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Robby linked me this post on Facebook and asked for my opinion of it, and then I totally forgot to tell him my opinion and now I am going to write a blog post about it instead.
In this post, Robby distinguishes multiamory and polyphilia:
Multamory is the act of being in a romantic and/or sexual relationship with more than one person over the same period of time. Multamory is opposed to unamory (a relationship with only one person) and anamory (being in no romantic and/or sexual relationships). Romantic anamory is being single. Sexual anamory is not having sex. Voluntary short-term sexual anamory is sexual abstinence (or continence); voluntary long-term sexual anamory is celibacy.
Polyphilia is a preference for having multiple simultaneous mid-to-long-term romantic and/or sexual partners. Polyphilia is opposed to monophilia (a preference for one partner) and aphilia(a preference for having no partners). We can distinguish romantic polyphilia from sexual polyphilia, and do the same for monophilia.
This distinction does one thing which is very important, which is distinguishing between preference and behavior. A lot of monogamous people tend to assume that poly people are monogamous people who are making themselves miserable for no readily apparent reason. Similarly, a lot of polyamorous people tend to assume that monogamous people just need to learn how to become polyamorous and then they will be able to. Sometimes people who prefer monogamy assume this is because they just haven’t developed the relationship skills for polyamory, and then wind up making themselves and their relationship partners unhappy.
However, I have problems!
The most obvious problem is that there are a lot of people– perhaps most people– who can be happy in both monogamous and polyamorous relationships, and thus are not aphiliac, polyphiliac, or monophiliac.
This sort of category also tends to lead people to believe that change is not possible. Most heterosexuals believe they were born that way and can’t change, even though many heterosexuals who strive to become bisexual end up experiencing some success. While many heterosexuals are incapable of experiencing same-sex attraction, the idea that it is impossible for one’s sexuality to change is simply untrue. This is a particular problem for polyamory, because anecdotally polyhacking is much more common and successful than bihacking. There are many more poly-by-choice people we’d erase than queer-by-choice, and there are many more people who would like to be polyamorous and could self-modify into polyamory that we might discourage.
(The fact that sexuality can change does not imply that a moral obligation to change. Obviously.)
The third problem is that words like this always tend to lead people to stop thinking “this is a useful abstraction for discussing certain things, like that some people don’t want to be mono and you shouldn’t try to make them” and start thinking “this is a real group of people who exists and all has similar preferences.” For instance, consider heterosexuality! Most people assume that “heterosexual” refers to a single preference. However, in practice, a heterosexual woman might be attracted to people with penises, people whose systems have male-typical hormones, people who identify as men, people with typically male secondary sexual characteristics, people the woman reads as male, or any combination of the above. This is where we get nonsense like “you’re attracted to a woman with a penis? You’re GAY!”. No, you’re just attracted to people who identify as women and have typically female secondary sexual characteristics. It doesn’t matter if that makes you “really heterosexual”. “Heterosexual” is an abstraction over a lot of different configurations of sex- and gender-based attraction, and it happens to be a bad abstraction for dealing with trans and intersex people.
However, I think that a single axis from prefers polyamory to prefers monogamy ends up erasing a really important difference that comes up a lot when people are considering polyamory: the difference between the desire to have multiple partners and the desire for your partners to have multiple partners.
First: it is important to note that people can be apathetic on both of those axes. Someone who is apathetic on both axes is the most central case of someone who can easily be poly or monogamous. In addition, people may desire polyamory or monogamy for unrelated reasons: for instance, someone who only wants secondary relationships is going to have a far easier time being poly than monogamous. But those people are less common, in my experience, and I shall proceed to ignore them.
I think most people have a pretty good model of both the desire to have multiple partners and the desire to have a single partner. Someone might want only one partner because they only fall in love with one person at a time, or they’re very picky, or they’re very busy and don’t have time for multiple partners, or they have a limited amount of emotional energy and become polysaturated very very quickly, or they prefer to develop nonsexual/nonromantic relationships and find that being Officially Off-Limits helps that. Someone might want multiple partners because they fall in love with multiple people at once, or they value sexual variety, or they don’t have a clear distinction between romantic relationship and friendship, or they want to experience new relationship energy while having a strong, committed primary partnership.
