Two months ago (an eternity in podcasting, I know) I was on the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast to discuss polyamory with Aella and Eneasz, both of whom are hella fucking poly. I favor monogamy without moral objection to polyamory, yet its appeal eludes me. Given the caliber of my interlocutors, I walked away feeling uncharacteristically frustrated with our conversation, largely because I think we lack a shared understanding of each other’s vocabulary.
1. I think what motivates a lot of poly people to deal with the constant exhaustion, calendaring etc, that you accurately have detected, is that it’s a very compelling hobby. An acquaintance of mine once remarked that “poly people are the model train enthusiasts of dating” and I’ve found that to be quite true. I am myself a person with a major and profound interest in sex/romance, and the main reason I got involved with poly in the first place was not that I felt inherently called to it, but because it made it easier to find partners who are deeply interested in thinking about and exploring those things.
2. I recently wrote a post about fidelity, and would be very curious about your thoughts. The writing style is much less cut and dry than what you are doing here -- but maybe it will still be interesting: https://open.substack.com/pub/lydialaurenson/p/fidelity
Okay, this helps me clarify a few of my recent thoughts.
I generally like the framing of mono/polyamory as an orientation, something that depends on characteristics stable enough to be considered part of your personality, but now I wonder if it's the best approach.
First, I would like to tweak the labels on the graph slightly:
- I see the horizontal one as "preference for having multiple partners", to make it clear that the negative is "not only do I see no interest in dating multiple people, I actively dislike it"
- The vertical one should be "preference for exclusivity", to show that a negative preference for exclusivity is a preference for your partner to have other partners.
Then, we can debate the extent to which these preferences, your position on the graph, are due to genetics and upbringing and similarly immutable individual properties. But insofar as they are stable, they do constitute something like an "orientation".
But I don't think someone's position on the graph determines - or should determine - the choices that they make in their life. It's obviously an important part of it, but one can imagine someone who in many circumstances would be poly, but who gives up polyamory to date a mono person (or to fit in a social group), or someone who is still a bit bothered by their partner's polyamory but is willing to give it a shot.
The neat thing that becomes apparent is that in a mostly egalitarian society, the further you are from the positive diagonal, the more sacrifices you'll likely have to make:
- If you're in the top left, the only way you'll satisfy all your preferences is with a harem (whatever the gender-swapped version would be, I couldn't find a name for it; I doubt there are words for gay and trans-inclusive variants)
- If you're in the bottom right you could... try to force your partner to date other people while not doing it yourself I guess? Seems weird but maybe more achievable.
Of course, to the extent that these preferences can change, you can try to push them in one direction or another, to end up in a more egalitarian-compatible region.
So in the end, your position on the graph might be mostly fixed, but even if it is, preferences are (for better or worse) not destiny, and considering yourself mono or poly is a question of choice.
I really like Aella's two-axis model, but agree that only neurotic rationalists & adjacents will really care enough to pivot and radically revise how they view poly people.
This feels a lot like a debate I've had with a friend about sexuality -- you could imagine two axes: attractions and behaviors. You can intuition-pump preferring one axis over another pretty easily:
- We should use attraction as the primary axis because there's many gay men who have always known they were gay but due to societal stigma ended up marrying & living with a woman, and a behavioural axis would say they're straight
- We should use behavior as the primary axis because otherwise you have ~20% of Gen Z self-identifying as bisexual, and then proceeding to enter 100% standard heterosexual partnerships and ultimately never have a homosexual relationship. Someone who identifies as bisexual because they're somewhat attracted to the other sex, but will never bear the costs of that attraction and is functionally straight to everyone in their lives, is basically doing a sort of stolen valour.
(I don't think either argument here is particularly rock-solid, but thinking about them certainly pushes me in one direction or another).
At the end of the day your choice of primary axis (if you must pick one at all), probably says a lot about your prior intuitions and only a bit about what the "true" categories really are
"I’m not fucking anyone else not because my wife forbids me, but because I just don’t care to"
This is approximately my position, too. I hated dating. The thought of going out and meeting new people to fuck, to learn their foibles and what makes them tick, makes me want to go home before I've even left. And I found a partner who feels the same way. Dating is a game that neither of us particularly enjoyed, but we already won! We found each other, we don't have to play that game anymore!
And I realize that's not for everyone. Some people *like* going out and meeting new people, and I'm glad those people exist because they can do the bulk the interpersonal stuff (sales, management, doctoring) while I sit at my computer and churn out work on my own. I hope those people meet each other and form as many polycules as they like. I'm very happy with my bicule(?) and I don't think I'd be happier with another person in the mix.
THAT BEING SAID:
I think it is worth exploring a much more common "soft" form of polyamory: porn (and, to a less-soft extent, strip clubs). My wife knows, and is ok with, me looking at porn, and, while I don't think she does, I would be ok with her doing the same. This is certainly not the same as a secondary relationship (no calendars to work out, no chance of me running off with a PNG), but it is a nudge of the relationship away from strict monogamy and towards poly. This sort of minor loosening of the boundary framing is a way that I've been able to understand poly-inclined people better, even though it's not for me.
Come September, I will celebrate my 40th wedding anniversary. I still have no desire to be a vegetarian.
It's not that I have anything against vegetables. I like vegetables. I really do. It's just that I prefer them as a side dish, and they are almost always more delicious when garnished with bacon. I think I've made my point clear.
