Tags
[epistemic status: trolling]
So, let’s assume there is some percentage of the population (call them “obligate mono”) who really, really want a monogamous relationship. And let’s say there’s some percentage of the population (call them “obligate poly”) who really, really want a poly relationship. There are probably more obligate mono people than obligate poly people, on account of they managed to get the entirety of society to agree to make their relationship goals mandatory. Call it three times more obligate mono.
However, there is a much larger percentage of the population (call them “undetermined”) who can be happy in either a polyamorous relationship or a monogamous relationship. This group is probably larger than the obligate monos and the obligate polys put together. This is based on my own experiences: before I was in the rationalist community, I found new partners by hitting on people who, in their past relationships, had been happily monogamous; not only did I only once get turned down because someone preferred monogamy (despite its obvious advantage as a face-saving tool), I also never experienced any problems from accidentally dating a mono person. I might be subconsciously selecting for poly-open people, but I’m not that good.
So let’s say sixty percent undetermined, thirty percent monogamous, ten percent poly.
The interesting thing is that undetermined people aren’t really undetermined- not most of them, anyway. Shifting an undetermined person from mono to poly, or from poly to mono, involves breaking up all of their current relationships– a hefty price to pay, particularly on the first date. And cowboying and cheating are both considered pretty bad behavior in their respective communities– not to mention being pretty unappealing gambles for the person considering them.
Therefore, obligate poly and (single) obligate mono people inevitably find themselves with competing interests: fighting for the pool of undetermined people. We can see this in the number of monogamous people who complain loudly about everyone in their social circles being poly, and the number of poly people who would complain loudly about everyone in their social circles being mono, except that you can’t do that because then you’re Saying Polyamory Is Superior To Monogamy and Don’t You Know You’re Not Allowed To Do That, Only Monogamous People Are Allowed To Say That Their Preferred Relationship Style Is Superior. Usually, this winds up soundly in favor of the obligate mono people, since there are far more of them.
But if a community (let’s call it, just as an example, the “rationalist community”) happens by chance to have a higher number of poly members– even as small a minority as twenty or thirty percent– they get a chance to take over and grab all the undetermined people.
This is, obviously, unfortunate for obligate mono people. But the situation of an obligate mono person in a highly poly community is worse than the situation of an obligate poly person in a highly mono community, for two reasons. First, currently monogamous people have the grace to remove themselves from the dating pool: the poly person in a highly mono dating community finds themselves with poly people (both obligate and undetermined), undetermined people, and the odd single obligate mono person. Currently poly people are not nearly so polite, and the obligate mono person finds himself picking through poly person after poly person.
Second, the poly network is self-perpetuating. If an undetermined person breaks up with their monogamous partner, they’re back on the market and can be poly or mono. If an undetermined person breaks up with their poly partner, they… probably have two or three other partners that mean they’re going to stay poly. A poly network can stay poly even if no one in the network is obligate poly. A community that has more obligate mono people than obligate poly people can stay primarily polyamorous because of quirks of the community’s founders. This is, to put it lightly, suboptimal.
Is the solution, then, stigmatizing polyamory?
The problem with stigmatizing polyamory is that obligate mono people really, really don’t want obligate poly people in their dating pool. Obligate mono people are so distressed by their partners cheating on them that some of them have murdered their partners over it. Since many people who cheat want multiple partners, if all the obligate poly people date each other, the obligate mono people are at much lower risk of experiencing this pain. Stigma is a blunt instrument; what we need is something that separates the obligate poly people from the undetermined people.
The solution is obvious.
Baby, we were born this way.
Present polyamory as something genetic, something set before you’re born. We managed to do it for homosexuality despite it being literally less genetic than how nice a person you are, so the facts won’t get in the way. Present obligate poly people as a tiny minority who discover who they are in adolescence. The people who don’t discover that they’re poly will assume they were just born monogamous, like everyone else, and become happy monogamous people.
Some undetermined people may notice that they can be happy in both mono and poly relationships. It might be wise to stigmatize being undetermined. The stigma against bisexuals is instructive here. Teach everyone to consider them fakers, unable to make up their minds, just trying out polyamory for some sexy thrills before they leave you for their real monogamous relationship. Undetermined people might have their own stereotypes: for instance, mono people might stigmatize them as cheaters, and poly people as having crappy communication skills because they can get away with that in monogamous relationships.
