The answer to this question is bound to be highly subjective, and I don’t think there even is a “right” or “wrong” stance on this issue. Of course, barring extreme cases, such as one partner being oppressive or controlling, or so unhealthily dependant on the other that he/she would, I don’t know, be unable to live without him.
If you decide to say something on the lines of “anything goes as long as he/she is happy”, you are not working under realistic assumptions anymore. Everyone is at least a little selfish, everyone, even in a polygamous relationship, has a “comfort zone” and determines what is okay and not okay for his/her partner to ask. Moreover, everyone has the right to be. Just like Alicorn had the right to decide to set those rules and boundaries with her partner. Pretending that nothing the other person does would “ever” cause disturb and discomfort, and you would be ready to accept it as long as he/she is happy about it is certainly very noble, but not very realistic. In practice, there are things we are okay with, and things we are not comfortable with, and that don’t simply, automatically, become acceptable just because we value our loved one’s happiness (for instance, in this case, by her own words Alicorn wouldn’t be okay with her partner marrying someone else, or, eventually, having kids out of wedlock, because there are certain areas she want to be “just the two of them”, something, for lack of a better word, “special”, shared “just” between the two of them).
In the end, if I love someone I want them to be happy. Check. I don’t wat that happiness to be entirely correlated with my involvement in her life -because, well, in that case we would fall in the previous rather unhealthy scenario-.
That said, I don’t think there would be anything wrong with desiring that a (hopefully not insignificant) part of the reason she is happy is because of my involvement in her life. After all, we are talking about a couple. Without a gesture, an event, a place, some form of special connection… without having something in common, shared only between the two of you, we wouldn’t be talking about a couple. Maybe about a good arrangement for the purpose of sexual satisfaction and possible future reproduction. Otherwise, I could simply take this line of reasoning and bring it to its possible conclusion “I love her, I want her to be happy, I don’t particularly care if any of that happiness is correlated to my involvement in her life, and apparently that doesn’t seem to be the case → we should not be together (you could say, since she doesn’t mind your presence, either, you could still be an item, but we already established that we don’t care at all is any of her happyness is connected to our presence, and we are for all intents and purposes unneccessary, redundant).
Of course, the point here is that in the case of an open relationship, or even a polygamous one, that is not the case, we are not going to the extreme where we say “I don’t care how little time she spends with me, I don’t care if she prefers to be with someone else rather than here with me, because all that matters to me is her happiness”. You might be willing to do the sacrifice, but would a relationship where you never saw her, where no part of her happines was tied to your presence anymore (to the point where it wouldn’t even matter if you were there or not) even be callen a “relationship” anymore?
Notice that, once again, that is not the case we are discussion. Reading Alicorn’s post on polyhacking, she mentioned rules, boundaries, things that made her unconfortable, little priviledges she might want to have… like the fact that the “primarily” relationship (by her own words, 95% of the whole) is that between her and her partner, or the fact that she eventually wants to marry and requires “exclusive” rights when it comes to progeny, if nothing else, or the fact that she reserves the right (psychologically helpful trick) to stop him from going to see another woman, if she does not feel like it (thought she doesn’t feel the need to exercise it).
Just as there is a “More Highly Evolved” poly trope, there is also what I might call “Needs-Based Poly” trope. (“I can’t meet all the needs of one partner, nor can they meet all of mine, so by diversifying there is now more chance of our various needs being met by someone.”)
That is not exactly incorrect, in that it does increase the probabilities, but it’s by no means a guarantee. For instance I’m currently involved with (for various instances of “involved with”) five people and I still don’t have a partner I can play board games with.
The reason I’m calling this a trope is because when taken to excess it often seems to promote an idea of … fungibility of relationships or people. This is possibly what the “replaceable” notion above was getting at.
Perhaps relatedly, I’ll observe that one measure of relationship reassurance for me is how easy it would be for someone to leave me, and how many other options & opportunities they have. This seems counter-intuitve sometimes, but for me, the fewer constraints tying someone to me, the more it suggests (to me) that they are with me solely from desire and choice. The relevance to poly is that if they have other relationships and don’t seem to lack opportunities for more, I can safely discount loneliness and horniness from their motivations for being with me. That’s a plus in my head.
While in hindsight my answer was too verbose, it is also true that the matter was important enough to deserve better than to be dismissed with a two line sentence. Alicorn’s post went more in depth than that, and in my answer, I tried to be general in order to go beyond the simple “this works for me, so it must be the optimal solution”.
