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.
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.