Desire for multiple partners gets into The Dreaded Jealousy Issue. It seems to me like there are approximately two things that are put into the “jealousy” category, and this is very unclear and we should separate them more clearly. First is being upset that your partner is dating other people for a reason. For instance, you might feel scared that your partner is going to replace you with someone else or sad that your partner isn’t fulfilling one of your needs with you but they are with someone else. You may have internalized monogamous norms that say you’re lower-status if your partner has sex with someone else. If you have those sorts of feelings and want to be poly, I want to reassure you that they are very fixable and a good polyamory book like The Ethical Slut or More Than Two will be full of guidance about how to do so. (If you don’t want to be poly, then you don’t have to! You do you.)
The second is an emotion which I don’t understand at all and have never experienced from the inside, so please forgive me if I do a bad job of describing it. Some people feel that having their partner fall in love with or have sex with someone else lessens their relationship somehow or takes away the specialness. Even the thought of their partner going on a date can make them extremely upset to the point of hating their metamour. This is true even if all of their emotional needs are met, their partner is being honest, and their partner is not going to leave them.
I would prefer that we call the former emotions “insecurity”, “envy”, “fear of being low-status”, etc. and that we reserve “jealousy” for the latter emotion. This is clearer, because it encourages us to treat (say) romantic insecurity as a special case of regular insecurity that shouldn’t be dealt with any differently (which it is), keeps poly people from assuming that people who don’t want their partners to date other people are just like us but more insecure, and prevents poly people from assuming we have a solution to jealousy. As far as I know, successful poly people usually do not experience the jealousy emotion (although we are perfectly likely to experience insecurity, envy, etc.), and if you do it is a sign you should be monogamous.
Of course, there are reasons other than jealousy to not want your partner to have other partners: for instance, they might not have a lot of free time or spare emotional energy, and you reasonably believe that polyamory would harm your relationship.
Jealousy is probably largest inferential gap stopping people who want their partners to be poly from understanding people who want their partners to be monogamous. (I don’t fully understand it myself!) I think the largest inferential gap the other way is that people aren’t just putting up with their partners having other partners: many people actually desire it.
For instance, some people think their partners dating other people is extremely cute and it makes them happy. (This is called “compersion”. Fangirls in the audience: it’s similar to shipping. Nonfangirls: it’s… kind of like when your friend gets a good partner, except times ten.) Some people– stereotypically asexuals, but the only person I’ve dated who had that preference was actually allosexual– feel pressure to satisfy their partners sexually if their partner can’t respond to “nah, not in the mood tonight” with “okay, I’ll go sleep with my other boyfriend.” Some people are squicked by the way that monogamy seems to them to imply ownership of your partner’s sexuality. And, yes, neoreactionaries in the audience, some people get off on their partners being promiscuous.
Robby’s category of “polyphilia” is, I think, a continuum between “desires multiple partners and desires partner to have multiple partners” and “desires single partner and desires partner to have single partner.” But I think this erases two groups of people who exist: people who desire a single partner but want that partner to date other people (call them “automonophiles”), and people who desire multiple partners but want their partner to be monogamous (call them “autopolyphiles”).
Both automonophiles and autopolyphiles are likely to face problems that polyphiles and monophiles are not. Multiamorous automonophiles are often pressured– even by well-meaning partners!– to have more than one partner. (So are polyphiliac people who, at the moment, just happen to only have one partner.) Fortunately, this is a fairly easily solved problem: don’t assume that because a relationship is mono/poly it’s unequal or unfair. It might be satisfying the preferences of everyone involved.
