There is one issue that I have with this article and most discussions around polyamory. That is mixing in open relationships and poly. There is a massive difference between, you can do whatever sexually you want and dating other people. There is an emotional difference.
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.
The poly vs open distinction is interesting because (anecdotally) I see some variation there between gay and lesbian relationships—it seems like gay dudes are more likely to be in a door-ajar couple, whereas the throuples I know are usually groups of lesbians!
Conversely, I don't see many poly gay dudes or door-ajar lesbian couples, and lesbians might be more monogamous on average.
I didn’t, and didn’t even know those behaviors. Discovered two staple of LGBT humour that are great, hope it doesn’t sound rambling for those who know it:
Question: What does a lesbian bring on a second date?
Answer: A U-Haul.
——
Question: What does a gay man bring on a second date?
Answer: What second date
Oh, I've heard of it... and have even been accused of doing it, lol. But I'm not sure it counts as u-hauling if you talk about marriage within the first month and then take another decade to tie the knot :P
From my experience. I only know a few poly gay men. I know far more gay couples in open relationships that have similar lines that I do when it comes to anything beyond that.
I mean, for sure those lines get blurry. Things that you may traditionally associate with dating like cuddling on the couch at a party (just a party, not anything more) or similar things. But, there is still that line.
I do wonder why that seems to be the case. I am reluctant to get into stereotypes to explain it...
Def agree that consensual non-monogamy (CNM) != polyamory, and there's a loottt of confusion out there around that distinction (and in this article and this HN thread, too).
I might be poly for the right people at the right time, but I'm not currently. However, I'm definitely CNM for life because all I want is to talk it out!
Well, that, and occasionally hook up with other people
They are often times grouped together because the people writing this blogs, articles, newspapers were never in a poly relation and have no clue about the topic they are writing (but of course they have an opinion without the experience and think it's ok to sell an opinion or morale piece as more than it is).
I think poly is kind of an umbrella term right now for a lot of different kinds of "multiple partners" type relationships. I am ENM (ethically non-monogamous) but if you're not familiar with the term (and most people aren't) saying poly is much easier. It is a bit like saying LGBT and including all the things that fit under the umbrella but aren't lesbian, gay, bi or trans.
It's not a very good umbrella term, the term itself implies a relationship structure where an individual is in multiple, involved intimate relationships. A couple in an open relationship where one or both partners engage in dalliances doesn't fall under that umbrella.
It's posible to draw such clear line? Surely, it's rather easy to convince oneself you have all your relationships nicely compartmentalized..till reality does otherwise.
Ajar, to mean, slightly open. So, not a open door (anyone), not a revolving door (everyone), and not a closed door (no one).
It's a bit of a contrived term and there's not much to read into it. It's like how "hitting a home run" is slang for getting laid, and rounding the bases was an associated metaphor that evolved from it; they only make sense by the association with the original metaphor.
> "And the names of them were Aholah the elder, and Aholibah her sister; and they always filled their ballrooms; the event was never small. Yea, for unto the records of the temple, they had the biggest balls of all." —Ez/Dz 60:9
The modern gay lifestyle harkens directly back to Jewish communities at the time of Christ, almost completely unchanged. Yet Jesus never condemned them.
21% of Americans have experimented with consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, far more than two decades ago
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 think you're making the claim much bigger than it is. The narrow interpretation of "consensual non-monogamy" does not imply a relationship. Having a threesome with your partner and your best friend already qualifies. Making out with a non-partner while your partner watches might already qualify, depending on how the question is understood.
See, you can say that but if it's treated as a one time thing and actually stays a one time thing, then probably the two people in the couple aren't going to go around calling their relationship "non-monogamous"
Time spent with different partners doesn't necessarily have to be equal. For instance a "comet partner" who you only spend a couple of days with every few months is one type of common poly relationship
> 21% of Americans have experimented with consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, far more than two decades ago
> Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.
I guess it depends a lot on how the terms are defined. If you include parallel dating (during the "non-exclusive" phase of dating), I could easily see this as being true.
I don't think most people are having sex with multiple people or even doing this parallel dating business. Parallel dating is less common than serial dating, and parallel dating with sex is even less common than parallel dating. It sure isn't looking like 20% of people to me. I avoid people like that too so maybe there is some selection bias.
A single threesome is enough to put all its participants into those 20 per cent, and according to studies, 10 per cent of women and 18 per cent of men had a threesome.
There is a majority of the cohort already, and if your friends perceive you as judgmental, they won't likely tell you that they have had one.
There's no way 18% of straight men had a threesome. That sounds like the kind of thing people would lie about. In any case, a single threesome is not "polyamory" and certainly not closely related to "parallel dating."
I think this might be less of "I now have two families" and more of "we brought a third person into the bedroom for a bit of spice once in a blue moon".
After some sleuthing I believe the original source for that statistic is [1]. But that’s a study of single adults which is a wildly different population than adults as a whole.
Good thing you figured out that non-monogamy simply doesn't work. Must feel good to finally get to the bottom of that! I'll make sure to inform the millions of Americans currently practicing it that you figured it out - simple arithmetic!
> 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.
Not everyone (or even necessarily anyone in a family) works full time, and not everyone who works, full-time or otherwise, works in an institution at arm’s length from the family, so even at the basic premises your argument about constraints suffers from false generalization problems. Observing that polyamorous family structure is suboptimally suited for a dystopian proletarian life in some extreme capitalism assumptions is accurate, but note that that the same observation has been made by many about monogamous relationships.
> Even if you perfectly split your free eight between two people,
Why are you assuming splitting time? A person can interact with more than one other person at a time.
> god forbid you have a commute or a kid.
Seems that in many ways having kids in a poly family would be easier than a monogamous nuclear family. The only problem I see with commutes is that a poly family unit is going to be forced into more complicated commute-optimization trade-offs (OTOH, the probability of having viable commute-sharing with at least one other partner is also higher, so there’s plusses and minuses on that front, too.)
It's wild that we can't differentiate lust and love, committed relationship and meaningless sex. That's the main thing I get from the confusion in the article and the confusion in the comments here about what even defines polyamory. It sounds to me like who you have sex with is the main and only thing that defines a relationship? Can people that wait to have sex until marriage ever be considered polyamorous while unmarried? If a married person gets close to a second person but doesn't do anything sexual with them are they still being monogamous?
Polyamory may literally just mean "Many loves" but I think we can all agree that we are not in a polyamorous relationship with our parents or close friends
The level of partnership doesn't have to be sex, but being real sex is the thing that most often differentiates romantic partnerships from other close relationships
> but being real sex is the thing that most often differentiates romantic partnerships from other close relationships
I don't actually agree. I think "willingness and continued intention to follow this person and live with them ever still, including the sacrifices that come along with it" tends to be something that connects more with relationships traditionally seen as romantic.
It's something that would separate a very close friendship from, for example, a "Queer Platonic Relationship", which could very arguably be romantic.
It can be difficult to differentiate between those, because you can have meaningless sex in a committed relationship and meaningful sex in a non-committed one. I have sex with several of my close friends because the difference between platonic love and romantic relationship is not very clear in my mind. And I've had relationships that are very close and intimate where I haven't had sex with them because while some of them have been romantic, they just haven't been physical.
> you can have meaningless sex in a committed relationship and meaningful sex in a non-committed one
no, I don't think this is true. The older I get the more I think there's real wisdom in being very careful about who you have sex with.
It will have meaning, whether you want it to or not, and it will be negative meaning like regret if you are not very careful.
Sex is extremely dangerous and it is only safe to engage in it with someone you know well and trust, and trust isn't to be given lightly. You will be at your most vulnerable with your partner, both during the act and potentially afterwards due to the hormonal effects and emotional effects as well as the potential physical consequences. "Safe sex" is a lie.
I don't think in the age of birth control that everyone needs to wait until marriage but we have gone very far in the other direction and I really wish someone had told me when I was younger that I would remember all of my partners in vivid detail, especially the ones I wish I could forget.
No, there is really no such thing as meaningless sex.
For our ancestors, not being choosy about sex had very serious consequences. (It still might.) It’s “wild” to you that 3 million years of evolution is working as intended?
I assume you are talking about our Hunter-gatherer ancestors based on the timeframe, but I'm not sure what you mean by serious consequences. Could you expand on that a bit?
I suspect monogamy as we know it is a response to the invention of agriculture, and we have closer relatives (the bonobos) who have sex much more freely than some of our other closer relatives.
EDIT: Whoops I misread the abstract of the article, that doesn’t really give evidence towards my claim. However STDs did exist and I’m assuming people knew about them. Pregnancy itself would be a deterrent
I think it depends on what we consider "meaningless".
Is it "meaningless" that I hang out with friends on a Friday night? We didn't really accomplish anything except for possibly growing our relationships.
I think when myself and many people say we have "meaningless" sex it just means that beyond that particular moment, it doesn't have any other purpose. (beyond maybe its with a friend and it does the same as going out for drinks and just grows a relationship).
It was fun in the moment, but thats it. It is the same as going out for drinks, playing a game, or any other activity that I engage with friends with. Of course it's not truly "meaningless" or we wouldn't be doing it since we wouldn't be enjoying it. But it doesn't have to go deeper than that.
It depends how you define meaningful and meaningless which is highly subjective - so it’s neither naive nor idiotic to be able to have meaningless sex - maybe it’s just not something you feel
I think people who like ideas like polyamory have misconstrued notions about what monogamy is, which is a general cultural problem in western societies these days.
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.
Well said, monogamy is a structure for producing a stable child rearing environment — and by relation a stable society. It is entirely consensual where arranged marriages no longer take place.
I have no issues how people screw each other but monogamy has a purpose, and if your purpose is to raise a stable family your odds are best if you pursue monogamy.
Monogamy is one such structure. It seems very tied to the modern idea of the "nuclear family." There are others. Having an extended family all living together is another. Tribes where children are raised communally is another.
Communal living is highly overrated. If you're a young and capable person you'll be shouldered with responsibility and live under the thumb of your elders. Not a dignified existence. I barely tolerate my own parents, I will not tolerate my extended family demanding things from me.
It's highly underrated by young people who don't like the idea of living with their parents. Ultimately, the cost of this is shouldered by day care fees, parental leave, social security checks we cut to old people, and less efficient living spaces; problems which were ok in an era of gdp and population growth, but in the era of stagnation? We'll see.
> Having an extended family all living together is another.
Collectivism has clear benefits but comes at a steep price: the need to establish and enforce group norms. The nuclear family seems like a compromise in this space, a revealed preference.
I mean, I would probably be happy living like an Orca in a matrilineal family group but, then again, I've always gotten along with my Mom. What about the people who haven't? Or who only started to once they moved out? Those people would be faced with living in a disharmonious environment or leaving to a world hostile to individuals.
You are taking effective birth control completely for granted.
It wasn't that long ago that monogamy was the default because no one wants to have a baby from a night of netflix and chill.
IMO you have the direction of causation backwards. Monogamy is not some child rearing optimization strategy. It was a social construct that evolved because causual sex at one point was incredibly expensive and now it is not because of birth control.
I can't imagine going to my theorerical wife-in-open-monogamy-relationship and tell her that the girl I had sex with at work's Christmas party gave me std because, despite she had her pills, but the rubber fell. It's just not mixing up in my head.
Also, if I give myself to my wife as a whole (i.e. I take care of her, the home and the children) I do not have time really to have another affairs. The rest of the time I'm left with I either sacrifice to be with her or have my own time like play games or compose music. There are lots of things to be done really, and I couldn't imagine sacrificing my family and duties to pursue sexual satisfaction with other people outside of my family.
> I do not have time really to have another affairs.
That's a good point, and true of most people I expect. The wealthy have time, though. Wealth buys time. Kings, the epitome of being wealthy historically, have always had time for affairs, and are oft remembered for exactly that(!), but a growing proportion of "common folk" are becoming increasingly wealthy themselves, freeing up the necessary time among more and more people. However, wealth inequality is high, so the opportunity of time is not evenly distributed.
> Monogamy is not some child rearing optimization strategy.
Can you go into this a little more? Is there evidence (either way) that stable 2-parent households are or aren't better for kids, or that an alternative is better?
Similar to comments above there's a difference between poly and open. I've not tried either but I've multiple good friends who are in "monogamish" relationships and it seems to work pretty well. For them the non-monogomy is just fun they have with others, but ultimately their partnership comes first. Otherwise it's very similar to the monogamy you describe but with agreed exceptions to sexual exclusivity.
It's not for everyone and it takes a lot communication (and low levels of jealousy) but it seems to work well at providing the structure and stability of marriage without forcing the full sexual exclusivity that some find constricting.
Why does their partnership come first? Whats stopping you from finding somebody better to make a priority? Isn’t that the point of being poly is to have the ability to shop around?
It takes work, for both people to compromise, to critically self-evaluate and improve.
When it's easy to just "shop around", you never really have to look hard in the mirror. It's easier to just internally assign blame to the other person: "they're not meeting my needs", and go off seeking someone else who will.
There's value in resilience, in building up your character so that you can endure turmoil.
All relationships have stormy times.
A key facet of emotional maturity is to be able to distinguish climate from weather.
People nowadays don't want commitment, and when they have it they don't respect it anyway.
I think this attitude will sooner or later change back, when the bill will come due. Life is full of challenges and hardships, and having somebody you committed to and who's committed does help deal with stuff.
I think the raise in popularity of polyamory is largely a proxy measure for the raise in selfishness.
Where I am from marriage is forever and there is no way to dissolve it without burning in eternal fire - it’s very much about ownership.
Kudos on you to having a modern marriage but marriage in the past (and also now) also is about ownership.
It’s a literal contract between two people and you are legally obligated to take care of the other person.
This was... the US, Britain, etc for many years and much of the middle east and parts of them and Asia today.
