A lot of polyamory advice books are, frankly, terrifying. They make it sound like to be poly you have to be Emotional Competence Georg, who lives in a firm boundary adn negotiates with his partners about 10,000 emotional needs each day.
So I would like to say something reassuring to my crazy friends: you don’t have to be good at relationships to be poly.
It helps! It definitely helps! The advice in More Than Two or The Ethical Slut is good for people of all relationship styles, monogamous and polyamorous.
However, I am needy, whiny, insecure, and approximately as good at communication as a potted plant. I have a diagnosis that got a reputation as being absurdly manipulative, and then it turned out the reason we were all being manipulative is that none of us have any idea how to ask for things from our partners other than “cry a lot and cut yourself.” (I don’t recommend this as a communication strategy. For one thing, while it adequately conveys ‘I am upset’, it totally fails to convey any ways to solve the upsetness.)
And I have been poly for several years and it has worked out fine.
That’s for a bunch of reasons. Polyamory is sometimes easier. I have hypersexuality symptoms which, for those of you not up on your borderline lingo, means that sometimes I am like “I am sad! Clearly the correct response is to go out and fuck someone I actually don’t like that much and then never call them!” If I were monogamous, this would cause tremendous strain on my relationships and hurt for my partners in a time when I couldn’t really use the strain. Since I’m poly, I’m pretty sure it qualifies as a healthy coping mechanism. (Social model, bitches.)
A lot of times your problems aren’t polyamory-specific problems, they’re problems you’re going to face in every single relationship, mono or poly. For me, the specific insecurity of my partner sleeping with someone prettier than me barely registers next to the all-encompassing background insecurity about why my partner is dating someone as terrible as me in the first place. I might feel abandoned when my partner goes on a date with someone else, but I also feel abandoned when they go hang out with a friend. I have to deal with this shit either way, so I might as well deal with it in the way where I get to kiss pretty girls.
A lot of the problems that are created by poor communication are solvable. So your partner gets jealous, so you get your feelings hurt, so your partner feels like you don’t love them, so you and your partner get into a fight and storm off into separate rooms, so you have utterly failed to tell your partner your kinks. It happens. Is it good to put effort into avoiding those things? Of course! I don’t think anyone wakes up in the morning and says “today I want my feelings to be hurt!” But they’re also survivable. Nothing will explode. In five years, it will be funny, or cringeworthy, or regrettable, or something you look back on that made your relationship stronger, or something you look back on with relief because you finally dumped that person– but it will be fine.
And a lot of times your partners are willing to work with you. If you’re bad at setting boundaries, your partners can check in when they’re doing something they think might make you uncomfortable. If you’re insecure, your partner can reassure you. If you can’t deal with your anger without yelling, get a partner who can yell back. For a lot of people, that sort of stuff is a hard limit: I personally could never date someone who yells. But there are lots of people for whom it is not a hard limit, and who are happy to pay the price of putting up with your shitty relationship skills in order to date you.
I am not saying it is okay to have shitty relationship skills. By all means, try to improve your communication! What I am saying is that it is okay if you’re doing the best you can, and if the best you can is seriously suboptimal. You can still be sex-positive and poly if you want to.
Thing of Things 
Where do you think the “you have to be unusually good at relationship skills to successfully be poly” meme comes from?
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Backgorund: not poly, never been poly.
Doesn’t in seem like in a relationship, especially one that is relatively new, that comtemplating your partner being intimate (anything from sex down to holding hands) with someone else makes you very unhappy? At least, this seems like a relatively default setting for most people in their teens and 20s. Maybe that is typical mind fallacy, but I feel like it is a dominant trait.
One successful strategy for preventing that unhappiness would seem to be to take it off the table. And that has been the default strategy for quite a while.
If you decide not to take it off the table, you better be good at managing it in yourself and your partners.
Ozzy seems to be saying that, because of how they are, the typical strategy doesn’t work to prevent the unhappiness, the lower bound on actions that invoke jealousy is too low. So why stick to the strategy because it works for other people?
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Oh for the ability to correct my typos… Sigh.
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Most poly people don’t care about their partners being intimate with other people. They might feel insecure or afraid their partner will leave them, but “I don’t think she’s better than me and I don’t think you’re going to leave me and I am having all my emotional needs met in this relationship and I don’t believe that you holding hands with someone else signals that our relationship is meaningless, but I am still INCREDIBLY DISTRESSED by you holding hands with someone else” is not a thing that successful poly people usually feel– certainly not after a couple months to get used to the whole business. This is not an issue of relationship skills, because it’s not like we have that emotion and all manage it really well. We just don’t have it.