If you believe evolutionary psychologists, autopolyphilia is the natural human sexual orientation. Unfortunately, it also presents a lot of problems. Where many people believe that automonophiles are being taken advantage of, many people believe that autopolyphiles are taking advantage of others: getting the advantage of polyamory themselves without the cost of their partners’ other partners. Automonophilia is a lot more compatible with other people’s sexual desires: a polyphile with an automonophile partner can often get their compersion needs met with other partners, and there are lots of people who are apathetic about whether their partners have other partners. Unfortunately, it looks like the best options for autopolyphiles are to find a compatible automonophile, repress their desire for multiple partners and become unamorous, repress their jealousy and become multiamorous, or work very hard on their envy and insecurity in hopes of modifying into a more popular category.
stargirlprincess said:
I actually think I am actually a automonophile. I see myself as a sort of boring and slow moving person. Many people seem to have so much more energy! I can imagine interacting with me to be pleasant (for some people) but I feel incapable of satisfying most of the desires a good partner would satisfy. On the other hand I find the idea of having more than one partner scary. I do not think I am capable of being a good partner to one person nevermind many!!!! I do however strongly desire permission to cuddle with whoever want to. Cuddling has a sexual component in many cases (surely everyone has noticed guys sometimes get erect when cuddling etc) but I really like cuddling!
I am currently monogamous. But I feel that me dating one person who has multiple partners is the “natural” relationship for me. I strongly desire my partners needs/desires are met but I really do not have it in me to meet them.
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stillnotking said:
Most people don’t have total confidence in the honesty and loyalty of our partners. We can’t know they are being honest and will not leave us, absent a perfect lie detector — and maybe not even then, since feelings are apt to change. The only experiment in polyamory among people I’ve personally known ended with one of the original couple being dumped within a week, even though they’d been assured that wouldn’t happen.
I would describe jealousy as feeling threatened. That feeling isn’t necessarily irrational, unless we assume that any relationship vulnerable to being broken up from the outside was unhappy in the first place, which seems dubious to me.
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Myca said:
I think that would fall into Ozy’s first classification, (“insecurity”, “envy”, “fear of being low-status”, etc.), and I’d agree that it’s not necessarily irrational. (Though I’ll throw in a plug for Tristan Taormino’s “opening up” here in addition to Ozy’s recommendations, if you’re feeling these things and would like to learn not to.) The feelings of jealousy I had when I was monogamous were absolutely (well, mostly) irrational.
I think that, “fear your partner will meet someone they like better and leave you,” isn’t irrational, but I’d note that it’s more likely in monogamy than polyamory, since the point of polyamory is that you don’t then have to leave. Now, this is assuming everyone involved actually wants to be poly rather than just use it as an excuse to move on, which I’ve also seen.
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ozymandias said:
I think this is a difference between people who desire their partners to have multiple partners and people who don’t.
Like… if one of my partners meets someone they’re happier with than me, doesn’t have enough emotional energy for all their relationships, and breaks up with me, I want that to happen. Why wouldn’t I? They’re happier! I love them, so I want them to be happy.
And, yeah, sometimes it’s going to hurt. Sometimes I do get the part of me that’s like “I don’t want you to be HAPPY I want you to be with ME.” But ultimately there’s the comfort that the person I love is happy, and that’s a really big comfort.
(The exception, of course, is my future life partnership, but that’s a different issue.)
And in practice… I know my partners want to be with me, because they choose to be with me. I know they don’t want to leave me for someone sexier, because they haven’t done it. If you guarantee that your partner loves you by keeping them from meeting any other alternatives… that sounds really scary to me! I would always be worried that the only reason they were with me is because I’d stopped them from looking at other alternatives.
And frankly if your experiment in polyamory ends with one of the original couple being dumped within a week, there are either serious problems in your relationship or one of you is incapable of being in love with more than one person at once.
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Matthew said:
I think this is a difference between people who desire their partners to have multiple partners and people who don’t.
Like… if one of my partners meets someone they’re happier with than me, doesn’t have enough emotional energy for all their relationships, and breaks up with me, I want that to happen. Why wouldn’t I? They’re happier! I love them, so I want them to be happy.
I don’t think this is correct. I definitely feel jealousy, but I would also prefer a partner choose someone else if that would make them happier (exception: spouses in a functional marriage –i.e. not actively unhappy, just less than maximally so — with children should weigh the interests of the children really heavily in such calculations). But that is the choice. The partner can choose to go be with someone else if they think that will make them happier, but they don’t get to have their cake and eat it too by keeping me.