But even if being undetermined is destigmatized, most people don’t notice that they can be happy in a poly relationship until they try it and like it. The most important thing is to hide that fact: to tell people that you have to know you’re poly, that you can’t try it out. The relatively few people who are self-aware to notice are no threat compared to the number of people who might like it if they tried it. As long as that happens, poly people will be a minority in all communities not specifically aimed at us, and both obligate mono and obligate poly people will be happy.
Thing of Things 
This is the beast thing I’ve read all day.
LikeLike
OZY GET US AN EDIT BUTTON 😦
LikeLike
This seems to be the appropriate place to state my endorsement of the proposition that this post is brilliant.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The best part of the trolling is the background assumption that there are exactly two types of relationships, and therefore exactly three types of people. Epic.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Huh? What’s trollish about that? The difference between 1 and > 1 partner is, as a matter of fact, the socially and psychologically relevant boundary, no?
LikeLike
Right, but you missed the “assumption that there are exactly two types of relationships” part. What constitutes a “partner”?
At present, I have one person whom I often call my “girlfriend”. Sometime last year, I also had a relationship with someone who I called my “partner”. I currently have some friendships that also involve varying levels of physical intimacy…
Then again, I’m more relationship-anarchist than polyamorist.
LikeLike
Grumble grumble ‘genetic’, ‘heritable’, and ‘fixed’ are all completely different things grumble grumble.
LikeLike
Not to the average person on the street.
LikeLike
The context is that Ozy periodically makes this claim about homosexuality in less troll-esque situations, often in such a way that implies !heritable=!fixed. I’m not actually allowed to complain about it because that means the trolling wins, but I’m at least permitted some ironic grouchiness.
LikeLike
*I* know that “not born this way” is not the same thing as “not currently immutably this way”, but I’m still allowed to complain about people who believe in the gay gene.
LikeLike
I realize this is a troll, but I think this post may’ve accidentally convinced me (undetermined, I guess; currently with one obligate poly partner) that poly relationships are indeed objectively better. Not sure what here gave me that impression. Maybe it’s that the obligate mono people above seem like freaking whiners w/r/t the undetermined.
LikeLiked by 1 person
[ epistemic status : mindkilled emotional visceral response ]
Monogamy is still the ultimate pretentiousness that goes “I’m so much better for you than everyone else in the world that you’re not allowed to even begin to express affection, in the following ways : {list}, to anyone but me”.
In addition to the emotional blackmail of “If I catch you beginning to think about kissing anyone else I’ll be very sad”.
The real, blindingly obviously transparent reason is “I’m so insecure that I’m afraid I’d lose you if you even thought about kissing someone else ;_; please don’t leave me, I might never find anyone else ever again”.
While most males are trying to get into the pants of every female they can get away with doing anyway.
I long for the day this hypocrisy will be deleted forever.
Fidelity is when your lover comes back to you, not that they never go to anyone else. In practice, it’s how many times one wakes up next to someone they love. It’s a float, not a bool.
LikeLike
An insecure people are, of course, not allowed to have relationships that fulfill their preferences, or indeed any at all.
Uhm… What?
LikeLiked by 4 people
Wait! Really, this?
So we’re right about you guys. Like, that kindly old man who smiles at young girls on the subway *really is* a pervy old freak?
Cuz sometimes that happens. I’ve seen men perv on girls way too young to be dealing with a man like *that*, in ways that make the girls super uncomfortable. I watched it play out. Such men are a menace.
On the other hand, most men are not like this. Most men, when they are kind to women and girls, are just being kind. In fact, the first kind of guy fucks things up for the majority of guys, since now we gals have to be on guard all the time for creepers.
But you think the “all men are creepers” theory is correct? Really? You meant to say that?
You’re wrong, of course. Most men have sexual feelings, which are cool and healthy and awesome. As they grow up they learn how to manage these feelings in constructive ways.
Well, most men do.
#####
Monogamy seems to work very well for a lot of people, although the “one true love for life” thing doesn’t always work. So they do “serial monogamy.”
And yes, a lot of people do the latter while believing in the “one true love” thing, and this creates trouble. Fine. But that is a separate topic from monogamy itself.
