I find this very interesting. Polyamory is something that I’ve toyed with intellectually for a while, but I have several ugh fields around it. Namely, and this one has been borne out by this very post, that “going polyamorous” seems like the kind of thing monogamous females do in order to acquire polyamorous males. Perhaps if one was a sufficiently status-y female, one would be able to convert the polyamorous male to being monogamous. Of course, this comes with all sorts of issues (namely, making the polyamorous partner unhappy). I just haven’t been sufficiently convinced that being polyamorous would make me happy for any reasons other than using that polyamory to attract a high-status mate that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to attract. I, like you Alicorn, have been too long seduced by the monogamy aesthetic.
Now, I will try to imagine the conditions sufficient in order for me to hack myself into being polyamorous. I imagine that they would be thus:
I would have to decide, for myself, that I wanted to be polyamorous before meeting some polyamorous male that I desired. That is the only way that I can reasonably trust myself to make a decision in my own best interest.
I would have to be convinced that there was no asymmetry. I believe this is my primary repulsion to polyamory. I envision myself in a situation where I want primary access to a partner who does not similarly wish primary access to me. I also envision lots of emotions and stress involved in deciding what “primary” even means.
I need to be convinced, for myself, that becoming polyamorous is not a status-lowering move.
I’m concerned about the exponential increase in exposure to STI’s as well. Of course, I’ve had partners cheat on me in so-called monogamous relationships, so I’m aware that this is not something that a monogamous relationship necessarily shields me from.
As it stands, I haven’t been in a monogamous relationship wherein I desired within that relationship that it was open so that I could date others. I also haven’t yet desired someone who was (to my knowledge) polyamorous. I have already decided that I do not want the latter condition to be the catalyst for changing my worldview, so right now, I consider myself open to the possibility in the future, should I find myself in a situation where I wanted to date multiple partners. So thanks Alicorn, I am now significantly more luminous!
I would have to decide, for myself, that I wanted to be polyamorous before meeting some polyamorous male that I desired. That is the only way that I can reasonably trust myself to make a decision in my own best interest.
That sucks. A compatible partner that is successfully poly is some evidence that poly could also work for you, as well as being something that brings the possibility to your attention. Yet by meeting them you have instead cut off the whole possibility. You’d be better if you never laid eyes on them! :P
This is just the way I like to relate to myself but I’d decide I was allowed to switch to poly if it was a good idea but that I’m not allowed to date poly-inspiration-X. For at least as long as a limerance period could be expected to interfere with judgement and also long enough that I could see if poly worked for me without the interference. That way my infatuation biases don’t get to subvert my decision making either by temptation or by defensive reaction.
I would have to be convinced that there was no asymmetry. I believe this is my primary repulsion to polyamory. I envision myself in a situation where I want primary access to a partner who does not similarly wish primary access to me. I also envision lots of emotions and stress involved in deciding what “primary” even means.
That’s a massive deal to me too. I am far more careful with shielding myself from asymmetry when playing poly. My primary partner also has to be able to accept that us having other relationships means that she will get less of my attention. Bizarrely enough not everyone gets this. Seriously… being poly doesn’t add extra hours to the day!
For myself I am also reluctant to get into situations where I’m seeing multiple people within the same social circle. Or, more to the point, where my partners are seeing other people within my social circle. Simply because it changes the nature of my interactions with my friends. Sex begets competition. It makes people more like humans (status hungry monkeys) and less like ‘people’. It’s hard enough balancing egos and rapport with potential rivals when you aren’t fucking the same girl (or guy). That just isn’t the kind of game I like to be playing with my own friends. I prefer Settlers of Catan.
Fortunately most of my core circle is made up of (awesome, open minded but sincere) Christians so there is no chance that we’ll end up with love pentagons. Just lots of couples and me doing WTF I want. :)
Seriously… being poly doesn’t add extra hours to the day!
You know, I had assumed that Time-Turners were invented by a Hogwarts Headmaster who despaired of getting the school schedules straight and one day before deadline stayed up until 6AM inventing the Time-Turner, and that he (gender coinflip-generated) succeeded because he was the first person to try for time travel just to get extra time and not to change the past, and that the invention within Hogwarts is why they get a traditional free pass on using them. But some polyamorous past wizard would be just as reasonable an inventor.
I like love pentagons and poly chains within the community. It creates a familial feeling. Of course nothing’s actually gone wrong in my immediate poly family yet. You can easily see how this could go wrong.
I like love pentagons and poly chains within the community. It creates a familial feeling. Of course nothing’s actually gone wrong in my immediate poly family yet. You can easily see how this could go wrong.
And from my side I can see how it could go right. I visited Berkeley recently (bootcamp) and it was adorable.
I like love pentagons and poly chains within the community. It creates a familial feeling.
There aren’t many places where people would be comfortable making that comparison! But I suppose if it wasn’t for the inbreeding risk, Westermarck effect and massive potential for abuse incest would be the perfect family bonding activity. You’re living with each other already!
I lived in a co-op for several years & found myself in the midst of a poly community (quite separately) at the same time. I would almost be surprised if people didn’t treat their closest friends & lovers like their family in such interconnected communities. To say so comes naturally when you feel that way, which we did/do. It’s just the family you chose, not the family you were born into.
It’s just the family you chose, not the family you were born into.
More to the point of the grandparent, they are the family members that you have sex with. (I usually prefer not be thought of as a brother by my romantic interests, nor do I find myself with the urge to grope my sisters.)
Mono vanilla uptight people also have family members they have sex with. They’re called “spouses”. When someone mentions their spouse as part of their family, listeners rarely recoil in accusations of incest.
The relevant characteristic of marriage here is the long-term, committed relationship with frequent contact (not necessarily cohabitation). Close-knit poly communities have several of these per person.
If people who are indirectly related by such relationships (e.g. siblings-in-law) get along well and see enough of each other, they usually have familial feelings toward each other (unless the families I know are weird). The relationship being sexual on both sides rather than sexual on one side and blood on the other has no reason to change this.
Mono vanilla uptight people also have family members they have sex with. They’re called “spouses”. When someone mentions their spouse as part of their family, listeners rarely recoil in accusations of incest.
That is literally true, and saying that you have sex with your family members doesn’t technically mean you admit to incest. That’s why what I said was “There aren’t many places where people would be comfortable making that comparison!”
This is just the way I like to relate to myself but I’d decide I was allowed to switch to poly if it was a good idea but that I’m not allowed to date poly-inspiration-X. For at least as long as a limerance period could be expected to interfere with judgement and also long enough that I could see if poly worked for me without the interference. That way my infatuation biases don’t get to subvert my decision making either by temptation or by defensive reaction.
That’s completely reasonable, I’ll agree with that.
Seconded. Seems like Alicorn’s reasons for going poly are not good—being head over heels for MBlume and him not being willing to go monogamous in return… meh.
Alicorn, other poly folks, a question:
I don’t get poly (aside from the simple “some folks are just different from me” unhelpfulness). Don’t poly folks want to feel special to their partners? Because seeing my partner being emotionally or physically intimate with someone else (or knowing they were, even without seeing it) = immediate non-specialness. How could you be special if you’re so easily replaceable by others in the harem? Enlightenment me, please, for I am confused.
That said, if you’re really happy, I’m happy for you, and I apologize for rocking the boat, if I have.
But, based on Alicorn’s own experience, even she would feel ”...skeptical that there was enough interest for both the relationship and the subsidy to persist.”, in the case of more than 3 “primary” partners. I guess that despite the cliche “there is enough love for everyone”, in practice it wouldn’t be realistic to expect a single person to share his attention/interest equally among n people, if n became too high.
in practice it wouldn’t be realistic to expect a single person to share his attention/interest equally among n people, if n became too high.
If n is >10, then even with someone devoting all their time to relationships, they are still going to be giving a small amount. to each
For n=1; the relationship will generally be saturated before all the time is used up, but for higher values of n it becomes more and more likely that all the time will be used up, before the relationship is saturated.
Personally I couldn’t handle more than 3 primary relationships, and I wouldn’t even be able to handle 3 unless the partners also had other partners; to be there for them when I am otherwise engaged.
This is not directly on point, but it might be interesting to see if there are quantitative measures for how rich the various biographies of people with multiple personality disorder are.
Research directly into relationships could be complicated by social factors, the difficulties of studying dynamics, political issues, etc. In contrast, the related subject of how much time one has to spend being someone to be a relatively complete person should be free from that.
If it turns out that a person with MPD can carry, say, three complete personalities at most without them being caricatures or undeveloped characters, that would somewhat indicate a lower limit of three on how many full relationships with others one could have. If each human can be three really distinct people, and each person can have at least one relationship at a time, it seems like an emotionally adept person would be able to handle three relationships without having to fragment their mind.
Or perhaps there are only enough hours in a day to form one normal personality, or perhaps there are enough for ten, I have no idea.
It is an interesting though… of course, there would be other, practical considerations… i.e., if we are assuming three “primary” relationships of the same “importance” (I couldn’t find a better word… maybe “rank”, “status”) we would be dealing with four persons living under the same roof. Add offspring into the mix, and we would have eight, twelve,etc. people lving together...
Even without considering the fact that it would be difficult to give each of the three lovers an equal and significant amount of attention (a day has only 24 hours, it’s won’t stretch to accomodate our needs), adding progeny into the mix… the only option I could see would be limiting the number of children to one per lover (no twins, thanks), and maybe adding a few years between each birth (otherwise the female partner would be in and out of the hospital). Of course, some of the male partners might decide they won’t have kids (I wouldn’t know why, since they would need to deal with the offspring of the other couples anyway), or, if we were talking about bisexual participants, there might be two female and two male partners, so the numbers might change a bit…
Raising the offspring won’t be an easy task, either. I mean, with four adult (autority) figures living under the same roof, some of whom might not be interested/capable/willing to deal with children (what if a part of the quartet wanted to reproduce and the rest did not?), who the child will likely come to see as “parental”, despite what said adults might wish… What if there is disagreement regarding the way the child is raised? It’s true that the “natural” parents would be only two, but the rest would likely have almost as much of a hand in their education, and seeing them on a daily basis, living together as a single family unit, they would feel (and be) entitled to set some ground rules anyway.
In the end, I think there is a point beyond which things would not be manageable anymore. In that respect, Alicorn’s decision seems a sensible one, not only because of the reassuring psychological benefit of “status” she mentioned, but also because the dynamics of such a large family unit living in an enclosed space (need I mention “rebellious teenager”?) would likely be too complex for anyone to manage successfully. I mean, for that to work, one should hope that there would never be a fight/attrition, and even in that case, the sheer number of things to do would be discouraging. Of course, we are talking about the rather “extreme” case of four people having an equal role in the relationship, not of a main couple with different paramours.
Could you give some examples of how they do feel sufficiently differentiated? It is not clear to me how it works in practice, and while I could imagine scenarios, I don’t trust my own imaginative accuracy when it comes to imagining much about poly relationships.
Could you give some examples of how they do feel sufficiently differentiated?
To be honest I don’t think I’m the right person to ask. I currently don’t want that level of commitment or ‘specialness’ and at those times when I have I was monogomous. Others will be able to answer with what it feels like from the inside.
#Why would my being special to someone imply that they couldn’t have sex and/or long-term relationships with people they found attractive?#
To quote Alicorn’s original 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.]#
We are talking about a real need, a real issue here. While I consider the answer essentially correct, I also feel that dismissing the implied concern out of hand, as if it was not there to be considered, would be a mistake (after all, many of those considering polygamy are bound to feel that same way). Note that, as remarked, even here we have different levels, different shades, there is a difference between being someone’s top romantic priorities and just a generic “one of the many”.
I guess that what the original poster meant was “unique”, “exclusive”, rather than “special”. Alicorn’s post remaked that being the “top” romantic priority is 95% of the deal. The fact that the relationship is not “unique”, but that you are just one of two, six, n romantic interests might make someone feel as if they were easily repleaceable, interchangeable like a car’s wheel, whereas, in fact, the feelings of those involved are no less real or intense.
Simply because there are others just like you does not mean that you don’t matter to your partner. In other words, it does not make you “not special”, only “not unique”, which, to some people, might appear like the same thing, but it is not.
The problem lies in that remaining 5% that distinguish “top” from “exclusive” romantic interest. To some people, that uniqueness -the fact that the bond is unique, involved only you and your partner, and no one else- is something special and valuable in an of itself. The fact of the matter is that the value one places on exclusivity is highly subjective, everyone has to draw their own conclusions.
An unstated question that emerges in these two points is “can two people be fully satisfied with only each other?” -the original poster seemed to imply (I apologize if that was not the case) that the very need to have a relationship with other people besides the current partner means that said partner is not the “right” person, otherwise you wouldn’t feel unsatisfied (as I heard in the past, essentially using artificial measures to keep up a relationship that should have ended ages ago)-.
While I don’t completely agree with that, I must say that I would likely not consider polygamy simply because of some feeling of boredom I might end up feeling in the future. In general, in that respect, I must say that I don’t see poly as the panacea to save a not completely satisfactory relationship. In my opinion, it would be entirely possible for two people to be satisfied with each other without resorting to outside partners. Communication is the real issue, here -without that, even with ten different partners one would never be able to have a functioning relationship-. So, I don’t necessarily see polygamy as the answer to lack of interest in an existing relationship, nor as some sort of magical solution that would ensure the surivival of a future one.
To put it simply, you could very well feel lonely in a crowd.