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zz said:
>heterosexuals who strive to become bisexual end up experiencing some success
Can anyone recommend how to do so?
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wireheadwannabe said:
My “descent into bisexual madness” tag at wirehead-wannabe.tumblr.com goes into some detail. I’m currently at or slightly below a Kinsey 2 and a little bit fluid. In my case I was probably repressing same-sex attractions up until I decided I wanted to change, so YMMV. I have has a notable increase in same-sex attraction just by allowing myself to relax the mental blocks created by internalized homophobia. You might surprise yourself even if you think you’re straight!
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Henry Gorman said:
I transitioned from apparent heterosexuality to bisexuality by doing stuff, but I’m not sure if what happened was “switching from heterosexuality to bisexuality” or “realizing that I was bisexual all along.” What happened was that I did some physical stuff with another guy and realized that my body responded to that in roughly the same way that it responded to doing similar stuff with women. Later, I spent time fantasizing about going down on some guys who I felt warmly towards– unsurprisingly, I like it. Now, I identify comfortably as a Kinsey-2 bisexual, have a happy sexual relationship with a woman, and spend plenty of times cheerfully looking at photos of Matt Bomer without his shirt.
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Matthew said:
As a kinsey 0, my strong suspicion is that the correct answer to this is “start out at higher than 0 on the kinsey scale.” Count me as extremely skeptical that anyone has ever managed true bi-hacking.
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Henry Gorman said:
This probably depends really strongly on how subconscious sexuality fits into your model. I would agree with you that it’s likely that not everyone could become bisexual.
I do, however, suspect that a lot more could be than are, though, going by the way that people’s sexualities seem to change in prison and other sex-segregated environments.
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ozymandias said:
I’ve known two people who self-report no same-sex attraction, then an epiphany, then bisexuality. So that is a thing that happens.
But certainly not everyone can become bi successfully.
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Anonymous said:
I think the thing that had the largest effect for me was threesomes (with a woman I was in a relationship with and another man), which over time built up an association between positive/aroused feelings and male bodies. Kissing boys started as something I did primarily to please my girlfriend and over time grew to be very enjoyable in its own right. (Of course, this requires finding boys who are okay with you kissing them for extrinsic reasons initially.) If that’s not feasible I wonder how well looking at same-sex porn while having straight sex would work?
Of course, I can’t conclusively refute the claim that I was just repressed bi to begin with, but that’s not how it felt from the inside. But I certainly don’t expect this to work for everybody.
Relatedly I wonder how common it is for people to become more bi as a result of relationships/sex with trans and genderqueer people. Potential trans/genderqueer partners are unlikely to be comfortable with that motivation though so it’s probably not ethically viable as a deliberate strategy.
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ozymandias said:
Man, I volunteer to help make people more bi!
(…This might be more effective once I’ve medically transitioned.)
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TK-421 said:
I propose “polyflexible” to cover the case of “can be happy in both monogamous and polyamorous relationships”.
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ozymandias said:
I dislike this because it implies they default to polyamory, which both creates a bad norm and isn’t true (by sheer numbers, most apathetic people will be monogamous).
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wireheadwannabe said:
To me that term sounds like it implies a mild preference for polyamory in the same way the “heteroflexible” implies a preference for the opposite sex.
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Athos the Cat said:
How about “flexiphilia”? There’s an unspecified referent, but it might work anyway.
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qwertyne said:
sounds like love for contortionists
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Myca said:
I used to experience this emotion (way back in the mists of prehistory when I was monogamous), but for me it wasn’t exactly the feeling that it took away from the specialness of the relationship. It was much more visceral and irrational, like when I thought of my partner with someone else, I’d have a horrible sick sinking feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach which I might justify as being about the specialness of our relationship.
I mean, on some level, I understood that it was irrational, I think.
The other thing that I’ve heard in the past from unamorous/monophilious partners is a strong reaction to the idea that their reaction ought to make sense or be explicable. “I shouldn’t have to explain why it upsets me for my partner to fuck someone else!”
