Polyamory doesn't liberate; monogamy doesn't protect

Myself, I am in an open relationship but I know that what I consider poly is a line I do not wish to cross. I know that just it is not for me. I don't consider myself poly. (To be very clear, this is not a judgement on being poly. I have several poly friends. I just don't know why we group all of them together)

Mixing these has made having discussions with some people more difficult. So I am not really sure why we are grouping all... non traditional relationship structures into poly.

That all aside. I find whenever this topic comes up to be quite interesting. I don't live in SF but I am a gay man. I know very few gay couples that are not at least "door ajar" as I have heard a few explain it. I have had a few people ask me why I am open, and honestly I don't like that question. To me the better question is, "why not?". And you may have a valid reason, maybe you are a very jealous person, maybe you just don't want too and thats perfectly valid.

But to me this boils down the problem isn't monogamy, being open, poly, or however you want to define your relationship (or lack of one). The problem is the assumption of monogamy. Not ever having that discussion, and honestly having the discussion without jumping to doing something because you think it's the way you are supposed too.

I do find some of the numbers presented here to be interesting, particularly the divide between men and woman. But I honestly can't really speak on that since I don't really have much exposure to this world outside of the LGBT world.

Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.

I've never seen a poly relationship make it past 10 years and I've never seen a poly relationship without significant issues that you wouldn't see in a monogamous relationship. Furthermore, there simply isn't enough time in the day for poly to work. You sleep for eight hours, work for eight hours, and then have eight hours in your day left for everything else. Even if you perfectly split your free eight between two people, you're going to quickly become a boring person whose entire personality is the fact that you're poly, god forbid you have a commute or a kid.

I don't own my partner and she doesn't own me. I give myself freely to her and she does the same. It's not about expectation, but commitment. I promise her she's the only one for me, despite my very human desires, and she promises me the same thing. This is healthier than the pervasive "ownership" mental model, because we both very much are aware that we have human and animal desire, and understand that the commitment is freely given. We don't get mad at each other for being attracted to other people, and feel no jealousy, we would feel betrayed if the other broke the commitment, because we were promised something by the other.

The idea that monogamy is the default in relationships outside of marriage is a very new thing in US culture. There was a time, not so long ago, when the point at which monogamy began was marriage, or for some, engagement. Needing to define being single in over convoluted terms like "polyamory" is a bit ridiculous.

I've always been very casual about these things with partners. Some can't handle it, they're jealous by nature or something. Usually, being clear "we aren't committed until we talk about that and commit" is a pretty easy to digest thing for people, even if they default to the opposite usually.

On a less personal note, it's no coincidence I think that the most successful cultures in the world were and are monogamous by social expectation. Polyamorous social structures are not conducive to responsibility with regard to rearing children, and are more often than not to leave women in a difficult position. As such, women expect commitment from men where there are few options to prevent pregnancy. That's not to say anything about the spread of disease. Jealousy is still a problem, and leads to conflict. Polygamous social structures, the second most successful of the reproduction/sex oriented social structures, lead to swathes of unmarried men, and you get rejections from the tribe, hostile takeovers, warlike cultures designed to dispose of the men who will not hope to reproduce. Monogamy is the stable arrangement and it shows. Other more exotic complex social arrangements tend to be very niche, small tribal groups relegated to basically Africa, and don't scale well.

I think if young people want to have fun, do it, be clear, if someone doesn't like it that's their decision to not participate. But slapping labels on it like it's some revolution in sexual dynamics is silly. Be prepared to outgrow your exploration, read the allegory of Chesterton's fence to understand why.

Sexless and loveless are both well documented in research and polls. People fucking less than past decades, fewer being in relationships than than past decades, and more reporting being alone and lonely than past decades.

Not that it's literally "coercive" -- they're not being forced to be in that relationship in any real sense. But the dynamic I often observe (well, infer from observations) is that a person would really like to monogamous or polyamorous (or a different kind of polyamorous---just, they want to be in a different status) but feels they aren't allowed to assert what they want from their partner(s), and a result is being somewhat "degraded" by the status of their relationship. They may even believe they are happy with everything, because it's the best thing they can feel they can get, but often (I suspect) there's an arrangement they would be much happier with, if they could bring themselves to insist on it.

After all a person ought to aspire to be physically and emotionally secure enough to assert what they need from their partners, even if that risks the partner leaving them, and they ought to be able to find partnerships in which their partner respects them enough to compromise or negotiate if it is something they truly need.