Ah, Yassine, how beautifully and brightly The Motte shines through you :)
This post of yours is a deep and honest examination and questioning of yourself as well as others.
In order to contribute, you bring me to further disclosures about myself. I have been ployamorous before polyamory became a word (I notice that the adjective is not yet such for the spellchecker): it was then called free love -- and going back many years, the reason why I pride myself in being a legal bastard (aka not the child of the man who was married to my mother, although none of the parties disagreed with my conception). Now I have had the same primary partner for 20 years -- I had many others, and from one I had a son... I managed to remain close friends with most of them even after the end of the relationship, which is something more than I have seen for many of my friends.
The attitude of "mine is a better lifestyle than yours" is very common, and especially frequent in subcultures that get flak from the mainstream (after all, one gets told every day that theirs is better). So one keeps hitting those rocks, whether conscious or subconscious, all the time when navigating an attempt to understand why people do what they do and what they mean by it.
The attempt to reach definitions of whose meaning we are reasonably certain and that make sense to all parties is a completely legitimate pursue. Myself, as a polyamorous person, find very little resonance with a definition of poly as "not placing restrictions on other(s)", except as a very generic element and just one of many, at that.
With more poly than monogamous close friends and a zillion poly acquaintances (as I am also a member of several other intersecting "alternative" subcultures while passing at first glance for very 'normie') I can attest that polyamory is a spectrum far, far wider than gender will ever be. Finding a strict definition that covers all while not being diluted into near meaninglessness is almost impossible.
The problem is that, given any subculture, there come the pundits and gurus of that subculture, who push their vision of it. (Any trend of mainstream does the same, of course, except that some are so old that we become incapable to see them for trends.) And that is great, so far as it allows people to find bearings, motivation and justification for what they are and desire -- but it is less great when it becomes a struggle among categorising definitions that claim universality.
Then we have not just, 'what is poly, how it works and how we can define/explain it', but, 'this is poly, it works this way, and if you do not do it this way you do it wrong.'
As an example, for a period the "egalitarians" polies maintained that anybody with a hierarchy of relationships in their poly structure were doing poly wrong. At times you were dissed if you lived with one but not the others among your poly partners. Still many think that unless you experience compersion your relationships are sort of fake and doomed to fail.
I think, personally, that defining being poly on a theoretical attitude that may or may not stand at the test of fact (You do not place restrictions on your partner -- yes, but what happens when your partner screws someone else? What happens when your partner tells someone else that they love them? -- you cannot define poly on the matter of principle alone).
And if the definition is just simply on restricting or not, even in matters of actual fact... besides the definition being only negative and so telling nothing about what we do and why we are fulfilled by it... uh, poly is full of boundaries and restrictions, because humans are full of needs and wants. If you stop being poly any time you, with acts or reasoning or just the awareness that a certain behaviour will hurt you, restrict the boundless freedom of a partner to engage in whatever they want at the moment -- well then, very few of us remain. And mostly, I feel, those remaining would be those who actually do not care very much about the people they relationship with. That's sort of a swinger attitude applied to all relationships (nothing wrong with swinger attitudes as long as they are conscious: if you do not want to engage in anything more than casual sex, recurrent or not, it is a perfectly legitimate choice). But polyamory is supposed to be about more complex relationships.
I know that I am a staunch supporter of promiscuity (yes, it can be vain and shallow: so can be almost everything else; the question is not how many you rub against, but whether you use them as dolls to project your fantasies on, or you are interested in them as persons). I happen to desire to know many in a deeper way, and sexual knowledge is part of that. At times, it resolves in a pleasant encounter that leads no further. At times it leads to longer and growing relationships.
The problem people have with promiscuity is just about sex, for sex is a resource that our evolutionary history has led us to restrict (our line of ancestry is clearly closer to chimps than bonobos). But evolution and biology are not a destiny, neither for ethics nor for societal mores, like good old Jerry Coyne never ceases to repeat.
Your considerations about cheating and about the desire to fuck other people as opposed to the exclusive interest for one are less convincing to me.
I shall talk of sex, of course, because sex is the true differentiating matter here. For nobody ever objects to the fact that people in a sexual relationship with someone can also have and want multiple non sexual relationships with others, either superficial or very deep and intense -- it is called having friends. One's beloved sexual partner does not even need to share all one's friends.
In my experience, beyond the honeymoon period of a relationship, a larger number of men than women innately desire new and different and frequently but not exclusively transient sexual relationships (this does not in any way exclude that a large number of women are also promiscuous, just statistically this is a fact, also due to evolutionary traits which in no manner determine how things "should" be). -- It is bloody hard to speak of these concepts, as the needed caveats take almost as many words as the main argument itself.
However, a large number of people do, in general, desire sex with a variety of others despite having a steady sexual partner, after the nascent state period (and that was to me a clue from your own words, when you spoke of the absence of desire to look at Tinder in the past when falling in love, whatever that means for you). A large number of people have these desires beyond the nascent state. Some do not ever, not necessarily because of self repression; some do all the time; and some do not or do by periods and chance (I fall in the last category).