Women just aren't in control of their lives and personhood in so many ways under even modern marriage law. I believe it's still problematic in some US states and I know it's problematic in many places that we might even consider "civilized" where a woman cannot bring her husband for divorce, the husband must bring his wife for divorce. There are still places in the "civilized" world where it is considered legal for a man to force himself upon his wife against her will or enact violence upon her if she does not submit.
Beyond that, there is an assumption in some layers of society that women will marry and have no autonomy over their lives.
A good friend of mine in the early 90s faced extreme issue closing the joint account between her and her (recently deceased) husband. She was told that she needed her husband's "written and notarized approval" to take any action against the account, even though she was listed as the primary contact on the account because the system enforced that only male account holders were allowed to make changes. In fact, this system didn't allow a single woman to open a bank account until 1992!
Another friend of mine has been attempting to get a hysterectomy voluntarily (every woman on her mother's side has developed cervical cancer in the last 4 generations), has no interest in ever having a child or getting married to a man for that matter, and has faced numerous doctors who will not even hear her out because "what if her future husband wants kids" just absolutely stalls the conversation. She has recently gotten further by having a local wiccan coven write some bullshit on paper that it's her "religious duty to nature" to have this happen, which has at least gotten a few doctors to read and go "I'll have to check in on this."
Just this year, American women in the south were reminded that their vote is just as secret as their husband's. This spurred a wave of men who began calling for the stripping of the rights of women because they might vote differently than their husbands.
I'm well aware of US history. It's just that I'd rather not go back decades and certainly not centuries. Thankfully honor killings and FGM are quite rare in my part of the Midwest US, for now at least.
Polyamory is a sign of comodification/casualness about relationships and sex, in an increasingly sexless and loveless period.
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.
It is a sign of increasing inequality / hypergamy as the most desirable 1% of men have multiple partners while the rest have none.
In other words human society is reverting to the way it always has been since the dawn of the agricultural age 12,000 years ago.
There was never any reason to believe that the monogamous system of the 1950s West was a permanent stable arrangement and indeed we are seeing its death in our own lifetimes.
It's not exclusively a "West" thing, and it never was. Monogamy has been a stable and thriving system in many parts of the world for centuries, well before the 1950s or the Western framing of it. Societies in South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East, for example, have long upheld monogamous traditions through cultural and religious practices, sometimes even more rigidly than the West.
They also had slavery, secret societies that hoarded scientific knowledge and attributed it to religious powers, dictators as a default, and plenty of other things people did for thousands of years. How people used to do it, especially more than 100 years ago, is of no worth to anybody living without it being constantly tested.
Newton was a genius with an amazing model, until Einstein showed he was thinking too small, and its becoming apparent that Einstein missed something at this point. Humanity advances by pushing and testing limits.
Ehh, maybe it's just how the poly scene is shaped around here, but in my experience the men are usually very far from any real or imagined "most desirable 1%". For poly women the gamut is wider, but not that much. Heavy tendency towards the ASD spectrum in both.
Your "1%" will just go to clubs or on Tinder and hook up with other conventionally attractive people, without having to deal with some weirdo subculture.
> Your "1%" will just go to clubs or on Tinder and hook up with other conventionally attractive people, without having to deal with some weirdo subculture.
Pretty much. There's a lot of swingers these days, but no one with a triple digit IQ will raise their say "Hey I'm a swinger!" to their entire friend circle due to all the downsides that come along with it. People just do it quietly to avoid causing drama (from usually ugly people). I've always suspected the need for people to declare these types of alternate-sexuality lifestyles is more attention seeking and validation than actual organic expression of an identity. The loudest ones about these lifestyles are usually the most boner-killer types in terms of looks.
I have a strong feeling that like many new things, poliamory is currently mostly/only getting get “positive marketing” narrative.
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 ?
I wonder if it's also easier for people who have less family relationships going on.
Me and my girlfriends are all distant from our families. If I regularly visited my parents and siblings and spent time with them, I'd have less time for romantic partners.
I wonder if there's a need for secure family-like relationships, and where the family of origin has failed, people are more likely to seek that feeling from romantic partners. "There is no form of incest greater than T4T"
I really hate "traditional values" on account of their peddlers and the history books full of horrors they have enabled but when literally every successful society and major religion has some semblance of a 1:1 rule even if the exceptions and edge case handling are different you kinda gotta take notice.
More of a one-to-many rule. Only one side is expected to be fully monogamous.
It's long been socially acceptable for men to have mistresses or even multiple separate families, so long as they had the resources to take care of them all. And the social faux pas of merely sleeping with other women is very recent.
One side would be stuck with a kid and have significant difficulty paying for/supporting themselves with the extra burden, without an attached male. The other one could give false names and/or disappear never to be seen again.
There's a tragedy of the commons when it comes to the question of "what do all of the single people do?" Each relationship beyond monogamy can be thought of as "taking away" an opportunity from the partner you would have paired with had you been monogamous. ie a relationship opportunity cost.
Typically, societies with imbalanced relationship ratios, an in particular single males, tend to be more unstable. Should poly folks design their life around the consequences of disaffected young males? No, of course not. Nor should we artificially privilege monogamy to ensure social stability for obvious reasons of individualality and moral policing. We should study the phenomenon and remedy the male psyche to ensure social stability and discover, scientifically, the threshold at which we can expect it to be a problem.
I liked this, but I feel like it glosses over a significant dynamic that discolors both sides of the mono/poly split, which is "people not living the life they want".
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.)
The downsides of being in a rigidly-defined monogamous relationship are all kind of obvious, I think. Most people do not experience love or attraction as zero-sum games: you can have a "crush" or whatever on Person B without diminishing your feelings for Person A. So a person in a monogamous relationship is going to miss out on some positive physical and emotional connections that might have been really enjoyable.
But...
I've known a fair number of people in poly/open/etc relationships over the years and they tend to be inherently unstable, even moreso than trad monogamy. Like you said, often one person wants more exclusivity.
Also... let's be totally honest. One partner is almost always going to have more access to sex and love outside the relationship. Either they are more attractive, more assertive, or simply have more free time, or any other number of reasons. So the "openness" never seems to work out in a totally equal and/or equitable way.
They also seem to run into the problem of time and energy. In the abstract, love and sex are not zero-sum games. But a person only has so much energy and so many free hours in a week. So in practicality, yeah. It does become a bit zero-sum.
If someone truly loves their partner, wouldn't they be happy that their partner is getting more of what they need? Even if that is more sex?
I honestly don't know the answer to this question.
I've heard the optimal form of monogamy is when both partners fully give themselves to each other, and 100% seek the happiness of their partner. I was taught this in a religion. I can't logically understand it though. I can't imagine being happy or maintaining my own identity without spending at least a portion of my energy on myself.
I haven't been successful in relationships though, so what do I know? Is that just a religiously inspired fantasy, or can a real relationship work that way?
> If someone truly loves their partner, wouldn't they be happy that their partner is getting more of what they need? Even if that is more sex?
When analyzing my feelings after I got cheated on by a fairly long-term partner, I realized I wasn't upset she had had sex with another guy, but the rather the betrayal of doing so behind my back and trying to hide it.
This realization shaped my following relationships.
> I can't imagine being happy or maintaining my own identity without spending at least a portion of my energy on myself.
This is also true for myself, however it doesn't involve sex with others in my case. I'm content with my partner.
> If someone truly loves their partner, wouldn't they be happy that their partner is getting more of what they need? Even if that is more sex?
I feel like this kind of weird idea is due to a fallacy of replacing the actual human experience of love with a sort of rationalized version that has no boundaries or preferences or anything like that. The answer is... no? yes? if you want to? You can love someone and still care about what they do or don't do, and if it's a healthy relationship they'll respect those boundaries, or compromise if necessary, and you'll be respecting theirs also. It definitely does not mean "everything is permitted", unless that's what your personal boundaries are---which means that's what a relationship is to you.
The optimal form of monogamy is whatever the two people in the relationship want it to be. Sometimes that's 100% seeking the happiness of their partner (I think that's a delusional fantasy though). Sometimes it's two people coexisting and just having each other's back. The whole point is that each person finds a relationship that gets what they need. Not what some idealized version of a person that they aspire to be would need.
And my money's on no, most people do not want a relationship where their partner has sex with whoever they want, because it is also a fallacy that sex is a physical need rather than emotional one. In fact it has a lot to do with emotions, safety, power, compassion, etc, and those are all things that are (often) tied into a relationship, especially as you get older.
People focus so much on getting equal sex. If that bothers you you'te totally missing the point. Poly people invented the word compersion to amend a blind spot in our language, and thereby do the same in our emotional vocabulary. At least from their point of view. Maybe it's not a part of our vocabulary because it's contrary to our biology.
"It makes me happy to see my partner happy" is Relationships 101. Just because people gave it a word, doesn't mean it didn't exist - and I'd claim the opposite, poly people had to make a word because its not seen as the default in that community.
This is like saying, I invented the word "hiverchill" which means "that feeling of cold when it snows". You can't say this was a blind spot in our language. We didn't need this word, because of course you are cold when it snows.
"Compersion" is usually more than just "it makes me happy to see my partner happy", but "it makes me happy to see my partner happy, even when that would (at least traditionally) inspire some bad feeling in me."
Compersion isn't the feeling you get when you give your partner flowers and they smile, it's the feeling you get when your partner tells you a story about how nice their date with someone else was. It's a very particular flavor of joy-for-partner, that for some people doesn't exist at all because it is clouded by jealousy or fear or other feelings.
> poly people had to make a word because its not seen as the default in that community.
Feeling joy at your partner going on a date with someone else is not seen as the default in any community except the poly community.
Only issue is that when you get what you want, you might be convincing your partner(s) to settle for something they want less. Perhaps the mindset of "best I can get" and finding an acceptable compromise is the way to go.
I truly believe that it is possible to be in a relationship where both people's "best I can get" is "me and my partner are both getting what we want", like you can love someone in a way in which your own preferences recalibrate to be compatible with theirs.
Not sure if this is a state everyone can reach, or would want to, but I'm quite sure it's attainable for lots of people.
(Aside, I have some friends who are bad at asserting themselves in the ways I was talking about, but about, like, everything. They'll say "I want X", but they'll feel they have to provide a good reason for it to be taken seriously, e.g. "I want to eat dinner early tonight because it messes up my sleep when we eat late".
(You can imagine the kind of relationships (family or friends or romantic) they might have had in their lives which trained them to act this way...)
So they act like they have to give a sufficiently good reason for their preferences to be taken seriously.... which is, IMO, the degraded state I'm talking about.
In a respectful relationship, the fact that you want something IS a reason to do it; you don't have to provide a logically adequate reason to get what you want as well. And if two people's desires are incompatible, both will happily compromise to find a way to make them compatible again.)
I think you don't really know what you want if you don't know why you want it. Learning to understand oneself is a huge part of one's personal growth. When you don't know the "why", it's easy to be mistaken about what you actually want, and push for a superficial projection of it, not the real underlying thing. (And therefore lose out on relationships you didn't know you'd be happy with.) But we speak in generalities of course.
They'll say "I want X", but they'll feel they have
to provide a good reason for it to be taken seriously,
e.g. "I want to eat dinner early tonight because it
messes up my sleep when we eat late".
This is really interesting.
On one level this could be a really bad sign (either about the relationship, or just one person's self esteem) where a person can't just want something. They have to "justify" it.
On the other hand, I don't know if that's necessarily bad?
Like, if we always eat dinner at 7ish and now you want to eat at 5pm I feel it's just natural that I'd want to know why? Because we probably had reasons for eating at 7pm, and maybe I want to kind of weigh them against everything else? Because maybe I can't take my lunch break at work until 3pm, so eating dinner at 5pm really sucks for me. etc. etc etc etc
And if two people's desires are
incompatible, both will happily
compromise to find a way to make
them compatible again
Amen, absolutely. Let's say you can't eat at 7.... but I can't eat at 5.
But what is the point of eating together? Is it really the act of forking nutrients into our mouths... or is it spending time together? Maybe we can just chill out and talk at 5pm. You can eat... and I'll just hang out and we can talk about our day or watch some netflix or w/e.
I probably have just always picked shitty partners but in my experience that kinda happy compromise problem-solving attitude seems so rare. kudos to you for that attitude.
I wasn't super happy with that example, it's vaguely based on something that happened to me recently but I can't quite remember what happened well enough to make it sound compelling. But I do notice this phenomenon of "justifying one's preferences" in people pretty regularly. When it happens, it sounds odd... like it stands out as insecure, but they seem to not be aware it's odd at all.
I guess the way this usually manifests is not that a person gives reasons at all, but rather that they seem to give too many reasons. Like offhandedly saying "I feel like doing this" is normal. But going on about the reasons, making sure they're very clear and crisp and agreed upon by everybody is more like the aberrant/degraded thing I'm talking about.
I think it might also be because "Swinging" is a word from a previous era and some/many of the young LGBTQ+ people are against learning from their elders.
> young LGBTQ+ people are against learning from their elders
No, there's a missing generation. As (previously) one of those, my generation is now the "elders", and we had to learn in a strange, weirdly sheltered way. Our elders were dead or hiding. The topics were taboo, the representation garbage, and the content online? Often blocked in the place we had internet access.
I do a lot of teaching to my younger queer friends. Sometimes I have to do a lot of research on a topic before I can give an answer.
In addition, Swingers weren't talked about in any part of my growing up. It wasn't until as an adult I looked at my partner and said "Oh, they're having a key party" at an exhibit of a model 50s-era home in the midwest.
Sorry, yes, I wasn't intending to give the impression that I was ignoring the many, many that died in the 80s during the AIDS epidemic. I was intending to refer to Millenials as the elders and Gen Alpha as the "young LGBTQ+".