But I suspect a lot of people aren't there, and being mono/poly is often a "workaround": if you don't believe you can fully assert the relationship you want, sometimes you can get half of it by becoming monogamous/polyamorous instead even if it's not truly your preference. And maybe that lets you avoid the issue, sometimes for years. But it's never as as good as being able to get what you truly want.

(Occasionally I mention this vibe to people and they react negatively---"who are you to question other people's decisions?", they say. And at one level they're right, because yes, everyone out there is pretty much day-to-day making the best decision they can see to make for themselves, so if they're coping with their world by being in a certain kind of relationship, it's not really our place to doubt them.

But on the other hand, you can sense when someone is not living their best life, whether it be living the relationship they want or having the job / friends / beliefs / sexuality / gender that they want. You can't be sure, but these things do show a bit through cracks in the way that people talk and act. So I think it's fair to observe this phenomenon and speculate about it, so long as you never push anyone to "admit" to it, or to change before they're ready.)

Basically: what’s being advertised is mostly the “happy path”. Everything goes well until it doesn’t, what then?

Relationships are hard. There are a number of ways things get messy (and/or toxic) with two individuals, somehow things should improve with more than two persons ?

If there's an equivalent article which focuses more on the machinery of long-term polyamorous relationships that would be interesting.

0: It's not that we're old but that we will be old by the time we're done.

Generalizing wildly, "going poly" seems to be driven by one partner's selfishness and the other partner's desire to please. It has resulted in breakup of the original dyad in 100% of cases.

1. Being a very particular sort of person (I'm going to guess specifically Bay Area tech or tech-adjacent rationalist), the author is surprised to find that his personal experience of poly dating is different to what the statistics say. Is it the author's social group? His preferences? A limitation of his context? Nope, it's "statistics, culture, and biology". I find this to be generally true of rationalist writing: why reflect when you can generalise?

2. "most things conceptualized as identity are silly" is a pretty significant axiom to assert halfway down a section on definitions, immediately underneath the Classical Greek Forms of Love infographic. The article's first conclusion is just this same premise restated, leaving me suspicious of whatever reasoning occured in between.

3. It's hard to even find the author's actual perspective through all the equivocation. Monogamy and polyamory are both deluded in their own ways, they both say they're natural, but really the most natural thing is... incel-tier sexual economics? And maybe that's bad, or maybe not, so you should do what feels right for you. But also it's really about your attachment wounds, so maybe just do whatever's easiest. Or maybe just pick one and stick with it. But you can (and probably will) change your mind. In conclusion, the important thing is to be thoughtful and considered in our choices and the effect they have on society.

As far as I can tell, the actual truth of this piece is that the author is in a community where polyamory is the norm. He really tried to make it work for him but it didn't. He's not poly anymore and kinda thinks the whole thing is busted, but doesn't want to alienate his community. So he's just wafting a general sense of intellectualised discontent into the air and hoping for the best. I mean, fine, but I don't think we needed to get to Level Seven of The Spiral to do it.

Afterwards, oddly enough, I wound up in a friendship for a while with a different woman who had just broken up with her fiance for almost the same reason. In her case she had always been open about wanting to be Poly, her fiance had been okay with it, and I guess changed his mind the closer they got towards marriage. She left him because he wanted to change the parameters of the relationship and she didn't.

I wound up talking to the second woman a lot about polyamory and my unhappiness with how my ex had treated me. One night we met for coffee and she basically spent the whole time trashing me. She called me a loser for still being upset about my ex, she told me I was a miserable sad sack of a person and I needed to get over it, etc. Once she was done with that, she proceeded to tell me (in unwelcome and unwanted detail) about a lot of the latest sex parties she had been attending and how excited it made her to be living her fantasies. Then she casually asked if I wanted to go back to her place and screw (which was not our relationship up to that point). I declined, told her I didn't want anything to do with her anymore and left. She spent a couple of weeks asking me what she had done wrong. I mostly ignored her but even when I tried to explain she just argued with me, then eventually she cut me off with a long tirade where she acted like it was her choice not to have anything to do with me anymore, not mine

I'm aware that n=2 is not statistically significant, but those two encounters happening within the span of a few months kind of convinced me that people who are Poly are self-centered, emotionally stunted, and absolutely not suitable for any kind of long term relationship

Yeah a lot of monogamous relationships end these days too, but if this is representative of even a small fraction of poly people, I wonder if you can even call poly a relationship at all, really

I once asked a person who described themselves as 'ethically non-monogamous' what that meant, if it were possible to love more than one person. I was told I was presumptuous, I needed to do more reading, and she gave me multiple paragraphs that interspersed terms like 'the traditional family model' that suggested this was coming from literature.