If nothing else, the increased number of people involved would make it harder to cope with possible attritions/jealousies that might arise in the future. It’s all to easy to imagine the potential problems: your partner having a fight with her partner, and being irritable when she is with you, her partner becoming jealous with her and your relationship,… the mere fact that there are more people, and more variables to consider, make the list of “things that could go wrong” that much longer, negating pretty much any perceived advantage one might think to gain from such an arrangement, simply because of the increasingly complex dynamics.
Again, to summarize, put enough people together, and you will most likely end up saying something that one of them disagrees with. It’s all too easy hurting someone without meaning to, even if you know him very well, and that problem is magnified if you increase the number of people involved (at least in my experience).
In the end, the only point I disagree with is the fact that polygamy might necessarily be the best way to have a satisfactory, lasting relationship. In my experience, that had not been the case, and in general, I think that, as a possible arrangement, it’s not without its own share of problems, albeit different ones. It’s not necessarily superior to a monogamous relationship, just… different. I guess that what I am trying to say is, don’t expect it to be a magical solution to all of your problems, without proper communication, it will fail, just like anything else.
I think I could have lived with being a member of a triad without explicit rankings; other arrangements would have been progressively less appealing and at some point I would have been necessarily skeptical that there was enough interest for both the relationship and the subsidy to persist.
So I would guess, it all depends on the situation. Are we talking about a “primary” relationship, etc. I guess that at a certain point you could, presumably, start to quetion your role and importance in the relationship.
The thought of my partner sharing a particular level of connection (poorly specified, but I know it when I see it / imagine it) with another person triggers typical primate challenge behaviors in me. E.g., violence toward the other male. Along with feelings of having been hurt. Since I’m special to my partner, the implication is that she wouldn’t want to make me feel hurt and highly violent.
You’ve never felt romantic jealousy? Or did you hack it away like Alicorn?
For males who do not share this trait, I wonder on the mechanism, and whether it might have some relation to measures of testosterone. Probably too simplistic, but a study I’d like to see nonetheless.
I’ve found that my jealousy, though much lower than seems normal, still varies considerably. And it correlates, as far as I can tell, with general self-confidence. If I’m feeling down about myself I feel much more possessive and attached to significant others. When I’m feeling good about myself I’ve been fine with open relationships. Of course, that doesn’t mean that variable explains all jealousy variation in the population. As for testosterone: anecdotally I haven’t noticed anything when my testosterone level increased following a change in diet and exercise.
And it correlates, as far as I can tell, with general self-confidence. If I’m feeling down about myself I feel much more possessive and attached to significant others. When I’m feeling good about myself I’ve been fine with open relationships.
This has been my experience too—jealousy almost always comes from a place of insecurity. For a while my standard jealousy first-aid was just to make an extra trip to the gym/practice some other skill I could feel good about improving at.
Don’t poly folks want to feel special to their partners?
Yes. Which is part of why I allow competition. Personally, I find it easier to feel special when I know that my partner has other options, but still chooses to spend most/all of her time with me. I want my partner to be spending time with the person (or people) she is best matched with, even if it’s not me. But if it is me, then I feel great, especially when I see my partner dropping one of her other options in favor of spending more time with me, or telling me that she enjoys spending time with me more.
Yes. Which is part of why I allow competition. Personally, I find it easier to feel special when I know that my partner has other options, but still chooses to spend most/all of her time with me.
But the reality is that they always have other options.
To be perfecly fair, from my relatively brief poly experience, there is also the other half of the coin: the disappointment of not being the one said partner choses, the potential jealousy (irrational, but, undenyably not exactly an emotion that can be controlled at will), and, as Alicorn’s post highlighted, the fear of losing said partner -breakups do happen, and, in relation to another post, the situation between a mother and her sons is quite different because that bond does not fit this particular requirement-.
That is a new, interesting perspective to me. Thank you for joining in. (Thanks to all the poly folks who have been replying to me. Very cool, very helpful.)
As has been suggested by others: different people need different things to “feel special” in the sense you mean it here.
Some people have their sense of relationship-specialness diminished when their partner goes out to see a movie without them, or when their partner expresses the sense that someone else is attractive, or when their partner goes to the office instead of staying home with them, or when their partner chooses to spend holidays with his or her birth family, or when their partner socializes with someone other than them, or when their partner kisses someone other than them, or when their partner has sex with someone other than them, or when their partner establishes a long-term sexual or romantic relationship with someone other than them, or etc. or etc. or etc.
It’s not particularly helpful to talk about what ought to diminish my sense of relationship-specialness. If I know what does in fact diminish it, and I can find a way of operating in the world that meets my needs given that (either by changing my preferences to suit my current environment, or changing my environment to suit my current preferences, or a combination), then I will feel more special than if I don’t.
The idea that there’s some particular way of expressing relationship-specialness that is privileged, and people for whom that mode of expression is necessary and sufficient are somehow more correct than people for whom it is not, is often a consequence of mistaking one’s own personal state (or one’s culture’s preferred state) for an ineluctable human condition.
I agree with most of what you say here. I did not intend to imply you ought to feel or behave a certain way, so apologies if it seemed that way. I just don’t/didn’t understand, and would like to. Thanks for chiming in. (Didn’t realize how many poly folks were on the message board.)
Oh, don’t worry, I wasn’t feeling personally targeted. And just to avoid confusion: I’m not actually poly myself; I’ve been in a monogamous relationship for ~20 years and have no particular desire to alter that condition. But I live in a social circle where it is increasingly the default relationship option.
Because seeing my partner being emotionally or physically intimate with someone else (or knowing they were, even without seeing it) = immediate non-specialness.
I don’t know why you would say this, and I strongly disagree.
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?
I apologize for rocking the boat, if I have.
Interesting benefit of polyamory: there’s a lot less that can rock the boat (or sink it)! We enjoy a stability we did not have before.
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?
I didn’t understand this line of argument before I was poly, and I don’t understand it now. Yes. Of course if you have multiple children they’re individually less special to you! You have less time and energy for each, less brain-space to store facts about each, and you aren’t even culturally allowed to have a favorite! There’s a sense in which you “love them all equally”, sure, but I’d be willing to bet that something like 75% of parents would be unable to claim that under Veritaserum.
As for why it should be different for lovers, the psychology about lovers and children is very different. It’s a conceit of our current sensibilities that we even use the same word to refer to how we feel about those, our siblings, our pets, and ice cream. There is no reason in principle why we couldn’t have been hardwired for extreme strict romantic monogamy and still love lots of children.
Yes. Of course if you have multiple children they’re individually less special to you!
Hmm… perhaps we don’t mean the same thing when we use the word “special”. If I pretend that you used a word unfamiliar to me instead and had to work only on context, where you continue with:
You have less time and energy for each, less brain-space to store facts about each
...then I’d have to agree with you. Certainly, I have less time and energy to devote to each child.
and you aren’t even culturally allowed to have a favorite!
For the record, I never claimed to love them all equally, or to not have a favorite. (They are all my favorites, in different realms, but even so… it would be absurd to claim that it just happens to all add up to be equal.)
But I don’t see what point you are making here. My point is that my love for the first child was not diminished by the arrival of the second. For some other definition of special (importance in my life), I would say that the first is just as special to me.
The reason this is brought up (perhaps mostly by poly people with more than one child) is that one’s capacity for love, for this “specialness” is not fixed! Another child comes along, and your capacity grows. Another long-term, committed partner, and your capacity grows.
That is the point of the argument: capacity is not fixed in size.
As for why it should be different for lovers, the psychology about lovers and children is very different.
Certainly, but the point about specialness-capacity-increase is fairly general. I would apply it to lovers, to children, to favorite movies, to desserts, to symphonies… the more things we love (or are special or meaningful to us), the more our capacity increases. These things, these experiences make us grow. (Well, maybe not desserts; that’s a different kind of growth.)
And we accept that this is how we work in terms of children, movies, food, music… why make an exception for lovers?
There is no reason in principle why we couldn’t have been hardwired for extreme strict romantic monogamy and still love lots of children.
Ok. I suppose not. I suppose we could have been hardwired for extreme preference for only one flavor of ice-cream… Do you just really not like the comparisons between different categories of things we like/love/enjoy? Of course our feelings for these different categories are all very, very different, but the generalization seems valid enough to me.
And especially: if they feel similar enough to me for the generalization to hold, then I’m really not going to be convinced that I must love only one by the argument “romantic love is different because it’s different”. (Which isn’t what you were saying, but it’s the message this line of argument addresses.)
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 don’t know why you would say this, and I strongly disagree.
Have you ever felt jealousy? Romantic or otherwise? I don’t feel it over my partner finding someone else attractive—that’s too distant and automatic to be a threat—but a pursued relationship with someone else is too much of a threat to my relationship. I also don’t see this as an unfounded insecurity that I should work on reducing; if you’re more secure in your primary relationship than I would be in a poly scenario, I feel like you may not be updating sufficiently given available information about human relationships.
Why should it be so different for lovers?
Having multiple children doesn’t threaten the loss of your previous children. That’s why.
Interesting benefit of polyamory: [...]
I accept that this may be true for you. It does not appear to be true of most of the poly folks I’ve come across. I have seen a lot of drama and boat-rocking and boat-sinking. Hell, it just happened again, publicly, in Tortuga.
It is possible that I have not come across a proper representative sample of poly relationships and have an inaccurate view. But I remain skeptical of your claim to this benefit for poly.
Thank you for your perspective on the matter. I feel a bit like an anthropologist dropped into a foreign land.
Have you ever felt jealousy? Romantic or otherwise?
Yes, both. But I don’t see jealousy as this big emotional dead-end. “If you see jealousy, run the other way! Only evil will you find here!” Jealousy is a response. Like a rash or something. It’s an indication that something needs to be dealt with. It could be the emotional equivalent of skin cancer… but it’s more likely that it’s the equivalent of a need to use a different brand of soap. Upon further inspection, it’s often not that big of a deal.
Having multiple children doesn’t threaten the loss of your previous children. That’s why.
See, I think we are just looking at this from very different perspectives. Why would your partner need to leave you for another if they could just have you both?? It seems to me that monogamy and its “all or nothing” treatment of partners is what causes people to leave. Monogamy is not immune to partners leaving, to which divorce statistics attest. No, I would say that monogamy encourages leaving! Sometimes even demands it.
if you’re more secure in your primary relationship than I would be in a poly scenario, I feel like you may not be updating sufficiently given available information about human relationships.
I’m guessing we are updating on very different data. Monogamy is a disaster, contributing to tremendous misery and pain (not to mention waste of resources). And the polyamory I’ve seen has been largely positive. Not universally, but largely. On more than one occasion, I’ve even seen it save what monogamy threatened to destroy, with its insistence upon jealous, fear, and punishment.
I have no idea what you are talking about with Tortuga, so cannot reply to that (sorry).
But yes, it seems we have very different experiences with polyamory, and in both cases mostly anecdotal evidence. (Perhaps I have just been lucky!) But before you write off polyamory altogether, I would suggest that you take a harder look at monogamy and what it has left in its path.
Why would your partner need to leave you for another if they could just have you both??
Because they might like the other more, which would hurt me enough that I would not want to stay.
But before you write off polyamory altogether [...]
Oh, it was written off long ago; my curiosity is academic, not for assessment with respect to personal change. I am in a successful, long-term monogamous relationship, and neither of us want that to change.
I’m not sure what you mean by what monogamy “has left in its path.” If you mean divorce rates, I can only repeat that my anecdotal experience with polyamorous couples has seen them split up at least as frequently.
Because they might like the other more, which would hurt me enough that I would not want to stay.
And a child might (and often will) say the same about a new little brother or sister.
This doesn’t illustrate your proclaimed difference between the two situations. You’re not losing your partner, you’re leaving them. Just as a child doesn’t lose their parents love, but they may choose to ignore that love because they are jealous of a younger sibling.
I don’t see the child-parent relationship as usefully analogous to the romantic love relationship.
You’re not losing your partner, you’re leaving them.
If one of your partners murders your mother, but wants to stay with you, is there really a difference if you call what follows “losing them” or “leaving them”? You lost/left your partner because they committed a dealbreaker. I just have different dealbreakers than you do.
I see your murder analogy as less useful than the child-parent analogy, FWIW.
Anyway, I asked, and you answered:
Why would your partner need to leave you for another if they could just have you both??
Because they might like the other more, which would hurt me enough that I would not want to stay.
Whoa, whoa, whoa… that is not an answer to the question I asked! You see, already, by examining the hypothetical situation, we are getting somewhere. :-)
So are your fears truly about being left, or about feeling a level of jealousy and hurt that you don’t think you can live with?
(You don’t have to answer me; the point is that, through asking these kinds of questions and examining your feelings, you can find the source of these feelings. And sometimes it’s a surprisingly small thing that you really need!)
You lost/left your partner because they committed a dealbreaker. I just have different dealbreakers than you do.
You choose (and are allowed to change) your deal-breakers.
And for the record, in case it sounds like I’m trying to convince you to try polyamory again, I’m really not. Not at all. While I don’t think the reasons you gave are very good ones for avoiding polyamory, the fact that you are in a successful mono relationship that you are both happy with is all the reason you need, of course. :-)
So are your fears truly about being left, or about feeling a level of jealousy and hurt that you don’t think you can live with?
