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Notes -
Maybe I'd be more sympathetic to poly if both partners go to a bar and one partner is actively wingman-ing for the other depending on the day. Which to me is the key difference- swingers read to me as "I want you to get as much satisfying sex as you can because I am happy when you have sex you enjoy (but I'm not going to get locked out of what I want, and if it starts to grate on the relationship it's always up for discussion/give-and-take"), while poly reads "I want me to get as much satisfying sex as I can; what my partner does is simply not my concern, and if I'm not in the mood for them or if they aren't getting as much sex as I am they can just fucking deal with it".
Perhaps that's an abuse of the term(s), but swinger is not [claimed to be] an orientation, whereas poly is, and orientations have "they can just deal with it, I was #bornthisway" baked in by definition. Not that that's inherently a bad thing- straight people do that all the time, after all- but "fucking whoever I want whenever I want is my orientation" has the ability to destroy a relationship in a way no other orientation does (though "I'm not a [gender I was born as]" or "I'm not attracted to you" can do it for mostly-but-not-completely-unrelated reasons).
I don't want to say it's unethical to be poly, or inherently abusive even (and negotiating it up front is probably the best thing to do in that circumstance anyway)- but that most people that invoke "poly" as "inviolable/orientation" are only doing it when their interest in being exclusive to their partner runs out, and that is not the mark of someone you want to continue to trust. The people you do want to trust are those that have been committed for a long time and can actually take their partner saying "no" for an answer... which is why swinging is something they do, not someone they are.
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