So - unpopular opinion, and an alternative to "the world is reverting back to the original state of our ancestors with polyamory and hypergamy" -- what if a lot of these definitions are lifestyles that are catching on, due to certain personality proclivities that have always existed, and by making complex explanations we've given them acknowledgment?

In other words, niche lifestyles that have been very much studied and many academic essays written.

I think evolutionary speaking, it is neither that humans are by nature strictly monogamous nor polyamorous. I think what people are confused about is that evolution often benefits from conflicts of interest between individuals. It also can both benefit from societal norms and from deviations from them. It can benefit from honesty and from deception. It can benefit from people doing their best to figure out and live by what their personal nature is and by people trying to overcome their nature to become something they think is better than that.

Multiple loves, versus getting it on with others once in a while, but not forming lasting relationships with them.

My partner and I have open relationship. We don't "date" other people, and actively avoid the baggage that comes with people who try to turn it into that. But a sexcapade or romp is fair.. we might be sexy, but not the only sexy people on the planet.

Monogamy is coercive.

For a lifestyle that tries to sound “open,” this is an incredibly judgemental view to take on the many people who don’t live your lifestyle.

Some of this attitude reminds me of hearing “nobody cares if you’re not tattooed” in my tooth, from tattooed people. Right before insisting I should get a tattoo to be like them.

To be clear, I don’t care what 2, 3 or 30 consenting adults do in their personal lives. I wonder if the negative view of monogamy is just the immaturity of youth and those people have since grown out of that position?

It's like using those insult word, except with a new word, and then a thing that was immoral then becomes cool.

My experience: started a poly thing, after about 3 months she closed her couple and went monogamous again.

It's like arguing "we don't need to wear clothes" except there are sociological, historical reasons that we wear clothes, it's not about being progressive or not.

> I believe that it is valuable to deeply interrogate nature, not because it is intrinsically right, but because it helps us to understand what materials we are working with.

Also the author mentions Robert Sapolsky, whose work I absolutely adore. If you haven't read any of his books or watched interviews/lectures with him, definitely do so! If you want to understand human nature, he's a phenomenal resource.

The primary drive of every living creature from whales to amoeba is to procreate. Having children is WHY we have a sex drive and an urge to have relationships in the first place.

Tons of studies show children require stability in the relationships in their lives. Poly may work great for people without children, but children need the stability of long term committed parents who are always there and this is best provided by monogamy.

/facepalm

However, I dove into it, read a lot of books, and decided to give it a try and was dating 3 women at once, while trying to also meet a huge number of other major life responsibilities, and the scheduling alone was a living nightmare. Having a deep and meaningful relationship with one person already takes the maximum amount of my time that I could possibly allocate to romance. Three time constrained and shallow relationships are maybe 1/100th as satisfying as one good one to me - I actually felt more lonely when I was dating 3 women, even though one was only dating me.

I would go on a trip or adventure, and have to keep 3 women updated on my well being and whereabouts. I would accidentally mix up my schedule, and have to rearrange 3 other peoples schedules to fix it- including managing a lot of resulting anger and jealousy. My snarky opinion is that polyamory is primarily for people that appreciate extra stress, busyness, logistics, scheduling, and conflict. I also feel it inevitably hurts people when you are more excited about a new partner than them, and it fundamentally requires a low level of empathy - and love - for your partners to be willing to hurt them in that way.

I think people should be free to do whatever they want, but I am skeptical that polyamory is anything but awful for people that have regular levels of human empathy, or have obligations like a career or children. I read almost every book I could on polyamory, and I felt the authors were almost universally sociopaths- and I could tell they were deeply harming other people in their own stories, and didn't even realize or care. For example, the book "The Ethical Slut" the author literally describes raping people, and is completely oblivious, and thinks they are "helping open them to new experiences."

In most countries guys just quiety see a prostitute and have a great time without inflicting weird justifications for their horniness on their families.

So Musk is building a harem now?

Richard Dawkins made the same point about humans being roughly between polyamory and monogamy 20 years ago in the Ancestors Tale (and others likely made the points before that). And the evo-psy people have been saying all these points for similarly long...

It should be multiamory.