Re: trust, and the breaking thereof that is cheating. I fail to see how the "trust shortcuts" you mention engender actual trust. For in my experience they do not. Yes, they are powerful social or symbolic bonds which, witnessed and sanctioned by the surrounding society, enforce fidelity against social reproach. But they do not make you trust the person, really: you trust that the contract, symbol, moral obligation, whatever, will hold back the person from breaking trust. In love and passion, most people promise the 'forevers' and the 'nevers', and they do believe every bit of it. But the curse of time and change is upon us, and often dissolves our promises against our ability to do anything about it. As a remedy, the symbols and social bonds have only a moderate effect, as the entire history of humanity shows, while possibly increasing the number of cheaters where the desire for others becomes too strong, the status quo is too comfortable to shatter, and talking of such desires would become a deal breaker.
You have a very clear-cut way of choosing, in your case. That girlfriend of yours expressed interest for sleeping with others, and you broke up with her. You did not negotiate, because you had a very clear idea of your boundaries. And your boundaries require that the other wants you and only you.
She could have felt afterwards, I guess, that you did not want her enough, if just the expression of a desire pushed you away; else you would have discussed, and tried to keep her.
Many people who cheat, I have learned, do not speak up upfront because they cannot bear the difficulty that being honest about their desires would imply, since many people would react like you did; either they cannot bear the loss of a loved one or they cannot bear the loss of the life and habits they are used to. If they reveal their desires and are told no, on the other hand, at times those desires are too strong nevertheless. And so they cheat. It is a painful weakness of those who become unable to clearly decide what is more important to them, and who hope by subterfuge to have their cake and eat it too.
Then there are those who enjoy cheating, but that is a pathology.
I believe that there are personalities that are right for monogamy, because of what they want in a relationship and how their internal balance works. And there are personalities that are right for polyamory, for the same reason. There is no size that fits all. And there are people who do monogamy horribly and get hurt, and people who do polyamory horribly and get hurt, and at times, even with the best intentions and the highest self awareness, shit happens beyond one's control and one gets hurt.
We get hurt a lot.
Oh look, I exceeded comment length. It is your fault, Yassine.
Long ago, I described a related 4 quandrant perspective:
+============+============+
| I can, you won't | I can, you can |
+============+============+
| I can't, you won't | I won't, you can |
+============+============+
Monogamy is in the lower left, poly is in the upper right.
Quite a few monogamists would gladly migrate to the upper left quadrant if they had the option, but so would more than a few polyamorists. The lower right quadrant is pretty sparce, tho.
It's phrased as "you won't" rather than "you can't", because in this fantasy, they would imagine their partner is not resenting unwanted restrictions, but just not desiring multiple intimate relations while being fine with themselves having that freedom.
The bottom left to upper right diagonal is well populated because of a sense that fairness means accepting the same rules one wishes others to follow.
I don't have any moral objection to the other quadrants, so long as it's freely negotiated and meets the needs of both partners. That just doesn't happen as often. I knew one couple like that.
(Responding to some of the conversations within the comments, not just in the article itself)
I have long been wary of present self's wisdom in trying to make pledges for future self, after observing how present self wanted the freedom to change beyond what past self had expected.
So when my partner and I got serious, we made two agreements:
First, we committed to break up if we could not have a healthy relationship
Second, we committed to work hard to have a healthy relationship
We did NOT commit to being together forever.
This has worked for nearly 50 years now, and we are very happy together. (We did indeed need to work hard to keep the relationship healthy, and we continue to reap the intimacy and support benefits of that work).
In our case, this has been done in a polyamorous context (although we were in practice behaving monogamously for perhaps 15-20 years of that time, our relationship even then did not orbit around any promise of permanent sexual exclusivity). This has worked very well for us, and today we are in a stable long term network of heartful lovers and friends.
We have not had or needed a big trust shortcut, instead building trust over time and with experience. Given how important our relationship is to each of us, early poly experiences (before the term was coined) involved some serious anxiety, but over time we have built a lot of trust that our partner is very unlikely to go away (physically or emotionally) with a new relationship. We did eventually get married for pragmatic reasons, but did so as low key as possible so it would not change our relationship, rather than in hopes that it would.
We see jealous feelings as similar to a the "check engine" light in a car - a fallible indication that something might be going wrong, worth paying attention to. This particular car may have a number of false alarms, but sometimes it's a valid warning that should be taken seriously. That's a time to be as conscious as possible, not a time to fall into autopilot reactions! However, jealous feelings are not treated as a new age sin, but as a voice at our table trying to warn us of something, wisely or misguidedly. It seldom comes up today, but we have no ideal that being free of jealousy is more evolved.
Long ago we observed that love is very expandable, but the timeclock is not, so yes there is an economy of time and attention to manage. Partly for that reason, we are not allergic to "heirarchy" in relationships, but it's a soft and caring prioritization where everybody matters even if some relationships have priority when conflicts cannot be avoided. To be honest, the scheduling has not been exhausting, but it does take time to keep other relationships healthy, and a lot of growth. So we can easily understand why monogamy works better for most people.
It's a matter of different tradeoffs working better for different people, rather than one or the other being superior overall. I have no brook with poly supremacists, and no beef with those who consciously choose monogamy for themselves. And actually, the different tradeoffs framing applies to the very different ways of being poly too. The way that some people "do" polyamory would not work at all for us - and that's OK, poly is about creating customized relationships that fit the particular individuals.