In your previous post, you seemed to imply (and I apologize if that was not the case) that it was either “I require exclusiveness out of a selfish desire to be the sole reason of your happiness” or “since I love you, the most important thing is your happiness, and I will ignore any discomfort any of your actions might cause me”. I simply pointed out that that’s not exactly a practical outlook, and that Alicorn’s post itself painted quite a different picture (i.e. she has a “primary” relationship with the man she sees as her possible future husband/father or her children, etc.).
I don’t see how the desire for a monogamous relationship would necessarily be different, in principle, from the desire to be the sole mother of a man’s children, or to have the right to stop him from seeing other people, if she wanted to spend some time with him. It’s not as if Alicorn said “if having a child with this woman makes him happy, and I love him, then I should put my any problems I might have with that aside and allow him to do that”. Just like someone else might be comfortable with remaining lovers without the “official” recognition of a marriage, or might not have a problem with children born out of wedlock, one could very well have issues with polygamy, and that woulnd’t imply that he was an inherently selfish person, or that he loved his partner any less. It would just mean that, at that point in time, he has different expectations. No need to mock him, look down on him (not that you did), or even imply that he simply “didn’t understand”: for example, I woulnd’t probably feel the need to marry, but that doesn’t mean that I would look at someone who wanted that and say in my head “poor guy, he is a victim of social conventions, he doesn’t understand that love is love anyway, and that a signature on a piece of paper won’t have any impact on his relationship”. Similarly, while having multiple partners doesn’t have any impact on what a person feels about a particular lover, some people are simply bound to be uncomfortable with the idea of “sharing”, and I think that’s perfectly okay, as long as they are satisfied with what they have.
In your previous post, you seemed to imply (and I apologize if that was not the case) that it was either “I require exclusiveness out of a selfish desire to be the sole reason of your happiness” or “since I love you, the most important thing is your happiness, and I will ignore any discomfort any of your actions might cause me”.
Your apology is accepted, and I in turn apologize for having miscommunicated.
The two unreasonable extremes you describe correspond to desired partner-happiness correlations of 1 and 0, respectively. Your DPHC is apparently higher than Alicorn’s, the latter having been deliberately lowered by a process described above; I was trying to explicitly quantify those values.
The answer to this question is bound to be highly subjective, and I don’t think there even is a “right” or “wrong” stance on this issue. Of course, barring extreme cases, such as one partner being oppressive or controlling, or so unhealthily dependant on the other that he/she would, I don’t know, be unable to live without him.
If you decide to say something on the lines of “anything goes as long as he/she is happy”, you are not working under realistic assumptions anymore. Everyone is at least a little selfish, everyone, even in a polygamous relationship, has a “comfort zone” and determines what is okay and not okay for his/her partner to ask. Moreover, everyone has the right to be. Just like Alicorn had the right to decide to set those rules and boundaries with her partner. Pretending that nothing the other person does would “ever” cause disturb and discomfort, and you would be ready to accept it as long as he/she is happy about it is certainly very noble, but not very realistic. In practice, there are things we are okay with, and things we are not comfortable with, and that don’t simply, automatically, become acceptable just because we value our loved one’s happiness (for instance, in this case, by her own words Alicorn wouldn’t be okay with her partner marrying someone else, or, eventually, having kids out of wedlock, because there are certain areas she want to be “just the two of them”, something, for lack of a better word, “special”, shared “just” between the two of them).
In the end, if I love someone I want them to be happy. Check. I don’t wat that happiness to be entirely correlated with my involvement in her life -because, well, in that case we would fall in the previous rather unhealthy scenario-. That said, I don’t think there would be anything wrong with desiring that a (hopefully not insignificant) part of the reason she is happy is because of my involvement in her life. After all, we are talking about a couple. Without a gesture, an event, a place, some form of special connection… without having something in common, shared only between the two of you, we wouldn’t be talking about a couple. Maybe about a good arrangement for the purpose of sexual satisfaction and possible future reproduction. Otherwise, I could simply take this line of reasoning and bring it to its possible conclusion “I love her, I want her to be happy, I don’t particularly care if any of that happiness is correlated to my involvement in her life, and apparently that doesn’t seem to be the case → we should not be together (you could say, since she doesn’t mind your presence, either, you could still be an item, but we already established that we don’t care at all is any of her happyness is connected to our presence, and we are for all intents and purposes unneccessary, redundant).