At least what I see on TikTok has reflected a lot of the elder (Millenial) LGBTQ+ people becoming periodically frustrated with the younglings for not listening to them as they talk about exactly the frustrations / issues the new ones are going through or aren't having to go through.
Weirdly, swingers *were* talked about in my family when I was young.
Google seems to think monogamish is the new word for it, but that is a really confusing word (I thought it meant you can cuddle puddle with your friends).
100k out of *how many out homosexual individuals during that era in the area being studied*?
And it's not just raw numbers, either. It's how many lives / families were impacted in this unique way.
To add, it's also 100k that were almost entirely in a single demographic that was explicitly and implicitly being harmed by those in power during that era.
I want to add more. The whole “30 is gay death” expression, I bet, especially since it’s not really a thing anymore, was greatly influenced by there being very few gay people over 30. Because the rest were dead.
Hey btw I absolutely did mean "a generational cohort of lgbtq people" not the broader total population. Which would make no sense, so I assumed no one would interpret my meaning that way. Thanks for calling me a bigot and then starting a fight with these other people about it though.
A lot of people don't seem to realize polyamory versus open relationship. Polyamory is about holding multiple relationships. Open relationship is more about the physical act, without additional relationships.
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.
I've observed a number of poly relationships from the outside, as a friend of one or more of the participants. I've also been in a monogamous relationship for >20yr and I've lived on both coasts of the US in that time.
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.
Indeed a wild generalization, but I can agree from many anecdotes that monogamous couples "going poly" is super super hard - much easier to start a relationship in a poly dynamic than attempt to transform one.
My only observation of this phenomenon was essentially as you described in your second paragraph, the difference being it started as a poly relationship and it was painfully visible that one person was the third wheel there and in denial about it.
Probably a function of the particlar psychographic you hang out with.
Meanwhile one observes the denial of any potential to even discuss ENM (along with straight-up cheating) contributing to an immeasurable portion of dyad breakups.
Or people staying in the dyad, but with tremendous unacknowledged suffering.
On dating sites 100% of the girls I've seen with poly/open relationship on their profiles are butt ugly.
Guys have been banging other girls on the side since forever, but now apparently a new word is needed and everyone needs to know about it. Just go and bang someone else and don't go on about it to your actual gf ffs.
I thought this was a nice article. I myself am in a non-open poly relationship and it works quite well for us. It's also pretty common in my community (homos) because we all like the same sex
It means, myself and my two partners are in a relationship with each other, and do so without seeking sex or love from other people. It's just the three of us, no more, no less.
I'm always wary of definitions for things that require complex explanations, and are subject to debate. That doesn't mean it's invalid, but it just speaks to - and I hate to say this - a possible influence of academic studies or literature or class content.
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.
An underappreciated feature of nonmonogamy is that it makes ethical conflicts of interest a bit more challenging. This article doesn't discuss that explicitly, but does hint at it in some of the quotes
It’s hard enough when there are clear roles/responsibilities/expectations. Divorces (which assume monogamy) are notorious for getting incredibly ugly.
Look at how few people can even agree what open/enm/poly even means in this discussion.
Then add more parties with more emotions and more abilities to act out…. More degrees of freedom means harder to predict.
And then also add in that Society is going to have an even harder time holding anyone accountable for anything in these kinds of situations - he said/she said is hard enough, what about when it’s he said/she said/he said/she said/they said?
Just give up and throw everyone in jail? Or no one?
This article didn't really hit for me. It feels like I'm just reading the author's particular experiences run through a gauntlet of theorisation that ultimately does more to obscure than clarify the message.
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.
I am someone who experienced the "longterm partner decided she wanted to be poly" heartbreak. When she told me, I asked her why she would choose to stay with me rather than just be single and date as many men as she wanted. She told me something along the lines of "I love you, I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but I don't feel like one person is enough for all the love I have". I wasn't terribly happy with that response, and she broke up with me a week later (while a man who she wanted to be poly with was staying with her). She left me because she wanted to change the parameters of the relationship and I didn't
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
The real danger comes when this pattern meets underlying trauma or personality issues - the manipulation becomes a way to process or control rather than connect, while the constant desire from others makes it feel justified or even righteous.
This isn't about relationship styles - it's about recognizing when multiple connections are being used as tools for manipulation rather than genuine human bonds.
Someone said something like this to me recently about a story I related where I was told an ex boyfriend would be at a falsely framed "party" the partner was literally driving me to when she told me.
My new friend said to me, "you should have gotten out of the car". I replied that if I had I would have had to been prepared to walk away from the relationship on the spot when it happened. That is easier said than done in a moment.
> my brother in Christ, you should've broken up with her on the spot
After she told me she wanted to be with me for life? I had hoped the poly issue was going to be in the past
I was in my early 20s, I was in love, she was my second girlfriend, who happened to be my high school crush, "the one that got away" but I got a second shot with her and took it, I was living the dream
How that relationship ended screwed me up for a long time. I'm better now, and I have a very loving stable partner
>After she told me she wanted to be with me for life?
well, as you saw, it wasn't really the case, was it? I don't mean to rub salt into the wound, but she's been fucking that guy long before that conversation with you.
I'm glad to hear that it had all worked out for you in the end. never second-guess your decision to reject that suggestion.
> After she told me she wanted to be with me for life? I had hoped the poly issue was going to be in the past
You hopefully learned that girls lie, like to avoid conflict and keep their options open. Once you accept these 3 facts they become much easier to understand. Guys care less about point 2.
Only judge someone by their actions, not words. And your gf fucking other people is a pretty clear statement of her feelings for you and her intention for your future.
Pretty good article. I think everyone could do with a little less pathologization of a lot of human behaviour. My wife has suggested in the past that we have another wife so that we can have more children[0]. I'm amenable to the idea but the logistics of this seem hard to me: our finances are fused, our desires are mostly unified, and it took me many years to find someone with whom this was easy to do. A two-party marriage like mine is straightforward for us both. There is a natural Nash equilibrium in responsibility splitting. We do so without explicit handling and simple nudges one way or the other suffice to recalibrate. I imagine long-term polyamorous relationships are easier to handle for people who have more explicit procedures in interaction or who are more comfortable with the uncertainty.
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.
What you're describing is polygamy, and I've considered it for myself. It is corrosive if it is adopted as a social institution in a culture, but if a free rider here or there (such as myself) pulls it off, better for them. I have talked to my wife about it, she doesn't like the idea, although she does like women and it wouldn't be a just me getting the benefit type deal. I think she's probably right, the dynamic can get too messy, and I think youre right, it took me my whole life to find her, finding another one that's perfect for me as well as perfect for her would probably take a decade. Not really a reasonable timeline.
Also, she wants the children she raises to be hers, the shared responsibility thing doesn't appeal to her, and the potential rivalries between women and their respective children just aren't conducive to raising healthy people, which is ultimately the goal of all of this. Maybe she will change her mind one day. Maybe it could be made to work. I'm not dead set on it and am happy with the status quo.
The point is to avoid that precise problem by parallelizing the child-having. My wife can only have one child at a time and medically recommended spacing is 18 months. The objective is to have our children as young as we can given our current ages.
We'll see where we get. In some sense, the revealed preference is that I didn't, considering I prioritized my career over finding a partner. But we'll see.
I don’t think the author is saying this is their opinion but this sentence stood out to me:
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?
> I wonder if the negative view of monogamy is just the immaturity of youth and those people have since grown out of that position?
There are powerful entities, including religions and country laws, that either make life easier for people pratcicing the monogamous relationship style or just outright force that style on masses of people. This force spawns resistance, and the negative view you mention is an expression of this resistance.
I think we are conflating two different things. Monogamous people and monogamous institutions. Does the author mean institutions are coercive or that couples are coercive?
Systemic, indoctrinated and even toxic monogamy, perpetuated by people and society at large.
You've got people and relationships that are so harmed by strict heteronormativity and its related monogamy that "men and women can't be friends" and "you can't say that lady's cute because that's cheating" and pornography is adultery.
It's little microaggressions and requirements of conformity that systematize and enforce monogamy in little ways.
It doesn’t matter what system, society will ruin anything it enforces. Everything has pros and cons.
Imagine the same system enforcing poly. You’d have mandatory partner sharing to those in power, all sorts of requirements and gate keeping for who could and could not share, or be part of various cliques, etc.
For sure, anyone pretty or desirable would be expected to be poly and like it or else, etc.
The reality is that system would fly apart even faster than monogamous systems since there is no meaningful way to ‘opt out’ and protect oneself, which is why you don’t see it in any large scale societies.
The author of the post was quoting a book as saying that, and criticizing the book at the same time, so it sounds like you're more or less agreeing with 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?
The negative view of monogamy that these people convey is an attempt to justify their lifestyle to people who don't like it, or to recruit more people to their lifestyle. One could argue that both monogamy and nonmonogamy have selfish aspects, but monogamy has proven more successful as a strategy for human society. Of course polyamorous people would debate that with you, but the disadvantages of polyamory are so obvious that it isn't easy to justify.
Some obvious risks are: higher chances of STDs, higher chances of strangers causing trouble for you in your home, more difficulties having kids (from paternity issues to differences in values like poly people don't often want kids), and a higher risk of losing your partner. You would probably be better off paying for a prostitute than trying to make polyamory work with all its inherent drama and complications. You still have to worry about STDs but at least you can walk away from any and all other trouble.
STDs aren't a mystery, we know how to avoid them. I actually invited more strangers into my home back when I was monogamous, honestly, but I'm not sure what that has to do with polyamory. Monogamous people lose their partners all the time, have you seen the divorce rates? None of what you are suggesting matches my experience.
Not to mention that safer sex practices are much more normalized in ENM circles. Getting tested before engaging with someone new (or on the reg if new partners are a more frequent thing), using protection, being open with partners about what you're up to are all great for preventing exposure to STDs.
Being monogamous with a cheating partner is...not so great at it. Their tolerance for risky behavior is obviously high, and they're already showing a lack of care for any consequences by stepping out. Yes, I know, "my partner would never be unfaithful," and I hope that's the case for everyone reading this. But it's a common enough occurrence that we all know someone who it's happened to.
>Being monogamous with a cheating partner is...not so great at it. Their tolerance for risky behavior is obviously high, and they're already showing a lack of care for any consequences by stepping out.
That's not a case of real monogamy. We could call it "attempted monogamy" maybe. Cheating partners often want to keep their original relationships intact and as such don't take extreme risks. They probably aren't sleeping with other people as often as a poly person would, and the type of person they sleep with is likely less promiscuous than a poly person.
It seems pretty clear to me that STD risks are lower for those in nominally monogamous relationships, even if there is always some risk of cheating. Redefining the cheating as acceptable behavior (that is, redefining the relationship as poly) is not solving any STD problems. It might if you absolutely cannot trust your partner to be remotely monogamous, but you do want to stay with them, and you do trust them to tell you who they're sleeping with, AND you can effectively use that information to reduce your own risks. For me, I just don't want to be with someone who does not think I'm enough.
>STDs aren't a mystery, we know how to avoid them.
I never said it's a mystery. I'm saying that monogamy is much safer than nonmonogamy in terms of STD risk. These risks are not negligible. Look at how many people have herpes for example.
>I actually invited more strangers into my home back when I was monogamous, honestly, but I'm not sure what that has to do with polyamory.
You don't have to sleep with strangers to be poly, it is true. But I think most people who are in fact sleep with strangers and others who might profess to be poly yet secretly have a lot of jealousy.
>Monogamous people lose their partners all the time, have you seen the divorce rates?
They lose them less than poly people. That's the point.
>None of what you are suggesting matches my experience.
Since many of the downsides I've explained are in terms of relative risks, one instance of good luck does not disprove it. I also think it's common sense that having more partners makes life complicated and introduces more significant risks. Hell, even one partner can wreck your life. More than one, especially the type of people who partake in such deviant and risky behavior, is just asking for trouble.
The negative view of monogamy is the Internet amplifying the most controversial "hot take" because it gets more clicks than "Do what thou will".
I was monogamous with my wife for about 8 years and I loved her and I think I still love her even though we broke up and probably won't be together again romantically ever.
I would say that monogamy, right now, is _not for me_. I just crave adventure, I'm a contrarian, I want more out of life than the standard, I want to sleep around. The revealed preference is that I want every aspect of my life to be "different" whether that's desktop Linux, veganism, changing my gender, etc.
If I had left that marriage and got into another monogamous relationship, in a few months I'd be wanting to date other people again.
There is a new documentary coming out called The Village of Lovers, https://thevillageoflovers.com/. It is about a 40-year intentional polyamorous "free love" community called Tamera in Portugal. It is specifically about non-hierarchal polyamory. And I watched it and I tend to agree with their approach. It seems like the answer to a lot of society's problems honestly.
While reading the definitions I was imagining this flat male comic with gender jokes "monosaturated, am I right?" When I came to the quotes I was kind of relieved to see women representing this experience.
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.
Polyamory is just a nice way to try people and cheat as you want. It's a cool way to say casual sex.
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 don't think I have casual sex but... Sure, is it wrong to want to try people?
I'm currently trying non-monogamy after a monogamous marriage slid from "I could spend the rest of my life with this person" to "I should not have settled down so early in my 20s"
This quote so resonated with me that I thought it worth a specific call out:
> 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.
Do polyamorous people have more or less children compared to non-polyamorous people? This is a way to judge the viability of this way of life long term rather than just as a fad. For it to be sustainable it needs to be both more than the groups around it and above replacement. If it is neither it is a fad.
If that's your definition of success then don't look at the fertility rates of countries around the world. You would be forced to conclude that everyone should be made materially worse off.
Do americans realise how odd it is that prostitution is illegal there?
In most countries guys just quiety see a prostitute and have a great time without inflicting weird justifications for their horniness on their families.
Why do you say this? This has only become untrue in recent history. For most of history the man effectively possesses the woman. We have feminism to thank for sexual equality and it's still today controversial and not universal. You're standing in the eye of the storm saying of course the winds are calm.