Both, of course. The jealousy and hurt is, in part, a rejection to a fear of being left or rejected. And in part it’s just base possessiveness, probably. I’m good with that.
you can find the source of these feelings
I’m answering questions about these feelings because I’m in a discussion about them with people who presumable don’t feel them (or not in the same way). I’m not confused or in the dark about the source of my feelings on the matter. This is not the first time I’ve thought about my feelings, just as I’m sure when you explain why you’re okay with poly, it’s not your first time working through these thoughts either.
You choose (and are allowed to change) your deal-breakers.
Sure. But why would I, when I have zero desire to?
Seconded. Seems like Alicorn’s reasons for going poly are not good—being head over heels for MBlume and him not being willing to go monogamous in return… meh.
I wouldn’t describe it as being “head over heels”, at the time the decision was made. We’d dated before and I was very happy during that time, and I wanted it back. The universe is allowed to be set up so I have to make some changes to get things. It turned out to be set up that way. I wanted the gotten thing more than I wanted what I had to give up, and I had the power to make the trade.
Alicorn, other poly folks, a question: I don’t get poly (aside from the simple “some folks are just different from me” unhelpfulness). Don’t poly folks want to feel special to their partners? Because seeing my partner being emotionally or physically intimate with someone else (or knowing they were, even without seeing it) = immediate non-specialness. How could you be special if you’re so easily replaceable by others in the harem? Enlightenment me, please, for I am confused.
I will be better able to answer the question if you unpack the words “special” and “replaceable”.
I will be better able to answer the question if you unpack the words “special” and “replaceable”.
I’ll try. Not sure I’ll succeed, though, as it screams obviousness to my brain, so it’s hard to understand the outside perspective wherein it is not clear.
A partner stating he or she would rather not be with me than be with just me indicates that I am not particularly significant. Not special to him or her. Replaceable, pretty easily, considering how doable it is to not live like a swinger (the other side of poly, emotional & intellectual connection = good friends, no line-crossing necessary).
I enjoy feeling like I am more important to my partner than anyone/anything else. I am under the impression that this is normal in humans, and that it feeds the default human tendency toward monogamy. Do you not enjoy this / prefer this to being one-of-many?
From a different angle: If MBlume (or whoever your primary is at a given time) would be with you either way, monogamous or poly, which would you choose, given all the non-drama/non-jealousy & other apparent ‘awesomeness’ of your poly adjustment? Would you prefer to stay this way, or would you prefer an MBlume who was happy to give up all other men/women to be with just you forever?
I just looked over my shoulder and asked. Turns out your question is a practical one—MBlume says he would go monogamous for me if I wanted. If he’d said this before I hacked poly, I wouldn’t have hacked poly. (He wouldn’t have said it then—he needed the information of how our relationship has gone for the past month.) Given that I’m now poly, and that we both have other partners/prospects who we’d be somewhat distressed to give up, I’m not planning to reverse the hack. It’s a matter of hassle and loss aversion mostly. But I do find it meaningful that he would monogamize himself if I were not sufficiently superpowered to have rendered it unnecessary.
But I do find it meaningful that he would monogamize himself if I were not sufficiently superpowered to have rendered it unnecessary.
Alternatively, he is able to offer this primarily because he knows it is unnecessary / your polyhack is an inseparable part of your value as a partner.
If he’d said this before I hacked poly, I wouldn’t have hacked poly… Given that I’m now poly, and that we both have other partners/prospects who we’d be somewhat distressed to give up, I’m not planning to reverse the hack.
Sounds like a pretty definitive answer to the “You just went poly for the guy!” objection.
People move city to be with people; is this necessarily any different? Especially when you know lots of people living in that city going “move here, we love it here!”
Sounds like a pretty definitive answer to the “You just went poly for the guy!” objection.
It does. Even though it doesn’t refute the “You just went poly for the guy!” assertion at all. It could well fit with “I just went with poly for the guy and it is awesome! You should try it!”
I do find it meaningful that he would monogamize himself if I were not sufficiently superpowered to have rendered it unnecessary.
Agreed. Yay. I am happier for you both now. (Is it strange that I have concerns about people I don’t know very well, because I consider them part of my extended tribe somehow? I need to ask more people if they feel this way.)
I certainly find the same on other forums and communities. I am not sufficiently part of the lesswrong community to feel a tribe-connection, but I would feel such concern for a person who went to my local RPG club (even if I’d never met them) or who attended my favourite LARP (as long as I had talked to them at least once or twice)
and that it feeds the default human tendency toward monogamy.
From what I understand the default human tendency is is medium term monogamy (with cheating) combined with extreme promiscuity, particularly by the highest status males. Some polygamy thrown in too.
I think that “humans tend towards monogamy” and “humans don’t tend towards monogamy” are both misleading, as they lump together two things which don’t necessarily go together: being monogamous, and requiring monogamy of others. Instead, I’m inclined towards thinking that there’s a tendency to require sexual/romantic monogamy from one’s partner while still wanting to have sexual/romantic relationships with others.
Though some people seem to be strongly monogamous (in both senses of the word) by nature, others seem to be strongly non-monogamous (in both senses of the word), and some fall in between. So if there is a strong genetic component, there’s also the possibility that some kind of frequency-dependent selection might be going on instead of just a universal tendency towards one thing.
Yes, humans are bad at plenty of things they want (or seem to / claim to want). Bad at rational action, yet members at this site strive to do better. Bad at ethical & consequentialist reasoning, yet many of us strive to do better.
So being bad at monogomy is not a particular good argument for abandoning it. But maybe you didn’t mean to imply that—I speak to it because I’ve heard that claim from a few poly folks before. If so, disregard.
If you just meant to clarify that, yes, humans are not perfect monogomists, then okay, we’re agreed on that.
If you just meant to clarify that, yes, humans are not perfect monogomists, then okay, we’re agreed on that.
Um, no. And not anything about arguments for abandoning things either. It was a straightforward description of the approximate default human instincts with neither practical or normative argument implied.
Replaceable, pretty easily, considering how doable it is to not live like a swinger (the other side of poly, emotional & intellectual connection = good friends, no line-crossing necessary).
To clarify: would you say that romantic love only differs from friendship in that you have sex with the one you love?
Because to me, there is a massive difference between the two. Friends with benefits doesn’t become romantic love instantly, and romantic love without sex is entirely possible.
It’s possible our brains are different, or possible you mean something else; or indeed, it’s possible that you’re wrong about yourself.
To narrow it down, I’ll give you a hypothetical: Imagine your hypothetical partner agreed to give up the sexual side of poly, and only have sex with you (perhaps you’re the best sexual partner they’ve ever had, and have just the right sex drive for them, so they’re perfectly happy with that situation). However, they keep going out on dates with other partners, spending romantic nights in with other partners, etc. Would you feel comfortable with that situation?
However, they keep going out on dates with other partners
Could you clarify how “going out on dates” is different from hanging out with friends? Dinner, hang-gliding, museums, movies. “Date” implies you’re considering a person as a potential physically-intimate partner. If that is ruled out (as you stipulated it is), you’re not going on dates, you’re hanging out with friends.
I consider some allowance for those things as part of family/friendship. Soo… kiss = cheek, the way you’d kiss a friend or cousin, no open mouth clearly sexual “makeout” kissing. Hugging is fine. Cuddling/snuggling are kind of borderline. Depends on context. But typically people don’t sit around snuggling friends they aren’t sleeping with or trying to sleep with.
But typically people don’t sit around snuggling friends they aren’t sleeping with or trying to sleep with.
I do this all the time. When I hang out with the correct subset of my platonic friends we casually flop onto each other and braid each other’s hair and exchange backrubs. I have photographic evidence. One doesn’t have to be weird about those things.
But do you think it is common/typical/majority behavior?
I concur with your unintended implication that female-female groups do this (“braid each other’s hair, exchange backrubs”) more often than male-female and male-male pairs do.
I platonically snuggle with some of my male friends too. And I have photographic evidence of some guys I know who are not dating each other snuggling, too.
I guess I don’t know how typical it is. I don’t know many normal people and suspect they’re dull.
I concur with your unintended implication that female-female groups do this (“braid each other’s hair, exchange backrubs”) more often than male-female and male-male pairs do.
But typically people don’t sit around snuggling friends they aren’t sleeping with or trying to sleep with.
Perhaps not. But I am having to draw on an atypical hypothetical to try and find our exact point of disagreement. I hope you don’t mind?
Okay, so, refined hypothetical: The person you are dating is also, in their personal opinion, ‘dating’ an asexual man. This man has no interest in making out with them, let alone sex, but does enjoy romance, and cuddling up with them in order to share the feeling of emotional closeness.
Your partner considers this relationship equally important to the relationship between the two of you, and makes sure to schedule sufficient time to spend with each of you. They celebrate their anniversary with this other partner, and your anniversary with you, as well as wishing to spend time with this partner on valentines day.
They recently met this other partner’s family, going to his brothers wedding with him; as his ‘date’.
I am having to draw on an atypical hypothetical to try and find our exact point of disagreement. I hope you don’t mind?
Not at all.
Your partner considers this relationship equally important to the relationship between the two of you [...] Does this bother you?
Yes. No one should be as important to my partner as I am.
If you modify your scenario to involve an asexual male who likes to cuddle (or a gay male or a straight female, easier for me to imagine than a purely asexual male, although I know those folks do exist) and that that person is important to my partner but not as important as I am, then I would not have a problem with their cuddling at all, or being emotionally close.
That is very interesting, thank you for taking my hypotheticals seriously, and answering honestly.
What you are asking your partner to give up is not the “swinging lifestyle” as you thought: you’re also asking your partner to give up having anyone they consider as important as they consider you.
I hope you can now understand why people make such a big distinction between swinging (where they have other sexual partners, who aren’t as important as their romantic partner) and polyamory (where they have multiple romantic partners, who may not be sexual, but can be equally important to each other)
I hope you can now understand why people make such a big distinction [...]
I knew about the distinction before, I just didn’t realize how much polyamorous people disliked being associated with swingers, and phrased poorly as a result.
There still seems to be more overlap (more poly folks who permit one-night stands in swinger-ish manner than monogamous folks who permit it). Do you find this not to be the case? Most poly partnerships keep their sexuality limited to the 3 or 4 or 6 of them, and would look down on a partner having sex with people they didn’t intend to add to the long-term group?
polyamory (where they have multiple romantic partners, who may not be sexual
How common is it in your experience for the polyamorous to have non-sexual romantic partners?
There still seems to be more overlap (more poly folks who permit one-night stands in swinger-ish manner than monogamous folks who permit it). Do you find this not to be the case?
Hmmm, I’m not entirely sure. In my social circle far more monoamorous people #PRACTICE# one night stands (in a swingerish manner) than polyamorous people. The polyamorous people may #allow# it; but when you can date whoever you want, and aren’t forced to limit it to a one-night stand, why would you limit it?
My social circle is, however, distinctly atypical, and so cannot really be construed as evidence of much.
Most poly partnerships keep their sexuality limited to the 3 or 4 or 6 of them, and would look down on a partner having sex with people they didn’t intend to add to the long-term group?
Groups suggest a closed loop, which is uncommon. However many poly people I know are uninterested in having sex with anyone who they don’t feel a romantic bond with, simply because they have far more satisfying alternatives available.
How common is it in your experience for the polyamorous to have non-sexual romantic partners?
Maybe 10%, or so. Not massively common, but certainly not unheard of. Far more would be open to non-sexual romance, just haven’t had one.
knew about the distinction before, I just didn’t realize how much polyamorous people disliked being associated with swingers, and phrased poorly as a result.
The association with swingers is a problem due to the fact it leads to people, such as yourself, failing to recognise the differences, and making factually incorrect statements.
I’ll answer your questions shortly in a seperate post; but I have a point I feel I may have failed to make, so I’ll make it here:
The post I first replied to contained this line that I quoted:
Replaceable, pretty easily, considering how doable it is to not live like a swinger (the other side of poly, emotional & intellectual connection = good friends, no line-crossing necessary).
You have since revealed that there is a level of emotional and intellectual connection that you consider line crossing. This is an important change in your position, so I think it is important that you put those two beliefs together, and realise that one of them must be wrong.
Work out which one is wrong, and remove it; that is the purpose of this whole site :-)
It’s not a change; there was no explicit comparison between connection to others and connection to me in that statement, so I didn’t address it there.
So, to clarify: My partner can have any level of emotional/intellectual connection with friends and family, as long as it remains non-sexual and I remain most important / without equal.
In the previous post your only restriction was that they not have sex with others. You have now stated that you have two restrictions*: that is a contradiction of your previous position.
*and the restriction requiring that they give up anyone that is of equal importance to you is a massive one, far larger, to me and many polyamorous people, than the sexual restriction.
the restriction requiring that they give up anyone that is of equal important to you is a massive one
That my partner would have anyone equally important to me in the first place is highly unlikely, because we are not poly. How would such a high importance relationship form against a monoamorous backdrop? So it’s really not a big deal in practice.
But you were talking about the hypothetical situation in which you were being courted by a polyamorous person, saying that you’d be upset about their unwillingness to give up their “swinging lifestyle”*, and therefore wouldn’t date them.
*(a description that was extremely inaccurate)
Had you forgotten that that was the root of this conversation?
But you were talking about the hypothetical situation in which you were being courted by a polyamorous person
No, I wasn’t. I think I see where that miscommunication happened.
I mentioned that it is pretty easy not to have multiple partners (which I wrongly lumped, off-handedly, under the non-term-of-art “swinging”), and so that someone being unwilling to not pursue multiple partners would make me feel replaceable.