In our case the communication skills we needed to keep our own relationship healthy have been pretty much the same as what we needed for polyamory and vice versa. So I think that polyamory has helped our own relationship overall.
I love the way you think, Yassine. I agree with your take on many things, including in this article. I will quickly note my agreement with your take on definitions whose merit come from facilitating communication, on a good definition for polyamory, etc.
Here's the point I wanted to comment upon though:
> "I want my partner to have the same overriding desire for me; not for them to reluctantly forgo others because of my say so."
Let's pick that apart a bit. It sounds somewhat like "let's not have any ground rules, and instead assume idealistically that what each of us feels like doing will always be the right thing to do".
What's actually wrong with a partner forgoing an intimate relationship with a third party (even if such felt very tempting at the time), in order to support an existing monogamous relationship? That could be a healthy and wise recognition of one's enlightened self interest in the big picture, versus impulsively following the temptations of the moment.
Consider the alternative. One person, after 20 years of relationship, finds themselves in a situation like a business trip, where they feel a lot of attraction to a third party. Since they know their partner doesn't want them to forgo a tryst just on that partner's say so, why not go for it?
It's my experience that in a long term relationship, sometimes we do (or avoid doing) something just because it's what our partner needs or wants, rather than because it's our own inclination at the moment.
I'm not talking about slavish adherence to whatever a partner wants. If so doing (or not doing) becomes a sacrifice too far, then we can with integrity ask to renegotiate agreements (or even break up if it's that important).
Of course it would be ideal if our partner always felt exactly as we want them to feel, so they never had to choose between their inclination and their care for us and our relationship, because their own inclinations always matched our own desires - but is that realistic in the long run, with most of us humans?
The willingness to give significant weight to our partner's wants and needs even when they differ from our own "if I were not in this relationship" inclinations, is part of a committed relationship, as I have experienced it.
Big agree on the exhaustion aspect. Hell, I can barely manage a handful of friendships, so the mere notion of an overpopulated romantic agenda is the closest thing to a waking nightmare I can imagine.
I think the definition of poly as "okay with a lack of fidelity from partner" is more technically correct, despite "wanting to fuck others" often being primary motivation. It's one I'd arrived at independently after several relationships with people who are actually monogamous, but willing to be flexible because I'm cute. I found they were largely willing to fuck around, but if I pursued any thing on my end suddenly there were issues.
It's an operational requirement to do poly correctly, not the base motivation. Since people who lack that requirement often cause all sorts of drama in poly circles, and since poly circles being so interconnected at the hip are more vulnerable to interpersonal drama like that, it's valuable to make the definition one which politely excludes them.
(Also, literally no group uses an external definition for itself. Native Americans didn't become Hindi just because Columbus was a putz.)
That you, a monogamous man, spent most of this essay disputing how a polyamorous woman defined polyamory feels like an instance of mansplaining to me. An experienced polyamorous person who has swapped stories with a lot of other experienced polyamorous people would realize that the most essential part of polyamory, and the most difficult part, is allowing your partner(s) the freedom to have sex & romance with other people. Imagining yourself having sex & romance with other people is easy. The feelings you get when your partner(s) actually have sex & romance with other people -- that's when the "rubber hits the road".
I think your examination of different kinds of jealousy is useful, and I'd like to try pulling it apart myself. There's prospective jealousy, in which people worry that their needs won't be met; and there's retrospective jealousy, in which people find that their needs are not being met. Trust issues can play a role in both kinds, but even when you trust somebody you might still worry about future needs not being met, or experience current needs not being met. Trust is important, but isn't enough; the crucial point is getting your needs met, and jealousy comes from believing that your partner should be assisting you in meeting your needs, but either will not or is not.
Experienced polyamorous people will often deal with feeling jealous by taking responsibility for meeting their own needs, instead of thinking this responsibility belongs to their partner(s). For example, if I'm not getting enough sex from my partner(s) I can pursue it with other people, or if I'm feeling lonely I can reach out to another partner or anybody else.
There's definitely a risk in polyamory that if you allow your partner to roam that she'll find somebody she likes better than you, and will decide to upgrade. But this risk exists in monogamy also if you allow your partner to leave the house, or allow visitors in the house. To pursue a polyamorous lifestyle you probably will want to assess the trustworthiness of a potential new partner early on. I use a variety of personality aspects to assess trustworthiness. I'm probably lucky, but I've never once had the scenario where an established partner starts lying to me because they've met some new hot fling. But of course this scenario is not limited to polyamory.
I appreciated reading your essay about this and I'm glad you continue trying to understand the polyamorous point of view, despite not sharing it.
These people are fucking exhausting. They’re exhausting to talk to, listen to, and be around, and they’re nowhere near as interesting as they like to believe.
I realize that this will earn me no friends, but this too clever by half redefinition of polyamory seems like political rhetoric that obscures truth more than it illuminates it.
The only real defining characteristics of polyamory is that you have sex with multiple partners. That's it. It's the only actual difference between the expectations of monogamy and polyamory. I think it's good for people to examine jealousy etc., but I don't know any monogamous couple who has hard rules forbidding their partner to never be attracted to anyone else or ever speak of it, that's just being honest and mature. The boning is the differentiator.
It also seems like something that stops when a couple has kids - you have to be either very wealthy or very bohemian to have the time for multiple intimate relationships while juggling kids and work.