Fantastic article, but as a monogamous married father of 4, I think the author misses the fundamental point of all relationships... And the point of life itself: Reproduction.
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.
I feel like the daily experience of relationships in 2024 America is wildly incompatible with the idea that relationships are for reproduction.
Our genes may at some level be programmed to conspire to get us to reproduce, but we are (for all intents and purposes) autonomous and free to do that or not as we wish, and to have relationships for whatever reasons we want.
There's a bizarre twist of logic going on when you replace "the drive of creatures is (empirically) to reproduce" with "therefore we ought to reproduce". The two are not equivalent; you do not have to do what you are "told".
You might not be as autonomous as you think. Behavior in this area is mostly driven by instinct and emotion. People just rationalize their actions later.
I'm not saying that I am or am not autonomous at a chemical level. I'm saying that the fact that someone is programmed to do something has no bearing on whether they ought to do it at a moral level. The only reason a person ought to "follow their programming" is that they want to. After all, if it really is their programming, they will follow it automatically. There is no point rationalizing: "I must be programmed this way, therefore I have to do it". No, if you were programmed to do it, you'd be doing it already.
Is it possible that instinct and emotion drive some people to scale mountains, write software, start businesses, create great works of art, instead of having children?
The explore-exploit tradeoff is well known. Maybe my DNA isn't written to be happy with putting down roots and having kids?
Well, you're not exactly primally driven to reproduce. You're primally driven to engage in some behavior, and experience hedonistic pleasure from it, with the side effect of reproduction. Reproduction is expensive, so evolution created a dirty trick. This is why birth control is so damn popular. You're driven to fuck, not to reproduce. I have no idea what the experience is for an amoeba, but I would guess it feels more like ejaculation than tears of joy to them.
For a lot of people though, the desire for children is there, strong, and comes from somewhere else, almost like it comes from somewhere deeper like a soul or something. I know that's true for me. My goal with my relationship, and well before that when I was shopping, was about family for most of my adult life. It seems this is out of fashion these days and people figure it out late. Hedonistic pleasure is fleeting, creating amazing people can go on literally forever if done correctly, it is an ambition and achievement unto itself, and is rewarding in a way science doesn't yet understand, to be a little facetious.
> For a lot of people though, the desire for children is there, strong, and comes from somewhere else, almost like it comes from somewhere deeper like a soul or something.
Isn’t that just another part of the evolutionary drive to get you to have children? Besides the sex drive? Just like you have a natural will to live and an objection to be killed/kill yourself?
Well, that feeling of wanting to have kids isn't really universal. It's not really primal, like needing to eat or something. The desire for sex pretty much is.
Is it evolved? I guess everything is evolved. Some people have the desire to abuse their children. That's evolved too some how some way, I wouldn't call that an evolutionary drive though.
I don't know if female dogs crave sex or crave puppies. If they're anything like us, the majority of the time it's the former craving that leads to puppies. That's all I know.
I generally agree with what you are saying, but you need to add "and not fighting" to "long term committed parents who are always there." Not fighting is so important that sometimes the parents need to split up so they can stop fighting. They can still be committed parents who are always there for the kids while no longer in a relationship with each other and the kids will do well.
I really really wish someone had told me that a long time ago, and while I'm wishing I wish someone would have told my children's grandparents that an even longer time ago.
when my parents separated (and then divorced) and we moved, i thought it was the best thing that we moved so far away that they just could not meet and thus could not fight anymore. that was my feeling as a 12 year old. forget shared responsibility and kids alternating between both parents. in our case that would have been a disaster and the opposite of a stable living situation for us children.
From an evolutionary point of view the point of life may be reproduction, but from a personal point of view it most certainly is not. Plenty of people have no interest in having kids, and what about people who are sterile? Should they just give up on life?
Some people prefer to live alone, but everybody has relationships of some sort, children or no.
People have been fooled into thinking their hobbies should override billions of years of evolution... if you behave as your body is hard wired to behave, you will be happier.
I suspect you're being downvoted based on the "purpose of life is reproduction" piece, but I hope people are aware that this part about studies showing that in general Poly parenting leads to worse outcomes for children is spot on
Poly relationships tend to be complicated, and children are not capable of understanding all of the nuance of ethical poly relationships, nevermind the many variations of non-ethical poly relationships. It tends to lead to people who have really screwed up ideas about relationships and attachment issues.
Note that this is not me saying that ethical poly relationships are inherently screwed up. What I'm saying is that from the outside perspective of an immature child, who will likely then go on to mimic what they see modelled without understanding it, that child is going to have screwed up ideas about relationships
This seems correct, all the happy poly people I know don’t have kids. The ones that do have kids seem to struggle more (a similar level as being a single parent but obviously in different ways).
I can't reply to the flagged comment, but I can reply to myself.
There is so much more in humanity than our ability to procreate — every living organism does that, that's not special, it doesn't make us human.
What makes us human, is our ability to create, to pour our heart and very essence into our art, the desire to reach perfection in our craft. We create knowledge, we explore the world, and are in the process of discovering its true nature. We kiss and dance and love, we give, and we share.
Having kids doesn't prevent us from enjoying all those things, but having kids is also not a prerequisite for a good and fulfilling life.
Anyone can have children, but not everyone can create good people, and personally, I love my unborn children too much to expose them to this world.
I think we are dealing with survivorship bias more so than anything else. We can look back and speculate about society, how it functioned and all that, but every time we do we are limited in knowledge and by our own biases.
I chose to reply as I did because of the whole “I doubt it’s a coincidence”.
Lots of people are going to push back against your statement - I personally agree with you. This is all about continuing our species and everyone else trying to weave some different tale is simply living in la-la land.
My open/poly relationship was incredibly shallow. My "lover" felt more like a friend, and they weren't even that important to me because I only knew them for a few months. The relationship became fully transactional, and I eventually just left for another person I was with to be monogamous. If the idea of a relationship is ultimately just friend + sex or a business relationship, I can see how it works well for you. But for me it was lacking.
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...
I had an ex that "forced" me to become poly to stay together, which in hindsight was really just abuse and cheating rather than polyamory, although I didn't realize it at the time. So I'll admit I'm a bit jaded, and that colors my opinions of it.
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."
> For example, the book "The Ethical Slut" the author literally describes raping people
Wow, I don't remember that. I'll have to re-read it.
> I also feel it inevitably hurts people when you are more excited about a new partner than them
It certainly happens.
Sometimes I think I'm doomed to be unhappy because I just want too much out of life. I can't imagine settling down, but I don't want flings or hookups without emotion, I want to feel a lot of emotion with people freely.
The first possibility is that, as the Internet keeps saying, I'm a shit person and I'm not ready to date. Most people seem to start dating around half my age so even if this is true, I just reject it. The second is that I just haven't met the person who is such a perfect match that I would sacrifice a lifetime of possibility to stay with them forever. I don't imagine that partner exists. Given that I'm going to crush on people who aren't my partner(s), I'd rather be upfront about it.
The third possibility is that I really am a sociopath and I just want the wrong things. I ask people and they say I'm not a narcissistic or a sociopath. I feel empathy, I don't try to control people.
It's talking about a different place and culture than you're in and you're calling it out of touch because it's not familiar to you? Isn't that the point?
You ... might be the out-of-touch one here. This culture is pretty common all over the country these days (although definitely most prevalent in the big metro areas).
How could they be meaningless? They have clear meanings. Maybe you mean that you are choosing to disbelieve them? Then that's your problem. They're self-evidently true if you live in these places.
What? Subjective claims still support an argument, just more loosely than objective ones do. Instead of saying my observations are wrong or that you disagree with them, your stance is that "opinions aren't real"? That's absurd.
The kind of worldview being promoted here tends to have people that prefer to enforce their worldview by the sword rather than in the chamber of ideals and free thought.
Disgust is an interesting response to this experience.
I encourage you to reframe your thoughts in "is they consenting adults?" and then "is this hurting anyone?" if the answers are "yes they're adults and they're not hurting anyone", I encourage you to mind your own business :)
Gay people aren't "shoving things in your face" when they kiss, or can be seen holding hands, or have representation in a book or movies because the author wanted to represent themselves in the media any more than straight people are "shoving things in your face" when they kiss, or can be seen holding hands, etc. Equally, non-monogamous people aren't shoving anything in your face by existing in a way that makes them happy and affirmed. Disgust over other people's choices and lives and the subsequent attempt to squelch that is very anti-liberty.
The formation of contract cults around relationships is the basis of all law. Every sort of state flows from that. Every limitation of a society in that department ,every ability grows from this. A judge looks like a priest for a reason . The masses call for moral constraints in times of crisis because of this.
Handle with care for culture makes and brraks these things .
I wish someone would find a way to shield us from those topics on Hacker News, the one place that we can go without being flooded with those mundane societal issues and focus on actual technology and science
Despite the technical focus, HN is one of the most diverse and thoughtful communities I've ever had the privilege to be a part of - and I've been doing this since 300 baud. There isn't really anything I wouldn't want to see discussed here. If you find you absolutely cannot disregard things you aren't interested in, you might want to try Youtube comments, or maybe a technical community on Facebook.
Great comment, appreciate you taking the time to come in and share your thoughts. We've discussed and decided to prioritize this change - please check back very soon!
There is one issue that I have with this article and most discussions around polyamory. That is mixing in open relationships and poly. There is a massive difference between, you can do whatever sexually you want and dating other people. There is an emotional difference.
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.
The poly vs open distinction is interesting because (anecdotally) I see some variation there between gay and lesbian relationships—it seems like gay dudes are more likely to be in a door-ajar couple, whereas the throuples I know are usually groups of lesbians!
Conversely, I don't see many poly gay dudes or door-ajar lesbian couples, and lesbians might be more monogamous on average.
Sounds like you haven't heard of UHauling. It's a trope that many lesbians are highly relationship oriented and things get serious really quickly.
I didn’t, and didn’t even know those behaviors. Discovered two staple of LGBT humour that are great, hope it doesn’t sound rambling for those who know it:
Question: What does a lesbian bring on a second date? Answer: A U-Haul.
——
Question: What does a gay man bring on a second date? Answer: What second date
Oh, I've heard of it... and have even been accused of doing it, lol. But I'm not sure it counts as u-hauling if you talk about marriage within the first month and then take another decade to tie the knot :P
> I don't see many poly gay dudes
From my experience. I only know a few poly gay men. I know far more gay couples in open relationships that have similar lines that I do when it comes to anything beyond that.
I mean, for sure those lines get blurry. Things that you may traditionally associate with dating like cuddling on the couch at a party (just a party, not anything more) or similar things. But, there is still that line.
I do wonder why that seems to be the case. I am reluctant to get into stereotypes to explain it...
This can't be the whole story, but probably significant that gay hookup apps are light-years ahead of lesbian hookup apps :P
Def agree that consensual non-monogamy (CNM) != polyamory, and there's a loottt of confusion out there around that distinction (and in this article and this HN thread, too).
I might be poly for the right people at the right time, but I'm not currently. However, I'm definitely CNM for life because all I want is to talk it out!
Well, that, and occasionally hook up with other people
They are often times grouped together because the people writing this blogs, articles, newspapers were never in a poly relation and have no clue about the topic they are writing (but of course they have an opinion without the experience and think it's ok to sell an opinion or morale piece as more than it is).
I think poly is kind of an umbrella term right now for a lot of different kinds of "multiple partners" type relationships. I am ENM (ethically non-monogamous) but if you're not familiar with the term (and most people aren't) saying poly is much easier. It is a bit like saying LGBT and including all the things that fit under the umbrella but aren't lesbian, gay, bi or trans.
It's not a very good umbrella term, the term itself implies a relationship structure where an individual is in multiple, involved intimate relationships. A couple in an open relationship where one or both partners engage in dalliances doesn't fall under that umbrella.
It's posible to draw such clear line? Surely, it's rather easy to convince oneself you have all your relationships nicely compartmentalized..till reality does otherwise.
That is kinda cutting the line a little fine I think.
How does one move from a monogamous relationship to a poly relationship except through an open relationship?
What does “door ajar” mean? I have seen several references to it but no definition.
The way that my friends have described it.
Neither of them are actively looking, going to events, on apps, etc.
But if an opportunity presents itself with a friend or whatever they have already established that it’s fine.
It’s still open, but it seems the difference is seeking it out vs it just happening.
Guarantee you one of them is actually always looking.
The door is not wide open to potential partners, but it’s also not closed —> door ajar.
Thanks for the explanation, it helped, but I still have no clue where does the "ajar" thing come from, letter for letter.
Ajar, to mean, slightly open. So, not a open door (anyone), not a revolving door (everyone), and not a closed door (no one).
It's a bit of a contrived term and there's not much to read into it. It's like how "hitting a home run" is slang for getting laid, and rounding the bases was an associated metaphor that evolved from it; they only make sense by the association with the original metaphor.
...Oh, it's an actual English word, I didn't know and now I am embarrassed. Should have checked the dictionary.
Thank you!
I imagine it's like an open relationship with more rules around when and how one engages in outside activities.
They can pork other people if they want to.
monogamish
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John 8:7-11
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Ezekiel 23:20
> "And the names of them were Aholah the elder, and Aholibah her sister; and they always filled their ballrooms; the event was never small. Yea, for unto the records of the temple, they had the biggest balls of all." —Ez/Dz 60:9
The modern gay lifestyle harkens directly back to Jewish communities at the time of Christ, almost completely unchanged. Yet Jesus never condemned them.
21% of Americans have experimented with consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, far more than two decades ago
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 think you're making the claim much bigger than it is. The narrow interpretation of "consensual non-monogamy" does not imply a relationship. Having a threesome with your partner and your best friend already qualifies. Making out with a non-partner while your partner watches might already qualify, depending on how the question is understood.