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I do think that a good portion of unhappiness people tend to feel at the thought of their partner being intimate with someone is based in the assumptions of monogamy-as-the-only-options, because in the dominant narrative, one’s partner being intimate with someone practically means be *definition* that they don’t care about us, and that is *of course* unhappiness-causing.
I think that being able to seperate out one’s partners’ feeling for others from their feelings for ourselves makes a *huge* difference here.
*shrug*
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I haven’t really been openly poly, but I’ve always thought of it as something I should try, mostly because some people seem to like me a lot in small doses, but nobody seems to like being around me large amounts of time, so a monogamous relationship looks unpromising for me. So I certainly hope good relationship skills aren’t necessary for being poly, or there’s no chance it would ever work for me; I certainly don’t have those.
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How much of this is mediated by attractiveness?
I’ve found that in most relationships, open or closed, it’s the less attractive partner who does most of the “work” of keeping the relationship going and is the one who ends up cutting the most slack for misbehavior. And there is a lot more work for the other party to do in an open relationship, since your attention is going to naturally wander from them.
Is it possible that you’re significantly more attractive than most of your partners, and that colors your view of things? It sounds like that might be the case, given that your description is mostly framed in terms of how other people meet your needs.
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The most interesting thing about polyamory to me is that there doesn’t seem to be a large difference between male and female participation. I would have predicted a huge tilt toward women, just based on the idea that men are the “buyers” and women the “sellers” in the sexual economy. Buyers are much more eager to negotiate exclusive contracts.
I can think of a few reasons why this might be the case. From most cynical to least cynical:
* Polyamorous men generally have low buying power, and are taking poly relationships over nothing.
* Polyamorous men have genuinely successfully decoupled feelings of sexual/reproductive jealousy from feelings of happiness in a relationship.
* The economic model of sexual behavior is totally wrong, and we should scrap it and start over.
I really want to believe #3, but it explains so many other things so well, dammit.
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To explain your observations, you just need #3 to be wrong for a (largish) fraction of polyamorists, while being correct for a majority (probably even a plurality would be enough) of the population.
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That’s what I was going for with #2. The analogous situation would be something like a counter-cultural or religious commune, where the usual economic imperatives are drowned out by other values.
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I think that sex positive feminist types (Ozy, Cliff Pervocracy, etc.) quite often mistake #2 for #3. They live in social groups where sex-as-commodity is an alien concept, and thus dismiss the posibility of people from very different groups being correct (or at least somewhat correct) when they use those models. ‘Girls like jerks’ may be a similar case.
I fear that this line of reasoning could lead to sexual elitism by sex positive groups regarding their members as having more agency or something. Mumble mumble.
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Uh, both Cliff and I have dated monogamously and dated sexually jealous partners. We didn’t grow up in Sex-Positive Feminist Utopia, we grew up in the same society everyone else did.
I think there are many circumstances where one can usefully model sex as a commodity. (If nothing else, sex work!) But that does not mean I think “men are buyers, women are sellers” is a remotely useful model, because in my experience, including in my experience of monogamous relationships and sexually jealous partners and sex work, it isn’t.
…Besides, in that model aren’t men usually sellers of commitment and women sellers of sex? If men wish to negotiate an exclusive sexual contract, women by the same token would wish to negotiate an exclusive commitment contract, and thus be down on polyamory. If anything, stillnotking ought to predict that women are enthusiastic swingers.
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I bet the difference between swinging and polyamory is not as pronounced in most people’s minds as it is in yours. (Of course, this means they’re just wrong about one or both of them, but their accuracy doesn’t matter for this point.) Even I had to take a second to realize the distinction you were making.
Commitment is one thing men offer for sex. Probably not even the most common thing. Infidelity has, in most times and places, been seen as less of a failing in men than in women, as long as they are providing materially for their mates and children. Sex workers are overwhelmingly female, and the male ones usually have homosexual clients. Men trade stuff-that-isn’t-sex for sex more than women do. That’s what I meant by “women sell, men buy”. I am open to non-economic explanations for this phenomenon, though.
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Personally I’ve seen very little overlap between poly-space and swinger-space. I’m sure some folks bridge the divide, but the poly people I know tend to be very much *not* swingers. I don’t know anyone fully in the swinger “scene,” as in those who go to swinger parties and such. However, I know some who kinda-sorta swing — including me and my g/f — and they are *absolutely not* poly.
(I’ve been poly in the past, but right now I’m enjoying being “basically monogamous but sometimes we meet someone and take them home and fuck them.” That’s really fun.)
