Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

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> the collective learning of uncountable generations

Wisdom in one context can be foolishness in another. To live a good life it is necessary to re-evaluate the actions of your forebears and determine if it is still applicable to your modern context. That doesn't make someone a "social iconoclast", it makes them wise. Our ancestors did the same thing to their ancestors. Homo sapiens is 300,000 years old, and our societies have changed a lot since then, and will continue to change.

Note that I personally have no desire to be anything other than monogamous, but I know several people (both young and elderly) who are successfully polyamorous. I also know people who have catastrophically failed at polyamory; but then, of course, I also know people who have catastrophically failed at monogamy.

As far as I'm concerned, normalizing polyamory will strengthen monogamy. It seems like some people out there just aren't cut out for monogamy, and in a monogamous world they inevitably become cheaters. Let the polyamorous people remove themselves from the monogamous dating pool and you will exclusively remove people who would otherwise be compelled to cheat.

I like this take. Already you see specialization of dating apps toward different relationship styles, with Hinge more focused on Monogamy, Tinder on the casual/singles crowd, and Feeld for the nonmonogamous.

I agree this is decidedly positive for the monogamous folks. There is now less risk of them connecting with and falling in love with someone who isn’t a good match.

In your example, there’s a group of people who aren’t cut out for monogamy and are a problem for society no matter what. But I think there’s a much larger group of people that could do it in a society that offers them strong support and reinforcement, who will fail and flounder in a society that leaves them free to make choices.

In my culture, neither divorce nor cheating are socially acceptable. Now, I’m happily married to my wife. But I’m also aware that I had better do everything I can to make my marriage happy, because that’s it. My social standing would be devastated if I got divorced. People would be talking about me in hushed tones 12,000 miles away.

> In your example, there’s a group of people who aren’t cut out for monogamy and are a problem for society no matter what.

To be clear, in my example, polyamorous people are only a problem for society because that society has decided that polyamorous people are a problem. I am advocating for basing our societal mores on reasonable consideration from first principles rather than simply tradition.

> But I think there’s a much larger group of people that could do it in a society that offers them strong support and reinforcement, who will fail and flounder in a society that leaves them free to make choices.

While it is certainly possible to argue against the notion of such-and-such freedom, this appears to be making the following argument: "it is possible to imagine that greater individual freedom will result in undesirable collective outcomes, therefore, all of our traditional restrictions on individual freedom are necessary and may not be challenged." I find this argument to be unconvincing.

The support for this argument that you have given is of the general form: "I am incentivized to be a good husband because I would suffer socially if I were not; therefore, monogamy incentivizes positive relationships." I will counterargue that in a society where divorce is met with social ostracization, this disincentivizes being a good spouse, because you know that your partner is stuck with you even despite your bad behavior. My in-laws are proof of this: my mother-in-law refuses to divorce for religious reasons, despite the fact that my father-in-law is both abusive and a proven cheater. Her misery and guilt over her husband's infidelity does not benefit society in the least. And lest you think that this is a problem of society failing to properly ostracize the husband, rest assured that his children refuse to speak to him and he does not care in the slightest.

> To be clear, in my example, polyamorous people are only a problem for society because that society has decided that polyamorous people are a problem

Any problem for the society is like that. You can say robberies are a problem only because society decided it is. That's how society works - there's no some external source where it could be checked, so the implication that it's arbitrary baseless decision because it is social is wrong - all rules of thd society are such, so if you want to have any rules at all, those would be the ones you'd have. It's impossible to have a society where everyone derives their morals from the physical laws anew all the time.

> To be clear, in my example, polyamorous people are only a problem for society because that society has decided that polyamorous people are a problem

I’m pretty sure that no kid has thought to themselves “I wish my parents had a bunch of unstable relationships with many different people.” That’s not a social construct. Monogamy is one of the most universal practices, embraced by different, unrelated cultures that differ along many other dimensions. How did all those different societies reach the same arbitrary “decision?”

> will counterargue that in a society where divorce is met with social ostracization, this disincentivizes being a good spouse, because you know that your partner is stuck with you even despite your bad behavior.

Empirically, American subcultures in where divorce is taboo, such as Asians, Mormons, etc., are more successful—e.g. their kids have higher economic mobility—than other Americans. Indeed, divorce as a phenomenon has largely affected the lower classes. In affluent WASP circles divorce may not be as openly condemned the way it was, but it’s still taboo in a way that it isn’t among, say, Appalachians.

> I’m pretty sure that no kid has thought to themselves “I wish my parents had a bunch of unstable relationships with many different people.”

You're begging the question. Polyamory doesn't imply instability any more than monogomy does. I know people who have been in decades-long poly relationship.

What I do see happen often in poly and poly-adjacent communities, especially those with children, is that children become a more communal responsibility, somewhat mimicking the effect of larger, multi-generational households you see in Asian and Hispanic communities, which usually leads to higher stability and better outcomes.

>You're begging the question. Polyamory doesn't imply instability any more than monogomy does. I know people who have been in decades-long poly relationship.

It’s doesn’t logically imply it. But statistically they are much more unstable. There’s studies that show 90+% of open marriages end in divorce.

Sort of, maybe, probably not.

The study you're citing doesn't actually have a methodology that one can interrogate about how it reached this figure, and there's some fairly common patterns like opening a marriage in response to infidelity, that would create a misleading correlation between open marriages and unstable ones.

That's vastly different from entering into a relationship with the intent to be non-monogamous (and perhaps already having multiple partners), but is probably much more common, because, for whatever reason there's less of a taboo on sleeping around while married than on having multiple committed romantic relationships.

That’s entirely possible. It’s also entirely possible that something about starting a relationship monogamously and then transitioning has some kind of protective effect vs starting poly.

We don’t have enough data to tease out the cause. We can only say that open marriages, for whatever reason, are less stable than closed ones.

There is also, you know, just paying attention and drawing our own judgements from what we see with our own eyes.

Not that normal marriages are sunshine and rainbows. But I have yet to see a poly marriage with kids that wasn’t deeply disturbing. Though of course the primary folks said everything was fine.

Asian and Hispanic families are built around nuclear families (more strongly than even in the west). In my language, we have a whole set of words you don’t have in English for identifying relatives through marital relationships. (E.g. different words for maternal aunts versus paternal aunts.) It’s all highly structured around the assumption that marital relationships are durable.

Your conclusion here doesn’t follow from the premise - when two families or clans are marrying each other the result is not a nuclear family.

It’s not just a nuclear family, but the nuclear family is still the foundation of the larger structure. Everyone is precisely situated in relation to durable marital bonds between two specific people. It’s not some free for all. Yeah, the cousins all play together and the aunties cook dinner together, but there’s no ambiguity or imprecision about who is married to whom.

Asian multi-generational family structures are often invoked to justify fatherless children raised “by the community,” etc., and it drives me nuts. There is nothing liberal about us—we have some of the most rigid marriage norms and gender roles around.

> It’s all highly structured around the assumption that marital relationships are durable.

You're again begging the question!

Non-nuclear doesn't imply non-durable!

Reevaluate is fine, but I mostly see something like "oh it's all social construct" (somehow this implies it's worthless or even worse, oppressive) and that is considered enough to forego further consideration of comparative benefits. That's not evaluation, that's just hubristic dismissal.

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