> Having a threesome with your partner and your best friend already qualifies
I don't think it does qualify any more than having a one night stand between two single people implies that they are dating
This seems to be ignore that Poly implies a relationship, not just sex
The quote isn't about "Poly" it's about non-monogamy. Having a one night stand with a stranger while simultaneously having a partner is not monogamy.
See, you can say that but if it's treated as a one time thing and actually stays a one time thing, then probably the two people in the couple aren't going to go around calling their relationship "non-monogamous"
Doesn't really matter what they call it - that's non-monogamy (edit: or cheating)
But the measurement was "consensual non-monogamy", not "polyamory".
How many threesomes with their partner and their best friend would someone have to have before they're polyamorous?
Well if more than 3 shakes is a wank then the 4th threesome is a poly relationship.
That's probably up to whatever the couple thinks, and has no universally correct answer
It just seems absurd to suggest that a monogamous couple who has one single threesome, one time, and then never again, is now "non-monogamous" forever
It's obviously a spectrum.
A related concept is if you suck dick are you gay?
Asking for a friend?
It depends if you enjoy it buddy
Time spent with different partners doesn't necessarily have to be equal. For instance a "comet partner" who you only spend a couple of days with every few months is one type of common poly relationship
> 21% of Americans have experimented with consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, far more than two decades ago
> Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.
I guess it depends a lot on how the terms are defined. If you include parallel dating (during the "non-exclusive" phase of dating), I could easily see this as being true.
I don't think most people are having sex with multiple people or even doing this parallel dating business. Parallel dating is less common than serial dating, and parallel dating with sex is even less common than parallel dating. It sure isn't looking like 20% of people to me. I avoid people like that too so maybe there is some selection bias.
A single threesome is enough to put all its participants into those 20 per cent, and according to studies, 10 per cent of women and 18 per cent of men had a threesome.
There is a majority of the cohort already, and if your friends perceive you as judgmental, they won't likely tell you that they have had one.
There's no way 18% of straight men had a threesome. That sounds like the kind of thing people would lie about. In any case, a single threesome is not "polyamory" and certainly not closely related to "parallel dating."
> experimented with consensual non-monogamy
I think this might be less of "I now have two families" and more of "we brought a third person into the bedroom for a bit of spice once in a blue moon".
After some sleuthing I believe the original source for that statistic is [1]. But that’s a study of single adults which is a wildly different population than adults as a whole.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2016.1...
Good thing you figured out that non-monogamy simply doesn't work. Must feel good to finally get to the bottom of that! I'll make sure to inform the millions of Americans currently practicing it that you figured it out - simple arithmetic!
Maybe it was only 2% of the population, but they accounted for 21% of the relationships.
Now we're thinking with portals!
> Simply isn't enough time in the day
We do a lot of three-person dates and hangouts, that helps with timing
> 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.
Not everyone (or even necessarily anyone in a family) works full time, and not everyone who works, full-time or otherwise, works in an institution at arm’s length from the family, so even at the basic premises your argument about constraints suffers from false generalization problems. Observing that polyamorous family structure is suboptimally suited for a dystopian proletarian life in some extreme capitalism assumptions is accurate, but note that that the same observation has been made by many about monogamous relationships.
> Even if you perfectly split your free eight between two people,
Why are you assuming splitting time? A person can interact with more than one other person at a time.
> god forbid you have a commute or a kid.
Seems that in many ways having kids in a poly family would be easier than a monogamous nuclear family. The only problem I see with commutes is that a poly family unit is going to be forced into more complicated commute-optimization trade-offs (OTOH, the probability of having viable commute-sharing with at least one other partner is also higher, so there’s plusses and minuses on that front, too.)
I believe 21% of americans have at least tried to hook in a third for a threesome fling successfully or nonsuccessfully
Half of them informed their spouses about it beforehand. One-eighth of them did so after the fact.
It's wild that we can't differentiate lust and love, committed relationship and meaningless sex. That's the main thing I get from the confusion in the article and the confusion in the comments here about what even defines polyamory. It sounds to me like who you have sex with is the main and only thing that defines a relationship? Can people that wait to have sex until marriage ever be considered polyamorous while unmarried? If a married person gets close to a second person but doesn't do anything sexual with them are they still being monogamous?
Polyamory may literally just mean "Many loves" but I think we can all agree that we are not in a polyamorous relationship with our parents or close friends
The level of partnership doesn't have to be sex, but being real sex is the thing that most often differentiates romantic partnerships from other close relationships
> but being real sex is the thing that most often differentiates romantic partnerships from other close relationships
I don't actually agree. I think "willingness and continued intention to follow this person and live with them ever still, including the sacrifices that come along with it" tends to be something that connects more with relationships traditionally seen as romantic.
It's something that would separate a very close friendship from, for example, a "Queer Platonic Relationship", which could very arguably be romantic.
People devote themselves to their non-romantic loved ones, including parents and siblings.
Sure but the thing that matters is when you make a bond with someone who isn't a member of your family.
It can be difficult to differentiate between those, because you can have meaningless sex in a committed relationship and meaningful sex in a non-committed one. I have sex with several of my close friends because the difference between platonic love and romantic relationship is not very clear in my mind. And I've had relationships that are very close and intimate where I haven't had sex with them because while some of them have been romantic, they just haven't been physical.
> you can have meaningless sex in a committed relationship and meaningful sex in a non-committed one
no, I don't think this is true. The older I get the more I think there's real wisdom in being very careful about who you have sex with.
It will have meaning, whether you want it to or not, and it will be negative meaning like regret if you are not very careful.
Sex is extremely dangerous and it is only safe to engage in it with someone you know well and trust, and trust isn't to be given lightly. You will be at your most vulnerable with your partner, both during the act and potentially afterwards due to the hormonal effects and emotional effects as well as the potential physical consequences. "Safe sex" is a lie.
I don't think in the age of birth control that everyone needs to wait until marriage but we have gone very far in the other direction and I really wish someone had told me when I was younger that I would remember all of my partners in vivid detail, especially the ones I wish I could forget.
No, there is really no such thing as meaningless sex.
You could make the argument that there is no real meaningless sex, because oxytocin is released when having sex and oxytocin causes binding.
Then you have to define what is meaning because it’s not just hormones
For our ancestors, not being choosy about sex had very serious consequences. (It still might.) It’s “wild” to you that 3 million years of evolution is working as intended?
I assume you are talking about our Hunter-gatherer ancestors based on the timeframe, but I'm not sure what you mean by serious consequences. Could you expand on that a bit?
I suspect monogamy as we know it is a response to the invention of agriculture, and we have closer relatives (the bonobos) who have sex much more freely than some of our other closer relatives.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11219
EDIT: Whoops I misread the abstract of the article, that doesn’t really give evidence towards my claim. However STDs did exist and I’m assuming people knew about them. Pregnancy itself would be a deterrent
For our female ancestors, yes. For our male ancestors, less so.
3 million? You may have missed some classes in school
>lust and love, committed relationship and meaningless sex
Just to complicate, some more types of love to add into the mix: limerence and agape.
Many would argue that there is no such thing as meaningless sex.
I’m of the opinion that arguing for the existence of such thing is naive and idiotic.
I think it depends on what we consider "meaningless".
Is it "meaningless" that I hang out with friends on a Friday night? We didn't really accomplish anything except for possibly growing our relationships.
I think when myself and many people say we have "meaningless" sex it just means that beyond that particular moment, it doesn't have any other purpose. (beyond maybe its with a friend and it does the same as going out for drinks and just grows a relationship).
It was fun in the moment, but thats it. It is the same as going out for drinks, playing a game, or any other activity that I engage with friends with. Of course it's not truly "meaningless" or we wouldn't be doing it since we wouldn't be enjoying it. But it doesn't have to go deeper than that.
If it's all meaningful, then it has no meaning.
Meaning comes from distinction, the opposite of undifferentiated sex.
Meaning, particularly in this context, can also come from consequences
It depends how you define meaningful and meaningless which is highly subjective - so it’s neither naive nor idiotic to be able to have meaningless sex - maybe it’s just not something you feel
There are powers at play in this world that don't care about one's feelings.
I think people who like ideas like polyamory have misconstrued notions about what monogamy is, which is a general cultural problem in western societies these days.
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.
Well said, monogamy is a structure for producing a stable child rearing environment — and by relation a stable society. It is entirely consensual where arranged marriages no longer take place.
I have no issues how people screw each other but monogamy has a purpose, and if your purpose is to raise a stable family your odds are best if you pursue monogamy.
Monogamy is one such structure. It seems very tied to the modern idea of the "nuclear family." There are others. Having an extended family all living together is another. Tribes where children are raised communally is another.
Communal living is highly overrated. If you're a young and capable person you'll be shouldered with responsibility and live under the thumb of your elders. Not a dignified existence. I barely tolerate my own parents, I will not tolerate my extended family demanding things from me.
It's highly underrated by young people who don't like the idea of living with their parents. Ultimately, the cost of this is shouldered by day care fees, parental leave, social security checks we cut to old people, and less efficient living spaces; problems which were ok in an era of gdp and population growth, but in the era of stagnation? We'll see.
Those are all true and fair points, but they illustrate that most people value freedom and autonomy at a very high dollar amount.
> Having an extended family all living together is another.
Collectivism has clear benefits but comes at a steep price: the need to establish and enforce group norms. The nuclear family seems like a compromise in this space, a revealed preference.
I mean, I would probably be happy living like an Orca in a matrilineal family group but, then again, I've always gotten along with my Mom. What about the people who haven't? Or who only started to once they moved out? Those people would be faced with living in a disharmonious environment or leaving to a world hostile to individuals.
You are taking effective birth control completely for granted.
It wasn't that long ago that monogamy was the default because no one wants to have a baby from a night of netflix and chill.
IMO you have the direction of causation backwards. Monogamy is not some child rearing optimization strategy. It was a social construct that evolved because causual sex at one point was incredibly expensive and now it is not because of birth control.
I can't imagine going to my theorerical wife-in-open-monogamy-relationship and tell her that the girl I had sex with at work's Christmas party gave me std because, despite she had her pills, but the rubber fell. It's just not mixing up in my head.
Also, if I give myself to my wife as a whole (i.e. I take care of her, the home and the children) I do not have time really to have another affairs. The rest of the time I'm left with I either sacrifice to be with her or have my own time like play games or compose music. There are lots of things to be done really, and I couldn't imagine sacrificing my family and duties to pursue sexual satisfaction with other people outside of my family.
> I do not have time really to have another affairs.
That's a good point, and true of most people I expect. The wealthy have time, though. Wealth buys time. Kings, the epitome of being wealthy historically, have always had time for affairs, and are oft remembered for exactly that(!), but a growing proportion of "common folk" are becoming increasingly wealthy themselves, freeing up the necessary time among more and more people. However, wealth inequality is high, so the opportunity of time is not evenly distributed.
> Monogamy is not some child rearing optimization strategy.
Can you go into this a little more? Is there evidence (either way) that stable 2-parent households are or aren't better for kids, or that an alternative is better?
Similar to comments above there's a difference between poly and open. I've not tried either but I've multiple good friends who are in "monogamish" relationships and it seems to work pretty well. For them the non-monogomy is just fun they have with others, but ultimately their partnership comes first. Otherwise it's very similar to the monogamy you describe but with agreed exceptions to sexual exclusivity.
It's not for everyone and it takes a lot communication (and low levels of jealousy) but it seems to work well at providing the structure and stability of marriage without forcing the full sexual exclusivity that some find constricting.
Why does their partnership come first? Whats stopping you from finding somebody better to make a priority? Isn’t that the point of being poly is to have the ability to shop around?
One benefit to commitment is that it's hard.
It takes work, for both people to compromise, to critically self-evaluate and improve.
When it's easy to just "shop around", you never really have to look hard in the mirror. It's easier to just internally assign blame to the other person: "they're not meeting my needs", and go off seeking someone else who will.
There's value in resilience, in building up your character so that you can endure turmoil.
All relationships have stormy times.
A key facet of emotional maturity is to be able to distinguish climate from weather.
> It's not about expectation, but commitment.
I think this is the main point.
People nowadays don't want commitment, and when they have it they don't respect it anyway.
I think this attitude will sooner or later change back, when the bill will come due. Life is full of challenges and hardships, and having somebody you committed to and who's committed does help deal with stuff.
I think the raise in popularity of polyamory is largely a proxy measure for the raise in selfishness.
Everyone likes to party, no one likes to clean up afterwards.
Where I am from marriage is forever and there is no way to dissolve it without burning in eternal fire - it’s very much about ownership.
Kudos on you to having a modern marriage but marriage in the past (and also now) also is about ownership. It’s a literal contract between two people and you are legally obligated to take care of the other person.
Ownership implies control without the consent of whomever is being controlled.
Where you are from sounds horrific. Hopefully it changes for the better soon.
This was... the US, Britain, etc for many years and much of the middle east and parts of them and Asia today.
Women just aren't in control of their lives and personhood in so many ways under even modern marriage law. I believe it's still problematic in some US states and I know it's problematic in many places that we might even consider "civilized" where a woman cannot bring her husband for divorce, the husband must bring his wife for divorce. There are still places in the "civilized" world where it is considered legal for a man to force himself upon his wife against her will or enact violence upon her if she does not submit.
Beyond that, there is an assumption in some layers of society that women will marry and have no autonomy over their lives.
A good friend of mine in the early 90s faced extreme issue closing the joint account between her and her (recently deceased) husband. She was told that she needed her husband's "written and notarized approval" to take any action against the account, even though she was listed as the primary contact on the account because the system enforced that only male account holders were allowed to make changes. In fact, this system didn't allow a single woman to open a bank account until 1992!
