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The core difference I see between people building normal relationships, and people attempting to build “polyamorous” relationships is that the poly people aren’t really.
Sex with my wife is certainly a property of my relationship with her, but it’s more of a manifestation of our relationship than it is the point of it. We have sex with one another as a result of the rest of it.
If I had to guess, I’d say >70% if my peer group engages in polyamory. I can think of 0 of them who are in long term stable relationships. But I think that make sense. The thing my wife and I are building is just categorically different than what polyamorous people are doing. The depression these people seem to almost always experience I think results from incorrect expectations about what they’re doing.
There is probably a comparison to be made here to the trans movement. The cycle is: a trans person engages in surgeries and drugs, but doesn’t get the results they imagined or were promised, so they become an activist who insists that the answer is to target younger people with more surgery, and more drugs. Of course this also doesn’t work, and the cycle continues until the answer becomes that the whole of society is broken and we need to completely tear down all of the structure of the world and rebuild it from scratch (which of course will also not work).
I see this behavior with poly people. You are not creating relationships in the traditional sense, you are creating transaction agreements, and when this doesn’t result in a relationship, the answer becomes bizarre activism, thinly (or not so thinly!) veiled attacks on your outgroup, or angry rants on social media.
Again I think that there is a comparison to the trans movement here in that poly people want to redefine various words to try and make sense of their behavior. This is where the attempts to redefine words (which just so happen to align with mean ways of talking about their outgroup!) like trust and jealousy come from.
What’s especially sad and insidious about this to me is that when these things reach their obvious conclusions (not working), the answer is to double down and recruit people, instead of warning them off of it.
As a broader comment: there is definitely something interesting there. Is there a name for this? It’s like “no I didn’t ruin my life I like this actually and we need more people to do it!”, and then a cycle of escalation that seems to end in “all of society is invalid”. This pops up all over the place in the culture wars.
I literally had to read your comment twice because after the first time reading it, I remembered that straight poly people exist and that might change my interpretation of your comment. I suspect this is selection effects of my friend group and straight poly people are in reality more common than queer poly people given there's a lot more straight people. In retrospect, it occurs to me that I do know some, and all of the straight poly people I can think of are either married or in relationships where I'd be surprised if they didn't get married. I can think of one couple that went monogamous when they got married. Of course, if they're not in a relationship, I probably wouldn't know if they are poly, so definite selection effects there.
But my point in highlighting that I think of poly as a mainly queer phenomenon, is that poly people may not have the same metrics for success in their dating life that you do (which from your post, I'm getting is to build a stable life-partner relationship?).
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I also have lots of poly friends (maybe 30% of my peer group) and most of them are in long term stable relationships. I can't claim that my sample is representative but generally they seem very happy and mature about their decision.
Can you pick one and describe them? Just some questions: how long have they had this arrangement, how long after they started dating did it start, are they married, do they have kids, etc.
The closest one I can think of is: has kids, married, but the husband openly resents the woman (who is substantially more attractive than he is, and obviously gets a lot more extra marital activity than he does).
The others were "polyamorous", but eventually got married, had kids, and are now monogamous.
The rest are as I describe: angry bitter facebook rants about people lying to them (and everybody knows exactly what they're talking about). Lots of eventually finding somebody they really like and entering a relationship with them.
Sure, the couple I know best has been engaged for almost 2 years now and have been together for about 4 years now. AFAIK they've always been poly. The girl is one of my best friends and tells me a lot about her encounters. She's bi & I've set her up with some attractive female friends of mine. The guy is also bi and so they regularly have orgies/threesomes and have what seems like an equivalent roster of secondaries. No kids but they intend to. Both are conventionally attractive, and though they're affiliated with rats they're of the rare variety who are socially outgoing. They're definitely an exceptional example.
Having been engaged for 2 of the four years they’ve been together, and intending to have kids but not doing it, and this is the exceptional example?
If you consider those to be failure indicators then a ton of monogamous couples would also fit the bill. Neither lack of kids nor a long engagement period would stand out as remarkable among my mono friends.
Yes there are lots of people in relationships which are not working. My point is that polyamorous relationships don't seem to work because they aren't trying to form relationships. Calling a group of friends who have sex with each other a "relationship" is intentionally confusing language.
We used to just call this "friends with benefits", and the people engaged in it knew that they weren't trying to create long term stable bonds.
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