That said, people should do whatever makes them happy. My experiences trying polyamory did not make me happy, but that doesn't mean it's the case for everyone.
This seems reasonable enough. A couple thoughts -
1. I think what motivates a lot of poly people to deal with the constant exhaustion, calendaring etc, that you accurately have detected, is that it’s a very compelling hobby. An acquaintance of mine once remarked that “poly people are the model train enthusiasts of dating” and I’ve found that to be quite true. I am myself a person with a major and profound interest in sex/romance, and the main reason I got involved with poly in the first place was not that I felt inherently called to it, but because it made it easier to find partners who are deeply interested in thinking about and exploring those things.
2. I recently wrote a post about fidelity, and would be very curious about your thoughts. The writing style is much less cut and dry than what you are doing here -- but maybe it will still be interesting: https://open.substack.com/pub/lydialaurenson/p/fidelity
Okay, this helps me clarify a few of my recent thoughts.
I generally like the framing of mono/polyamory as an orientation, something that depends on characteristics stable enough to be considered part of your personality, but now I wonder if it's the best approach.
First, I would like to tweak the labels on the graph slightly:
- I see the horizontal one as "preference for having multiple partners", to make it clear that the negative is "not only do I see no interest in dating multiple people, I actively dislike it"
- The vertical one should be "preference for exclusivity", to show that a negative preference for exclusivity is a preference for your partner to have other partners.
Then, we can debate the extent to which these preferences, your position on the graph, are due to genetics and upbringing and similarly immutable individual properties. But insofar as they are stable, they do constitute something like an "orientation".
But I don't think someone's position on the graph determines - or should determine - the choices that they make in their life. It's obviously an important part of it, but one can imagine someone who in many circumstances would be poly, but who gives up polyamory to date a mono person (or to fit in a social group), or someone who is still a bit bothered by their partner's polyamory but is willing to give it a shot.
The neat thing that becomes apparent is that in a mostly egalitarian society, the further you are from the positive diagonal, the more sacrifices you'll likely have to make:
- If you're in the top left, the only way you'll satisfy all your preferences is with a harem (whatever the gender-swapped version would be, I couldn't find a name for it; I doubt there are words for gay and trans-inclusive variants)
- If you're in the bottom right you could... try to force your partner to date other people while not doing it yourself I guess? Seems weird but maybe more achievable.
Of course, to the extent that these preferences can change, you can try to push them in one direction or another, to end up in a more egalitarian-compatible region.
So in the end, your position on the graph might be mostly fixed, but even if it is, preferences are (for better or worse) not destiny, and considering yourself mono or poly is a question of choice.
I really like Aella's two-axis model, but agree that only neurotic rationalists & adjacents will really care enough to pivot and radically revise how they view poly people.
This feels a lot like a debate I've had with a friend about sexuality -- you could imagine two axes: attractions and behaviors. You can intuition-pump preferring one axis over another pretty easily:
- We should use attraction as the primary axis because there's many gay men who have always known they were gay but due to societal stigma ended up marrying & living with a woman, and a behavioural axis would say they're straight
- We should use behavior as the primary axis because otherwise you have ~20% of Gen Z self-identifying as bisexual, and then proceeding to enter 100% standard heterosexual partnerships and ultimately never have a homosexual relationship. Someone who identifies as bisexual because they're somewhat attracted to the other sex, but will never bear the costs of that attraction and is functionally straight to everyone in their lives, is basically doing a sort of stolen valour.
(I don't think either argument here is particularly rock-solid, but thinking about them certainly pushes me in one direction or another).
At the end of the day your choice of primary axis (if you must pick one at all), probably says a lot about your prior intuitions and only a bit about what the "true" categories really are
"I’m not fucking anyone else not because my wife forbids me, but because I just don’t care to"
This is approximately my position, too. I hated dating. The thought of going out and meeting new people to fuck, to learn their foibles and what makes them tick, makes me want to go home before I've even left. And I found a partner who feels the same way. Dating is a game that neither of us particularly enjoyed, but we already won! We found each other, we don't have to play that game anymore!
And I realize that's not for everyone. Some people *like* going out and meeting new people, and I'm glad those people exist because they can do the bulk the interpersonal stuff (sales, management, doctoring) while I sit at my computer and churn out work on my own. I hope those people meet each other and form as many polycules as they like. I'm very happy with my bicule(?) and I don't think I'd be happier with another person in the mix.
THAT BEING SAID:
I think it is worth exploring a much more common "soft" form of polyamory: porn (and, to a less-soft extent, strip clubs). My wife knows, and is ok with, me looking at porn, and, while I don't think she does, I would be ok with her doing the same. This is certainly not the same as a secondary relationship (no calendars to work out, no chance of me running off with a PNG), but it is a nudge of the relationship away from strict monogamy and towards poly. This sort of minor loosening of the boundary framing is a way that I've been able to understand poly-inclined people better, even though it's not for me.
Come September, I will celebrate my 40th wedding anniversary. I still have no desire to be a vegetarian.
It's not that I have anything against vegetables. I like vegetables. I really do. It's just that I prefer them as a side dish, and they are almost always more delicious when garnished with bacon. I think I've made my point clear.
Ah, Yassine, how beautifully and brightly The Motte shines through you :)
This post of yours is a deep and honest examination and questioning of yourself as well as others.
