Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, built in male ev-psych concern about sex (and really it’s the connection to paternity) vs female concern about resource investment. Poly people argue you can learn to get over these things, but I’m not so sure.

I remember reading poly tends to appear in communities where there are men with very high status and wealth. In that context it makes sense men would push for harems (like a gorilla) and try to persuade others to do this too (obviously with more complex better sounding arguments than “I want a harem”), but I remain pretty skeptical.

Ultimately people can do what they want. I’m just skeptical it’d work out.

Of course it’s in my interest to argue that otherwise dating gets even worse for men so who knows?

I thought this rationally speaking podcast on the topic was great: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/216-being-a-transhumani...

This Sam Harris podcast about why people cheat was also really good: https://youtu.be/N4B9krAxIpY

The latter goes into interesting things like how men tend to ask “did you sleep with him” and women focus on “do you love her”. The former being an obvious risk of the baby not being yours and “wasting” resources on someone else’s baby, the latter showing risk of abandonment of investment. The selective pressures for this psychology seems reasonable. Also sex is a commodity for women, not for (most) men - how it’s valued is different.

They also talk about why each side cheats (more interesting in the women case imo) and things like how women tend to (unknowingly) curate backup mate options to protect against disaster.

My hypothesis is the nastiness directed towards women that sleep around is also tied up in this stuff too. It lowers investment required from men. Women have an incentive to shame others from doing this even if they don’t really know why they do so.

I’d be careful with ev-psych explanations. It often reads as trying to find some rational sounding explanation for what are really just social norms. And these norms evolve: in my experiences in the free-for-all of app-enabled dating, attitudes run the gamut for both men and women… you’ll meet women looking for casual sex and men looking for an emotional connection.

Yeah this is a fair flag and a risk with this kind of thinking I try to be cautious of. It can be hard to know what’s a cultural norm. Plus there’s always over-fitting and high variability within a group (always outliers and exceptions).

Still, I’ve so far found it to hold up a lot of the time even with apps and modernity. What people say and how they behave are different. People often add after the fact narratives and say one thing while doing something else.

That's a backwards way of looking at it.

It is typical for passion to fade in relationships and superficially it often looks like the woman has lost passion first and people come to conclusions like "men like sex better than women like sex." I think actually women are quicker to get bored with boring monogamous sex whereas many men will tolerate mediocre sex (keeps your prostate gland for clogging up for one thing...)

The highest libido women have a higher sexual capacity than the highest libido men. It's a consequence, for one thing, of the refractory period of the male organ. Assuming a poly relationship involves some amount of emotional closeness and seriousness it's hard to believe a poly man can really serve more than 2 or 3 women at a time but a woman who is sexually voracious can have 5 or more lovers. Quite a few women who are not responsive with their husbands might experience a sexual awakening with somebody else, if only because of the power of new relationship energy.

So Poly in the modern world is not about a man having a harem (women have multiple partners too) but instead people developing networks for passion, mutual support, resource sharing, etc. Personally I have been there and done that with children but I still like the feelings of falling in love and I want to develop those feelings and share them with people as a high art.

> “I think actually women are quicker to get bored with boring monogamous sex whereas many men will tolerate mediocre sex”

Women have easy access to sex in a way that most men don’t. I think that’s probably the reason men are happy to have anything. I don’t know that I buy women care a lot about novel sex after the novelty wears off.

> “a woman who is sexually voracious can have 5 or more lovers”

I doubt the men are happy about this for the reasons I talk about. Yes, lots of women have lots of partners in their 20s when they’re high status and lots of men are competing for them. IME most burn out of this and find it unfulfilling about the time it also starts to become more competitive, there’s no investment.

> “So Poly in the modern world is not about a man having a harem (women have multiple partners too) but instead people developing networks for passion, mutual support, resource sharing, etc.”

This is the thing I’m skeptical of. Men are willing to sleep with pretty young women and will put up with competing with others if they must (don’t have a choice, fairly rare for young women not to have some sort of partner), but would rather not. Women eventually want investment, but will sleep around when they’re young to size up mates (and because it’s fun). High status men would be okay with poly if it meant they had lots of female partners only and pretend it’s all this other stuff.

I just don’t think you can turn off billions of years of selective pressures around these feelings. Maybe you can choose to ignore them, but I’m not so sure.

This. If I were looking for a magic spell to make people impervious to seducing and being seduced I would make them think the way you do. (e.g. evolutionary psychology, black-pill, any-pill, etc.)

I spend my time thinking about the opposite kind of spell.

I am feeling limerent for someone right now. When it started I was just practicing charming people (which I take absolutely seriously, do it to develop metamours, but also find gratifying in itself) but then I got a response and it really got to me.