Which … like, I don’t think that emotional reactions need to be reasonable or justified. That’s the point, they’re emotions, and they get respect regardless. I do have a much easier time helping my partners if I understand what’s going on, though, and I do have a negative reaction to responses that seem to fairly sum up as, “well, this is just right and normal and doesn’t need a justification.”
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Matthew said:
I mean, on some level, I understood that it was irrational, I think.
I find it kind of jarring when people use the term “irrational” for things like this. It may be anachronistic, but there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual jealousy.
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blacktrance said:
Something can simultaneously be irrational and have good evolutionary reasons to exist.
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Myca said:
Right, blacktrance, absolutely.
I use the term ‘rational’ to mean something roughly like “intellectually reasoned, justified, and chosen.” Biological imperatives are irrational in that they’re not reasoned – they’re instinctual or pre-programmed.
And like I said, ‘irrational’ isn’t an excuse to ignore the reaction. Emotions are generally (and literally) irrational, and we address them anyway, but different methods of addressing are appropriate depending on the rationality of the initial reaction.
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Matthew said:
I think the correct term for something that doesn’t involve consciously optimizing reasoning is “arational”, whereas “irrational” is a narrower phenomenon that involves doing something contraindicated by rational thought.
Sexual jealousy may not be a reasoned process, but it’s also not systematized losing.
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roe said:
Here is a reasonably precise way insecurity is experience in monogamy (by me):
Marriage with kids is… Well, there’s a definite way in which it’s a grind, and a challenge to your bond as lovers. Conversation has to be down-shifted so the kids understand, going out together isn’t really an option unless you can find babysitting. Every activity that you do for yourself – taking classes or seeing friends or whatever – is taking time away from your partner (who has to watch the kids &etc.) in a more-or-less zero sum way.
That is, you’ve got to very carefully manage dopamine* levels in your relationship – take every opportunity to inject some excitement or difference experience or whatever because such opportunities are rare. Kids sometimes are excitement generators but often it’s (frankly) a grind and inconvenience to look after their needs all time.
Doesn’t sound like much of a sales pitch, right? Well, it’s a trade-off and offers rewards on a different axis – and delayed gratification &etc. And it’s manageable if you don’t get complacent.
So, anyways, if we were in any kind of poly relationship, one of us would be getting a *huge* dopamine injection from an outside relationship with infatuation &etc., and coming to associate the main partner with all the grind-y parent-y stuff. And taking time away from the main partner in that zero-summy way to pursue the outside relationship.
Yes, it’s an insecurity – kind of like a house full of old newspaper and the lights on the fire alarms go out.
*Yes, I know it’s more complicated – please allow use of short-hand.
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ozymandias said:
There are people who have long-term polyamorous relationships and have children. I am not in this category so I can’t talk about how one resolves this sort of problem, but I suspect it is perfectly solvable. 🙂 (There are tradeoffs, of course– but it depends on how important polyamory is to you.)
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Myca said:
In my experience (I got no kids, but I’ve been in relationships with those who do), there are a couple options.
One option, where one of the parents has an outside relationship and one does not, is that the outside relationship can help invigorate that parent so that they return to the pair-bond with more emotional energy, and the ability to be more loving and supporting towards their partner. I mean, the solution to, “this is grinding me down,” should not necessarily be “well it ought to grind us BOTH down!” 😉
Another option, of course, is for both parents to have outside partners so that they both get a break from the grind from time to time, and get both their fun vacation time and their important family time.
Finally, and this has been how it’s worked for me, mostly, outside partners can be part of solving these problems! When I was in a relationship with a married woman with a kid, she and I would have dates at her house so that we could babysit while her husband went out on a date, or I might even come over and babysit so that the two of them could go out.
I think it’s important for any outside partner dating a person with a kid to understand that just because they may have another parent to lean on doesn’t mean that they’re not a parent, and that you can’t try to date them as though they’ve got no other responsibilities.
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roe said:
This is the type of response I was looking for, cause I was curious – so thanks!