I think you read my statement as “the person already has multiple partners, and I demand they give them up to date me.” I didn’t mean it that way. If someone already has a partner (or partners) that is (are) more important than me, I wouldn’t be pursuing them or demanding anything of them in the first place.
Aside: I mentioned earlier that I shouldn’t have used the term “swing*”, but you still seem hung up on it. Can we move past that? Apologies, again; I hadn’t realized it would be so offensive to the poly crowd.
The term itself is not the problem. The problem was that your original post claimed that the only bit you objected to was the sexual aspect. Clearly, this is not the case, but, for reasons I am uncertain of, you still seem to be standing by your original statement as an accurate one.
I am trying to make it clear to you that what you are asking them to give up is NOT just about the sex. What you are asking them to give up is the option to LOVE other people. Which is very different from just asking them to give up the option to FUCK other people.
for reasons I am uncertain of, you still seem to be standing by your original statement as an accurate one
No one asked me for a list of all conditions I place on relationships. So I stated one and not others. Accurate is different from complete. You are noticing incompleteness and accusing it of inaccuracy.
I was not surprised / learned nothing new about my preferences when I noted that I need to be the most important person to my partner.
[...] is NOT just about the sex.
Agreed. It’s also about relative levels of significance. Not sure why you think that is not clear. I hope it is now clear that it is.
What you are asking them to give up is the option to LOVE other people.
As long as they don’t love them as much as they love me, and as long as that love doesn’t become sexual/romantic, then no, I am not.
My partner can love her family and friends, as can I. But no matter how much she loves those friends, I would be quite surprised and hurt if she told me one of them were as important to her as I am.
No one asked me for a list of all conditions I place on relationships. So I stated one and not others. Accurate is different from complete. You are noticing incompleteness and accusing it of inaccuracy.
Incompleteness claimed as completeness is inaccuracy. Your statement referred to poly as having precisely two sides, the sexual side (which you had a problem with) and everything else (which you didn’t).
It turns out you DO have a problem with the everything else side.
That is incompleteness posing as completeness, which is inaccuracy.
My partner can love her family and friends, as can I. But no matter how much she loves those friends, I would be quite surprised and hurt if she told me one of them were as important to her as I am.
Why would you be hurt by this?: this is honest curiosity on my part, because I don’t understand that sort of thinking. I can’t see any harm to you, so I find myself confused.
Incompleteness claimed as completeness is inaccuracy.
Good thing I didn’t claim, in my original statement, to be stating anything precise about polyamory or about my own list of preferences. Else I’d be in trouble.
Why would you be hurt by this? [...] I can’t see any harm to you
It is the harm of not being Most Important. This is something I value—it makes me happy to be the center of my partner’s world, and her mine. I consider removal of things I value to be harms.
jmed, you seem to consider admitting previous inaccuracy a bad thing. This whole site is based around the idea that coming in, one will be wrong, and leaving one will be less wrong. Why is it so hard for you to accept that what you wrote was wrong?
It is the harm of not being Most Important. This is something I value—it makes me happy to be the center of my partner’s world, and her mine. I consider removal of things I value to be harms.
Would you feel similarly harmed if your partner revealed that she considered all of her friends and family put together (as a collective, but not individually) to be more important than you as an individual?
jmed, you seem to consider admitting previous inaccuracy a bad thing.
Considering I already, in the comments of this one LW post, apologized to various folks for being unclear and using terms inaccurately (“swinger”), you seem to be mistaken.
Why is it so hard for you to accept that what you wrote was wrong?
It isn’t hard, when I actually agree that what I write is wrong, which certainly happens enough.
Why is it so hard for you to accept that your interpretation can be wrong? Especially given all the oft-repeated basic LW knowledge on miscommunication and people-talking-past-one-another?
Would you feel similarly harmed if your partner revealed that she considered all of her friends and family put together (as a collective, but not individually) to be more important than you as an individual?
Hmm. I feel like I would not be as hurt by that, because social network is important, but I would be surprised by it. I think my partner would abandon them to stay with me if such a choice were forced (let’s say by some sort of relocation protection program whereby she is safe with me or without me, but once the choice is made, no contact with me or them can ever be made again).
Why is it so hard for you to accept that your interpretation can be wrong? Especially given all the oft-repeated basic LW knowledge on miscommunication and people-talking-past-one-another?
Because I am looking at what you wrote, not what you think you wrote.
You wrote that you’d want a person to give up the sexual side of poly, but not the other side. This says that there are two parts to poly in your mind, and only the sexual part is a problem. This isn’t, in fact, true, the non-sexual side is also a problem to you; as the non-sexual part would still compromise your position of importance.
However I suppose this has dragged on long enough, and there is unlikely to be any value extracted from this part of the conversation, so you may feel free to state your piece, and I will read it, but probably not respond unless you request me to.
Hmm. I feel like I would not be as hurt by that, because social network is important, but I would be surprised by it. I think my partner would abandon them to stay with me if such a choice were forced (let’s say by some sort of relocation protection program whereby she is safe with me or without me, but once the choice is made, no contact with me or them can ever be made again).
Okay, thank you for the information. It’s a valuable insight into how other people differ from me. You are certainly the sort of person who I would call naturally monoamorous, and incapable of happy polyamory. By the sounds of it you and your partner are both happy with this, so :-D.
EDIT: I suppose, to avoid being hypocritical, I should apologise for my incorrect belief that you were unwilling to accept being incorrect :p
I’ve been making my way through this whole thread & haven’t seen a few of the responses I would have made, so I’ll just leave them here for posterity.
Also, I haven’t tried the quote syntax yet, so we’ll see if this works cleanly...
A partner stating he or she would rather not be with me than be with just me indicates that I am not particularly >significant. Not special to him or her. Replaceable, pretty easily, considering how doable it is to not live like a >swinger (the other side of poly, emotional & intellectual connection = good friends, no line-crossing necessary).
I enjoy feeling like I am more important to my partner than anyone/anything else. I am under the impression that >this is normal in humans, and that it feeds the default human tendency toward monogamy. Do you not enjoy this / >prefer this to being one-of-many?
There are a few things I would say here.
First, how does this really differ from monogamous relationships, other than in frequency? People get broken up with, neglected, and otherwise treated in bad ways in both kinds of relationships, not just the polyamorous ones.
If anything, I’d think that being dumped & seeing your ex with another partner would be far worse alone than with other people who still care. Or on the more trivial side, if my partner prefers to do something without me one night, I can’t call another partner to do something if I’m monogamous, because I don’t have one! (Which isn’t to say that I’m not cheating, the possibility of which seems like a huge mark against monogamy, at least if we’re just going to sit here & ask what could go wrong, and how badly.)
This is all to say that I feel just as replaceable & vulnerable in monogamous relationships as I do in polyamorous relationships.
But what about feeling special when you’re not unique to your role (at a given time)?
I think the analogy (sometimes not an analogy at all) of friendships is better than the one about mothers loving their children that I’m seeing thrown around here. It also illustrates the point that some people do come up short. Some people are not the best friend of anyone, just as some people might not be a poly-primary for anyone, and who probably wouldn’t have the easiest time finding a meaningful monogamous life partner either.
But let’s assume things go well in your love life & friendships. Just because I have other friends doesn’t mean I’m incapable of being exclusive best friends with just one person, or that that person can’t change over time. (This is, in fact, something I have had more success in with friendships than with monogamous relationships, despite fewer social expectations to guide it.) This is where the analogy to monogamy ends, but the analogy to polyamory goes all the way down.
At times in life, I’ve been fortunate to have whole little groups of very close friends, each of whom I would describe as best friends & each with different or similar merits. I never thought any of them less than special to me, nor did it even occur to me that I should, since they were important in my life. (And similar to polyamory but dissimilar to monogamy, nothing kept these friendships together past their due date, which isn’t to say that all of them have ended either.) I like to think that my friends got the same feeling from me, but certainly they made me feel special, lack of exclusivity & all.
I won’t spell out the rest of the friend/poly analogy, since it’s similar down through the other levels of closeness, but I will point out the one major thing I think it overlooks.
None of this can address the fact that monogamous people place a great deal of value on sexual exclusivity in a way that makes sex itself special. This is a fundamental difference which I think has something in common with orientation, though it seems more malleable than that. If you’re poly, chances are you don’t feel special because of the act of sex itself so much as the person sharing it with you. I don’t mean to diminish the former, or to say that the latter isn’t important to monogamous people, because it is; but I would say that there’s a marked difference in emphasis, at least from my experience. (A better writer could get at this more accurately.) The point, anyhow, is that in switching to polyamory, I found that the sources of my feeling special were distinct from what they had been. Not better or worse, just different. So as far as feeling special goes, I can’t say that I’m actually inspired to feel special by exclusivity, but there are other equally valid ways that I do.
And one last point not directly in reply to jmed’s post. Jealousy is a common problem often brought up, and rightly so. It’s destructive, powerful, involuntary, and difficult to manage, not unlike anger. I find it both interesting & odd that anger management is common, yet jealousy management is not.
With anger, there’s a widespread public consciousness that it’s possible (if difficult) to learn to move past it, even if that doesn’t mean we’re perfect at that; that there are plenty of programs & groups out there to help people do this; and that social expectations are so high in this regard that public outbursts of anger are hardly tolerated.
As for jealousy, there are small bubbles of consciousness (fortunately with a great deal of overlap with poly communities!) about similar control over one’s emotions, insofar as possible, but it doesn’t seem to be something many people work on, nor are they expected to do so. It is in this regard, and this only, that I view polyamory as preferable to monogamy, and not merely alternative to it. A cultural change would make it a moot point, but for now poly people seem to do a better job with it because, one, they’re forced to, and two, they get more practice.
Hopefully someone reading through this thread a year from now will get to this post & think “Aha! I was just wondering why no one brought that up.” Or maybe I’ll be the only one who stirs up old news.
A partner stating he or she would rather not be with me than be with just me indicates that I am not particularly significant. Not special to him or her. Replaceable, pretty easily, considering how doable it is to not live like a swinger (the other side of poly, emotional & intellectual connection = good friends, no line-crossing necessary).
What??! Oh my, how differently this works for me. I am attracted to many, many people, and they are ALL irreplaceable, nevermind relationships, my very attraction to them is irreplaceable! People are fascinating and unique, and in every case there is a mixture of common, less common, and unique features that contribute to the attraction, as well as memories of experiences I shared with them. The idea that by pursuing an attraction to someone else in anyway means that any given attraction is not special is an insult to my feelings! In many cases, I love these people more than I can even express and would, were it not for limitations of time and persuasion, do more things than there are names for with them, and indeed whole different sets of such things with each one, and that’s if I couldn’t persuade anyone to do them in larger groups. I am unspeakably sad that I almost never get to do any of things, and unspeakably grateful that get to do even the more mundane things I ordinarily do with my friends, and indeed to have met them and interacted with them at all.
I am not a very successful poly in real life, mostly I think because I have literally never met another poly and have therefore been operating on the basis of trying to convert monos, but when I occasionally have periods of success I am so elated that I barely know what to do with myself—alas, I fear in many cases I am not even able to communicate this to my partners. So please, please, if I love you, no matter whatever else I do, think anything but that you are not special to me!
Don’t poly folks want to feel special to their partners?
Well, with my closer, romantic partners, yes.
But being in the top 4 is special enough for me. I don’t need to be someone’s world, I don’t WANT to be someone’s world, I just want to be one of the people they think of first.
Because seeing my partner being emotionally or physically intimate with someone else (or knowing they were, even without seeing it) = immediate non-specialness. How could you be special if you’re so easily replaceable by others in the harem? Enlightenment me, please, for I am confused.
A) harem is the wrong term IMO. There are poly people who have harems (and are thereby members of harems, for poly is generally symmetrical) but most I know don’t bother with such purely sexual relationships.
B) I am not easily replaced by any of my paramours. In one of my relationhips, I am the primary, the one who is lived with, and the one she comes home to. No other partner supplies that role. In the other relationship, I am her pet, her submissive, a perfect servant (a state I thoroughly enjoy on occasion, but could not live with 24⁄7). None of her other partners could adopt that role.
Poly people will rarely have two partners alike. Each partner provides something unique, that no-one else does.
And poly removes the big fear of monogamy: if one of my partners finds someone who supplies something I don’t, they won’t leave me for that person, because I supply something that person doesn’t. The relationship will only end if it becomes a negative, rather than merely if it isn’t the best available.
IOW: Poly makes me feel LESS replaceable. Because I fill a unique slot, that isn’t just the “relationship” slot, I can’t be replaced by anyone else.
That said, if you’re really happy, I’m happy for you, and I apologize for rocking the boat, if I have.
If someone’s poly situation is so vulnerable that your questions would knock them out of it, then it is probably a good thing that they be knocked out of it now; and have a chance to reconsider, before they get in any deeper.
If someone’s poly situation is so vulnerable [...]
Mainly I was concerned on behalf of Alicorn, because she just recently hacked herself into it, and also because she and MBlume had split up previously for whatever reason. That made it feel potentially more fragile than longer-established poly relationships, hence my comment.
Well, from the post, I would say that they are off for a good start. She put together a list of motivations, and she said she was already “naturally predisposed” for that sort of thing (I would guess a jealous person, or someone with strongly rooted convinctions about monogamy woulnd’t have ever thought to give it a try, and would have just said to MBlume “no thanks”, walked off, and tried to find another suitable partner). She might not have thought of poly in the first place, and the original motivation to enter into this kind of relationship might have had more to do with her desire to date MBlume (to her, it must have been a rather serious perk: she decided to go live in another place, she changed a rather important part of her life) than with her innate curiosity about that kind of life-style, but judging from her initial outlook, even before deciding to give it a try she didn’t seem too adverse to it (I would say she might even have considered it anyway, some years down the road, given the right stimulus). And even in the events of things ending badly… well, it’s not as if she couldn’t go back to the way things were before.
