortable with it, it would be a wonderful arrangement, but that it wouldn’t necessarily appeal to everyone (Alicorn mentioned people with her “mental makeup”, and indeed I think that part of it is a matter of natural inclination, or at least deeply rooted cultural influence -i.e. bisexuality in Anchient Greece-). At this time, for example, I certainly don’t feel the need to give it another try, through that’s just me: if anyone is thinking about it, focusing on the worse case scenario won’t do them any good, and would probably just end up paralyzing them. People like Alicorn and Elizier certainly seem satisfied by the outcome, so there certainly isn’t any reason to dismiss it based solely on peer pressure -always keeping in mind, through, that it’s no magical formula to save a failing relationship, nor a fool proof method that guarantees success, or improves your chances (as I said, the benefits are balanced by other kinds of complications, so I woulnd’t necessarily call it a “more easy to handle” arrangement -it could be, if you are prepared for it, open minded, not jealous, suitably trusing (when it comes to emotional intimacy, for example, I am not, despite efforts to correct that)-)-.
Zealous, you mean.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zealotic
No, I meant what I wrote.
Thank you, in that case, for giving me the opportunity to learn a new word (if only a synonym).