In order to contribute, you bring me to further disclosures about myself. I have been ployamorous before polyamory became a word (I notice that the adjective is not yet such for the spellchecker): it was then called free love -- and going back many years, the reason why I pride myself in being a legal bastard (aka not the child of the man who was married to my mother, although none of the parties disagreed with my conception). Now I have had the same primary partner for 20 years -- I had many others, and from one I had a son... I managed to remain close friends with most of them even after the end of the relationship, which is something more than I have seen for many of my friends.
The attitude of "mine is a better lifestyle than yours" is very common, and especially frequent in subcultures that get flak from the mainstream (after all, one gets told every day that theirs is better). So one keeps hitting those rocks, whether conscious or subconscious, all the time when navigating an attempt to understand why people do what they do and what they mean by it.
The attempt to reach definitions of whose meaning we are reasonably certain and that make sense to all parties is a completely legitimate pursue. Myself, as a polyamorous person, find very little resonance with a definition of poly as "not placing restrictions on other(s)", except as a very generic element and just one of many, at that.
With more poly than monogamous close friends and a zillion poly acquaintances (as I am also a member of several other intersecting "alternative" subcultures while passing at first glance for very 'normie') I can attest that polyamory is a spectrum far, far wider than gender will ever be. Finding a strict definition that covers all while not being diluted into near meaninglessness is almost impossible.
The problem is that, given any subculture, there come the pundits and gurus of that subculture, who push their vision of it. (Any trend of mainstream does the same, of course, except that some are so old that we become incapable to see them for trends.) And that is great, so far as it allows people to find bearings, motivation and justification for what they are and desire -- but it is less great when it becomes a struggle among categorising definitions that claim universality.
Then we have not just, 'what is poly, how it works and how we can define/explain it', but, 'this is poly, it works this way, and if you do not do it this way you do it wrong.'
As an example, for a period the "egalitarians" polies maintained that anybody with a hierarchy of relationships in their poly structure were doing poly wrong. At times you were dissed if you lived with one but not the others among your poly partners. Still many think that unless you experience compersion your relationships are sort of fake and doomed to fail.
I think, personally, that defining being poly on a theoretical attitude that may or may not stand at the test of fact (You do not place restrictions on your partner -- yes, but what happens when your partner screws someone else? What happens when your partner tells someone else that they love them? -- you cannot define poly on the matter of principle alone).
And if the definition is just simply on restricting or not, even in matters of actual fact... besides the definition being only negative and so telling nothing about what we do and why we are fulfilled by it... uh, poly is full of boundaries and restrictions, because humans are full of needs and wants. If you stop being poly any time you, with acts or reasoning or just the awareness that a certain behaviour will hurt you, restrict the boundless freedom of a partner to engage in whatever they want at the moment -- well then, very few of us remain. And mostly, I feel, those remaining would be those who actually do not care very much about the people they relationship with. That's sort of a swinger attitude applied to all relationships (nothing wrong with swinger attitudes as long as they are conscious: if you do not want to engage in anything more than casual sex, recurrent or not, it is a perfectly legitimate choice). But polyamory is supposed to be about more complex relationships.
I know that I am a staunch supporter of promiscuity (yes, it can be vain and shallow: so can be almost everything else; the question is not how many you rub against, but whether you use them as dolls to project your fantasies on, or you are interested in them as persons). I happen to desire to know many in a deeper way, and sexual knowledge is part of that. At times, it resolves in a pleasant encounter that leads no further. At times it leads to longer and growing relationships.
The problem people have with promiscuity is just about sex, for sex is a resource that our evolutionary history has led us to restrict (our line of ancestry is clearly closer to chimps than bonobos). But evolution and biology are not a destiny, neither for ethics nor for societal mores, like good old Jerry Coyne never ceases to repeat.
Your considerations about cheating and about the desire to fuck other people as opposed to the exclusive interest for one are less convincing to me.
I shall talk of sex, of course, because sex is the true differentiating matter here. For nobody ever objects to the fact that people in a sexual relationship with someone can also have and want multiple non sexual relationships with others, either superficial or very deep and intense -- it is called having friends. One's beloved sexual partner does not even need to share all one's friends.
In my experience, beyond the honeymoon period of a relationship, a larger number of men than women innately desire new and different and frequently but not exclusively transient sexual relationships (this does not in any way exclude that a large number of women are also promiscuous, just statistically this is a fact, also due to evolutionary traits which in no manner determine how things "should" be). -- It is bloody hard to speak of these concepts, as the needed caveats take almost as many words as the main argument itself.
However, a large number of people do, in general, desire sex with a variety of others despite having a steady sexual partner, after the nascent state period (and that was to me a clue from your own words, when you spoke of the absence of desire to look at Tinder in the past when falling in love, whatever that means for you). A large number of people have these desires beyond the nascent state. Some do not ever, not necessarily because of self repression; some do all the time; and some do not or do by periods and chance (I fall in the last category).