I will say this: she didn’t mention any jealousy, on either part, and the “ground rules” she put in place seem to have reassured her of her status, so I would say that her odds are pretty good. The fact that she feels confortable enough with her boyfriend to tell him “stay home with me, tonight” or to put down some rules about marriage and the prospect of children seems to indicate that they have pretty good communication, which is the most important thing anyway (the situation might have been different had MBlume’s girlfriend been in a primary relationship with him, at the time, because then Alicorn could have ended up in a “subordinate” position and I guess she woulnd’t have enjoyed being the third wheel).
(the situation might have been different had MBlume’s girlfriend been in a primary relationship with him, at the time, because then Alicorn could have ended up in a “subordinate” position and I guess she woulnd’t have enjoyed being the third wheel).
We were in a sort of pseudo-primary situation which wasn’t working that well. She broke up with me just as Alicorn and I were about to start seriously talking about how this would work, so the point became moot (though it did trigger a lot of concern on my end over whether I might be rebounding).
Don’t poly folks want to feel special to their partners?
Yes, and I do feel special to my partners; there’s been one in particular with whom that’s not fulfilled and often a source of tension, but that has more to do with the realities of our relationship and the differences in our neurology. The majority of the people I’m seeing could scarcely do more to make it clear to me how important, special and loved I am in their eyes.
You appear to be conflating non-monogamy with emotionally-shallow, superficial relationships undertaken primarily for sex.
You appear to be conflating non-monogamy with emotionally-shallow, superficial relationships undertaken primarily for sex.
I am in favor of a socially-connected human existence that involves an extended family/tribe of friends that one loves in different ways. What differentiates this from poly, other than sex?
Specifically, your assumption that having multiple sexual relationships negates the “specialness” of any sexual relationship that does occur.
I am in favor of a socially-connected human existence that involves an extended family/tribe of friends that one
loves in different ways.
Virtually any meaningful association of humans connected primarily by filial, affectional or social bonds could be described this way. It’s not specific enough by itself to differentiate polyamory from monogamy.
I was responding to your actual objection:
Don’t poly folks want to feel special to their partners? Because seeing my partner being emotionally or
physically intimate with someone else (or knowing they were, even without seeing it) = immediate
non-specialness.
...which immediately implies that having multiple sexual partners must somehow be synonymous with not desiring or having that sense of specialness.
So insofar as you admit you don’t get poly, your statement is honest—but the assumptions underlying it are mistaken. Many poly people want the same thing you do (a sense of specialness) and do not feel it’s jeopardized by seeing their partners emotionally or physically intimate with someone else.
And yes, there are some poly or otherwise nonmonogamous people whose desires and preferences probably don’t map to yours so readily. But some of us do understand what you want in a partnership, want it ourselves, and find it compatible with nonmonogamy.
Thanks for providing your perspective. I understand now that poly people get the sense of specialness in other ways, although how they accomplish it still eludes me on a visceral level. Intellectually, I see Alicorn and her insistence on being primary and on being able to demand exclusive time as accomplishing this sort of thing, but it still feels like not enough. But that’s just (unhacked) me. Thanks again.
Intellectually, I see Alicorn and her insistence on being primary and on being able to demand exclusive time as accomplishing this sort of thing, but it still feels like not enough.
These were parameters that either of us would have insisted upon, BTW. I’d been in a more nearly “undifferentiated partners” arrangement previously and had felt really insufficiently cared-for.
I find this very interesting. Polyamory is something that I’ve toyed with intellectually for a while, but I have several ugh fields around it. Namely, and this one has been borne out by this very post, that “going polyamorous” seems like the kind of thing monogamous females do in order to acquire polyamorous males. Perhaps if one was a sufficiently status-y female, one would be able to convert the polyamorous male to being monogamous. Of course, this comes with all sorts of issues (namely, making the polyamorous partner unhappy). I just haven’t been sufficiently convinced that being polyamorous would make me happy for any reasons other than using that polyamory to attract a high-status mate that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to attract. I, like you Alicorn, have been too long seduced by the monogamy aesthetic.
Now, I will try to imagine the conditions sufficient in order for me to hack myself into being polyamorous. I imagine that they would be thus:
I would have to decide, for myself, that I wanted to be polyamorous before meeting some polyamorous male that I desired. That is the only way that I can reasonably trust myself to make a decision in my own best interest.
I would have to be convinced that there was no asymmetry. I believe this is my primary repulsion to polyamory. I envision myself in a situation where I want primary access to a partner who does not similarly wish primary access to me. I also envision lots of emotions and stress involved in deciding what “primary” even means.
I need to be convinced, for myself, that becoming polyamorous is not a status-lowering move.
I’m concerned about the exponential increase in exposure to STI’s as well. Of course, I’ve had partners cheat on me in so-called monogamous relationships, so I’m aware that this is not something that a monogamous relationship necessarily shields me from.
As it stands, I haven’t been in a monogamous relationship wherein I desired within that relationship that it was open so that I could date others. I also haven’t yet desired someone who was (to my knowledge) polyamorous. I have already decided that I do not want the latter condition to be the catalyst for changing my worldview, so right now, I consider myself open to the possibility in the future, should I find myself in a situation where I wanted to date multiple partners. So thanks Alicorn, I am now significantly more luminous!
That sucks. A compatible partner that is successfully poly is some evidence that poly could also work for you, as well as being something that brings the possibility to your attention. Yet by meeting them you have instead cut off the whole possibility. You’d be better if you never laid eyes on them! :P
This is just the way I like to relate to myself but I’d decide I was allowed to switch to poly if it was a good idea but that I’m not allowed to date poly-inspiration-X. For at least as long as a limerance period could be expected to interfere with judgement and also long enough that I could see if poly worked for me without the interference. That way my infatuation biases don’t get to subvert my decision making either by temptation or by defensive reaction.
That’s a massive deal to me too. I am far more careful with shielding myself from asymmetry when playing poly. My primary partner also has to be able to accept that us having other relationships means that she will get less of my attention. Bizarrely enough not everyone gets this. Seriously… being poly doesn’t add extra hours to the day!
For myself I am also reluctant to get into situations where I’m seeing multiple people within the same social circle. Or, more to the point, where my partners are seeing other people within my social circle. Simply because it changes the nature of my interactions with my friends. Sex begets competition. It makes people more like humans (status hungry monkeys) and less like ‘people’. It’s hard enough balancing egos and rapport with potential rivals when you aren’t fucking the same girl (or guy). That just isn’t the kind of game I like to be playing with my own friends. I prefer Settlers of Catan.
Fortunately most of my core circle is made up of (awesome, open minded but sincere) Christians so there is no chance that we’ll end up with love pentagons. Just lots of couples and me doing WTF I want. :)
You know, I had assumed that Time-Turners were invented by a Hogwarts Headmaster who despaired of getting the school schedules straight and one day before deadline stayed up until 6AM inventing the Time-Turner, and that he (gender coinflip-generated) succeeded because he was the first person to try for time travel just to get extra time and not to change the past, and that the invention within Hogwarts is why they get a traditional free pass on using them. But some polyamorous past wizard would be just as reasonable an inventor.
I like love pentagons and poly chains within the community. It creates a familial feeling. Of course nothing’s actually gone wrong in my immediate poly family yet. You can easily see how this could go wrong.
And from my side I can see how it could go right. I visited Berkeley recently (bootcamp) and it was adorable.
There aren’t many places where people would be comfortable making that comparison! But I suppose if it wasn’t for the inbreeding risk, Westermarck effect and massive potential for abuse incest would be the perfect family bonding activity. You’re living with each other already!
I lived in a co-op for several years & found myself in the midst of a poly community (quite separately) at the same time. I would almost be surprised if people didn’t treat their closest friends & lovers like their family in such interconnected communities. To say so comes naturally when you feel that way, which we did/do. It’s just the family you chose, not the family you were born into.
More to the point of the grandparent, they are the family members that you have sex with. (I usually prefer not be thought of as a brother by my romantic interests, nor do I find myself with the urge to grope my sisters.)
Mono vanilla uptight people also have family members they have sex with. They’re called “spouses”. When someone mentions their spouse as part of their family, listeners rarely recoil in accusations of incest.
The relevant characteristic of marriage here is the long-term, committed relationship with frequent contact (not necessarily cohabitation). Close-knit poly communities have several of these per person.
If people who are indirectly related by such relationships (e.g. siblings-in-law) get along well and see enough of each other, they usually have familial feelings toward each other (unless the families I know are weird). The relationship being sexual on both sides rather than sexual on one side and blood on the other has no reason to change this.
That is literally true, and saying that you have sex with your family members doesn’t technically mean you admit to incest. That’s why what I said was “There aren’t many places where people would be comfortable making that comparison!”
That’s completely reasonable, I’ll agree with that.
Seconded. Seems like Alicorn’s reasons for going poly are not good—being head over heels for MBlume and him not being willing to go monogamous in return… meh.
Alicorn, other poly folks, a question: I don’t get poly (aside from the simple “some folks are just different from me” unhelpfulness). Don’t poly folks want to feel special to their partners? Because seeing my partner being emotionally or physically intimate with someone else (or knowing they were, even without seeing it) = immediate non-specialness. How could you be special if you’re so easily replaceable by others in the harem? Enlightenment me, please, for I am confused.
That said, if you’re really happy, I’m happy for you, and I apologize for rocking the boat, if I have.
Yes, but they don’t need to have a monopoly in order to feel that their product is sufficiently differentiated.
But, based on Alicorn’s own experience, even she would feel ”...skeptical that there was enough interest for both the relationship and the subsidy to persist.”, in the case of more than 3 “primary” partners. I guess that despite the cliche “there is enough love for everyone”, in practice it wouldn’t be realistic to expect a single person to share his attention/interest equally among n people, if n became too high.
If n is >10, then even with someone devoting all their time to relationships, they are still going to be giving a small amount. to each
For n=1; the relationship will generally be saturated before all the time is used up, but for higher values of n it becomes more and more likely that all the time will be used up, before the relationship is saturated.
Personally I couldn’t handle more than 3 primary relationships, and I wouldn’t even be able to handle 3 unless the partners also had other partners; to be there for them when I am otherwise engaged.
This is not directly on point, but it might be interesting to see if there are quantitative measures for how rich the various biographies of people with multiple personality disorder are.
Research directly into relationships could be complicated by social factors, the difficulties of studying dynamics, political issues, etc. In contrast, the related subject of how much time one has to spend being someone to be a relatively complete person should be free from that.
If it turns out that a person with MPD can carry, say, three complete personalities at most without them being caricatures or undeveloped characters, that would somewhat indicate a lower limit of three on how many full relationships with others one could have. If each human can be three really distinct people, and each person can have at least one relationship at a time, it seems like an emotionally adept person would be able to handle three relationships without having to fragment their mind.
Or perhaps there are only enough hours in a day to form one normal personality, or perhaps there are enough for ten, I have no idea.
It is an interesting though… of course, there would be other, practical considerations… i.e., if we are assuming three “primary” relationships of the same “importance” (I couldn’t find a better word… maybe “rank”, “status”) we would be dealing with four persons living under the same roof. Add offspring into the mix, and we would have eight, twelve,etc. people lving together...
Even without considering the fact that it would be difficult to give each of the three lovers an equal and significant amount of attention (a day has only 24 hours, it’s won’t stretch to accomodate our needs), adding progeny into the mix… the only option I could see would be limiting the number of children to one per lover (no twins, thanks), and maybe adding a few years between each birth (otherwise the female partner would be in and out of the hospital). Of course, some of the male partners might decide they won’t have kids (I wouldn’t know why, since they would need to deal with the offspring of the other couples anyway), or, if we were talking about bisexual participants, there might be two female and two male partners, so the numbers might change a bit…
Raising the offspring won’t be an easy task, either. I mean, with four adult (autority) figures living under the same roof, some of whom might not be interested/capable/willing to deal with children (what if a part of the quartet wanted to reproduce and the rest did not?), who the child will likely come to see as “parental”, despite what said adults might wish… What if there is disagreement regarding the way the child is raised? It’s true that the “natural” parents would be only two, but the rest would likely have almost as much of a hand in their education, and seeing them on a daily basis, living together as a single family unit, they would feel (and be) entitled to set some ground rules anyway.
In the end, I think there is a point beyond which things would not be manageable anymore. In that respect, Alicorn’s decision seems a sensible one, not only because of the reassuring psychological benefit of “status” she mentioned, but also because the dynamics of such a large family unit living in an enclosed space (need I mention “rebellious teenager”?) would likely be too complex for anyone to manage successfully. I mean, for that to work, one should hope that there would never be a fight/attrition, and even in that case, the sheer number of things to do would be discouraging. Of course, we are talking about the rather “extreme” case of four people having an equal role in the relationship, not of a main couple with different paramours.
Could you give some examples of how they do feel sufficiently differentiated? It is not clear to me how it works in practice, and while I could imagine scenarios, I don’t trust my own imaginative accuracy when it comes to imagining much about poly relationships.
Thanks.