There is this overlap in fetish space, where folks will often have “pickup play” with strangers they meet at parties. However, this is very often not-fully-sexual, meaning no genital contact and no orgasm. Frequently such people reserve the full-on sexytimes for their romantic partners. Many are poly. A few are not. It seems different from swinging.
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On *sexual market value*, it might be a useful model, but what is it a useful model for?
Certainly there are shallow women who keep “dating up” — but plenty a man cheats on his faithful wife with his hottie secretary. These things happen. But so what? Those people are those people. The question is, who are *you*? How do you want to date? What kind of people do you like? Do you think such people tend to be attracted to you? Why not?
I know plenty of rich guys without a romantic partner. I know plenty of poor guys who get plenty. I know weirdo nerdoid entities who figure it out. I know guys who lift weights and look good and seem outgoing, but who just crash and burn constantly.
I know gorgeous women who are unhappy with they romantic prospects. I know less attractive women who have amazing sexual lives. (In both these cases, I am estimating their attractiveness according to how I understand our broad cultural standards.)
During various portions of my life I’ve in all of these spaces, including both sides of the gender divide. (Except I guess I’ve never properly been a gorgeous woman, although I am pleased to discover that some people feel otherwise.)
In any case, you can find situations that are well described by SMV, but so what? You can find others that are not. You have some control of your own social context. What do you want?
For example, are you interested in those shallow social-climber types who want a perfect trophy husband, who will buy her a gorgeous ring and a gorgeous car and a gorgeous house and a gorgeous honeymoon and who is really there so this shallow bitch can brag to her friends?
If so, good luck. Those women are terrible.
What kind of men do they attract?
I suppose you can find the “sexual marketplace” if you really want to. I don’t recommend it.
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All this said, you’re allowed to be unhappy with your romantic situation. You are allowed to feel unattractive. You are allowed to dislike how the dating game is played in your social spaces. But what I am saying is this: beware simplistic social models built from a place of resentment. Such things are unlikely to capture the true nuance of *what you need to do to succeed*. Thus these models will hurt you.
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Veronica, I don’t harbor any resentment toward women, or romance, or my current girlfriend, or my ex-wife… or really anything, with the possible exception of the Microsoft corporation.
Our sexuality may tend to make us unhappy — which I consider a specific instance of the general maxim that life is suffering — but that’s a tragedy, not a crime.
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@stillnotking — but I don’t think that *you personally* developed the SMV theory, which seems to arise from segments of PUA culture, but then to have been grabbed full-on by the angry-bitter-resentful red pill crowd.
Which doesn’t mean it’s *false*, since bad people can notice true things. However, it does indeed seem to come from a place of resentment and seem to thrive in subcultures built from this.
And I call “map-territory” on this. You certainly *can* view relationships that way. Or you can *not* view relationships that way. The thing is, relationship-space is broad enough to find just about any structure you want to find.
Cloud gazing is fun! That one looks like a rabbit. That one looks like a bear.
In any event, what is the purpose of such models? Who are they trying to help? Are they really helping these people?
The people who are romantically successful, what models do they tend to use? What mind-hacks, what structures, what approaches?
Myself, when I was a male-presenting teen, I got into punk rock and dressed cool and learned to tell girls that I liked them. I guess I was cute enough. Most girls were not interested in me, but a few were.
That said, I was often too shy *when actually on dates*, and I let some opportunities slip by. On the other hand, my best relationships were with girls who I felt were super cute and sexy, but also “on my level.” It helped if they were weird-brained like me. Then I could communicate with them better.
I still had my trans stuff to deal with. Ultimately those relationships didn’t work, cuz I didn’t understand my own gender.
I later got married. The big key there was *telling my wife I was interested*. That lasted sixteen years. We made it through a lot, including much sexual dysfunction and ultimately gender transition. Eventually we fell out of love and moved on.
These days I work on being as pretty as I can be, as fun as I can be, as sexy as I can be, and I try to get over my shyness, but it’s hard. I rely much on my g/f being not-so-shy. We have fun and amazing sexual chemistry.
This is the first time I’ve experienced real sexual chemistry. It’s amazing.
But that is *me*. Other people will have a very different experience. But that said, SMV tells me very little that is useful. I’m not trying to date women at clubs or status climbers or people like that. I wouldn’t even know how to date people like that. It wouldn’t work out, since I cannot speak their language or play their games.
But I’m not trying to “corner the market” or have “any woman I want.” Blah! That shit is silly and probably has more to do with fiction than fact.
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I haven’t read the redpill version of SMV, and googling it gives a characteristic jumble of “how-to” articles in which I have no interest anyway. I suspect you’re pattern-matching me to people with whom I have little in common.