Re: trust, and the breaking thereof that is cheating. I fail to see how the "trust shortcuts" you mention engender actual trust. For in my experience they do not. Yes, they are powerful social or symbolic bonds which, witnessed and sanctioned by the surrounding society, enforce fidelity against social reproach. But they do not make you trust the person, really: you trust that the contract, symbol, moral obligation, whatever, will hold back the person from breaking trust. In love and passion, most people promise the 'forevers' and the 'nevers', and they do believe every bit of it. But the curse of time and change is upon us, and often dissolves our promises against our ability to do anything about it. As a remedy, the symbols and social bonds have only a moderate effect, as the entire history of humanity shows, while possibly increasing the number of cheaters where the desire for others becomes too strong, the status quo is too comfortable to shatter, and talking of such desires would become a deal breaker.
You have a very clear-cut way of choosing, in your case. That girlfriend of yours expressed interest for sleeping with others, and you broke up with her. You did not negotiate, because you had a very clear idea of your boundaries. And your boundaries require that the other wants you and only you.
She could have felt afterwards, I guess, that you did not want her enough, if just the expression of a desire pushed you away; else you would have discussed, and tried to keep her.
Many people who cheat, I have learned, do not speak up upfront because they cannot bear the difficulty that being honest about their desires would imply, since many people would react like you did; either they cannot bear the loss of a loved one or they cannot bear the loss of the life and habits they are used to. If they reveal their desires and are told no, on the other hand, at times those desires are too strong nevertheless. And so they cheat. It is a painful weakness of those who become unable to clearly decide what is more important to them, and who hope by subterfuge to have their cake and eat it too.
Then there are those who enjoy cheating, but that is a pathology.
I believe that there are personalities that are right for monogamy, because of what they want in a relationship and how their internal balance works. And there are personalities that are right for polyamory, for the same reason. There is no size that fits all. And there are people who do monogamy horribly and get hurt, and people who do polyamory horribly and get hurt, and at times, even with the best intentions and the highest self awareness, shit happens beyond one's control and one gets hurt.
We get hurt a lot.
Oh look, I exceeded comment length. It is your fault, Yassine.
Very interesting stuff, thanks for writing.
Long ago, I described a related 4 quandrant perspective:
+============+============+
| I can, you won't | I can, you can |
+============+============+
| I can't, you won't | I won't, you can |
+============+============+
Monogamy is in the lower left, poly is in the upper right.
Quite a few monogamists would gladly migrate to the upper left quadrant if they had the option, but so would more than a few polyamorists. The lower right quadrant is pretty sparce, tho.
It's phrased as "you won't" rather than "you can't", because in this fantasy, they would imagine their partner is not resenting unwanted restrictions, but just not desiring multiple intimate relations while being fine with themselves having that freedom.
The bottom left to upper right diagonal is well populated because of a sense that fairness means accepting the same rules one wishes others to follow.
I don't have any moral objection to the other quadrants, so long as it's freely negotiated and meets the needs of both partners. That just doesn't happen as often. I knew one couple like that.
(Responding to some of the conversations within the comments, not just in the article itself)
I have long been wary of present self's wisdom in trying to make pledges for future self, after observing how present self wanted the freedom to change beyond what past self had expected.
So when my partner and I got serious, we made two agreements:
First, we committed to break up if we could not have a healthy relationship
Second, we committed to work hard to have a healthy relationship
We did NOT commit to being together forever.
This has worked for nearly 50 years now, and we are very happy together. (We did indeed need to work hard to keep the relationship healthy, and we continue to reap the intimacy and support benefits of that work).
In our case, this has been done in a polyamorous context (although we were in practice behaving monogamously for perhaps 15-20 years of that time, our relationship even then did not orbit around any promise of permanent sexual exclusivity). This has worked very well for us, and today we are in a stable long term network of heartful lovers and friends.
We have not had or needed a big trust shortcut, instead building trust over time and with experience. Given how important our relationship is to each of us, early poly experiences (before the term was coined) involved some serious anxiety, but over time we have built a lot of trust that our partner is very unlikely to go away (physically or emotionally) with a new relationship. We did eventually get married for pragmatic reasons, but did so as low key as possible so it would not change our relationship, rather than in hopes that it would.
We see jealous feelings as similar to a the "check engine" light in a car - a fallible indication that something might be going wrong, worth paying attention to. This particular car may have a number of false alarms, but sometimes it's a valid warning that should be taken seriously. That's a time to be as conscious as possible, not a time to fall into autopilot reactions! However, jealous feelings are not treated as a new age sin, but as a voice at our table trying to warn us of something, wisely or misguidedly. It seldom comes up today, but we have no ideal that being free of jealousy is more evolved.
Long ago we observed that love is very expandable, but the timeclock is not, so yes there is an economy of time and attention to manage. Partly for that reason, we are not allergic to "heirarchy" in relationships, but it's a soft and caring prioritization where everybody matters even if some relationships have priority when conflicts cannot be avoided. To be honest, the scheduling has not been exhausting, but it does take time to keep other relationships healthy, and a lot of growth. So we can easily understand why monogamy works better for most people.
It's a matter of different tradeoffs working better for different people, rather than one or the other being superior overall. I have no brook with poly supremacists, and no beef with those who consciously choose monogamy for themselves. And actually, the different tradeoffs framing applies to the very different ways of being poly too. The way that some people "do" polyamory would not work at all for us - and that's OK, poly is about creating customized relationships that fit the particular individuals.
In our case the communication skills we needed to keep our own relationship healthy have been pretty much the same as what we needed for polyamory and vice versa. So I think that polyamory has helped our own relationship overall.