To be honest I don’t think I’m the right person to ask. I currently don’t want that level of commitment or ‘specialness’ and at those times when I have I was monogomous. Others will be able to answer with what it feels like from the inside.
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?
#Why would my being special to someone imply that they couldn’t have sex and/or long-term relationships with people they found attractive?#
To quote Alicorn’s original 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.]#
We are talking about a real need, a real issue here. While I consider the answer essentially correct, I also feel that dismissing the implied concern out of hand, as if it was not there to be considered, would be a mistake (after all, many of those considering polygamy are bound to feel that same way). Note that, as remarked, even here we have different levels, different shades, there is a difference between being someone’s top romantic priorities and just a generic “one of the many”.
I guess that what the original poster meant was “unique”, “exclusive”, rather than “special”. Alicorn’s post remaked that being the “top” romantic priority is 95% of the deal. The fact that the relationship is not “unique”, but that you are just one of two, six, n romantic interests might make someone feel as if they were easily repleaceable, interchangeable like a car’s wheel, whereas, in fact, the feelings of those involved are no less real or intense. Simply because there are others just like you does not mean that you don’t matter to your partner. In other words, it does not make you “not special”, only “not unique”, which, to some people, might appear like the same thing, but it is not.
The problem lies in that remaining 5% that distinguish “top” from “exclusive” romantic interest. To some people, that uniqueness -the fact that the bond is unique, involved only you and your partner, and no one else- is something special and valuable in an of itself. The fact of the matter is that the value one places on exclusivity is highly subjective, everyone has to draw their own conclusions.
An unstated question that emerges in these two points is “can two people be fully satisfied with only each other?” -the original poster seemed to imply (I apologize if that was not the case) that the very need to have a relationship with other people besides the current partner means that said partner is not the “right” person, otherwise you wouldn’t feel unsatisfied (as I heard in the past, essentially using artificial measures to keep up a relationship that should have ended ages ago)-.
While I don’t completely agree with that, I must say that I would likely not consider polygamy simply because of some feeling of boredom I might end up feeling in the future. In general, in that respect, I must say that I don’t see poly as the panacea to save a not completely satisfactory relationship. In my opinion, it would be entirely possible for two people to be satisfied with each other without resorting to outside partners. Communication is the real issue, here -without that, even with ten different partners one would never be able to have a functioning relationship-. So, I don’t necessarily see polygamy as the answer to lack of interest in an existing relationship, nor as some sort of magical solution that would ensure the surivival of a future one.
To put it simply, you could very well feel lonely in a crowd.
If nothing else, the increased number of people involved would make it harder to cope with possible attritions/jealousies that might arise in the future. It’s all to easy to imagine the potential problems: your partner having a fight with her partner, and being irritable when she is with you, her partner becoming jealous with her and your relationship,… the mere fact that there are more people, and more variables to consider, make the list of “things that could go wrong” that much longer, negating pretty much any perceived advantage one might think to gain from such an arrangement, simply because of the increasingly complex dynamics.
Again, to summarize, put enough people together, and you will most likely end up saying something that one of them disagrees with. It’s all too easy hurting someone without meaning to, even if you know him very well, and that problem is magnified if you increase the number of people involved (at least in my experience).
In the end, the only point I disagree with is the fact that polygamy might necessarily be the best way to have a satisfactory, lasting relationship. In my experience, that had not been the case, and in general, I think that, as a possible arrangement, it’s not without its own share of problems, albeit different ones. It’s not necessarily superior to a monogamous relationship, just… different. I guess that what I am trying to say is, don’t expect it to be a magical solution to all of your problems, without proper communication, it will fail, just like anything else.
To quote Alicorn:
I think I could have lived with being a member of a triad without explicit rankings; other arrangements would have been progressively less appealing and at some point I would have been necessarily skeptical that there was enough interest for both the relationship and the subsidy to persist.
So I would guess, it all depends on the situation. Are we talking about a “primary” relationship, etc. I guess that at a certain point you could, presumably, start to quetion your role and importance in the relationship.
The thought of my partner sharing a particular level of connection (poorly specified, but I know it when I see it / imagine it) with another person triggers typical primate challenge behaviors in me. E.g., violence toward the other male. Along with feelings of having been hurt. Since I’m special to my partner, the implication is that she wouldn’t want to make me feel hurt and highly violent.
You’ve never felt romantic jealousy? Or did you hack it away like Alicorn?
For males who do not share this trait, I wonder on the mechanism, and whether it might have some relation to measures of testosterone. Probably too simplistic, but a study I’d like to see nonetheless.
I’ve found that my jealousy, though much lower than seems normal, still varies considerably. And it correlates, as far as I can tell, with general self-confidence. If I’m feeling down about myself I feel much more possessive and attached to significant others. When I’m feeling good about myself I’ve been fine with open relationships. Of course, that doesn’t mean that variable explains all jealousy variation in the population. As for testosterone: anecdotally I haven’t noticed anything when my testosterone level increased following a change in diet and exercise.
This has been my experience too—jealousy almost always comes from a place of insecurity. For a while my standard jealousy first-aid was just to make an extra trip to the gym/practice some other skill I could feel good about improving at.
FWIW I’ve very rarely experienced anything like this reaction.
Yes. Which is part of why I allow competition. Personally, I find it easier to feel special when I know that my partner has other options, but still chooses to spend most/all of her time with me. I want my partner to be spending time with the person (or people) she is best matched with, even if it’s not me. But if it is me, then I feel great, especially when I see my partner dropping one of her other options in favor of spending more time with me, or telling me that she enjoys spending time with me more.
But the reality is that they always have other options.
To be perfecly fair, from my relatively brief poly experience, there is also the other half of the coin: the disappointment of not being the one said partner choses, the potential jealousy (irrational, but, undenyably not exactly an emotion that can be controlled at will), and, as Alicorn’s post highlighted, the fear of losing said partner -breakups do happen, and, in relation to another post, the situation between a mother and her sons is quite different because that bond does not fit this particular requirement-.
That is a new, interesting perspective to me. Thank you for joining in. (Thanks to all the poly folks who have been replying to me. Very cool, very helpful.)
As has been suggested by others: different people need different things to “feel special” in the sense you mean it here.
Some people have their sense of relationship-specialness diminished when their partner goes out to see a movie without them, or when their partner expresses the sense that someone else is attractive, or when their partner goes to the office instead of staying home with them, or when their partner chooses to spend holidays with his or her birth family, or when their partner socializes with someone other than them, or when their partner kisses someone other than them, or when their partner has sex with someone other than them, or when their partner establishes a long-term sexual or romantic relationship with someone other than them, or etc. or etc. or etc.
It’s not particularly helpful to talk about what ought to diminish my sense of relationship-specialness. If I know what does in fact diminish it, and I can find a way of operating in the world that meets my needs given that (either by changing my preferences to suit my current environment, or changing my environment to suit my current preferences, or a combination), then I will feel more special than if I don’t.
The idea that there’s some particular way of expressing relationship-specialness that is privileged, and people for whom that mode of expression is necessary and sufficient are somehow more correct than people for whom it is not, is often a consequence of mistaking one’s own personal state (or one’s culture’s preferred state) for an ineluctable human condition.
I agree with most of what you say here. I did not intend to imply you ought to feel or behave a certain way, so apologies if it seemed that way. I just don’t/didn’t understand, and would like to. Thanks for chiming in. (Didn’t realize how many poly folks were on the message board.)
Oh, don’t worry, I wasn’t feeling personally targeted. And just to avoid confusion: I’m not actually poly myself; I’ve been in a monogamous relationship for ~20 years and have no particular desire to alter that condition. But I live in a social circle where it is increasingly the default relationship option.
I don’t know why you would say this, and I strongly disagree.
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?
Interesting benefit of polyamory: there’s a lot less that can rock the boat (or sink it)! We enjoy a stability we did not have before.
I didn’t understand this line of argument before I was poly, and I don’t understand it now. Yes. Of course if you have multiple children they’re individually less special to you! You have less time and energy for each, less brain-space to store facts about each, and you aren’t even culturally allowed to have a favorite! There’s a sense in which you “love them all equally”, sure, but I’d be willing to bet that something like 75% of parents would be unable to claim that under Veritaserum.
As for why it should be different for lovers, the psychology about lovers and children is very different. It’s a conceit of our current sensibilities that we even use the same word to refer to how we feel about those, our siblings, our pets, and ice cream. There is no reason in principle why we couldn’t have been hardwired for extreme strict romantic monogamy and still love lots of children.
Which is why I sometimes taboo that word and try and explain exactly how I feel about my S.O. in other, more concrete, terms.
Hmm… perhaps we don’t mean the same thing when we use the word “special”. If I pretend that you used a word unfamiliar to me instead and had to work only on context, where you continue with:
...then I’d have to agree with you. Certainly, I have less time and energy to devote to each child.
For the record, I never claimed to love them all equally, or to not have a favorite. (They are all my favorites, in different realms, but even so… it would be absurd to claim that it just happens to all add up to be equal.)
But I don’t see what point you are making here. My point is that my love for the first child was not diminished by the arrival of the second. For some other definition of special (importance in my life), I would say that the first is just as special to me.
The reason this is brought up (perhaps mostly by poly people with more than one child) is that one’s capacity for love, for this “specialness” is not fixed! Another child comes along, and your capacity grows. Another long-term, committed partner, and your capacity grows.
That is the point of the argument: capacity is not fixed in size.
Certainly, but the point about specialness-capacity-increase is fairly general. I would apply it to lovers, to children, to favorite movies, to desserts, to symphonies… the more things we love (or are special or meaningful to us), the more our capacity increases. These things, these experiences make us grow. (Well, maybe not desserts; that’s a different kind of growth.)
And we accept that this is how we work in terms of children, movies, food, music… why make an exception for lovers?
Ok. I suppose not. I suppose we could have been hardwired for extreme preference for only one flavor of ice-cream… Do you just really not like the comparisons between different categories of things we like/love/enjoy? Of course our feelings for these different categories are all very, very different, but the generalization seems valid enough to me.
And especially: if they feel similar enough to me for the generalization to hold, then I’m really not going to be convinced that I must love only one by the argument “romantic love is different because it’s different”. (Which isn’t what you were saying, but it’s the message this line of argument addresses.)
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).
Have you ever felt jealousy? Romantic or otherwise? I don’t feel it over my partner finding someone else attractive—that’s too distant and automatic to be a threat—but a pursued relationship with someone else is too much of a threat to my relationship. I also don’t see this as an unfounded insecurity that I should work on reducing; if you’re more secure in your primary relationship than I would be in a poly scenario, I feel like you may not be updating sufficiently given available information about human relationships.
Having multiple children doesn’t threaten the loss of your previous children. That’s why.
I accept that this may be true for you. It does not appear to be true of most of the poly folks I’ve come across. I have seen a lot of drama and boat-rocking and boat-sinking. Hell, it just happened again, publicly, in Tortuga.
It is possible that I have not come across a proper representative sample of poly relationships and have an inaccurate view. But I remain skeptical of your claim to this benefit for poly.
Thank you for your perspective on the matter. I feel a bit like an anthropologist dropped into a foreign land.
Yes, both. But I don’t see jealousy as this big emotional dead-end. “If you see jealousy, run the other way! Only evil will you find here!” Jealousy is a response. Like a rash or something. It’s an indication that something needs to be dealt with. It could be the emotional equivalent of skin cancer… but it’s more likely that it’s the equivalent of a need to use a different brand of soap. Upon further inspection, it’s often not that big of a deal.
See, I think we are just looking at this from very different perspectives. Why would your partner need to leave you for another if they could just have you both?? It seems to me that monogamy and its “all or nothing” treatment of partners is what causes people to leave. Monogamy is not immune to partners leaving, to which divorce statistics attest. No, I would say that monogamy encourages leaving! Sometimes even demands it.
I’m guessing we are updating on very different data. Monogamy is a disaster, contributing to tremendous misery and pain (not to mention waste of resources). And the polyamory I’ve seen has been largely positive. Not universally, but largely. On more than one occasion, I’ve even seen it save what monogamy threatened to destroy, with its insistence upon jealous, fear, and punishment.
I have no idea what you are talking about with Tortuga, so cannot reply to that (sorry).
But yes, it seems we have very different experiences with polyamory, and in both cases mostly anecdotal evidence. (Perhaps I have just been lucky!) But before you write off polyamory altogether, I would suggest that you take a harder look at monogamy and what it has left in its path.
Because they might like the other more, which would hurt me enough that I would not want to stay.
Oh, it was written off long ago; my curiosity is academic, not for assessment with respect to personal change. I am in a successful, long-term monogamous relationship, and neither of us want that to change.
I’m not sure what you mean by what monogamy “has left in its path.” If you mean divorce rates, I can only repeat that my anecdotal experience with polyamorous couples has seen them split up at least as frequently.
And a child might (and often will) say the same about a new little brother or sister.
This doesn’t illustrate your proclaimed difference between the two situations. You’re not losing your partner, you’re leaving them. Just as a child doesn’t lose their parents love, but they may choose to ignore that love because they are jealous of a younger sibling.
I don’t see the child-parent relationship as usefully analogous to the romantic love relationship.
If one of your partners murders your mother, but wants to stay with you, is there really a difference if you call what follows “losing them” or “leaving them”? You lost/left your partner because they committed a dealbreaker. I just have different dealbreakers than you do.
I see your murder analogy as less useful than the child-parent analogy, FWIW.