Human behavior interests me, not because I’m trying to hack my brain (talk about unfortunate idioms), or meet hot singles in my area, but because… it just does. I like to know why people do things. I think those questions do have answers beyond just cloud-gazing. If you disagree, that’s cool, but we don’t have a lot to say to each other on the topic.
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@stillnotking — I’m not pattern matching *you* to anything. I am concerned about SMV as a meme. I’m concerned about its effects on the discourse. In other words, is it a useful model to help nerds understand their dating environment?
I think it is *not*, and in fact it is a terrible theory. It does not match the weirdness of nerd status. It does not help those of us with illegible approaches to status or with weird-brains, who are rightly more interested in finding compatible brain-people rather than “scoring” with Ms. Hottie-Mc-HB-10. Furthermore, it is in fact a theory that emerged from anger-misogyny-resentment space. That does not make it false, but it is a good reason to make us suspicious.
I think you can kind of make it work when looking at dating in clubs, or at dating among a certain segment of social climbers, and if you *squint really hard*, you can kinda make it work in other spaces — if you ignore all the ways the analogy does not work.
Which is to say, every analogy has a purpose. It has some work it is supposed to do. Trying to match sex, dating, and romance to a marketplace model is meant to *do things* to the discourse.
What things?
The ways that dating and romance are *not* like a marketplace are important. And more, they are mega-super important to weird-brain nerds.
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Nerd communities are typically male-skewed, so SMV theory can be helpful for male nerds trying to understand why they aren’t experiencing much success. Maybe it’s not because of some deep flaw in themselves that they need to spend a lot of time obsessing about in order to uncover… maybe it’s because the women they’re trying to date simply have better options, and they need to find a way to deliver more value.
As a guy, my experience of dating in a heavily male-skewed environment was that I would frequently meet a woman, have what seemed like a mutually enjoyable flirty conversation, get her number, but get ignored when I followed up via text. Without SMV theory, I’d be inclined to take this personally and obsess over what I did wrong or why she was so mean to me. With SMV theory, I recognize that the deck is stacked against me and I need to either move somewhere with a more favorable gender ratio (i.e. not the SF Bay area) or work to improve my value and make myself more shiny and desirable.
I agree that the dominate models people on the internet use to talk about dating are oversubscribed, but I do think the SMV model as significant useful predictive value.
The other people who seem interested in SMV theory are women trying to find committed relationships in female-skewed areas like the east coast. The people who seem down on SMV theory are people like Ozy or female nerds who have tons of relationship options, which makes sense–they aren’t bottlenecked on willing partners the way the groups I mentioned are. I recognize that SMV theory is a bit dehumanizing, but not much more dehumanizing than economic theory in general, and complaints about SMV theory sound like distress of the privileged to my ears, frankly.
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Fair enough. But that said, I don’t think environments with large numerical skews are a good test of SMV, insofar as SMV says things *beyond* merely noting the obvious fact that, given a hundred straight men and ten straight women, those women will get much attention and have an easy time getting dates, while those men will not.
On the other hand, it can be really hellish for women in those environments. About which, much has already been said and we don’t need to belabor the point. But still. At my workplace there is an 80/20 split in the engineering departments, which many women find darn uncomfortable. (Trust me. We talk.)
That discomfort is one of the things that SMV doesn’t really predict.
For example, my employer has a pretty large presence, both in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco, so moving out there would likely be good for my career. Many of my employer’s cooler projects are based out there. The project I am on, which is Boston/Cambridge based, is definitely a company outlier. (Plus it’s in Common LISP, which further isolates me.) But still, I’ve heard nothing good about the bay area. Obviously the real estate situation is a turn off. But I have money. A bigger turn off is all that I hear about west coast nerd culture.
Which I guess suggests that, speaking collectively, this is to some degree a hell of nerd-space’s own making.
In Boston nerd-space, although we have an 80/20 in engineering at my employer, we have a bigger nerd culture, with poly-space, nerd-queer space (including things like art shows and burlesque), “maker” culture, SCA folks, cosplay nerds, gaming folks, all kinds of book clubs and similar stuff. Around here there are tons of universities with really smart women. Many of those women like smart people. Some are straight.
(True story: I’m sitting at a bar reading a book about linear programming and polytope theory, when my bartender, a woman, asks what I am reading. So in a brief moment of terrible sexism, I kind of assume she won’t likely understand — yes I fail at social justice. So I say, “Well, it’s like trying to find the optimal value of a system of equations, but in this book we’re really looking at the boundaries, which are something called a polytope.”
Her response is predicable (since I’m sharing the story). She goes, “Yeah, I have my masters in evolutionary biology and I’ve done a bit with optimization stuff. Although not so much the linear stuff since our models are all pretty much non-linear always.”