Another friend of mine has been attempting to get a hysterectomy voluntarily (every woman on her mother's side has developed cervical cancer in the last 4 generations), has no interest in ever having a child or getting married to a man for that matter, and has faced numerous doctors who will not even hear her out because "what if her future husband wants kids" just absolutely stalls the conversation. She has recently gotten further by having a local wiccan coven write some bullshit on paper that it's her "religious duty to nature" to have this happen, which has at least gotten a few doctors to read and go "I'll have to check in on this."
Just this year, American women in the south were reminded that their vote is just as secret as their husband's. This spurred a wave of men who began calling for the stripping of the rights of women because they might vote differently than their husbands.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Married_Women%27s_Property_Act... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Married_Women%27s_Property_Act... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-19-6978-2_... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/women-required-to-obey-hu... https://www.npr.org/2024/11/03/nx-s1-5159978/republicans-for... https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/women-voting-...
Yeah, it’s actually your perspective that’s the recent innovation.
Most of history is closer to what GP described.
I'm well aware of US history. It's just that I'd rather not go back decades and certainly not centuries. Thankfully honor killings and FGM are quite rare in my part of the Midwest US, for now at least.
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How did you get this from GP’s comment? They’re saying the exact opposite in plain as day terms.
From this, I imagine:
> I don't own my partner and she doesn't own me.
Polyamory is a sign of comodification/casualness about relationships and sex, in an increasingly sexless and loveless period.
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.
It is a sign of increasing inequality / hypergamy as the most desirable 1% of men have multiple partners while the rest have none.
In other words human society is reverting to the way it always has been since the dawn of the agricultural age 12,000 years ago.
There was never any reason to believe that the monogamous system of the 1950s West was a permanent stable arrangement and indeed we are seeing its death in our own lifetimes.
> monogamous system of the 1950s West
It's not exclusively a "West" thing, and it never was. Monogamy has been a stable and thriving system in many parts of the world for centuries, well before the 1950s or the Western framing of it. Societies in South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East, for example, have long upheld monogamous traditions through cultural and religious practices, sometimes even more rigidly than the West.
You might want to check this out: https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success/
They also had slavery, secret societies that hoarded scientific knowledge and attributed it to religious powers, dictators as a default, and plenty of other things people did for thousands of years. How people used to do it, especially more than 100 years ago, is of no worth to anybody living without it being constantly tested.
Newton was a genius with an amazing model, until Einstein showed he was thinking too small, and its becoming apparent that Einstein missed something at this point. Humanity advances by pushing and testing limits.
Ehh, maybe it's just how the poly scene is shaped around here, but in my experience the men are usually very far from any real or imagined "most desirable 1%". For poly women the gamut is wider, but not that much. Heavy tendency towards the ASD spectrum in both.
Your "1%" will just go to clubs or on Tinder and hook up with other conventionally attractive people, without having to deal with some weirdo subculture.
> Your "1%" will just go to clubs or on Tinder and hook up with other conventionally attractive people, without having to deal with some weirdo subculture.
Pretty much. There's a lot of swingers these days, but no one with a triple digit IQ will raise their say "Hey I'm a swinger!" to their entire friend circle due to all the downsides that come along with it. People just do it quietly to avoid causing drama (from usually ugly people). I've always suspected the need for people to declare these types of alternate-sexuality lifestyles is more attention seeking and validation than actual organic expression of an identity. The loudest ones about these lifestyles are usually the most boner-killer types in terms of looks.
I have a strong feeling that like many new things, poliamory is currently mostly/only getting get “positive marketing” narrative.
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 ?
I think it’s just the latest fad neurodivergent people push on each other.
I wonder if it's also easier for people who have less family relationships going on.
Me and my girlfriends are all distant from our families. If I regularly visited my parents and siblings and spent time with them, I'd have less time for romantic partners.
I wonder if there's a need for secure family-like relationships, and where the family of origin has failed, people are more likely to seek that feeling from romantic partners. "There is no form of incest greater than T4T"
this, tbh. to a large degree.
anecdotally, all those I know who practice poly, and name it as such, also say they have asperger's.
I really hate "traditional values" on account of their peddlers and the history books full of horrors they have enabled but when literally every successful society and major religion has some semblance of a 1:1 rule even if the exceptions and edge case handling are different you kinda gotta take notice.
> major religion has some semblance of a 1:1 rule
More of a one-to-many rule. Only one side is expected to be fully monogamous.
It's long been socially acceptable for men to have mistresses or even multiple separate families, so long as they had the resources to take care of them all. And the social faux pas of merely sleeping with other women is very recent.
One side would be stuck with a kid and have significant difficulty paying for/supporting themselves with the extra burden, without an attached male. The other one could give false names and/or disappear never to be seen again.
Biologically, there are differences.
There's a tragedy of the commons when it comes to the question of "what do all of the single people do?" Each relationship beyond monogamy can be thought of as "taking away" an opportunity from the partner you would have paired with had you been monogamous. ie a relationship opportunity cost.
Typically, societies with imbalanced relationship ratios, an in particular single males, tend to be more unstable. Should poly folks design their life around the consequences of disaffected young males? No, of course not. Nor should we artificially privilege monogamy to ensure social stability for obvious reasons of individualality and moral policing. We should study the phenomenon and remedy the male psyche to ensure social stability and discover, scientifically, the threshold at which we can expect it to be a problem.
Chemistry is monogamous. 1 electron. 1 pairing.
In covalent bonds, it's two electrons one pair. Metallic bonds are more polyamorous.
I vote benzene for wildest non-monogamy config
They get excited but still bound
Oh boy, just wait until you learn about Plasma.
That's hot!
Like a cocaine fueled orgy!
I liked this, but I feel like it glosses over a significant dynamic that discolors both sides of the mono/poly split, which is "people not living the life they want".
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.)
I've kind of wondered this over the years myself.
The downsides of being in a rigidly-defined monogamous relationship are all kind of obvious, I think. Most people do not experience love or attraction as zero-sum games: you can have a "crush" or whatever on Person B without diminishing your feelings for Person A. So a person in a monogamous relationship is going to miss out on some positive physical and emotional connections that might have been really enjoyable.
But...
I've known a fair number of people in poly/open/etc relationships over the years and they tend to be inherently unstable, even moreso than trad monogamy. Like you said, often one person wants more exclusivity.
Also... let's be totally honest. One partner is almost always going to have more access to sex and love outside the relationship. Either they are more attractive, more assertive, or simply have more free time, or any other number of reasons. So the "openness" never seems to work out in a totally equal and/or equitable way.
They also seem to run into the problem of time and energy. In the abstract, love and sex are not zero-sum games. But a person only has so much energy and so many free hours in a week. So in practicality, yeah. It does become a bit zero-sum.
If someone truly loves their partner, wouldn't they be happy that their partner is getting more of what they need? Even if that is more sex?
I honestly don't know the answer to this question.
I've heard the optimal form of monogamy is when both partners fully give themselves to each other, and 100% seek the happiness of their partner. I was taught this in a religion. I can't logically understand it though. I can't imagine being happy or maintaining my own identity without spending at least a portion of my energy on myself.
I haven't been successful in relationships though, so what do I know? Is that just a religiously inspired fantasy, or can a real relationship work that way?
> If someone truly loves their partner, wouldn't they be happy that their partner is getting more of what they need? Even if that is more sex?
When analyzing my feelings after I got cheated on by a fairly long-term partner, I realized I wasn't upset she had had sex with another guy, but the rather the betrayal of doing so behind my back and trying to hide it.
This realization shaped my following relationships.
> I can't imagine being happy or maintaining my own identity without spending at least a portion of my energy on myself.
This is also true for myself, however it doesn't involve sex with others in my case. I'm content with my partner.
> If someone truly loves their partner, wouldn't they be happy that their partner is getting more of what they need? Even if that is more sex?
I feel like this kind of weird idea is due to a fallacy of replacing the actual human experience of love with a sort of rationalized version that has no boundaries or preferences or anything like that. The answer is... no? yes? if you want to? You can love someone and still care about what they do or don't do, and if it's a healthy relationship they'll respect those boundaries, or compromise if necessary, and you'll be respecting theirs also. It definitely does not mean "everything is permitted", unless that's what your personal boundaries are---which means that's what a relationship is to you.
The optimal form of monogamy is whatever the two people in the relationship want it to be. Sometimes that's 100% seeking the happiness of their partner (I think that's a delusional fantasy though). Sometimes it's two people coexisting and just having each other's back. The whole point is that each person finds a relationship that gets what they need. Not what some idealized version of a person that they aspire to be would need.
And my money's on no, most people do not want a relationship where their partner has sex with whoever they want, because it is also a fallacy that sex is a physical need rather than emotional one. In fact it has a lot to do with emotions, safety, power, compassion, etc, and those are all things that are (often) tied into a relationship, especially as you get older.
People focus so much on getting equal sex. If that bothers you you'te totally missing the point. Poly people invented the word compersion to amend a blind spot in our language, and thereby do the same in our emotional vocabulary. At least from their point of view. Maybe it's not a part of our vocabulary because it's contrary to our biology.
"It makes me happy to see my partner happy" is Relationships 101. Just because people gave it a word, doesn't mean it didn't exist - and I'd claim the opposite, poly people had to make a word because its not seen as the default in that community.
This is like saying, I invented the word "hiverchill" which means "that feeling of cold when it snows". You can't say this was a blind spot in our language. We didn't need this word, because of course you are cold when it snows.
"Compersion" is usually more than just "it makes me happy to see my partner happy", but "it makes me happy to see my partner happy, even when that would (at least traditionally) inspire some bad feeling in me."
Compersion isn't the feeling you get when you give your partner flowers and they smile, it's the feeling you get when your partner tells you a story about how nice their date with someone else was. It's a very particular flavor of joy-for-partner, that for some people doesn't exist at all because it is clouded by jealousy or fear or other feelings.
> poly people had to make a word because its not seen as the default in that community.
Feeling joy at your partner going on a date with someone else is not seen as the default in any community except the poly community.
Only issue is that when you get what you want, you might be convincing your partner(s) to settle for something they want less. Perhaps the mindset of "best I can get" and finding an acceptable compromise is the way to go.
I truly believe that it is possible to be in a relationship where both people's "best I can get" is "me and my partner are both getting what we want", like you can love someone in a way in which your own preferences recalibrate to be compatible with theirs.
Not sure if this is a state everyone can reach, or would want to, but I'm quite sure it's attainable for lots of people.
(Aside, I have some friends who are bad at asserting themselves in the ways I was talking about, but about, like, everything. They'll say "I want X", but they'll feel they have to provide a good reason for it to be taken seriously, e.g. "I want to eat dinner early tonight because it messes up my sleep when we eat late".
(You can imagine the kind of relationships (family or friends or romantic) they might have had in their lives which trained them to act this way...)
So they act like they have to give a sufficiently good reason for their preferences to be taken seriously.... which is, IMO, the degraded state I'm talking about.
In a respectful relationship, the fact that you want something IS a reason to do it; you don't have to provide a logically adequate reason to get what you want as well. And if two people's desires are incompatible, both will happily compromise to find a way to make them compatible again.)
I think you don't really know what you want if you don't know why you want it. Learning to understand oneself is a huge part of one's personal growth. When you don't know the "why", it's easy to be mistaken about what you actually want, and push for a superficial projection of it, not the real underlying thing. (And therefore lose out on relationships you didn't know you'd be happy with.) But we speak in generalities of course.
On one level this could be a really bad sign (either about the relationship, or just one person's self esteem) where a person can't just want something. They have to "justify" it.
On the other hand, I don't know if that's necessarily bad?
Like, if we always eat dinner at 7ish and now you want to eat at 5pm I feel it's just natural that I'd want to know why? Because we probably had reasons for eating at 7pm, and maybe I want to kind of weigh them against everything else? Because maybe I can't take my lunch break at work until 3pm, so eating dinner at 5pm really sucks for me. etc. etc etc etc
Amen, absolutely. Let's say you can't eat at 7.... but I can't eat at 5.But what is the point of eating together? Is it really the act of forking nutrients into our mouths... or is it spending time together? Maybe we can just chill out and talk at 5pm. You can eat... and I'll just hang out and we can talk about our day or watch some netflix or w/e.
I probably have just always picked shitty partners but in my experience that kinda happy compromise problem-solving attitude seems so rare. kudos to you for that attitude.
I wasn't super happy with that example, it's vaguely based on something that happened to me recently but I can't quite remember what happened well enough to make it sound compelling. But I do notice this phenomenon of "justifying one's preferences" in people pretty regularly. When it happens, it sounds odd... like it stands out as insecure, but they seem to not be aware it's odd at all.
I'll add:
I guess the way this usually manifests is not that a person gives reasons at all, but rather that they seem to give too many reasons. Like offhandedly saying "I feel like doing this" is normal. But going on about the reasons, making sure they're very clear and crisp and agreed upon by everybody is more like the aberrant/degraded thing I'm talking about.
The word swinger wasn't mentioned once. Probably because the swingers are just quietly enjoying their lives under the radar.
I think it might also be because "Swinging" is a word from a previous era and some/many of the young LGBTQ+ people are against learning from their elders.
Swinging is a very clear example of ENM.
> young LGBTQ+ people are against learning from their elders
No, there's a missing generation. As (previously) one of those, my generation is now the "elders", and we had to learn in a strange, weirdly sheltered way. Our elders were dead or hiding. The topics were taboo, the representation garbage, and the content online? Often blocked in the place we had internet access.
I do a lot of teaching to my younger queer friends. Sometimes I have to do a lot of research on a topic before I can give an answer.
In addition, Swingers weren't talked about in any part of my growing up. It wasn't until as an adult I looked at my partner and said "Oh, they're having a key party" at an exhibit of a model 50s-era home in the midwest.
Sorry, yes, I wasn't intending to give the impression that I was ignoring the many, many that died in the 80s during the AIDS epidemic. I was intending to refer to Millenials as the elders and Gen Alpha as the "young LGBTQ+".