But anyway, if you *personally* feel too constrained by monogamy, then be poly. Easy peasy. If mono people get shitty about that, tell them to stuff it. But you do you. Let them do them.
LikeLike
If I ever polyhack, perhaps I will try to think of it as serial monogamy, but paralell.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Point I – Your concept of fidelity sounds weirdly competitive.
When you have multiple love relationships (not just one love relationship plus outside sexual ones), and there are several people to “come back to”, fidelity seems to be zero-sum. Every time you wake up next to Alice is a time you don’t wake up next to Bob, a point Alice scores and Bob loses.
Even within couple-based non-monogamy, it’s still harsh. You can certainly defend “Every time I spend the night with someone else, I’m harming my partner a bit, but it benefits me more than it harms them, so we’re both better off agreeing to be harmed a bit in exchange for getting our rocks off.”, and it matches the experience of some people. (Ditto for “Every time I spend the night with someone else, I’m harming their partner a bit, but…”, and “Every time I spend the night with someone else, I’m harming my partner a bit, so I’ll have sex but no overnights.”) But it completely neglects the very common experiences of “Every time I spend the night with someone else, my partner is completely unaffected.” and “Every time I spend the night with someone else, my partner is delirious with compersion.”.
There’s also a weird effect: You can be a better (higher-fidelity) partner by not sleeping with other people, and an even better partner by dropping all other reasons not to wake up beside your partner, until you’re joined at the hip (possibly literally). This would not generally be considered a good outcome; this implies that fidelity isn’t monotonously good, that there is an optimal amount of fidelity. At which point we’re so far away from the conventional meaning of the word that you might as well find a different word and import connotations.
Point II – What do you think of alternatives to it?
Suppose someone says something like:
Okay, so you care about fidelity, defined as partners coming back to you. This is all well and good, and whenever I can reasonably do so I will help you have hi-fi relationships. But I don’t personally care about fidelity; I care about a completely different thing, call it “oathkeeping”.
The content of the oath is not arbitrary; it boils down to “I will behave in the following ways, because I can be happy doing so and you can’t be happy without me doing so”. In some relationships, that may mean “I won’t kiss anyone else”; in others it may mean “I won’t have unprotected sex with you if I’ve caught an STD you don’t know about”.
But keeping the oath matters in itself, independently of any consequences of breaking it. There’s a qualitative difference between trusting someone to keep their word, and trusting that they’re generally well-intentioned but having to worry whether their judgement of which promises are trivial or inconvenient enough to break matches your own.
I care about having partners who’ll keep their word, to me and to their other partners; metamours who’ll sit down with me and our mutual partner to negotiate terms and consider them binding; and social norms that value keeping promises.
How hypocritical, (un)reasonable, and (un)sustainable is this position? To what extent, if any, would you change your behaviour to oppose or assist such a person in your poly network?
Point III – Those are nowhere near the actual motivations of most monogamous people.
But you knew that. You’re ranting because you’ve been burnt before, not trying to do accurate psychology. Fair enough.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ten per cent obligate poly means obligate poly is between twice and four times as common as being gay. That seems really really high.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It doesn’t seem that improbable to me; most obligate poly people are not in poly relationships, they’re wandering about cheating on their partners (or really really wanting to while being too decent to do so).
LikeLiked by 1 person
😦
LikeLike
There are also a lot of people who might have no desire to be polysexual, but are still polyromantic. As in they have other close friendships that have a romantic element to them, but they never do anything sexual in the relationship.
I think this is a lot more common than people realize as most culture doesn’t differentiate between romantic and sexual aspects all that well.
LikeLike
Cheaters aren’t necessarily obligate poly. I’ve known people who will cheat on their partner but get very jealous and angry at the thought of their partner sleeping with someone else.
LikeLiked by 1 person
So… I’m an Obligate Mono person (in a weird way– I draw much harder lines between dating someone and being in a relationship with them than most people), and I am CONFUSED about this “cowboying” business. What, exactly, is the difference between “cowboying” and simply being attracted to a person and asking them if they’re Obligate Poly, or willing to be in a monogamous relationship? Because I’ve known (and been attracted to!) people who were currently poly, and this has involved conversations about whether they have a strong or weak preferences for polyamory. Sometimes the preference is strong/obligate, but not always. Especially when it comes to currently single undetermined people (it is, in my opinion, far less a case of bad form to ask a single person to try a new relationship style than it is to ask someone to leave other partners for you).