So yay her! I blush and feel shame.)
Anyway, my point is, sure, if men are way outnumbered, that’s gonna suck for pretty much everyone. Don’t do that.
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What seems really unfortunate to me is that male-skewed locales like the Bay Area have self-reinforcing dynamics. An imbalance of men means more desperate men, which leads to more men acting “creepy” or “beta” (pick your poison), which creates an undesirable situation for women, which exacerbates the imbalance of men.
I actually suspect you’d find the situation in the Bay Area better than you expect if you came to visit here. Part of the reason the Bay Area gets so much press from feminists is that there’s a huge feminist presence here, with many feminist writers in the area. A priori, if you hear a lot of complaints about an area, it’s not obvious whether that’s because there are a high density of complainers or a high density of things to complain about. My guess is that relative to tech, there are many more things to complain about in other male-dominated industries such as construction or law enforcement, but many fewer complainers.
But the huge feminist presence in the Bay Area includes a ton of feminist men too. You hear about them less because the local feminists do less complaining about them.
In fact, San Francisco arguably has one of the most thoroughly feminist cultures in the country. See this story by a woman who moved here and was disappointed that men didn’t hit on her on the street. And as a resident, my perception is that tech “bro culture” is rare to nonexistent in practice. Frequency with which things are written up in the media often doesn’t correspond well with the frequency with which they actually occur in the world. (I’m not saying there aren’t misogynist nerds. That’s much harder to measure because closet misogyny of this sort is harder to learn quickly about a person. What I’m saying is I can’t think of a single person I’ve met who seems like a good fit for the “sexist tech bro” archetype as it’s portrayed in the media.)
I think Bay Area tech companies probably vary in the degree to which they are feminist. The ones I’ve worked for personally seemed pretty woman-friendly–in two cases, a woman was my boss, and the women in the companies, although outnumbered, seemed reasonably happy. I’m dealing with a small sample size and I’m sure there are companies out there that are much worse for women than the ones I’ve worked at. But I get frustrated at what I perceive to be imbalanced press coverage of what the industry is like. (It might be useful to imagine some kind of bell curve representing the degree to which incidents make women uncomfortable, and then keep in mind that incidents broadcasted in the media are going to be the ones at the tail end of that bell curve because they are the most interesting.)
My perception is that feminist complaining serves at least partially to exacerbate the problems they complain about… by broadcasting that the Bay Area is a terrible place to be for women, they discourage women from moving here and prevent the gender ratio correction that’d be necessary to make it a nicer place for women. And some feminists act generally unpleasant, even to people who try to ally with them, and those generate anti-feminist backlash. What’s really needed from everyone is truth, compassion, moderation, thoughtfulness, etc. etc… which exactly the kind of thing Twitter thinks is totally boring and will fail to retweet. Basically I see a lot of self-perpetuating positive feedback loops of awfulness that keep getting worse and worse with no way to stop them, and that makes me sad.
So yeah, definitely planning to move to the east coast at some point
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@Joe — That all sounds plausible. In my case, however, my employer’s main office is SV based, and my beliefs about the place are based on women I know personally who work on the main campus. So this is not just “oh look at the angry feminist blogger.” It’s more, “My friend out there quit her job because of sexual harassment that was not properly dealt with by HR, alongside an environment of general sexist hostility.”
The women in the company talk. Word gets around.
For some reason our Cambridge campus does much better. (I suspect due to a general difference in the kind of tech-dudes who land out here compared to the valley. Plus, we have amazing leadership.)
Plus I’m mostly queer and I like women. Why would I go to a place with fewer cool-smart women? 🙂
(The answer to that is, I’d get to do cooler math at the main campus. So it’s a tough choice.)
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Of course, a big part of this is *not* about “fedora-style” nerd sexism. Which is to say, that stuff exists and it hurts. But I suspect that numerically the gender gap is more about software tech being woman-hostile in general, compared to (for example) medical and biotech, which seem more women-accepting. Since Cambridge is heavy in the latter — plus the schools! — we have a better nerd-gender balance.
The full-on fedora dude is actually pretty rare. Most of my male coworkers are entirely lovely men. I would find the same in SV, I’m sure. But the margins matter. Small things make big differences.
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Also note I’m using “fedora dude” as a code for a certain kind of nerdy guy. There is nothing wrong with actual fedoras. If you wanna rock a fedora — then rock your fedora. You’re good.
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I like it. With one caveat, the third to last paragraph. Sometimes its not fine, sometimes horrible stuff happens, things break and dont get mended, like, ever. But, well, such is life, so i guess that is fine too.
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