I don't compare this person to anyone else. I can't say she is a "7" or an "8" or "9". I don't idealize her absolutely but for all practical purposes she is perfect. I know she is receptive, I know she is vulnerable, I know she'll be disappointed if I don't take the next step. I could go into my past and remember being bullied in school and have many reasons to think I don't measure up but I don't go there because she is on the hook and I know I am good enough.

Also I know most people aren't that good about relationships, don't understand their own feelings, don't understand other people, don't see other people, don't listen, are too self-centered, etc. Based on my own ignorance and not wanting to feed my grandiosity (and conjugate feelings of worthlessness) I resist deciding what percentile my seduction skills are in, but I know my results aren't drawn from the same statistical distribution as the median person.

If you look at survey studies it's not so obvious that young people who are having casual sex are motivated by the desire for sex so much as what casual sex means for their relationship with the group. This is true for both women and men in somewhat different ways. (those "pickup artists" who I distance myself from are a homosocial community of men who like to boast about their conquests with other men and compare their experiences with abstract models who seem impervious to the many joys you can get from being a woman)

If you are looking at love as a process of comparison, sizing up, or sampling you are not going to feel it. If you jump in with both feet it's something different.

As for pretty young women I am still scratching my head because I see a lot of them and it's dawned on me that against all odds some of them like me as an animal but I agree with this guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal

that love starts with admiration. It's easy for me to admire somebody my own age who's got a lot of history and accomplishments but I haven't figured out how to deeply admire somebody young. I'm getting good at "showing not telling" my appreciation for their looks but I if I want to get good quality love and lust out of them in I need to see something that other people don't see and learning to see that and communicate that I see that is important.

I don't have any time for defeatism, actually I get better advice from my imaginary friends than I get from rationalists and manospherists.

The paradoxical thing is that evolutionary psychology seems to have little relevance to human sexual behavior. Probably hunter-gatherers were poly. Female orgasm is a thing but is by no means necessary for reproduction. Different cultures have very different ideas about love, family structure, etc. (Stehdahl's book On Love claims that attitudes were widely different in different countries in Europe and even in times a few decades apart in France.)

>it's not so obvious that young people who are having casual sex are motivated by the desire for sex so much as what casual sex means for their relationship with the group.

This was anecdotally true for me, at least. My group of male friends put sex on a pedestal in such a way that having sex with women made me more popular and highest status my male friends, and boosted my self-esteem as well. It's not that sex wasn't enjoyable for its own sake (especially considering I had so much less of it back then), but there were strong, additional non-sex reasons to pursue sex. So it's hard to disentangle all the different motivations.

> I need to see something that other people don't see and learning to see that and communicate that I see that is important.

This simultaneously strikes me as both a fascinating line of thought and overly simplistic. People aren't endlessly, perfectly competitive and rational the way many economic models assume we are. Sometimes being a reliable, quality, present, and attentive companion is enough to win a person's love and affection, even if there's someone "better" out there who might see things in them you don't see. And while seeing something unique in a person occurs in a moment, lasting companionship is lasting by definition. As you said, admiration is only the start.

Still, the skill of truly seeing another person in a unique way is a good one. It's good for the people you know, and it's good for your own self, your ability to learn from others, appreciate them, and grow from meeting them.

> I just don’t think you can turn off billions of years of selective pressures around these feelings. Maybe you can choose to ignore them, but I’m not so sure.

I've been involved in non-monogamous (and sometimes polyamorous) relationships for the past 7 years or so. What I've found is there are other options besides turning off or ignoring difficult feelings. The best option, for me at least, has been simply learning how to deal with them.

For example, jealousy frequently manifests as an obsessive rumination about the new paramour and your partner's feelings for them. There are a thousand leaves on that tree, and no solace to be found even if you pluck each and every one of them. What matters are the hidden roots of jealousy, which usually consist of insecurity, fueled by uncertainty.

Does my partner still want me? Are they still attracted to me? Do they still love me? Do I still turn them on? What will happen? Is this the beginning of the end? Will our connection suffer? If so, how far will it slide? Will we still spend time together, share love together?

These are some of the hidden questions that underly jealous ruminations and thoughts. And sometimes the best antidote is to simply ask these questions to your partner. Ask for reassurance and clarity, so you aren't suffering and wondering. I had one partner in particular who was great at anticipating these feelings during predictably tough moments, and providing loving reassurance in advance. It was magical how quickly it dissolved jealousy.

Beyond that, exposure therapy work wonders. Fearing that something will harm you, then experiencing it, and surviving it with minimal harm, repeatedly. It has a dulling effect on fear. You see it in people all over the world, who can walk tight ropes, jump out of planes, perform on stage in front of millions, approach strangers on the street, etc., all without the fear and worry they had when they first started. Dealing with jealousy with a particular partner isn't a much different mountain to climb.

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