By the same token, I do not think it’s bad for an Obligate Poly person to ask an undetermined mono-leaning person if they’d be willing to try poly out. This is why I can never muster the RAGE AGAINST ULTIMATUMS that so many people have when they talk about dating. Ultimatums are good! They inform you of your partner’s dealbreaker preferences so you can figure out if you’re a good match instead of torturing each other out of courtesy!
Thoughts?
LikeLiked by 2 people
The basic idea is that Bob (obligate mono) is dating Alice (currently poly) and has intentions of deepening the relationship and then saying “if you want to keep dating me, you have to become monogamous.” Sometimes this is simply the product of poor communication (Bob may believe that Alice’s other relationships aren’t important or committed because she’s poly), sometimes it’s active deception. This is a shit deal for both Alice and Bob: Alice thinks she has a happy poly partner and instead she has someone who wants her to break up with her other partners; Bob has to put up with being jealous for an indefinite period with no guarantee that Alice is ever going to want to be monogamous.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ahhhhhh. See, the only times I’ve had this discussion with poly people, they were currently single, I just knew they identified as poly. Also, I assumed that this was the sort of thing discussed before they started dating. (Bob to Alice: “I know we’ve been flirting/hanging out/whatever for a while, and I like you a lot. However, polyamory is not for me, so I’m thinking we should be friends and not date unless you’re willing/wanting to give monogamy with me a shot.”) If they are ALREADY DATING, that is shitty indeed.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Also, the way I’ve heard it, cowboying often has a thing where the mono partner, without saying so, thinks/*expects* that the poly partner will become mono for them (like, mononormative ideas about poly relationships not being as real/loving/etc) then acts like the poly partner betrayed them/wronged them when that doesn’t happen. So it’s not just going in with a secret agenda, it’s also then having your orientation and/or other relationships invalidated and being treated like *you’re* in the wrong.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Is this an allegory for bisexuality as well? Or, like, switchiness? Because you’re describing my relationship with every sexual/gender/romantic category out there.
LikeLike
It is not an allegory for anything. I came up with this argument and thought it was interesting but didn’t want to endorse it (because it ignores important heuristics like “tell the truth” and “allow people to autonomously decide whom they should date”).
LikeLike
I really should have said, “It’s funny how accurately this resembles the social climate I deal with as a bisexual person and as a switch.”
LikeLike
Now I want to write a story about a planet where society works like that.
LikeLike
This was a very entertaining post, with real meat to it as well. As a troll post it’s pretty effective too (presumably moreso for the poly crowd).
I do have a pair of humorless nitpicks, though at least they’re of the parts you seem to be advocating seriously rather than the jest.
The first is that the obligate poly : mono ratio is almost certainly an order of magnitude lower than that, and likely even less. The only way to get that ratio is, as you admit, by including most cheaters as closeted poly. But that makes as much sense as measuring the desire to abolish private property by counting the number of thieves: the “property is theft” crowd want their own stuff to go into the communal pot but thieves ime strongly object to having their own things taken. Wanting to have a faithful partner while being faithless yourself is something rather different than the kind of poly that gets advertised.
The second is the elephant in the room of children. Getting guys to financially support their own children once they’ve been divorced is a hard problem already, which poly doesn’t make any easier by loosening obligations to a single spouse, but getting them to raise some other guy’s kids in that situation looks even tougher. If people in poly marriages or relationships regularly reproduce then you need a full state childcare apparatus in place to deal with that: that means that your right to be poly can very easily infringe on my rights to raise my own children (not to mention my property rights). You can’t really talk about the socially optimal ratio of lifestyles without mentioning kids at all, that’s the whole point of having a society to begin with.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Has the Rationalist poly community had any children yet? deciding what to do seems highly nontrivial.
LikeLike
Several rationalists have children. Nearly everyone is explicitly reproductively monogamous. I am unclear about what problems polyamory presents that are not fixable with birth control and paternity tests.