Anyway, I asked, and you answered:
Whoa, whoa, whoa… that is not an answer to the question I asked! You see, already, by examining the hypothetical situation, we are getting somewhere. :-)
So are your fears truly about being left, or about feeling a level of jealousy and hurt that you don’t think you can live with?
(You don’t have to answer me; the point is that, through asking these kinds of questions and examining your feelings, you can find the source of these feelings. And sometimes it’s a surprisingly small thing that you really need!)
You choose (and are allowed to change) your deal-breakers.
And for the record, in case it sounds like I’m trying to convince you to try polyamory again, I’m really not. Not at all. While I don’t think the reasons you gave are very good ones for avoiding polyamory, the fact that you are in a successful mono relationship that you are both happy with is all the reason you need, of course. :-)
Both, of course. The jealousy and hurt is, in part, a rejection to a fear of being left or rejected. And in part it’s just base possessiveness, probably. I’m good with that.
I’m answering questions about these feelings because I’m in a discussion about them with people who presumable don’t feel them (or not in the same way). I’m not confused or in the dark about the source of my feelings on the matter. This is not the first time I’ve thought about my feelings, just as I’m sure when you explain why you’re okay with poly, it’s not your first time working through these thoughts either.
Sure. But why would I, when I have zero desire to?
I wouldn’t describe it as being “head over heels”, at the time the decision was made. We’d dated before and I was very happy during that time, and I wanted it back. The universe is allowed to be set up so I have to make some changes to get things. It turned out to be set up that way. I wanted the gotten thing more than I wanted what I had to give up, and I had the power to make the trade.
I will be better able to answer the question if you unpack the words “special” and “replaceable”.
I’ll try. Not sure I’ll succeed, though, as it screams obviousness to my brain, so it’s hard to understand the outside perspective wherein it is not clear.
A partner stating he or she would rather not be with me than be with just me indicates that I am not particularly significant. Not special to him or her. Replaceable, pretty easily, considering how doable it is to not live like a swinger (the other side of poly, emotional & intellectual connection = good friends, no line-crossing necessary).
I enjoy feeling like I am more important to my partner than anyone/anything else. I am under the impression that this is normal in humans, and that it feeds the default human tendency toward monogamy. Do you not enjoy this / prefer this to being one-of-many?
From a different angle: If MBlume (or whoever your primary is at a given time) would be with you either way, monogamous or poly, which would you choose, given all the non-drama/non-jealousy & other apparent ‘awesomeness’ of your poly adjustment? Would you prefer to stay this way, or would you prefer an MBlume who was happy to give up all other men/women to be with just you forever?
I just looked over my shoulder and asked. Turns out your question is a practical one—MBlume says he would go monogamous for me if I wanted. If he’d said this before I hacked poly, I wouldn’t have hacked poly. (He wouldn’t have said it then—he needed the information of how our relationship has gone for the past month.) Given that I’m now poly, and that we both have other partners/prospects who we’d be somewhat distressed to give up, I’m not planning to reverse the hack. It’s a matter of hassle and loss aversion mostly. But I do find it meaningful that he would monogamize himself if I were not sufficiently superpowered to have rendered it unnecessary.
Alternatively, he is able to offer this primarily because he knows it is unnecessary / your polyhack is an inseparable part of your value as a partner.
Sounds like a pretty definitive answer to the “You just went poly for the guy!” objection.
...I did just go poly for the guy. I just think that’s okay.
People move city to be with people; is this necessarily any different? Especially when you know lots of people living in that city going “move here, we love it here!”
I find this oddly cheerful. Go for it, then!
It does. Even though it doesn’t refute the “You just went poly for the guy!” assertion at all. It could well fit with “I just went with poly for the guy and it is awesome! You should try it!”
Agreed. Yay. I am happier for you both now. (Is it strange that I have concerns about people I don’t know very well, because I consider them part of my extended tribe somehow? I need to ask more people if they feel this way.)
I certainly find the same on other forums and communities. I am not sufficiently part of the lesswrong community to feel a tribe-connection, but I would feel such concern for a person who went to my local RPG club (even if I’d never met them) or who attended my favourite LARP (as long as I had talked to them at least once or twice)
From what I understand the default human tendency is is medium term monogamy (with cheating) combined with extreme promiscuity, particularly by the highest status males. Some polygamy thrown in too.
I think that “humans tend towards monogamy” and “humans don’t tend towards monogamy” are both misleading, as they lump together two things which don’t necessarily go together: being monogamous, and requiring monogamy of others. Instead, I’m inclined towards thinking that there’s a tendency to require sexual/romantic monogamy from one’s partner while still wanting to have sexual/romantic relationships with others.
Though some people seem to be strongly monogamous (in both senses of the word) by nature, others seem to be strongly non-monogamous (in both senses of the word), and some fall in between. So if there is a strong genetic component, there’s also the possibility that some kind of frequency-dependent selection might be going on instead of just a universal tendency towards one thing.
Yes, humans are bad at plenty of things they want (or seem to / claim to want). Bad at rational action, yet members at this site strive to do better. Bad at ethical & consequentialist reasoning, yet many of us strive to do better.
So being bad at monogomy is not a particular good argument for abandoning it. But maybe you didn’t mean to imply that—I speak to it because I’ve heard that claim from a few poly folks before. If so, disregard.
If you just meant to clarify that, yes, humans are not perfect monogomists, then okay, we’re agreed on that.
Um, no. And not anything about arguments for abandoning things either. It was a straightforward description of the approximate default human instincts with neither practical or normative argument implied.
This is what I meant by my last sentence, that humans are not perfect monogamists. Sorry I was unclear.
Ahh. Agreement!
Monogamous (for how long?) is probably a very important question in discussions of to what extent monogamy is natural for humans.
Is there a convenient term for raising that sort of question and/or filling in that sort of blank?
To clarify: would you say that romantic love only differs from friendship in that you have sex with the one you love?
Because to me, there is a massive difference between the two. Friends with benefits doesn’t become romantic love instantly, and romantic love without sex is entirely possible.
It’s possible our brains are different, or possible you mean something else; or indeed, it’s possible that you’re wrong about yourself.
To narrow it down, I’ll give you a hypothetical: Imagine your hypothetical partner agreed to give up the sexual side of poly, and only have sex with you (perhaps you’re the best sexual partner they’ve ever had, and have just the right sex drive for them, so they’re perfectly happy with that situation). However, they keep going out on dates with other partners, spending romantic nights in with other partners, etc. Would you feel comfortable with that situation?
Could you clarify how “going out on dates” is different from hanging out with friends? Dinner, hang-gliding, museums, movies. “Date” implies you’re considering a person as a potential physically-intimate partner. If that is ruled out (as you stipulated it is), you’re not going on dates, you’re hanging out with friends.
Same as above, examples please.
Thanks
A question before I continue: would you consider kissing, cuddling, snuggling, fussing, etc. as things you’d allow a partner to do with others or not?
Just so I can cater my examples to the exact region of the distinction.
I consider some allowance for those things as part of family/friendship. Soo… kiss = cheek, the way you’d kiss a friend or cousin, no open mouth clearly sexual “makeout” kissing. Hugging is fine. Cuddling/snuggling are kind of borderline. Depends on context. But typically people don’t sit around snuggling friends they aren’t sleeping with or trying to sleep with.
I do this all the time. When I hang out with the correct subset of my platonic friends we casually flop onto each other and braid each other’s hair and exchange backrubs. I have photographic evidence. One doesn’t have to be weird about those things.
I want to be your friend!
You are my friend! You just live far away.
I need more friends like your friends.
I think I need to hack to be more like her friends. Snuggling and braiding sounds healthy!
But do you think it is common/typical/majority behavior?
I concur with your unintended implication that female-female groups do this (“braid each other’s hair, exchange backrubs”) more often than male-female and male-male pairs do.
I platonically snuggle with some of my male friends too. And I have photographic evidence of some guys I know who are not dating each other snuggling, too.
I guess I don’t know how typical it is. I don’t know many normal people and suspect they’re dull.
It isn’t. I know a few normal people (“normal” along this particular dimension of personality/behavior, at least).
You are correct in your suspicions.
Upvoted for this.
Ditto.
Especially the braiding the hair part...
Guys are less often braidable but I ask when they are.
That reminds me. My hair is just about long enough that I’d be able to accept if asked. Definitely due for a hair cut!
Perhaps not. But I am having to draw on an atypical hypothetical to try and find our exact point of disagreement. I hope you don’t mind?
Okay, so, refined hypothetical: The person you are dating is also, in their personal opinion, ‘dating’ an asexual man. This man has no interest in making out with them, let alone sex, but does enjoy romance, and cuddling up with them in order to share the feeling of emotional closeness.
Your partner considers this relationship equally important to the relationship between the two of you, and makes sure to schedule sufficient time to spend with each of you. They celebrate their anniversary with this other partner, and your anniversary with you, as well as wishing to spend time with this partner on valentines day. They recently met this other partner’s family, going to his brothers wedding with him; as his ‘date’.
Does this bother you?
Not at all.
Yes. No one should be as important to my partner as I am.
If you modify your scenario to involve an asexual male who likes to cuddle (or a gay male or a straight female, easier for me to imagine than a purely asexual male, although I know those folks do exist) and that that person is important to my partner but not as important as I am, then I would not have a problem with their cuddling at all, or being emotionally close.
That is very interesting, thank you for taking my hypotheticals seriously, and answering honestly.
What you are asking your partner to give up is not the “swinging lifestyle” as you thought: you’re also asking your partner to give up having anyone they consider as important as they consider you.
I hope you can now understand why people make such a big distinction between swinging (where they have other sexual partners, who aren’t as important as their romantic partner) and polyamory (where they have multiple romantic partners, who may not be sexual, but can be equally important to each other)
I knew about the distinction before, I just didn’t realize how much polyamorous people disliked being associated with swingers, and phrased poorly as a result.
There still seems to be more overlap (more poly folks who permit one-night stands in swinger-ish manner than monogamous folks who permit it). Do you find this not to be the case? Most poly partnerships keep their sexuality limited to the 3 or 4 or 6 of them, and would look down on a partner having sex with people they didn’t intend to add to the long-term group?
How common is it in your experience for the polyamorous to have non-sexual romantic partners?
Hmmm, I’m not entirely sure. In my social circle far more monoamorous people #PRACTICE# one night stands (in a swingerish manner) than polyamorous people. The polyamorous people may #allow# it; but when you can date whoever you want, and aren’t forced to limit it to a one-night stand, why would you limit it?
My social circle is, however, distinctly atypical, and so cannot really be construed as evidence of much.
Groups suggest a closed loop, which is uncommon. However many poly people I know are uninterested in having sex with anyone who they don’t feel a romantic bond with, simply because they have far more satisfying alternatives available.
Maybe 10%, or so. Not massively common, but certainly not unheard of. Far more would be open to non-sexual romance, just haven’t had one.
The association with swingers is a problem due to the fact it leads to people, such as yourself, failing to recognise the differences, and making factually incorrect statements.
I’ll answer your questions shortly in a seperate post; but I have a point I feel I may have failed to make, so I’ll make it here:
The post I first replied to contained this line that I quoted:
You have since revealed that there is a level of emotional and intellectual connection that you consider line crossing. This is an important change in your position, so I think it is important that you put those two beliefs together, and realise that one of them must be wrong.
Work out which one is wrong, and remove it; that is the purpose of this whole site :-)
It’s not a change; there was no explicit comparison between connection to others and connection to me in that statement, so I didn’t address it there.
So, to clarify: My partner can have any level of emotional/intellectual connection with friends and family, as long as it remains non-sexual and I remain most important / without equal.
In the previous post your only restriction was that they not have sex with others. You have now stated that you have two restrictions*: that is a contradiction of your previous position.
*and the restriction requiring that they give up anyone that is of equal importance to you is a massive one, far larger, to me and many polyamorous people, than the sexual restriction.
That my partner would have anyone equally important to me in the first place is highly unlikely, because we are not poly. How would such a high importance relationship form against a monoamorous backdrop? So it’s really not a big deal in practice.
But you were talking about the hypothetical situation in which you were being courted by a polyamorous person, saying that you’d be upset about their unwillingness to give up their “swinging lifestyle”*, and therefore wouldn’t date them.
*(a description that was extremely inaccurate)
Had you forgotten that that was the root of this conversation?
No, I wasn’t. I think I see where that miscommunication happened.
I mentioned that it is pretty easy not to have multiple partners (which I wrongly lumped, off-handedly, under the non-term-of-art “swinging”), and so that someone being unwilling to not pursue multiple partners would make me feel replaceable.
I think you read my statement as “the person already has multiple partners, and I demand they give them up to date me.” I didn’t mean it that way. If someone already has a partner (or partners) that is (are) more important than me, I wouldn’t be pursuing them or demanding anything of them in the first place.
Aside: I mentioned earlier that I shouldn’t have used the term “swing*”, but you still seem hung up on it. Can we move past that? Apologies, again; I hadn’t realized it would be so offensive to the poly crowd.
The term itself is not the problem. The problem was that your original post claimed that the only bit you objected to was the sexual aspect. Clearly, this is not the case, but, for reasons I am uncertain of, you still seem to be standing by your original statement as an accurate one.
I am trying to make it clear to you that what you are asking them to give up is NOT just about the sex. What you are asking them to give up is the option to LOVE other people. Which is very different from just asking them to give up the option to FUCK other people.
No one asked me for a list of all conditions I place on relationships. So I stated one and not others. Accurate is different from complete. You are noticing incompleteness and accusing it of inaccuracy.