Of course, the point here is that in the case of an open relationship, or even a polygamous one, that is not the case, we are not going to the extreme where we say “I don’t care how little time she spends with me, I don’t care if she prefers to be with someone else rather than here with me, because all that matters to me is her happiness”. You might be willing to do the sacrifice, but would a relationship where you never saw her, where no part of her happines was tied to your presence anymore (to the point where it wouldn’t even matter if you were there or not) even be callen a “relationship” anymore?
Notice that, once again, that is not the case we are discussion. Reading Alicorn’s post on polyhacking, she mentioned rules, boundaries, things that made her unconfortable, little priviledges she might want to have… like the fact that the “primarily” relationship (by her own words, 95% of the whole) is that between her and her partner, or the fact that she eventually wants to marry and requires “exclusive” rights when it comes to progeny, if nothing else, or the fact that she reserves the right (psychologically helpful trick) to stop him from going to see another woman, if she does not feel like it (thought she doesn’t feel the need to exercise it).
Just as there is a “More Highly Evolved” poly trope, there is also what I might call “Needs-Based Poly” trope. (“I can’t meet all the needs of one partner, nor can they meet all of mine, so by diversifying there is now more chance of our various needs being met by someone.”)
That is not exactly incorrect, in that it does increase the probabilities, but it’s by no means a guarantee. For instance I’m currently involved with (for various instances of “involved with”) five people and I still don’t have a partner I can play board games with.
The reason I’m calling this a trope is because when taken to excess it often seems to promote an idea of … fungibility of relationships or people. This is possibly what the “replaceable” notion above was getting at.
Perhaps relatedly, I’ll observe that one measure of relationship reassurance for me is how easy it would be for someone to leave me, and how many other options & opportunities they have. This seems counter-intuitve sometimes, but for me, the fewer constraints tying someone to me, the more it suggests (to me) that they are with me solely from desire and choice. The relevance to poly is that if they have other relationships and don’t seem to lack opportunities for more, I can safely discount loneliness and horniness from their motivations for being with me. That’s a plus in my head.
Which is why I was asking for your personal perspective, not generalities and a five-paragraph circumlocution.
While in hindsight my answer was too verbose, it is also true that the matter was important enough to deserve better than to be dismissed with a two line sentence. Alicorn’s post went more in depth than that, and in my answer, I tried to be general in order to go beyond the simple “this works for me, so it must be the optimal solution”.
In your previous post, you seemed to imply (and I apologize if that was not the case) that it was either “I require exclusiveness out of a selfish desire to be the sole reason of your happiness” or “since I love you, the most important thing is your happiness, and I will ignore any discomfort any of your actions might cause me”. I simply pointed out that that’s not exactly a practical outlook, and that Alicorn’s post itself painted quite a different picture (i.e. she has a “primary” relationship with the man she sees as her possible future husband/father or her children, etc.).
I don’t see how the desire for a monogamous relationship would necessarily be different, in principle, from the desire to be the sole mother of a man’s children, or to have the right to stop him from seeing other people, if she wanted to spend some time with him. It’s not as if Alicorn said “if having a child with this woman makes him happy, and I love him, then I should put my any problems I might have with that aside and allow him to do that”. Just like someone else might be comfortable with remaining lovers without the “official” recognition of a marriage, or might not have a problem with children born out of wedlock, one could very well have issues with polygamy, and that woulnd’t imply that he was an inherently selfish person, or that he loved his partner any less. It would just mean that, at that point in time, he has different expectations. No need to mock him, look down on him (not that you did), or even imply that he simply “didn’t understand”: for example, I woulnd’t probably feel the need to marry, but that doesn’t mean that I would look at someone who wanted that and say in my head “poor guy, he is a victim of social conventions, he doesn’t understand that love is love anyway, and that a signature on a piece of paper won’t have any impact on his relationship”. Similarly, while having multiple partners doesn’t have any impact on what a person feels about a particular lover, some people are simply bound to be uncomfortable with the idea of “sharing”, and I think that’s perfectly okay, as long as they are satisfied with what they have.
Your apology is accepted, and I in turn apologize for having miscommunicated.
The two unreasonable extremes you describe correspond to desired partner-happiness correlations of 1 and 0, respectively. Your DPHC is apparently higher than Alicorn’s, the latter having been deliberately lowered by a process described above; I was trying to explicitly quantify those values.