LikeLike
Alicorn precommitted to paternity testing, which is interesting. http://lesswrong.com/lw/29w/taking_the_awkwardness_out_of_a_prenup_a_game/21eo
LikeLike
Off topic, but I don’t understand why paternity testing isn’t more of a social norm. Maybe it’s common but I just don’t hear about it? As a guy, I’d be vastly more comfortable with my girlfriend doing whatever if I can verify that any kids are mine. Jealousy feels like an instrumental goal to achieve the terminal goal of not being fooled in to raising someone else’s kids. Paternity testing seems like a win for everyone, because men feel less need to control women’s sexuality and women experience guys trying to control their sexuality less. Just my 2 cents.
LikeLike
From what I’ve read, the poly community models itself after the extended families common to non-Western societies. Whether this would work on a large scale, I don’t know, but I suspect the old adage about blood being thicker than water would apply; see the Cinderella effect.
LikeLike
Well yeah, after all the salient feature of an extended family is that it’s a family. You can, under certain conditions, create a “blood bond” between large numbers of unrelated people but it requires a lot more investment than the average monogamous marriage, often to the point of literal indoctrination.
This whole thing reminds me of communes. Not Marxist revolutionary communism, more like a Kibbutz. Sharing partners and property, living together in compounds or houses, the optimistic sense that “once we get away from the corruption of Worldly society things will just work themselves out” exemplified by Ozy’s comment that birth control and paternity testing should solve all of their potential issues (it’s a shame we monogamous folks don’t have these miraculous technologies).
You can probably run a functonal poly community, but it would probably need a strong ideology and/or a strong government to keep it together. Successful communes are very rare, and not for lack of trying.
LikeLike
Ever An Anon, the poly network is not a commune. I do not intend on raising my children in common with everyone in the poly network. I don’t even *know* everyone in my poly network, and I think some of them are dickheads. I– and nearly everyone else I know who intends on having children– intend on having children with a *single* primary partner and use birth control to prevent having children with other partners. Those who don’t intend to have children with a single primary partner intend to have children in a *committed* quad or triad, not with everyone in the fucking poly network. In the event that birth control fails, uncertainty about who the father is can be prevented with paternity tests, and the project of getting a poly father to pay child support and be involved in the child’s life seems no more difficult than the project of getting a mono father to pay child support and be involved in the child’s life.
While I have lived with my partners’ partners in the past, that’s because… it’s the Bay Area. Everyone has roommates, including monogamous people. It’s the fucking housing crisis. I’m really interested at what point roommates turn into a kibbutz! Did Volterra miraculously turn into a kibbutz when I started dating Mike, or was it always a kibbutz because he was my ex-boyfriend? If I and my current roommate hook up once and decide we aren’t feeling it, is my house a compound now and forever? Exactly how many blowjobs do I have to give? Inquiring minds!
LikeLike
Epistemic staus: super trolling
There’s another solution that was invented many times in many species: chat, but then don’t get caught. Obligate mono people think they’re in a monogamous relationship, obligate poly people can have more than one relationship at a time, and ambivalent people can do whatever.
“But every adulterer I’ve ever heard of got caught.” Yes, for the same reason every book you’ve ever read got published.
LikeLike
*cheat.
LikeLike
Well, it often *starts* with chatting!
LikeLiked by 1 person
You’re overlooking some of the most important benefits for the obligate mono side: “If you sleep with lots of guys in college, you should expect never to get married. This isn’t slut shaming, it’s just being realistic about your genetics.” And: “How your spouse feels about you cheating on zer doesn’t matter. You lied on the marriage license about being monogamous, so you get nothing in the divorce. And, of course, ze has no obligation whatever to try to reconcile with you, since your genetics make that impossible.”
LikeLike
Who says obligate poly people can’t get married? Of course they can get married; they just get married to each other. (And, besides, the logic that sleeping with lots of guys affects whether you’re obligate poly seems to require a perhaps dubious decision theory.)
The latter seems not very different from the way things currently are.
LikeLike
We can see this in the number of monogamous people who complain loudly about everyone in their social circles being poly, and the number of poly people who would complain loudly about everyone in their social circles being mono, except that you can’t do that because then you’re Saying Polyamory Is Superior To Monogamy and Don’t You Know You’re Not Allowed To Do That, Only Monogamous People Are Allowed To Say That Their Preferred Relationship Style Is Superior.