At least what I see on TikTok has reflected a lot of the elder (Millenial) LGBTQ+ people becoming periodically frustrated with the younglings for not listening to them as they talk about exactly the frustrations / issues the new ones are going through or aren't having to go through.
Weirdly, swingers *were* talked about in my family when I was young.
Google seems to think monogamish is the new word for it, but that is a really confusing word (I thought it meant you can cuddle puddle with your friends).
ENM?
Ethical non-monogamy
> some/many of the young LGBTQ+ people are against learning from their elders.
Well almost a complete generational cohort of their elders is simply missing. They died of aids in the 80s and 90s.
No, they didn't. At least look at the data before making such a bigoted statement.
Yes, we did lose a generational cohort.
There is a reason that the quilt is so large[1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/06/27/155868611/pieces-of-aids-quil...
100k out of 200 million (US)? Out of 5 billion (worldwide)?
The flu makes us lose five "generational cohorts" every year, then.
Intersectionality.
100k out of *how many out homosexual individuals during that era in the area being studied*?
And it's not just raw numbers, either. It's how many lives / families were impacted in this unique way.
To add, it's also 100k that were almost entirely in a single demographic that was explicitly and implicitly being harmed by those in power during that era.
I want to add more. The whole “30 is gay death” expression, I bet, especially since it’s not really a thing anymore, was greatly influenced by there being very few gay people over 30. Because the rest were dead.
>Intersectionality.
Nah, just elementary school Math.
It was around 1%, a considerable morbidity but still very far from losing "a complete generational cohort".
Hey btw I absolutely did mean "a generational cohort of lgbtq people" not the broader total population. Which would make no sense, so I assumed no one would interpret my meaning that way. Thanks for calling me a bigot and then starting a fight with these other people about it though.
A multiplication and a division is starting a fight nowadays?
>a generational cohort of lgbtq people
That's where the 1% figure comes from. If you look at the whole population it is more like 0.0001%.
Sorry if Math hurt your feelings.
Btw, bigot means a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief or an opinion, which seems relevant.
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A lot of people don't seem to realize polyamory versus open relationship. Polyamory is about holding multiple relationships. Open relationship is more about the physical act, without additional relationships.
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.
This article starts by noting that more women are polyamorous than men and then does a "thought experiment" where it completely ignores that.
I've observed a number of poly relationships from the outside, as a friend of one or more of the participants. I've also been in a monogamous relationship for >20yr and I've lived on both coasts of the US in that time.
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.
Indeed a wild generalization, but I can agree from many anecdotes that monogamous couples "going poly" is super super hard - much easier to start a relationship in a poly dynamic than attempt to transform one.
My only observation of this phenomenon was essentially as you described in your second paragraph, the difference being it started as a poly relationship and it was painfully visible that one person was the third wheel there and in denial about it.
Probably a function of the particlar psychographic you hang out with.
Meanwhile one observes the denial of any potential to even discuss ENM (along with straight-up cheating) contributing to an immeasurable portion of dyad breakups.
Or people staying in the dyad, but with tremendous unacknowledged suffering.
On dating sites 100% of the girls I've seen with poly/open relationship on their profiles are butt ugly.
Guys have been banging other girls on the side since forever, but now apparently a new word is needed and everyone needs to know about it. Just go and bang someone else and don't go on about it to your actual gf ffs.
I thought this was a nice article. I myself am in a non-open poly relationship and it works quite well for us. It's also pretty common in my community (homos) because we all like the same sex
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It means, myself and my two partners are in a relationship with each other, and do so without seeking sex or love from other people. It's just the three of us, no more, no less.
I'm always wary of definitions for things that require complex explanations, and are subject to debate. That doesn't mean it's invalid, but it just speaks to - and I hate to say this - a possible influence of academic studies or literature or class content.
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.
An underappreciated feature of nonmonogamy is that it makes ethical conflicts of interest a bit more challenging. This article doesn't discuss that explicitly, but does hint at it in some of the quotes
How so?
It’s hard enough when there are clear roles/responsibilities/expectations. Divorces (which assume monogamy) are notorious for getting incredibly ugly.
Look at how few people can even agree what open/enm/poly even means in this discussion.
Then add more parties with more emotions and more abilities to act out…. More degrees of freedom means harder to predict.
And then also add in that Society is going to have an even harder time holding anyone accountable for anything in these kinds of situations - he said/she said is hard enough, what about when it’s he said/she said/he said/she said/they said?
Just give up and throw everyone in jail? Or no one?
This article didn't really hit for me. It feels like I'm just reading the author's particular experiences run through a gauntlet of theorisation that ultimately does more to obscure than clarify the message.
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.
I am someone who experienced the "longterm partner decided she wanted to be poly" heartbreak. When she told me, I asked her why she would choose to stay with me rather than just be single and date as many men as she wanted. She told me something along the lines of "I love you, I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but I don't feel like one person is enough for all the love I have". I wasn't terribly happy with that response, and she broke up with me a week later (while a man who she wanted to be poly with was staying with her). She left me because she wanted to change the parameters of the relationship and I didn't
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
> spent the whole time trashing me
The real danger comes when this pattern meets underlying trauma or personality issues - the manipulation becomes a way to process or control rather than connect, while the constant desire from others makes it feel justified or even righteous.
This isn't about relationship styles - it's about recognizing when multiple connections are being used as tools for manipulation rather than genuine human bonds.
> convinced me that people who are Poly are self-centered, emotionally stunted, and absolutely not suitable for any kind of long term relationship
I might be, but if I waited until I was actually ready for relationships, I would probably not have had a single first date until my 40s
the more I glimpse American culture, the happier I am that I was not born there.
>I wasn't terribly happy with that response, and she broke up with me a week later
my brother in Christ, you should've broken up with her on the spot.
Someone said something like this to me recently about a story I related where I was told an ex boyfriend would be at a falsely framed "party" the partner was literally driving me to when she told me.
My new friend said to me, "you should have gotten out of the car". I replied that if I had I would have had to been prepared to walk away from the relationship on the spot when it happened. That is easier said than done in a moment.
> my brother in Christ, you should've broken up with her on the spot
After she told me she wanted to be with me for life? I had hoped the poly issue was going to be in the past
I was in my early 20s, I was in love, she was my second girlfriend, who happened to be my high school crush, "the one that got away" but I got a second shot with her and took it, I was living the dream
How that relationship ended screwed me up for a long time. I'm better now, and I have a very loving stable partner
>After she told me she wanted to be with me for life?
well, as you saw, it wasn't really the case, was it? I don't mean to rub salt into the wound, but she's been fucking that guy long before that conversation with you.
I'm glad to hear that it had all worked out for you in the end. never second-guess your decision to reject that suggestion.
>How that relationship ended screwed me up for a long time
You learned important life lessons young when they were low cost. I call that a win.
> After she told me she wanted to be with me for life? I had hoped the poly issue was going to be in the past
You hopefully learned that girls lie, like to avoid conflict and keep their options open. Once you accept these 3 facts they become much easier to understand. Guys care less about point 2.
Only judge someone by their actions, not words. And your gf fucking other people is a pretty clear statement of her feelings for you and her intention for your future.
Your problem is that you tried to make a relationship with your oneitis. Those never work.
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Pretty good article. I think everyone could do with a little less pathologization of a lot of human behaviour. My wife has suggested in the past that we have another wife so that we can have more children[0]. I'm amenable to the idea but the logistics of this seem hard to me: our finances are fused, our desires are mostly unified, and it took me many years to find someone with whom this was easy to do. A two-party marriage like mine is straightforward for us both. There is a natural Nash equilibrium in responsibility splitting. We do so without explicit handling and simple nudges one way or the other suffice to recalibrate. I imagine long-term polyamorous relationships are easier to handle for people who have more explicit procedures in interaction or who are more comfortable with the uncertainty.
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.
What you're describing is polygamy, and I've considered it for myself. It is corrosive if it is adopted as a social institution in a culture, but if a free rider here or there (such as myself) pulls it off, better for them. I have talked to my wife about it, she doesn't like the idea, although she does like women and it wouldn't be a just me getting the benefit type deal. I think she's probably right, the dynamic can get too messy, and I think youre right, it took me my whole life to find her, finding another one that's perfect for me as well as perfect for her would probably take a decade. Not really a reasonable timeline.
Also, she wants the children she raises to be hers, the shared responsibility thing doesn't appeal to her, and the potential rivalries between women and their respective children just aren't conducive to raising healthy people, which is ultimately the goal of all of this. Maybe she will change her mind one day. Maybe it could be made to work. I'm not dead set on it and am happy with the status quo.
> 0: It's not that we're old but that we will be old by the time we're done.
Raising children when you're old is so much harder, and you'll be mega-old when they're 20. I really don't see the point?
The point is to avoid that precise problem by parallelizing the child-having. My wife can only have one child at a time and medically recommended spacing is 18 months. The objective is to have our children as young as we can given our current ages.
I hope it’s not too personal, ignore if it is: How many children are you aiming for?
Given that we have this limit and our age, 3 if her health permits. If we could parallelize, one could imagine twice that+.
If you don't mind me asking, how many are you starting with now?
Because three is a lot. And if you're starting from 0 or 1 today, I can't imagine you actually want six.
We'll see where we get. In some sense, the revealed preference is that I didn't, considering I prioritized my career over finding a partner. But we'll see.
I don’t think the author is saying this is their opinion but this sentence stood out to me:
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?
> I wonder if the negative view of monogamy is just the immaturity of youth and those people have since grown out of that position?
There are powerful entities, including religions and country laws, that either make life easier for people pratcicing the monogamous relationship style or just outright force that style on masses of people. This force spawns resistance, and the negative view you mention is an expression of this resistance.
And it's worth adding that the comment "Monogamy is coercive." is a reflection of this part:
> There are powerful entities, including religions and country laws, that [...] just outright force that style on masses of people.
I think we are conflating two different things. Monogamous people and monogamous institutions. Does the author mean institutions are coercive or that couples are coercive?
Almost certainly Both!
Systemic, indoctrinated and even toxic monogamy, perpetuated by people and society at large.
You've got people and relationships that are so harmed by strict heteronormativity and its related monogamy that "men and women can't be friends" and "you can't say that lady's cute because that's cheating" and pornography is adultery.
It's little microaggressions and requirements of conformity that systematize and enforce monogamy in little ways.
It doesn’t matter what system, society will ruin anything it enforces. Everything has pros and cons.
Imagine the same system enforcing poly. You’d have mandatory partner sharing to those in power, all sorts of requirements and gate keeping for who could and could not share, or be part of various cliques, etc.
For sure, anyone pretty or desirable would be expected to be poly and like it or else, etc.
The reality is that system would fly apart even faster than monogamous systems since there is no meaningful way to ‘opt out’ and protect oneself, which is why you don’t see it in any large scale societies.
The author of the post was quoting a book as saying that, and criticizing the book at the same time, so it sounds like you're more or less agreeing with 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?
The negative view of monogamy that these people convey is an attempt to justify their lifestyle to people who don't like it, or to recruit more people to their lifestyle. One could argue that both monogamy and nonmonogamy have selfish aspects, but monogamy has proven more successful as a strategy for human society. Of course polyamorous people would debate that with you, but the disadvantages of polyamory are so obvious that it isn't easy to justify.
The disadvantages of polyamory are not obvious to me, as a 67 year who has been married twice and swore it off after the last one ended.
Some obvious risks are: higher chances of STDs, higher chances of strangers causing trouble for you in your home, more difficulties having kids (from paternity issues to differences in values like poly people don't often want kids), and a higher risk of losing your partner. You would probably be better off paying for a prostitute than trying to make polyamory work with all its inherent drama and complications. You still have to worry about STDs but at least you can walk away from any and all other trouble.
STDs aren't a mystery, we know how to avoid them. I actually invited more strangers into my home back when I was monogamous, honestly, but I'm not sure what that has to do with polyamory. Monogamous people lose their partners all the time, have you seen the divorce rates? None of what you are suggesting matches my experience.
Not to mention that safer sex practices are much more normalized in ENM circles. Getting tested before engaging with someone new (or on the reg if new partners are a more frequent thing), using protection, being open with partners about what you're up to are all great for preventing exposure to STDs.
Being monogamous with a cheating partner is...not so great at it. Their tolerance for risky behavior is obviously high, and they're already showing a lack of care for any consequences by stepping out. Yes, I know, "my partner would never be unfaithful," and I hope that's the case for everyone reading this. But it's a common enough occurrence that we all know someone who it's happened to.
>Being monogamous with a cheating partner is...not so great at it. Their tolerance for risky behavior is obviously high, and they're already showing a lack of care for any consequences by stepping out.
That's not a case of real monogamy. We could call it "attempted monogamy" maybe. Cheating partners often want to keep their original relationships intact and as such don't take extreme risks. They probably aren't sleeping with other people as often as a poly person would, and the type of person they sleep with is likely less promiscuous than a poly person.
It seems pretty clear to me that STD risks are lower for those in nominally monogamous relationships, even if there is always some risk of cheating. Redefining the cheating as acceptable behavior (that is, redefining the relationship as poly) is not solving any STD problems. It might if you absolutely cannot trust your partner to be remotely monogamous, but you do want to stay with them, and you do trust them to tell you who they're sleeping with, AND you can effectively use that information to reduce your own risks. For me, I just don't want to be with someone who does not think I'm enough.
>STDs aren't a mystery, we know how to avoid them.
I never said it's a mystery. I'm saying that monogamy is much safer than nonmonogamy in terms of STD risk. These risks are not negligible. Look at how many people have herpes for example.
>I actually invited more strangers into my home back when I was monogamous, honestly, but I'm not sure what that has to do with polyamory.
You don't have to sleep with strangers to be poly, it is true. But I think most people who are in fact sleep with strangers and others who might profess to be poly yet secretly have a lot of jealousy.
