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.
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.