I was not surprised / learned nothing new about my preferences when I noted that I need to be the most important person to my partner.
Agreed. It’s also about relative levels of significance. Not sure why you think that is not clear. I hope it is now clear that it is.
As long as they don’t love them as much as they love me, and as long as that love doesn’t become sexual/romantic, then no, I am not.
My partner can love her family and friends, as can I. But no matter how much she loves those friends, I would be quite surprised and hurt if she told me one of them were as important to her as I am.
Incompleteness claimed as completeness is inaccuracy. Your statement referred to poly as having precisely two sides, the sexual side (which you had a problem with) and everything else (which you didn’t).
It turns out you DO have a problem with the everything else side.
That is incompleteness posing as completeness, which is inaccuracy.
Why would you be hurt by this?: this is honest curiosity on my part, because I don’t understand that sort of thinking. I can’t see any harm to you, so I find myself confused.
Good thing I didn’t claim, in my original statement, to be stating anything precise about polyamory or about my own list of preferences. Else I’d be in trouble.
It is the harm of not being Most Important. This is something I value—it makes me happy to be the center of my partner’s world, and her mine. I consider removal of things I value to be harms.
jmed, you seem to consider admitting previous inaccuracy a bad thing. This whole site is based around the idea that coming in, one will be wrong, and leaving one will be less wrong. Why is it so hard for you to accept that what you wrote was wrong?
Would you feel similarly harmed if your partner revealed that she considered all of her friends and family put together (as a collective, but not individually) to be more important than you as an individual?
Considering I already, in the comments of this one LW post, apologized to various folks for being unclear and using terms inaccurately (“swinger”), you seem to be mistaken.
It isn’t hard, when I actually agree that what I write is wrong, which certainly happens enough.
Why is it so hard for you to accept that your interpretation can be wrong? Especially given all the oft-repeated basic LW knowledge on miscommunication and people-talking-past-one-another?
Hmm. I feel like I would not be as hurt by that, because social network is important, but I would be surprised by it. I think my partner would abandon them to stay with me if such a choice were forced (let’s say by some sort of relocation protection program whereby she is safe with me or without me, but once the choice is made, no contact with me or them can ever be made again).
Because I am looking at what you wrote, not what you think you wrote.
You wrote that you’d want a person to give up the sexual side of poly, but not the other side. This says that there are two parts to poly in your mind, and only the sexual part is a problem. This isn’t, in fact, true, the non-sexual side is also a problem to you; as the non-sexual part would still compromise your position of importance.
However I suppose this has dragged on long enough, and there is unlikely to be any value extracted from this part of the conversation, so you may feel free to state your piece, and I will read it, but probably not respond unless you request me to.
Okay, thank you for the information. It’s a valuable insight into how other people differ from me. You are certainly the sort of person who I would call naturally monoamorous, and incapable of happy polyamory. By the sounds of it you and your partner are both happy with this, so :-D.
EDIT: I suppose, to avoid being hypocritical, I should apologise for my incorrect belief that you were unwilling to accept being incorrect :p
Ditto.
Yup yup. And :-D to you figuring out what makes you happiest, and finding others with whom to live that way.
Accepted, and thanks again.
I’ve been making my way through this whole thread & haven’t seen a few of the responses I would have made, so I’ll just leave them here for posterity.
Also, I haven’t tried the quote syntax yet, so we’ll see if this works cleanly...
There are a few things I would say here.
First, how does this really differ from monogamous relationships, other than in frequency? People get broken up with, neglected, and otherwise treated in bad ways in both kinds of relationships, not just the polyamorous ones.
If anything, I’d think that being dumped & seeing your ex with another partner would be far worse alone than with other people who still care. Or on the more trivial side, if my partner prefers to do something without me one night, I can’t call another partner to do something if I’m monogamous, because I don’t have one! (Which isn’t to say that I’m not cheating, the possibility of which seems like a huge mark against monogamy, at least if we’re just going to sit here & ask what could go wrong, and how badly.)
This is all to say that I feel just as replaceable & vulnerable in monogamous relationships as I do in polyamorous relationships.
But what about feeling special when you’re not unique to your role (at a given time)?
I think the analogy (sometimes not an analogy at all) of friendships is better than the one about mothers loving their children that I’m seeing thrown around here. It also illustrates the point that some people do come up short. Some people are not the best friend of anyone, just as some people might not be a poly-primary for anyone, and who probably wouldn’t have the easiest time finding a meaningful monogamous life partner either.
But let’s assume things go well in your love life & friendships. Just because I have other friends doesn’t mean I’m incapable of being exclusive best friends with just one person, or that that person can’t change over time. (This is, in fact, something I have had more success in with friendships than with monogamous relationships, despite fewer social expectations to guide it.) This is where the analogy to monogamy ends, but the analogy to polyamory goes all the way down.
At times in life, I’ve been fortunate to have whole little groups of very close friends, each of whom I would describe as best friends & each with different or similar merits. I never thought any of them less than special to me, nor did it even occur to me that I should, since they were important in my life. (And similar to polyamory but dissimilar to monogamy, nothing kept these friendships together past their due date, which isn’t to say that all of them have ended either.) I like to think that my friends got the same feeling from me, but certainly they made me feel special, lack of exclusivity & all.
I won’t spell out the rest of the friend/poly analogy, since it’s similar down through the other levels of closeness, but I will point out the one major thing I think it overlooks.
None of this can address the fact that monogamous people place a great deal of value on sexual exclusivity in a way that makes sex itself special. This is a fundamental difference which I think has something in common with orientation, though it seems more malleable than that. If you’re poly, chances are you don’t feel special because of the act of sex itself so much as the person sharing it with you. I don’t mean to diminish the former, or to say that the latter isn’t important to monogamous people, because it is; but I would say that there’s a marked difference in emphasis, at least from my experience. (A better writer could get at this more accurately.) The point, anyhow, is that in switching to polyamory, I found that the sources of my feeling special were distinct from what they had been. Not better or worse, just different. So as far as feeling special goes, I can’t say that I’m actually inspired to feel special by exclusivity, but there are other equally valid ways that I do.
And one last point not directly in reply to jmed’s post. Jealousy is a common problem often brought up, and rightly so. It’s destructive, powerful, involuntary, and difficult to manage, not unlike anger. I find it both interesting & odd that anger management is common, yet jealousy management is not.
With anger, there’s a widespread public consciousness that it’s possible (if difficult) to learn to move past it, even if that doesn’t mean we’re perfect at that; that there are plenty of programs & groups out there to help people do this; and that social expectations are so high in this regard that public outbursts of anger are hardly tolerated.
As for jealousy, there are small bubbles of consciousness (fortunately with a great deal of overlap with poly communities!) about similar control over one’s emotions, insofar as possible, but it doesn’t seem to be something many people work on, nor are they expected to do so. It is in this regard, and this only, that I view polyamory as preferable to monogamy, and not merely alternative to it. A cultural change would make it a moot point, but for now poly people seem to do a better job with it because, one, they’re forced to, and two, they get more practice.
Hopefully someone reading through this thread a year from now will get to this post & think “Aha! I was just wondering why no one brought that up.” Or maybe I’ll be the only one who stirs up old news.
What??! Oh my, how differently this works for me. I am attracted to many, many people, and they are ALL irreplaceable, nevermind relationships, my very attraction to them is irreplaceable! People are fascinating and unique, and in every case there is a mixture of common, less common, and unique features that contribute to the attraction, as well as memories of experiences I shared with them. The idea that by pursuing an attraction to someone else in anyway means that any given attraction is not special is an insult to my feelings! In many cases, I love these people more than I can even express and would, were it not for limitations of time and persuasion, do more things than there are names for with them, and indeed whole different sets of such things with each one, and that’s if I couldn’t persuade anyone to do them in larger groups. I am unspeakably sad that I almost never get to do any of things, and unspeakably grateful that get to do even the more mundane things I ordinarily do with my friends, and indeed to have met them and interacted with them at all.
I am not a very successful poly in real life, mostly I think because I have literally never met another poly and have therefore been operating on the basis of trying to convert monos, but when I occasionally have periods of success I am so elated that I barely know what to do with myself—alas, I fear in many cases I am not even able to communicate this to my partners. So please, please, if I love you, no matter whatever else I do, think anything but that you are not special to me!
Well, with my closer, romantic partners, yes.
But being in the top 4 is special enough for me. I don’t need to be someone’s world, I don’t WANT to be someone’s world, I just want to be one of the people they think of first.
A) harem is the wrong term IMO. There are poly people who have harems (and are thereby members of harems, for poly is generally symmetrical) but most I know don’t bother with such purely sexual relationships.
B) I am not easily replaced by any of my paramours. In one of my relationhips, I am the primary, the one who is lived with, and the one she comes home to. No other partner supplies that role. In the other relationship, I am her pet, her submissive, a perfect servant (a state I thoroughly enjoy on occasion, but could not live with 24⁄7). None of her other partners could adopt that role.
Poly people will rarely have two partners alike. Each partner provides something unique, that no-one else does.
And poly removes the big fear of monogamy: if one of my partners finds someone who supplies something I don’t, they won’t leave me for that person, because I supply something that person doesn’t. The relationship will only end if it becomes a negative, rather than merely if it isn’t the best available.
IOW: Poly makes me feel LESS replaceable. Because I fill a unique slot, that isn’t just the “relationship” slot, I can’t be replaced by anyone else.
If someone’s poly situation is so vulnerable that your questions would knock them out of it, then it is probably a good thing that they be knocked out of it now; and have a chance to reconsider, before they get in any deeper.
Interesting. Thank you.
Mainly I was concerned on behalf of Alicorn, because she just recently hacked herself into it, and also because she and MBlume had split up previously for whatever reason. That made it feel potentially more fragile than longer-established poly relationships, hence my comment.
Well, from the post, I would say that they are off for a good start. She put together a list of motivations, and she said she was already “naturally predisposed” for that sort of thing (I would guess a jealous person, or someone with strongly rooted convinctions about monogamy woulnd’t have ever thought to give it a try, and would have just said to MBlume “no thanks”, walked off, and tried to find another suitable partner). She might not have thought of poly in the first place, and the original motivation to enter into this kind of relationship might have had more to do with her desire to date MBlume (to her, it must have been a rather serious perk: she decided to go live in another place, she changed a rather important part of her life) than with her innate curiosity about that kind of life-style, but judging from her initial outlook, even before deciding to give it a try she didn’t seem too adverse to it (I would say she might even have considered it anyway, some years down the road, given the right stimulus). And even in the events of things ending badly… well, it’s not as if she couldn’t go back to the way things were before.
I will say this: she didn’t mention any jealousy, on either part, and the “ground rules” she put in place seem to have reassured her of her status, so I would say that her odds are pretty good. The fact that she feels confortable enough with her boyfriend to tell him “stay home with me, tonight” or to put down some rules about marriage and the prospect of children seems to indicate that they have pretty good communication, which is the most important thing anyway (the situation might have been different had MBlume’s girlfriend been in a primary relationship with him, at the time, because then Alicorn could have ended up in a “subordinate” position and I guess she woulnd’t have enjoyed being the third wheel).
We were in a sort of pseudo-primary situation which wasn’t working that well. She broke up with me just as Alicorn and I were about to start seriously talking about how this would work, so the point became moot (though it did trigger a lot of concern on my end over whether I might be rebounding).
I agree with all of this.
You said what I tried to say, but better. Thank you.
Yes, and I do feel special to my partners; there’s been one in particular with whom that’s not fulfilled and often a source of tension, but that has more to do with the realities of our relationship and the differences in our neurology. The majority of the people I’m seeing could scarcely do more to make it clear to me how important, special and loved I am in their eyes.
You appear to be conflating non-monogamy with emotionally-shallow, superficial relationships undertaken primarily for sex.
I am in favor of a socially-connected human existence that involves an extended family/tribe of friends that one loves in different ways. What differentiates this from poly, other than sex?
Specifically, your assumption that having multiple sexual relationships negates the “specialness” of any sexual relationship that does occur.
Virtually any meaningful association of humans connected primarily by filial, affectional or social bonds could be described this way. It’s not specific enough by itself to differentiate polyamory from monogamy.
I was responding to your actual objection:
...which immediately implies that having multiple sexual partners must somehow be synonymous with not desiring or having that sense of specialness.
So insofar as you admit you don’t get poly, your statement is honest—but the assumptions underlying it are mistaken. Many poly people want the same thing you do (a sense of specialness) and do not feel it’s jeopardized by seeing their partners emotionally or physically intimate with someone else.
And yes, there are some poly or otherwise nonmonogamous people whose desires and preferences probably don’t map to yours so readily. But some of us do understand what you want in a partnership, want it ourselves, and find it compatible with nonmonogamy.
Thanks for providing your perspective. I understand now that poly people get the sense of specialness in other ways, although how they accomplish it still eludes me on a visceral level. Intellectually, I see Alicorn and her insistence on being primary and on being able to demand exclusive time as accomplishing this sort of thing, but it still feels like not enough. But that’s just (unhacked) me. Thanks again.
From my other dialogue with you, I suspect that the difficulty is that you seek a much higher level of specialness than many poly people do.
To me, the level of specialness you seek would seem actively undesirable; while to you the level of specialness I enjoy might seem insufficient.
These were parameters that either of us would have insisted upon, BTW. I’d been in a more nearly “undifferentiated partners” arrangement previously and had felt really insufficiently cared-for.