>Monogamous people lose their partners all the time, have you seen the divorce rates?
They lose them less than poly people. That's the point.
>None of what you are suggesting matches my experience.
Since many of the downsides I've explained are in terms of relative risks, one instance of good luck does not disprove it. I also think it's common sense that having more partners makes life complicated and introduces more significant risks. Hell, even one partner can wreck your life. More than one, especially the type of people who partake in such deviant and risky behavior, is just asking for trouble.
Could you elaborate more on this? In a non-esoteric way.
The negative view of monogamy is the Internet amplifying the most controversial "hot take" because it gets more clicks than "Do what thou will".
I was monogamous with my wife for about 8 years and I loved her and I think I still love her even though we broke up and probably won't be together again romantically ever.
I would say that monogamy, right now, is _not for me_. I just crave adventure, I'm a contrarian, I want more out of life than the standard, I want to sleep around. The revealed preference is that I want every aspect of my life to be "different" whether that's desktop Linux, veganism, changing my gender, etc.
If I had left that marriage and got into another monogamous relationship, in a few months I'd be wanting to date other people again.
There is a new documentary coming out called The Village of Lovers, https://thevillageoflovers.com/. It is about a 40-year intentional polyamorous "free love" community called Tamera in Portugal. It is specifically about non-hierarchal polyamory. And I watched it and I tend to agree with their approach. It seems like the answer to a lot of society's problems honestly.
While reading the definitions I was imagining this flat male comic with gender jokes "monosaturated, am I right?" When I came to the quotes I was kind of relieved to see women representing this experience.
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.
Polyamory is just a nice way to try people and cheat as you want. It's a cool way to say casual sex.
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 don't think I have casual sex but... Sure, is it wrong to want to try people?
I'm currently trying non-monogamy after a monogamous marriage slid from "I could spend the rest of my life with this person" to "I should not have settled down so early in my 20s"
This quote so resonated with me that I thought it worth a specific call out:
> 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.
Do polyamorous people have more or less children compared to non-polyamorous people? This is a way to judge the viability of this way of life long term rather than just as a fad. For it to be sustainable it needs to be both more than the groups around it and above replacement. If it is neither it is a fad.
Monasticism is a counterexample
If that's your definition of success then don't look at the fertility rates of countries around the world. You would be forced to conclude that everyone should be made materially worse off.
We probably need a solution to that. Below replacement fertility rates are not desirable.
Do americans realise how odd it is that prostitution is illegal there?
In most countries guys just quiety see a prostitute and have a great time without inflicting weird justifications for their horniness on their families.
“ The major monogamy delusion is obvious. It is simple: the idea that you possess your partner”
/facepalm
Why do you say this? This has only become untrue in recent history. For most of history the man effectively possesses the woman. We have feminism to thank for sexual equality and it's still today controversial and not universal. You're standing in the eye of the storm saying of course the winds are calm.
Fantastic article, but as a monogamous married father of 4, I think the author misses the fundamental point of all relationships... And the point of life itself: Reproduction.
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.
I feel like the daily experience of relationships in 2024 America is wildly incompatible with the idea that relationships are for reproduction.
Our genes may at some level be programmed to conspire to get us to reproduce, but we are (for all intents and purposes) autonomous and free to do that or not as we wish, and to have relationships for whatever reasons we want.
There's a bizarre twist of logic going on when you replace "the drive of creatures is (empirically) to reproduce" with "therefore we ought to reproduce". The two are not equivalent; you do not have to do what you are "told".
You might not be as autonomous as you think. Behavior in this area is mostly driven by instinct and emotion. People just rationalize their actions later.
I'm not saying that I am or am not autonomous at a chemical level. I'm saying that the fact that someone is programmed to do something has no bearing on whether they ought to do it at a moral level. The only reason a person ought to "follow their programming" is that they want to. After all, if it really is their programming, they will follow it automatically. There is no point rationalizing: "I must be programmed this way, therefore I have to do it". No, if you were programmed to do it, you'd be doing it already.
Are you wiser than billions of years of evolution?
Is it possible that instinct and emotion drive some people to scale mountains, write software, start businesses, create great works of art, instead of having children?
The explore-exploit tradeoff is well known. Maybe my DNA isn't written to be happy with putting down roots and having kids?
Well, you're not exactly primally driven to reproduce. You're primally driven to engage in some behavior, and experience hedonistic pleasure from it, with the side effect of reproduction. Reproduction is expensive, so evolution created a dirty trick. This is why birth control is so damn popular. You're driven to fuck, not to reproduce. I have no idea what the experience is for an amoeba, but I would guess it feels more like ejaculation than tears of joy to them.
For a lot of people though, the desire for children is there, strong, and comes from somewhere else, almost like it comes from somewhere deeper like a soul or something. I know that's true for me. My goal with my relationship, and well before that when I was shopping, was about family for most of my adult life. It seems this is out of fashion these days and people figure it out late. Hedonistic pleasure is fleeting, creating amazing people can go on literally forever if done correctly, it is an ambition and achievement unto itself, and is rewarding in a way science doesn't yet understand, to be a little facetious.
> For a lot of people though, the desire for children is there, strong, and comes from somewhere else, almost like it comes from somewhere deeper like a soul or something.
Isn’t that just another part of the evolutionary drive to get you to have children? Besides the sex drive? Just like you have a natural will to live and an objection to be killed/kill yourself?
Well, that feeling of wanting to have kids isn't really universal. It's not really primal, like needing to eat or something. The desire for sex pretty much is.
Is it evolved? I guess everything is evolved. Some people have the desire to abuse their children. That's evolved too some how some way, I wouldn't call that an evolutionary drive though.
I don't know if female dogs crave sex or crave puppies. If they're anything like us, the majority of the time it's the former craving that leads to puppies. That's all I know.
I generally agree with what you are saying, but you need to add "and not fighting" to "long term committed parents who are always there." Not fighting is so important that sometimes the parents need to split up so they can stop fighting. They can still be committed parents who are always there for the kids while no longer in a relationship with each other and the kids will do well.
I really really wish someone had told me that a long time ago, and while I'm wishing I wish someone would have told my children's grandparents that an even longer time ago.
when my parents separated (and then divorced) and we moved, i thought it was the best thing that we moved so far away that they just could not meet and thus could not fight anymore. that was my feeling as a 12 year old. forget shared responsibility and kids alternating between both parents. in our case that would have been a disaster and the opposite of a stable living situation for us children.
From an evolutionary point of view the point of life may be reproduction, but from a personal point of view it most certainly is not. Plenty of people have no interest in having kids, and what about people who are sterile? Should they just give up on life?
Some people prefer to live alone, but everybody has relationships of some sort, children or no.
People have been fooled into thinking their hobbies should override billions of years of evolution... if you behave as your body is hard wired to behave, you will be happier.
I suspect you're being downvoted based on the "purpose of life is reproduction" piece, but I hope people are aware that this part about studies showing that in general Poly parenting leads to worse outcomes for children is spot on
Poly relationships tend to be complicated, and children are not capable of understanding all of the nuance of ethical poly relationships, nevermind the many variations of non-ethical poly relationships. It tends to lead to people who have really screwed up ideas about relationships and attachment issues.
Note that this is not me saying that ethical poly relationships are inherently screwed up. What I'm saying is that from the outside perspective of an immature child, who will likely then go on to mimic what they see modelled without understanding it, that child is going to have screwed up ideas about relationships
> but children need the stability of long term committed parents
You can have long-term, committed throuples, just fine.
This seems correct, all the happy poly people I know don’t have kids. The ones that do have kids seem to struggle more (a similar level as being a single parent but obviously in different ways).
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I can't reply to the flagged comment, but I can reply to myself.
There is so much more in humanity than our ability to procreate — every living organism does that, that's not special, it doesn't make us human.
What makes us human, is our ability to create, to pour our heart and very essence into our art, the desire to reach perfection in our craft. We create knowledge, we explore the world, and are in the process of discovering its true nature. We kiss and dance and love, we give, and we share.
Having kids doesn't prevent us from enjoying all those things, but having kids is also not a prerequisite for a good and fulfilling life.
Anyone can have children, but not everyone can create good people, and personally, I love my unborn children too much to expose them to this world.
None of those tribes have ever managed to accomplish much. I doubt that's a coincidence.
I think we are dealing with survivorship bias more so than anything else. We can look back and speculate about society, how it functioned and all that, but every time we do we are limited in knowledge and by our own biases.
I chose to reply as I did because of the whole “I doubt it’s a coincidence”.
So which country is it that fits your model and you can point to as an example?
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Downvotes are mad that you're correct.
Lots of people are going to push back against your statement - I personally agree with you. This is all about continuing our species and everyone else trying to weave some different tale is simply living in la-la land.
If continuing the species was really a matter of desperation, governments would pay citizens to do it. I don't inseminate people for free
My open/poly relationship was incredibly shallow. My "lover" felt more like a friend, and they weren't even that important to me because I only knew them for a few months. The relationship became fully transactional, and I eventually just left for another person I was with to be monogamous. If the idea of a relationship is ultimately just friend + sex or a business relationship, I can see how it works well for you. But for me it was lacking.
Yawn. This post is all old hat.
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...
> and human polygynous situations (like Elon Musk and his baby momas https://nypost.com/2024/10/29/business/elon-musk-building-co... )
So Musk is building a harem now?
I want to be a hydrogen in a polycule. What are those called?
I had an ex that "forced" me to become poly to stay together, which in hindsight was really just abuse and cheating rather than polyamory, although I didn't realize it at the time. So I'll admit I'm a bit jaded, and that colors my opinions of it.
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."
> For example, the book "The Ethical Slut" the author literally describes raping people
Wow, I don't remember that. I'll have to re-read it.
> I also feel it inevitably hurts people when you are more excited about a new partner than them
It certainly happens.
Sometimes I think I'm doomed to be unhappy because I just want too much out of life. I can't imagine settling down, but I don't want flings or hookups without emotion, I want to feel a lot of emotion with people freely.
The first possibility is that, as the Internet keeps saying, I'm a shit person and I'm not ready to date. Most people seem to start dating around half my age so even if this is true, I just reject it. The second is that I just haven't met the person who is such a perfect match that I would sacrifice a lifetime of possibility to stay with them forever. I don't imagine that partner exists. Given that I'm going to crush on people who aren't my partner(s), I'd rather be upfront about it.
The third possibility is that I really am a sociopath and I just want the wrong things. I ask people and they say I'm not a narcissistic or a sociopath. I feel empathy, I don't try to control people.
Shrug?
Polyamory is wrong.
It should be multiamory.
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Note that the Bay Area also has a more traditional monogamy-seeking dating scene as well.
Professional computer touchers tend to have confusing relationships with other people.
It's talking about a different place and culture than you're in and you're calling it out of touch because it's not familiar to you? Isn't that the point?
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You ... might be the out-of-touch one here. This culture is pretty common all over the country these days (although definitely most prevalent in the big metro areas).
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How could they be meaningless? They have clear meanings. Maybe you mean that you are choosing to disbelieve them? Then that's your problem. They're self-evidently true if you live in these places.
Both terms are subjective and therefore don’t support your argument.
What? Subjective claims still support an argument, just more loosely than objective ones do. Instead of saying my observations are wrong or that you disagree with them, your stance is that "opinions aren't real"? That's absurd.
No, my position is that your opinion(s) are so disconnected to reality that, much like the article, can be safely ignored as bullshyt.
I mean, fine, believe whatever you want, but if you don't about engaging with what anyone else says why bother posting?
Because decadence and social degeneracy – especially inside tech – deserves to be mocked ruthlessly.
I imagine that the comment thread you've generated here is a net negative for the popularity of your worldview.
The kind of worldview being promoted here tends to have people that prefer to enforce their worldview by the sword rather than in the chamber of ideals and free thought.
Yes, and "active therapeutic/somatic/mystical work on your attachment wounds" is doing wonders for polyamory lmao
Disgust is an interesting response to this experience.
I encourage you to reframe your thoughts in "is they consenting adults?" and then "is this hurting anyone?" if the answers are "yes they're adults and they're not hurting anyone", I encourage you to mind your own business :)
Gay people aren't "shoving things in your face" when they kiss, or can be seen holding hands, or have representation in a book or movies because the author wanted to represent themselves in the media any more than straight people are "shoving things in your face" when they kiss, or can be seen holding hands, etc. Equally, non-monogamous people aren't shoving anything in your face by existing in a way that makes them happy and affirmed. Disgust over other people's choices and lives and the subsequent attempt to squelch that is very anti-liberty.
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What the inc-hell?
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Good cop-out, don't actually address OP's argument and just attack their character.
You know very well that generating garbage is easier than defending it.
Sorry.
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This is one of the stupidest things I've ever read.
The formation of contract cults around relationships is the basis of all law. Every sort of state flows from that. Every limitation of a society in that department ,every ability grows from this. A judge looks like a priest for a reason . The masses call for moral constraints in times of crisis because of this. Handle with care for culture makes and brraks these things .
I wish someone would find a way to shield us from those topics on Hacker News, the one place that we can go without being flooded with those mundane societal issues and focus on actual technology and science
I agree, and the hackernews demographic are the last group i want to hear from on things like this
Despite the technical focus, HN is one of the most diverse and thoughtful communities I've ever had the privilege to be a part of - and I've been doing this since 300 baud. There isn't really anything I wouldn't want to see discussed here. If you find you absolutely cannot disregard things you aren't interested in, you might want to try Youtube comments, or maybe a technical community on Facebook.
Great comment, appreciate you taking the time to come in and share your thoughts. We've discussed and decided to prioritize this change - please check back very soon!
You can downvote it.
Many hackernews readers have pretty diverse interests though, and want to hear about both tech and general social issues.
>You can downvote it.
Nope, you can't.