(Usually by the time she’s ground down with the kids, I’m ready for fun kid time, so it’s kinda more complementary like that)
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Jacob Schmidt said:
I don’t think so. “Preference” doesn’t mean “will only be happy with X,” it means “prefers X over ~X.” A polyphile might prefer multiple partners, but remain happy with 1 (hey, that’s me right now!).
But if that isn’t sufficient, I’d suggest changing the definitions from “prefers” to “enjoys.” A polyphile enjoys multiple partners. A monophile enjoys 1 partner. An aphile enjoys no partners. Someone who only wants no partners would be solely aphilic; someone who will only date multiple partners would be solely polyphilic; someone who will only date 1 partner is solely monophillic.
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Pat B said:
The vocabulary is interesting but there are still some missing variables.
For one, discretion. Pretty much everyone in the world outside of the Anglosphere understands that you can have a piece on the side without destroying the relationship, provided that you’re discreet in your infidelity. Rubbing it in your partner’s face, catching a disease, spending the nest egg, having a kid: those are all indiscretions in both senses of the word. Poly as currently practiced is good at every part but the first: it in fact demands a level of honesty which makes plausible deniability impossible. That makes it unattractive to a lot of people who might otherwise be open to the idea.
Another is that jealousy is highly conditional in ways which progressive people can’t easily admit to. For example, a lot of guys (self included) are not sexually threatened by women, and some even encourage our partners to hook up with girls on the side, but are extremely hostile to the idea of adding another guy into the mix. A lot of women are primarily jealous of women with characteristics they envy, sometimes even entire races, but are otherwise not overly bothered. These groups would get along better in a less intersectional poly: being told your preferences are inauthentic and morally indefensible doesn’t endear them to you.
Of course having a bigger tent isn’t unambiguously good. There are lots of great reasons to exclude people. But if the question is “why aren’t there more people in the group? ” these things might help answer it.
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osberend said:
For example, a lot of guys (self included) are not sexually threatened by women, and some even encourage our partners to hook up with girls on the side, but are extremely hostile to the idea of adding another guy into the mix.
Seconding this, with some a slight caveat: I think it’s not necessarily about feeling threatened, just as it’s not (as Myca noted upthread) about feeling unspecial. It can be (and was for me, when I was contemplating that prospect in my last relationship) just . . . viscerally horrible to contemplate in a way that doesn’t necessarily map readily to any more precisely defined emotion.
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Harlequin said:
As a monogamous fangirl with plenty of poly friends, thanks for that compersion analogy–I suddenly have a much better understanding of what they’re feeling (which I believed, but couldn’t really empathize with, before).
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Tapio Peltonen said:
I am sorry, I approve of making these kinds of distinctions but I’m not going to use words like “autopolyphile” until they’re way more mainstream. I can’t expect even myself, let alone other people, to remember their exact semantics.
I’m considering my own and my peers’ relationships on a case by case basis. I generally do not have romantic or sexual relationships, but I’ve still been helped a lot by this old blog post: https://intimacycartography.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/the-anatomy-of-relationships/
The main point being, there’s a large number of relevant factors determining the type of relationship and its exclusivity. Sexuality and “romance” (“limerence?”) are just two of them.
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Nita said:
That’s a nice post, thanks for the recommendation. I think it does a better job of capturing the fact that relationships grow into various shapes to accommodate individuals. “Preference for having multiple simultaneous partners”, on the other hand, sounds like a typical poly person chooses a relationship model and then tries to fill the N ‘partner slots’ with whoever they can find.
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ADifferentAnonymous said:
This seems like a good place to mention that I’ve been consisting coining the identity label “n=1” for myself, to capture the fact that while my partner and I have found the optimal number of partners to be one, we don’t think there’s anything special about that number.
This is also kind of my answer to mono- vs polyphilia: the number of partners I want is a complicated function of the available partners and my time and energy commitments, which currently outputs one. In principle I could enjoy having more partners, which maybe makes me a polyphile, but that makes it sounds like having just one partner means I’m deprived, when in fact that’s my choice and it would take a fairly extraordinary person to make me decide to take them on as a secondary.
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