I suppose this must be trivially true in the broader culture. Amusingly, though, for those of us who only ever discuss the subject in the context of blogs like this one, one gets quite the opposite impression.
I get the strong impression that most of the rationalist poly people believe that polyamory is supererogatory, and even those who don’t explicitly believe it still alieve it.
LikeLike
I’m glad you’re trolling, and not abusing the “born this way” argument in bad faith for reasons of expediency, like… some other activists I could name. 🙂
LikeLike
Oh, this made me think of that:
from Fredrik deBoer’s badly entitled piece every bad argument against polygamy, debunked
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m sure you’ve heard this plenty of times and have ready responses to it, but jeez, it seems like the elephant in the room, the Occam’s razor solution to your puzzle.
I think that the majority of people — before the higher-order moral reasoning, at a level closer to what may be termed “orientation” — are far more comfortable having multiple desirable partners than having their partner(s) do the same. Monogamous social codes aren’t the imposition of their own sexual orientation by people who strictly don’t want multiple partners; they’re game-theoretic equilibria among sexually and romantically selfish individuals who implicitly recognize the value of Leviathan.
Nor does it seem reasonable to regard cheaters as a sort of closeted “obligate poly”, would would imply that any asymmetric expectations such people might have for their partners (their jealously, their possessiveness) must be a peripheral aspect of their sexual personae, perhaps owing to their bad characters, rather than, you know, a much more fundamental feature of the most common sexual orientation out there.
In my view, the conflict that has to be resolved is achieving full rights and recognition for a small minority of mutually poly people, without breaking the dam which holds back a larger number of sexually one-sided people from using whatever financial or social or attractiveness differential they possess, to openly and happily have multiple relationships while denying that right to their primary partners.
LikeLike
my rather limited understanding of the status quo in poly circles is that asymmetrical poly/mono is kind of a dick move. sufficient taboo on polyandry while forcing monogamy upon partners seems to be a solution.
LikeLike
clarification: sufficient taboo on (polyandry while forcing monogamy upon partners) seems to be a solution.
also, this was meant to be a reply to J. Goard. my comment-fu is weak today.
LikeLike
Oh, I quite agree (with your clarified semantic bracketing, which I needed! :-P). My point is at a different level. I think that (significant openness to multiple partners oneself, together with even greater desire for monogamy on the part of one’s — at least primary — partner) is (a) much closer to a sexual orientation than a moral choice, and (b) far and away the most common such orientation (i.e., greater than truly symmetrical mono or poly). I don’t think that it makes sense to think of so-called romantic “possessiveness” as much more of a moral fault than, say, a lesbian not being into dudes. And I certainly don’t think that most cheating against mono promises is strong evidence of being a closeted poly, when my prior is that sexual selfishness (for lack of a better term) is the orientation of a large majority.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I know multiple people who either (a) cheated a lot, became poly, and stopped cheating, (b) would have cheated a lot when monogamous, but were saved from cheating by moral luck (e.g. being unattractive, not knowing how to flirt, lack of partners), and are currently poly, or (c) were too ethical to actually cheat, but were completely miserable because they wanted to, until they became poly. It seems plausible to me that if they didn’t have “become poly” as an option, they would have continued cheating or miserably not cheating. I have never claimed that every cheater is obligate poly, merely that many obligate poly people, if in monogamous relationships, wind up cheating (or unhappy because they can’t), and removing obligate poly people from obligate mono people’s dating pool is best for all concerned.
LikeLike
What that means in practice is that monogamous promises are often essentially mutual promises to a degree against both people’s sexual orientation, but this is still preferable to any alternative compatible with modern, egalitarian ethics. Cheating is indeed a predictable failure to reign in one’s deep preferences, but it doesn’t follow from this that most cheaters are poly.
LikeLike
*rein in 😮
LikeLike
So the question is: which is more optimal, going against one’s wish to have multiple partners or one’s wish for one’s partner to be exclusive with oneself.
LikeLike
Everyone says there is meat there but i cant see it 😦
Is that a solution for monogamous for the encroaching poly problem, solution that is: polys are born that way?
LikeLike