I normally don’t post on HN, but I wanted to to add some clarity to this. My wife and I are poly. We’ve been poly for about a decade, we were in a triad for two years (all three partners in relationships with one another), and have had many committed relationships over that time.

It’s absolutely not for everyone, and anyone who says folks are “too square” are needlessly self-righteous. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about polyamory. It’s frankly playing relationships on hard, and you need to be extra committed to working things out early and often. With the right personalities, it can force better relationship health because of the high risk, high reward nature of the lifestyle. I credit poly with giving me and my wife the skills to have hard conversations early and work through problems in good faith, and we do our best to conduct ourselves the same way in all our relationships in order to practice polyamory ethically.

I also take issue with you saying it can “never” work. It absolutely can, but as I said, it’s not for everyone. It also doesn’t mean every relationship lasts forever. Looking at any relationship in isolation, it’s just dating; people fall in and out of love naturally, and there’s very normal feelings of pain and loss sometimes. Those same feelings don’t stop monogamous folks from dating, and it’s the same in poly. But when that fallout does occur, there’s a wider safety net of people who are close to you and care about you and have more intimate understanding of you than having them as a friends alone, so there are definitely advantages if you put in the effort.

Because it does involve very different configurations of relationships when there’s more than one, poly requires rethinking what relationships mean generally, and it allows for a wider variety of relationship types, and I don’t just mean a linear friends with benefits to committed marriage. I mean accepting a broader range of human interactions and expectations as part of a valid relationship.

The result, if you’re willing to do the work and if it’s something you WANT to do, is a very rich set of experiences and deep relationships you might not have if you were monogamous.

So in short: it can work, it’s not for everyone and requires way more work than monogamy, and it is also inherently no better or worse than monogamy.