I love the way you think, Yassine. I agree with your take on many things, including in this article. I will quickly note my agreement with your take on definitions whose merit come from facilitating communication, on a good definition for polyamory, etc.
Here's the point I wanted to comment upon though:
> "I want my partner to have the same overriding desire for me; not for them to reluctantly forgo others because of my say so."
Let's pick that apart a bit. It sounds somewhat like "let's not have any ground rules, and instead assume idealistically that what each of us feels like doing will always be the right thing to do".
What's actually wrong with a partner forgoing an intimate relationship with a third party (even if such felt very tempting at the time), in order to support an existing monogamous relationship? That could be a healthy and wise recognition of one's enlightened self interest in the big picture, versus impulsively following the temptations of the moment.
Consider the alternative. One person, after 20 years of relationship, finds themselves in a situation like a business trip, where they feel a lot of attraction to a third party. Since they know their partner doesn't want them to forgo a tryst just on that partner's say so, why not go for it?
It's my experience that in a long term relationship, sometimes we do (or avoid doing) something just because it's what our partner needs or wants, rather than because it's our own inclination at the moment.
I'm not talking about slavish adherence to whatever a partner wants. If so doing (or not doing) becomes a sacrifice too far, then we can with integrity ask to renegotiate agreements (or even break up if it's that important).
Of course it would be ideal if our partner always felt exactly as we want them to feel, so they never had to choose between their inclination and their care for us and our relationship, because their own inclinations always matched our own desires - but is that realistic in the long run, with most of us humans?
The willingness to give significant weight to our partner's wants and needs even when they differ from our own "if I were not in this relationship" inclinations, is part of a committed relationship, as I have experienced it.
Big agree on the exhaustion aspect. Hell, I can barely manage a handful of friendships, so the mere notion of an overpopulated romantic agenda is the closest thing to a waking nightmare I can imagine.
I think the definition of poly as "okay with a lack of fidelity from partner" is more technically correct, despite "wanting to fuck others" often being primary motivation. It's one I'd arrived at independently after several relationships with people who are actually monogamous, but willing to be flexible because I'm cute. I found they were largely willing to fuck around, but if I pursued any thing on my end suddenly there were issues.
It's an operational requirement to do poly correctly, not the base motivation. Since people who lack that requirement often cause all sorts of drama in poly circles, and since poly circles being so interconnected at the hip are more vulnerable to interpersonal drama like that, it's valuable to make the definition one which politely excludes them.
(Also, literally no group uses an external definition for itself. Native Americans didn't become Hindi just because Columbus was a putz.)
That you, a monogamous man, spent most of this essay disputing how a polyamorous woman defined polyamory feels like an instance of mansplaining to me. An experienced polyamorous person who has swapped stories with a lot of other experienced polyamorous people would realize that the most essential part of polyamory, and the most difficult part, is allowing your partner(s) the freedom to have sex & romance with other people. Imagining yourself having sex & romance with other people is easy. The feelings you get when your partner(s) actually have sex & romance with other people -- that's when the "rubber hits the road".
I think your examination of different kinds of jealousy is useful, and I'd like to try pulling it apart myself. There's prospective jealousy, in which people worry that their needs won't be met; and there's retrospective jealousy, in which people find that their needs are not being met. Trust issues can play a role in both kinds, but even when you trust somebody you might still worry about future needs not being met, or experience current needs not being met. Trust is important, but isn't enough; the crucial point is getting your needs met, and jealousy comes from believing that your partner should be assisting you in meeting your needs, but either will not or is not.
Experienced polyamorous people will often deal with feeling jealous by taking responsibility for meeting their own needs, instead of thinking this responsibility belongs to their partner(s). For example, if I'm not getting enough sex from my partner(s) I can pursue it with other people, or if I'm feeling lonely I can reach out to another partner or anybody else.
There's definitely a risk in polyamory that if you allow your partner to roam that she'll find somebody she likes better than you, and will decide to upgrade. But this risk exists in monogamy also if you allow your partner to leave the house, or allow visitors in the house. To pursue a polyamorous lifestyle you probably will want to assess the trustworthiness of a potential new partner early on. I use a variety of personality aspects to assess trustworthiness. I'm probably lucky, but I've never once had the scenario where an established partner starts lying to me because they've met some new hot fling. But of course this scenario is not limited to polyamory.
I appreciated reading your essay about this and I'm glad you continue trying to understand the polyamorous point of view, despite not sharing it.
These people are fucking exhausting. They’re exhausting to talk to, listen to, and be around, and they’re nowhere near as interesting as they like to believe.
I realize that this will earn me no friends, but this too clever by half redefinition of polyamory seems like political rhetoric that obscures truth more than it illuminates it.
The only real defining characteristics of polyamory is that you have sex with multiple partners. That's it. It's the only actual difference between the expectations of monogamy and polyamory. I think it's good for people to examine jealousy etc., but I don't know any monogamous couple who has hard rules forbidding their partner to never be attracted to anyone else or ever speak of it, that's just being honest and mature. The boning is the differentiator.
It also seems like something that stops when a couple has kids - you have to be either very wealthy or very bohemian to have the time for multiple intimate relationships while juggling kids and work.
That said, people should do whatever makes them happy. My experiences trying polyamory did not make me happy, but that doesn't mean it's the case for everyone.